The Duke of Gaogui

He was the fourth ruler of the state of Wei, and the histories do not remember him by any imperial name. No posthumous title was conferred on him and no temple name; the rank that has attached to him is a dukedom he had held as a boy, before he was made emperor, and after his death the record went on using it because his imperial title had been taken from him. In the Records of the Three Kingdoms his annals are headed not with an emperor's style but with the words the Duke of Gaogui, and the years of his reign are counted in some of the older chronicles as the years of that duke. Duke is not a rank that a sovereign keeps; it is a rank a sovereign can be reduced to. That the name over this account is a duke's, and not an emperor's, is the first thing that has to be said about him.
He came to the throne at thirteen and died at nineteen, or twenty by the count his own court used, in the sixth year of his reign, on a street inside his own palace, killed by an officer of the man who governed in his name. He had no army, no treasury, and no party; the guards at the gates of his capital were not his, and the men who attended him at his lessons reported to another house. What he had was the classics he had studied, a small circle of scholars, and the one thing no regent could take from him, which was the decision of how his reign would end. In the fifth month of 260 he took a few hundred of the palace servants and went out with his own sword against the troops of the regent Sima Zhao. He knew what would happen. The account that follows is the account of how a young man with nothing chose his own death, and of why the dukedom that history gave him at the end reads more like an epitaph than any posthumous name would have.

1. The Boy from Yuancheng

He was born in 241, in the second year of the era Zhengshi, though some accounts put his birth a year later, in 242; the two datings stand side by side in the sources and cannot be settled. His father was Cao Lin, the prince of Donghai, a son of the founding emperor Cao Pi; the boy was thus a grandson of the founder and a nephew of the emperor Ming. In 244, when he was three or four, he was enfeoffed as Duke of Gaogui township in the district of Tan, and it is from that boyhood fief, and not from any throne, that the name he is known by comes.
His childhood fell in the years when the house of Cao was losing the state. In 249 Sima Yi took the government at Gaoping, and from that year the emperors of Wei were emperors in name. In 251, after the rising of Wang Ling, the princes and dukes of the imperial blood were gathered out of their principalities and settled in the neighbourhood of Ye, with officers set over them to see that they held no communication with one another. The boy was moved with them, or kept near them, at Yuancheng; the sources say he was among those watched. His father died about this time. He grew up in confinement, reading, and the histories give him the phrase that is used of promising boys who have been given nothing to do: he was fond of learning, and precocious.
In the ninth month of 254 the regent Sima Shi deposed the emperor of the day, Cao Fang, and the manner of that deposition belongs to the record of the reign before this one. What belongs here is only what came after it. Sima Shi first intended to set up the prince of Pengcheng, Cao Ju, a son of Cao Cao and so a generation above the late emperor Ming. The empress dowager, the Lady Guo, refused him: if a man of her husband's generation were made emperor, she said, the line of the emperor Ming would be cut off altogether, and the rule of the ancients was that where the great line had no heir one took a worthy son of a cadet branch and made him the heir. The boy she named was Cao Mao, a grandson of the emperor Wen and, in the reckoning that mattered to her, the nearest thing to a son of the emperor Ming. Sima Shi gave way, and the order went out that the Duke of Gaogui should be brought to Luoyang to continue the line of the emperor Ming.
He came with a courtesy that men remembered. At the Xuanwu lodge north of the city the ministers asked him to lodge in the front hall, and he refused it because it had been the late emperor's, and lodged in a side room instead; they asked that he be met with the imperial carriage, and he refused that too. When he entered Luoyang and the officials bowed to him at the south of the west side gate, he got down from his carriage to bow in return, and when the master of ceremonies told him that by ritual the Son of Heaven did not bow to his ministers, he answered that for the moment he was still a subject. At the gate of the halted carriage he got down again, though the rule allowed the emperor to ride through, and said that he had been summoned by the empress dowager and did not yet know what he had been summoned for. He walked to the eastern hall of the Taiji hall with the ministers, was received by the empress dowager, and was enthroned the same day in the front hall of Taiji, with the officials who stood in attendance glad of heart.
The first edict issued in his name was a confession of inadequacy and a promise of care, and it stood. He reduced the equipage and clothing of the sovereign and the expenses of the inner palace, and did away with the ornaments and ingenious toys made by the imperial workshops, the things that were pretty and of no use. In the third day of his reign he sent attendants of the palace out in every direction with the staff of authority to observe the customs of the provinces, to give relief to the scholars and the people, and to look into wrongful judgements and derelict officials. On the same days he gave the regent Sima Shi the yellow battle-axe and the privilege of entering the court without hurrying his step, of memorializing without giving his name, and of coming to audience with his sword and his shoes on. These two things were done in the same week and were not in contradiction: the young man meant to rule well, and the power that governed the state was not his. Sima Shi, who had watched him, sent his confidant Zhong Hui to take the measure of the new emperor. Zhong Hui came back and said that the boy had the talent of Chen Si, the prince of Chen, and the martial air of the great ancestor Cao Cao. Sima Shi is said to have answered that if it were so, it was the good fortune of the altars.

