The Boy Emperor Liu Bian

Liu Bian held the throne of the Han for five months in the year 189, from the thirteenth day of the fourth month to the first day of the ninth, and the standard history of the dynasty does not give him an annal. The Book of the Later Han grants annals to twelve emperors of the Eastern Han, and he is not one of them. His accession, his reign, his deposition, his death and his burial are written into other men's chapters: the end of his father's annals, the chapter of his mother the empress, the biography of the general who destroyed him. He is known as the boy emperor because the histories call him the young emperor, which is a description and not a title. No temple name was ever assigned to him and no imperial posthumous name; when his brother's court buried him in 190, the title it conferred was a prince's.
What the five months contain is the disassembly of a central government, carried out by three parties in the order of their distance from the throne. The empress dowager's family destroyed the eunuchs of the inner palace, the eunuchs destroyed the empress dowager's family, and the general who had been summoned from the northwest frontier to help in the work inherited what was left and took the throne itself, to give away. The boy was fourteen, or seventeen; the record preserves both figures and does not reconcile them. He said almost nothing that was written down. The structure of what was done to him is the whole of his history, and it is the subject of this account.

1. A Son Raised in a Taoist's House

Emperor Ling had lost his sons before this one was born. When Liu Bian was born to the Honored Lady He of Nanyang, in 176 by the usual reckoning, he was not raised in the palace. He was sent to the house of an adept named Shi Zimiao and brought up there, and because no one dared use his personal name he was called the Marquis of Shi, after the house that sheltered him. A note in the commentary quotes a contemporary collection on the reason: the emperor had lost sons repeatedly and did not dare give the child his proper name. This is the first fact of Liu Bian's life, and it is the pattern of all the others. He existed where other people had put him, under a label they had chosen for him.
His mother's family were butchers in the city of Wan. The Book of the Later Han says so without apology: the house was originally one of butchers, and she entered the harem by selection, the commentary adding that her family bribed the officers in charge with gold and silk to get her admitted. The history records her height, seven feet and one inch, and her temper, strong and jealous, so that no one in the harem was not afraid of her. In 180 she was made empress. Her father He Zhen, the butcher, was posthumously named general of chariots and cavalry and marquis of Wuyang, and her mother, named Xing, was made the Lady of Wuyang. The elder brother He Jin was brought to the capital and made general-in-chief in 184, the year the Yellow Turbans rose.
The succession was settled in nobody's favor. The emperor thought Liu Bian frivolous and without the bearing of a ruler and wished to set up in his place Liu Xie, the son of the Lady Wang, whom the empress had poisoned in the year of his birth in 181; the motherless boy was raised by the Dowager Dong and called the Marquis of Dong. But the empress was favored and her brother held the army, and so the question of the heir was left open until the emperor's death. Liu Bian was never formally made crown prince, though two chapters of the history, drawing on other sources, speak of him as the heir. He came to the throne as an imperial son, not as a designated one.