2. The Scholar on the Throne

The record of his reign is, for long stretches, the record of a man reading. He gathered a small court of scholars about him in the eastern hall of the palace and talked with them about books and wrote with them, and he gave them names: Pei Xiu he called the elder of the forest of scholars, Wang Chen the master of documents, and the others had their sobriquets too. He was impatient, and when he sent for a man he wanted him at once; because Sima Wang had duties outside the palace and could not come quickly enough, the emperor gave him a fast post-carriage and five guards so that he could arrive at a run whenever there was a discussion.
In the second month of 256 he held a debate in the eastern hall with his ministers on the worth of the rulers of the past, and the question he set them was whether Shao Kang of Xia, who restored a ruined dynasty, was greater than Liu Bang, the founder of the Han. His ministers answered that the founder and the restorer are not measured on the same scale, that a man who receives the mandate and begins a house is above one who inherits a broken one, and that Liu Bang therefore stood higher. The emperor would not have it. The founders, he said, are not always the best and the heirs are not always the worst; and Liu Bang, whatever he built, built it on the collapse of Qin, driving the clever and the strong before him by force and by cunning, and in his conduct he broke the rules of the sages again and again: as a son he endangered his father more than once, as a ruler he imprisoned a worthy chancellor, as a father he could not protect his own son. Set Liu Bang down in Shao Kang's place, the emperor said, and he might never have restored the house of Xia. The ministers, the next day, mostly came round. Yu Song, one of the ministers present, asked leave to have the emperor's words written down for posterity; the emperor, with a modesty that reads strangely from a man who had no power at all, said that his learning was shallow and that he would only make himself ridiculous to later ages. It was Zhong Hui who later set the discussion in order and preserved it.
In the fourth month of that year, 256, he went to the imperial academy and put his questions to the erudites of the classics, and the record of the day is one of the longest pieces of direct speech in the annals of the three junior emperors. He began with the Book of Changes, and asked the erudite Chunyu Jun why the same book had been called by different names in the three dynasties; when he was answered that the names changed with the ages, he pressed: if Fuxi made the Changes from the plan of Suiren, why did Confucius not say so; if Confucius wrote the commentaries and Zheng Xuan wrote the notes, why are the commentaries not joined to the text as the notes are; if the sages joined nothing, why was Zheng Xuan alone not modest? Chunyu Jun could not answer. He moved to the Book of Documents and took up an old quarrel of the commentators: one reading of a phrase made the sage-king Yao the equal of Heaven, another made him merely a follower of ancient ways, and the emperor asked which was right. The erudite Yu Jun, cornered, said that he only repeated what his teacher had taught him. The emperor then asked whether Yao, who had employed Gun on the flood for nine years and got nothing but ruin, could be called a man who knew men, and whether a sage could err. Yu Jun answered that sages are not without fault, and that Yao had at least corrected his mistake. The emperor was not satisfied. He moved on to the Record of Rites, and the day ended. The ministers who answered him kept saying, in one form or another, that the ancient meanings were too deep for them and that the emperor's questions went further than their knowledge reached.
In the sixth month of the year the court changed the era name to Ganlu, and the learning continued. In 257 he went to the hall of the circular moat and had the ministers compose poems at his order, and when two of them were slow about it and the master of ceremonies asked that they be dismissed, he refused and told the whole court instead that from then on they should study the ancient meanings and make clear the sense of the classics. In 258 he turned to the rites of old age: he took the text of the ancients that a state should honour its elders, and appointed the marquises Wang Xiang and Zheng Xiaotong as the three elders and the five experienced, the two figures of the classical ritual, and he led the officers of the court himself in the ceremony, standing north of Wang Xiang and asking his counsel as a pupil asks a master, while Wang Xiang sat facing south with a staff and spoke to the emperor on the principles by which the wise kings had governed. The histories record that those who heard it were moved to effort.
None of this was a hobby, and the record shows why he gave it both hands: it was the only sphere in which he had any authority at all. The courtier Zheng Xiaotong, who had the ear of the emperor and whose family had been close to the house of Cao, is said in one of the lost chronicles to have been poisoned in these years, and the reason given is that Sima Zhao feared he might tell the emperor something. The room in which the emperor could act was small, and the men who stood in it were watched.