2. The Death of the Emperor and the First Purge

Emperor Ling died in the fourth month of 189, on the day bingchen, in the Jiade hall of the Southern Palace; the history gives his age as thirty-four. On his deathbed he had entrusted Liu Xie to Jian Shuo, the eunuch colonel of the upper army, whom the late emperor had put at the head of the eight colonels of the Western Garden, with authority over the colonel director of the retainers and all below him, and even the general-in-chief counted among his subordinates. Jian Shuo was in the palace that day. He sent for He Jin, meaning to kill him and set up Liu Xie in his place. He Jin came. Pan Yin, Jian Shuo's own major and an old acquaintance, met him and signaled with his eyes. He Jin started, left by a side road for his camp, moved his troops into the lodging of the hundred commanderies, and pleaded illness. The plot failed without a blow being struck.
Two days later, on the day wuwu, the imperial son Bian was enthroned. The empress became empress dowager and held the court. Yuan Wei was made grand tutor, to share charge of the secretariat with He Jin, and the era name was changed to Guangxi, the light of dawn. Liu Xie, nine years old, was made prince of Bohai and was later moved to Chenliu. The Book of the Later Han says the new emperor was seventeen; an earlier chronicle, followed by the Zizhi Tongjian, says fourteen, and the Tongjian records the disagreement and adopts the smaller figure. Both numbers were used about him to the end: the chapter of his mother gives his age at death as eighteen, and the smaller reckoning makes it fifteen.
The first purge belonged to the general-in-chief. Jian Shuo, uneasy, wrote to Zhao Zhong and the other regular attendants proposing that they shut the palace gates and seize He Jin at once. Guo Sheng, a regular attendant from the same commandery as the He family, whose help had counted in their rise, showed the letter to He Jin instead. He Jin sent the prefect of the yellow gates to arrest Jian Shuo and kill him, and took over his troops. Then he turned on the rival consort house. Dong Zhong, the Dowager Dong's nephew, was seized and died; the dowager herself died in the sixth month, in terror and illness, and the common people laid her death at the door of the He family.

3. Summoning Men from the Frontier

Yuan Shao pressed the case. He had been colonel of the middle army among the eight of the Western Garden, he was now the general-in-chief's closest adviser, and his family had held high office for generations. The lesson of Dou Wu, he said, was that words leaked and that the five camps and the officials all feared the palace men. Now the general-in-chief had the weight of the empress's brother, his own brother held an army in the field, and his officers were young men of family, glad to spend their lives for him. He Jin was persuaded and laid the plan before the empress dowager. She refused. The eunuchs had guarded the inner palace since ancient times, she said, and the late emperor was newly dead, and she was not about to hand the government over to a room full of scholars. The Lady of Wuyang and He Miao, both of whom took the eunuchs' bribes, spoke for them at court. He Miao's advice to his brother was blunt. They had come from Nanyang together, poor and mean, and grown rich through the palace; the affairs of the state were not so easily managed; and spilled water could not be gathered up.
Yuan Shao's counter was to bring soldiers to the capital and frighten the empress into consent. He Jin's master of records, Chen Lin, objected in the language of the classics. The Changes warned against hunting deer without the keeper of the forest, and the proverb against catching sparrows with your eyes shut; to lay down your weapons and seek help from outside was to hand the haft of the sword to another man. The work would fail, he said, and it would become only the ladder to disorder. He Jin would not hear it. He sent west for Dong Zhuo, the former general, to camp at Shanglin Park; he sent his own officer Wang Kuang to raise the crossbowmen of Tai Shan; he ordered the governor of Dong commandery, Qiao Mao, to camp at Chenggao; and he sent the commandant Ding Yuan to burn Mengjin, so that the fire was visible from the city, all of it in the name of destroying the eunuchs. The empress still refused.
Then He Jin gave Yuan Shao the post of colonel director of the retainers, with the staff and the power to act on his own authority, and made Wang Yun the governor of Henan. Yuan Shao set his investigating officers to watch the eunuchs and pressed Dong Zhuo and the rest to hurry. The empress, frightened, dismissed every regular attendant and junior yellow gate to his home, keeping only He Jin's own men inside the palace. The eunuchs came to He Jin to apologize. He Jin told them the world was in uproar precisely on account of them, that Dong Zhuo was about to arrive, and asked why they did not take their leave and go to their fiefs. Yuan Shao urged him to finish the matter then and there, again and again, and He Jin refused. It was at this point that Zhang Rang got himself back into the palace. His daughter-in-law was the empress dowager's own sister, and he begged her through the Lady of Wuyang for one more turn of duty, and the edict went out recalling the eunuchs.