3. The Regent and the Huai

The year 255 took away the man who had put him on the throne and gave him another. In the first month, two commanders on the Huai, the general Guanqiu Jian and the inspector of Yang province Wen Qin, rose against Sima Shi in the name of the empress dowager. Their proclamation was a document of Wei politics and not of foreign war: they called on the court to depose Sima Shi and to put his younger brother Sima Zhao in his place, which is a measure of how far the office had become the property of a family. Sima Shi asked his advisers what to do. The governor of Henan, Wang Su, told him not to send another man but to go himself, because a rebel who has the rebels' families behind him in the interior is beaten by speed and not by weight. Sima Shi had just had a tumour cut from his eye and was not fit to move; he went anyway, and took the field against them.
The rising was broken. Guanqiu Jian was killed and Wen Qin fled to Wu, and the way he came into Wu, and what Wu did with him, belong to the record of Wu and not to this one. Sima Shi did not long outlive his victory. He died at Xuchang in the intercalary first month of 255, of the sickness of his eye, and the government of Wei was suddenly in the hands of a man who had not been named to it.
The emperor moved at once, and it was the one real chance he ever had. He issued an order that gave Sima Zhao the command at Xuchang and directed the minister of documents Fu Gu to bring the central armies back to the capital, which would have separated the brother from the army and left the succession to the regency to be settled at Luoyang. Sima Zhao refused the order. On the advice of Fu Gu and Zhong Hui he brought the army back to the capital himself, arrived at Luoyang, and there received the office he had been intended to be kept from. On the fifth day of the second month the emperor, with no army and no alternative, made him general-in-chief, with the regular attendance at court, the direction of all the armies at home and abroad, the conduct of the secretariat, and the right to come to audience with his sword and his shoes on. The window had opened and closed in a month. The histories are clear that the emperor understood what he had been trying to do, and equally clear that he had nothing to do it with.
The frontier gave him no respite. In the eighth month of the same year the army of Shu Han came out into the west, and at Taoxi the inspector of Yong province, Wang Jing, was beaten and his army broken. It fell to the court to answer for it, and the answer it gave is the clearest evidence of what the throne could still do. The emperor sent the colonel Deng Ai as acting general of the west and the general Chen Tai to join him, and then the grand commandant Sima Fu with picked troops; by the end of the ninth month Jiang Wei had drawn back. The emperor then issued an edict in his own voice that is worth more than most of the edicts of the reign, because it is the one place where the man on the throne and the business of the state are the same person. He began by taking the blame: he was young and without virtue, he wrote, and had not been able to hold back the violence of the enemy, so that the army of Shu had come into the border country and the battle of Taoxi had been lost. The dead, he said, numbered in the thousands; some had fallen on the field and their spirits could not come home, some had been taken prisoner and were in a foreign land; he grieved for them and could not stop grieving. He ordered the officers of the agricultural colonies and the two frontier commands to go to the households of the dead with condolences and to remit a year of tax and service, and to report every man who had died fighting, so that none should be forgotten. He then pardoned the families, in four commanderies of the west and in Jincheng, of all those who had deserted to Shu in the years of war, and finally ordered the generals in the west to send men over the old battlefields and along the water to gather up the bones of his soldiers and bury them. It is the only sustained piece of his own government that the record preserves, and it is a document about the dead.