4. The Ambush at Jiade

On the day wuchen of the eighth month, in September 189, He Jin entered the Changle palace to ask the empress dowager to execute all the regular attendants and fill their offices with gentlemen of the three bureaus. The eunuchs had been listening at the door. Zhang Rang, Duan Gui, Bi Lan and several dozen others came in by a side gate with weapons in hand and hid in the inner halls. As He Jin came out, they summoned him back on a forged edict of the empress. He sat down in the inner chamber, and Zhang Rang rebuked him. The world was in confusion, he said, and it was not only the eunuchs who were to blame; the late emperor had once been at odds with the empress and it had nearly come to ruin, and the eunuchs had wept and pleaded and each contributed a fortune in gifts to make it up; they had only wished to attach themselves to his house; and now he meant to destroy their whole kind, and if the inner palace was so filthy, who among the officials was clean? Then Qu Mu of the imperial workshops drew his sword and cut He Jin down in front of the Jiade hall. They issued a forged edict naming the former grand commandant Fan Ling colonel director of the retainers and the privy treasurer Xu Xiang governor of Henan. The secretariat suspected the document and asked that the general-in-chief come out and discuss it; a yellow-gate eunuch threw He Jin's head in among them and said that He Jin had plotted rebellion and had been executed.
Outside, He Jin's officers Wu Kuang and Zhang Zhang tried to force their way into the palace and found the gates shut. Yuan Shu, the colonel of the Rapid Tigers, broke in with Wu Kuang, and at dusk he burned the Nine-Dragon Gate of the Southern Palace and the eastern and western palaces, to force the eunuchs out. The eunuchs told the empress dowager that the general-in-chief's troops were in revolt and burning the palace, and took her, the emperor and the prince of Chenliu out by the covered way to the Northern Palace. Lu Zhi, a master of writing, stood under the window of the corridor with a spear and berated Duan Gui; the eunuchs were afraid, let the empress go, and she jumped from the gallery and escaped.
Yuan Shao and his uncle Yuan Wei forged a summons for Fan Ling and Xu Xiang and killed them. Yuan Shao's and He Miao's troops camped below the Vermilion Bird gate, and Zhao Zhong was caught and killed. Wu Kuang's men, who hated He Miao for not standing with his brother and suspected him of complicity with the eunuchs, cried out through the ranks that the murderer of the general-in-chief was the general of chariots; the soldiers, who had loved He Jin, wept and swore to die for him, and Wu Kuang and Dong Zhuo's brother Dong Min attacked and killed He Miao and threw his body into the park. Yuan Shao closed the gates of the Northern Palace and hunted the eunuchs, young and old, and killed them all. Men without beards were killed by mistake and saved themselves only by exposing their bodies; more than two thousand died.

5. The Night at Xiaoping Ford

Cornered, Zhang Rang and Duan Gui took the emperor, the prince of Chenliu and several dozen others out of the Valley Gate on foot, making for the ford at Xiaoping. The ministers came out to the Pingle viewing tower, and none of them followed. Only Lu Zhi rode through the night to the river, and Wang Yun sent a clerk of the central division of Henan, Min Gong, after him. Min Gong came up with the party at the Yellow River and cut down several of the eunuchs with his own sword, and the rest threw themselves into the water and died. As they went, the eunuchs wept and took their leave of the throne. When we are destroyed, they said, the world will be in chaos; let Your Majesty take care of himself.
The two boys walked south through the darkness, following the light of fireflies, for several miles. An uncovered cart was found in a common household, and the two of them rode in it together; then two horses were found, and the emperor rode one while the prince of Chenliu shared the other with Min Gong. At dawn on the day xinwei they reached the palace. A general amnesty was proclaimed and the era name was changed from Guangxi to Zhaoning. The same entry of the annals records that Dong Zhuo, the governor of Bing, had killed Ding Yuan, and that the minister of works Liu Hong was dismissed and Dong Zhuo made himself minister of works. Within five days the consort family and the palace eunuchs had destroyed each other, the capital army had no commander, and the first man with soldiers in the city had made himself one of the three highest officers of the empire.

6. The Gift of the Throne

Dong Zhuo had come with no more than three thousand foot and horse. Ashamed of the small number, and afraid that the great families would not obey him, every four or five days he marched his camp out secretly at night and returned at dawn with banners and drums in full array, so that the city took it for fresh troops arriving from the west; no one in Luoyang knew his real strength. Then the orphaned troops of He Jin and He Miao came over to him, and he had Lu Bu kill Ding Yuan and absorb his command, and his soldiers were many. A later chronicle preserves the chance that was missed. A recruiting officer named Bao Xin, arriving with troops, urged Yuan Shao to strike at Dong Zhuo while his men were still tired from the road; Yuan Shao saw that the soldiers were too strong and did not dare.
He met the returning emperor on the northern slopes of the Mang hill. The boy saw troops arrive suddenly and wept with terror, and when Dong Zhuo spoke to him he could not find words to answer; the prince of Chenliu answered, and went on to recount the whole course of the disaster. Dong Zhuo decided the prince was the worthier. The prince had been raised by the Dowager Dong, and Dong Zhuo claimed kinship with her clan, and on that ground he conceived the intention of changing the succession. He replaced the minister of works and took the title himself, and then the higher one of grand commandant. He put the proposal to Yuan Shao: the lord of the world should be a worthy man, and he meant to set up the Marquis of Dong. Yuan Shao answered that the sovereign was young and that no fault of his had reached the world, and that to set aside the elder son and set up the younger against the rites would not be obeyed. Dong Zhuo, with his hand on his sword, asked whether the affairs of the world were not decided by him. Yuan Shao replied that this was a great matter of state and asked to take counsel with the grand tutor, and then bowed with his sword laid across his arms and walked out of the hall.
The great assembly was called. What is great in the world, Dong Zhuo said, is heaven and earth, and next the relation of ruler and subject. The emperor was dull and weak and could not serve the ancestral temples or lord it over the world, and he wished to follow the precedent of Yi Yin and Huo Guang and set up the prince of Chenliu instead. No one answered. He spoke again, more harshly: when Huo Guang settled the succession, Tian Yannian had laid his hand on his sword, and whoever dared to obstruct this great decision would be dealt with by military law. The seated officials shook. Only Lu Zhi spoke. Of old, he said, Tai Jia was established and proved unenlightened, and the king of Changyi had more than a thousand faults, and that was why there were depositions; the present sovereign was in the spring of his life and had committed no fault, and was not to be compared with those cases. Dong Zhuo was furious and broke up the sitting.
The next day he gathered the officials again in the front hall of Chongde and forced the empress dowager to issue the deposition. The emperor, in his mourning, had the heart of no son, and his bearing was not that of a lord of men; he was deposed and made prince of Hongnong. The prince of Chenliu was enthroned, nine years old, and the era name was changed from Zhaoning to Yonghan. The grand tutor Yuan Wei took the seal and its ribbon from the deposed boy and presented them to the new emperor, and led the prince of Hongnong down from the hall to bow northward as a subject. The empress dowager choked with tears; the officials were sad, and none dared to speak.
Then Dong Zhuo turned on the empress dowager. She had pressed the Dowager Dong in the Yongle palace to her death, reversing the proper order of daughter-in-law and mother-in-law; she was moved to the Palace of Perpetual Peace, and on the day bingzi, two days after the deposition, Dong Zhuo killed her. She was buried in the tenth month with the rites of an empress and not of an empress dowager, and the mourning was not completed. Yuan Shao, who had argued against the deposition, left the capital and fled north; Dong Zhuo, at the advice of two of his own counselors, appointed him governor of Bohai and made him a marquis rather than hunt him down. And the calendar itself came apart. Within the one year 189 the dynasty was called by four names, Zhongping, Guangxi, Zhaoning and Yonghan, and in the twelfth month an edict abolished the three new era names and restored the sixth year of Zhongping, so that the year ended under the designation it had begun with.