4. The City on the Huai

In 257 the government tried to take the last of the frontier commands out of the hands of the man who held it. Zhuge Dan had governed the Huai at Shouchun for years as the general who conquers the east, and when Sima Zhao called him to the capital to be minister of works, and so to give up his army, he understood the summons for what it was. He killed the inspector of Yang province, Le Chen, and rose in the city, and to buy himself help he sent his son Zhuge Jing to Wu as a pledge and called on the men of Wu to come to his rescue. How Wu answered, and how its armies moved and were thrown back, is the business of the record of Wu; what is written here is the northern side of it.
Sima Zhao did a thing that no regent of the period had dared before. He took the field in person, and he took the emperor and the empress dowager with him. The form was that the Son of Heaven should grace the expedition and give the soldiers the sight of his standard, and the petition that was put up in his name asked the emperor to go out for a season and let the armies feel the weight of the throne; the substance was that the regent did not intend to be absent from the capital with the emperor left behind in it. So the young man who had no troops of his own was carried to the siege of Shouchun and made to watch, from inside the camp of the man who governed in his name, a war he was not allowed to direct. The city held out through the winter. In the first month of 258 it broke from within: Zhuge Dan fell out with Wen Qin, the commander who had come from Wu, and killed him, and Wen Qin's two sons went over to Sima Zhao. In the second month the walls were carried and Zhuge Dan was killed, and his family with him. It was the end of the last force on the frontier that had stood for the house of Cao without standing for Sima, and after it nothing in Wei was outside the regent's hand.
The histories give the emperor almost nothing to say in these months, and there is a reason. He was present at the greatest victory of the reign and had no part in it; the camp was Sima Zhao's, the orders were Sima Zhao's, and the emperor was in it as the seal is on a document. When he came back to Luoyang he went back to his books, and the government went on without him. The state he nominally ruled had never been stronger against its two rivals in the field, and had never been less his.

5. The Duke of Jin

What he watched over the next two years was the machinery of a change of dynasty, being assembled in front of him and at his order. In the fifth month of 258 the court offered Sima Zhao the chancellorship, the dukedom of Jin, and the nine bestowments, the sequence of honours by which a subject of the Han had once been raised to the edge of the throne. Sima Zhao refused, and refused again, and by the count of the record refused nine times, and the matter was left standing; in its place he took an increase of ten thousand households in his fief and the revenue of three counties, and the sons of his house who had no rank were made marquises. In the fourth month of 260 the same honours were offered again, and this time the regent did not refuse. Some of the men who studied the record took that as the moment the two of them understood each other: the emperor saw that his own dissolution was now on the table, and the regent saw that the emperor knew it.
The year before had given the emperor his image for it. In the spring of 259 a dragon had been reported in a well, and the court, which read the sky and the wells and the rivers for signs, called it fortunate. The emperor said that the dragon is a ruler's emblem, and that a dragon which cannot go up into the sky or out into the fields but goes on coiling at the bottom of a well is no emblem of anything good, and he wrote a poem on the dragon in the well. The poem is short and does not name him or anyone; it says that the dragon is trapped and cannot cross the deep, that mud-fish and eels sport before it, that it hides its teeth and folds its claws, and that his own case is the same. Everyone who read it knew what it meant, and Sima Zhao, the record says, read it and was displeased. In the first month of 260 there was an eclipse of the sun, which the men of that age read as the sky's comment on a failing sovereign, and in the fourth month came the second offer of the nine bestowments, and after it the emperor stopped writing and began to plan.