7. The Prince of Hongnong and the Silence of the Annals

In the first month of 190 the commanderies east of the mountains rose against Dong Zhuo. Dong Zhuo was afraid that they would carry the prince's name as their banner, and decided to kill him. He had the prince placed on an upper floor of the palace and sent Li Ru, the prefect of the palace, to him with poison. Take this medicine, Li Ru said; it will keep evil from you. The prince answered that he was not ill and that this meant to kill him, and he would not drink. He was made to drink. He gave a farewell banquet for his wife Tang Ji and the palace women, and in the course of the wine he sang: the way of heaven turns, and my path is hard; I give up the ten thousand chariots and withdraw to my fief; a rebellious minister presses me and my life cannot be extended; I go from you now to the dark and the hidden. He made Tang Ji rise and dance, and she raised her sleeves and sang: high heaven collapses and the earth crumbles; born to be an emperor, my fate is cut short; life and death part company, and from this we are sundered; lonely and alone, the grief in my heart. She wept, and the whole company sobbed with her. The prince said to her: you are a king's consort, and you will not end as a common man's wife; take care of yourself; from this, a long farewell. Then he drank the poison and died.
In the second month an edict buried him in the completed underground chamber of Zhao Zhong, the former regular attendant, and conferred on him the posthumous name prince Huai, which is a prince's name and not an emperor's. His wife Tang Ji of Yingchuan outlived him by years. She went home to her village and refused to remarry when her father pressed her, and she was still alive in the years of civil war that followed to be found, brought to the court, and invested as princess of Hongnong, with a place in the tomb park of her husband. The woman who had sung that high heaven had collapsed ended her days as the custodian of a grave.
The Book of the Later Han was compiled in the fifth century by Fan Ye, who had before him the records of the court and the earlier histories of the dynasty. He gave annals to twelve emperors of the Eastern Han, and he gave none to Liu Bian. The five months are entered at the end of the annals of his father, which close with the line that on the first day of the ninth month Dong Zhuo deposed the emperor and made him prince of Hongnong. The deposition itself, the killing of the empress dowager and the poisoning are told in the chapter of his mother, the empress Lingsi, among the chapters of the women of the harem, because that is where a woman's family and a woman's son belonged in Fan Ye's scheme. The general has his own biography, as generals do. This is a decision and not an oversight. The form of the official history is a judgement about what counts, and Fan Ye's judgement was that these months were an interruption in the succession conducted by other men, not a reign.
Later readers have been less careful with the labels. Enumerations of the dynasty disagree about him: counted one way the Eastern Han had twelve emperors and he is not among them, counted the other way he is the thirteenth and the last but one. The phrase young emperor is not ancient in its English form, and the title of this account is a modern rendering of a descriptor that appears in the annals themselves. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms rebuilt his ending altogether. In the novel he composes a poem of resentment after his deposition, and he, his mother and his wife are killed on the same day in the Palace of Perpetual Peace, the empress dowager thrown from a tower and the wife strangled, and the whole business is placed before the rising of the eastern armies. The record says otherwise. The empress dowager died two days after the deposition, in 189; the prince of Hongnong died in the first month of 190, after the eastern armies had risen, and he composed nothing; and his wife, whom the novel kills, outlived him by years and was invested as his princess.
What can be recovered of the boy himself is small. He was carried into a hall two days after his father's death and carried out of the government five months later by a stranger with soldiers. He wept when the soldiers came and could not answer their commander's questions. He refused the poison when it was offered and said why. He sang one song at the end, and made his wife dance. No policy, no appointment and no speech can be traced to his own mind. What his five months produced was a mechanism: a precedent by which a general with an army could take the throne from a boy and give it to his brother, and a demonstration that the seal of the Han had become a thing that could be lifted from one boy's belt and hung on another's. The dynasty had used child emperors before, and had been rid of them before. It had not yet had one given away.