6. The Fifth Month of 260

On the night of the sixth day of the fifth month, the first of June, 260, he made his move. He sent the chief of the palace attendants, Li Zhao, and an officer of the yellow gate, Jiao Bo, to the Lingyun terrace, outside the palace wall to the south-west of the city, to break out the armour and weapons stored there and to arm the servants and grooms of the household. That he had to go outside his own palace to find a store of arms is the whole military history of the reign in one fact: the guards about him had been reduced, after the fall of his predecessor, to a few hundred old and weak men, and the capital was held by the troops of the regent. It was raining. Someone proposed that he wait for a better day.
He sent for three men, the attendants of the palace Wang Chen and Wang Ye and the minister of documents Wang Jing, and told them what he was going to do. The words are given by a chronicle of the Eastern Jin, Xi Zuochi's Spring and Autumn of the Han and Jin, and it is that chronicle, and not the history of Chen Shou, that has preserved them: the design of Sima Zhao, he said, is known to every passer-by in the street; he could not sit still and wait to be deposed and humiliated, and that day he meant to go out with them and put it to the test. Wang Jing argued against him. He reminded the emperor of the duke of Lu, who in old times could not bear the ascendancy of the Ji family, marched out, and lost his state and became a laughing-stock; he said that the power in the state had long been in Sima Zhao's hands; he said that the palace guard was hollow and its weapons few, and asked what the emperor proposed to use. The emperor took from his breast the yellow silk edict he had written, threw it on the ground, and said that the thing was settled, that a man might as well die as not and that there was no cause to fear it. Then he went to tell the empress dowager. Wang Chen and Wang Ye ran from the palace to carry word to Sima Zhao. Wang Jing went with neither of them.
In the morning of the seventh day, the second of June, the emperor drew his sword, mounted his carriage, and led a few hundred armed servants and grooms out of the palace with drums and shouting, making for the residence of the regent. Word of the plan had gone before him, but it made no difference to the numbers, and he did not turn back. At the east gate of the halted carriage he met the colonel of the mounted guard Sima Zhou, a younger brother of Sima Zhao, coming into the palace with soldiers; the emperor's attendants shouted at them to clear the way, and Sima Zhou's men, seeing the emperor himself on the carriage with a drawn sword, broke and ran, because whether or not a man will kill his sovereign is another question from whether he will stand in front of him.
He went on to the south of the palace, the gate at the foot of the great hall, and there he met the soldiers of the palace guard, drawn up under the colonel of the guard, Jia Chong, a man of Sima Zhao's household. The emperor put his horse at them; some of the men turned to go, and there was a moment when the thing could have gone differently. Two of Jia Chong's officers stood by him, the cavalry commander Cheng Cui and his younger brother Cheng Ji, a household attendant of the heir, and it was Cheng Ji who, seeing the emperor come on and the line about to give, asked Jia Chong what was to be done. Jia Chong's answer is the sentence the case hangs on, and the source that preserves it is the Chronicle of the End of Wei, quoted in the commentary: the duke keeps and feeds you men for exactly this day, he said; there is nothing to ask. Cheng Ji took up his halberd and went forward, and struck the emperor, and the blade came out through his back. He died by the carriage.

7. The Name That Is Not a Posthumous Name

That same day the court issued an order in the name of the empress dowager which stripped him of the title altogether and declared him to have been a violent and unfilial man who had plotted to kill her and to take the government himself; he was reduced to commoner and was to be buried with the rites of a commoner, and the minister of documents Wang Jing and his household were handed over to the judges, while Wang Chen and Wang Ye, who had carried the word, were praised. The order is one of the two great documents of the affair, and it is preserved in the history of Chen Shou, which is itself the point: Chen Shou, writing under the dynasty that Sima Zhao's son founded, could not say in his own voice that the emperor had been murdered, and so he said it by other means. His account of the day is one line, that in the fifth month, on the day jichou, the Duke of Gaogui died, at the age of twenty by the count of his own court. No cause is given. Then, without comment, he sets down the empress dowager's order of condemnation and the memorial of the regent, and lets the reader put them against the long record of the boy's learning and his pardons and his grief for his dead soldiers, which fills the pages just before. Fifteen centuries later the historian Zhao Yi, reading it, called it the worst piece of concealment in the book, and observed that although Chen Shou was a subject of Jin and had some excuse, the same cannot be said for the way he treats the men of Wei. The other document is the regent's memorial, which took the blame off Jia Chong and laid it on the man who held the halberd. Sima Zhao wrote to the empress dowager that he had ordered the soldiers not to harm the emperor and had forbidden them to come near the carriage, and that Cheng Ji had broken into the ranks and struck him and so brought about his death, and that he had therefore had Cheng Ji executed by military law and had handed his family to the judges. Cheng Ji and his brother were killed, and their kindred to the third degree with them; the chronicle says the two of them would not accept the charge, and climbed naked on to a roof and shouted, until they were shot down from below. Jia Chong went unharmed, and was advanced in rank and given the command of the troops outside the city.
Not everyone obeyed the order to let it pass. The grand tutor Sima Fu, an uncle of the regent and the head of the family, ran to where the body lay and laid the emperor's head on his own thigh and wept over it, and said that he who had killed his sovereign had killed him by Sima Fu's fault. The left supervisor of the secretariat, Chen Tai, was asked by Sima Zhao what he was to do with himself, and answered that nothing short of the execution of Jia Chong would go any way toward answering to the world; Sima Zhao asked him to think of something less, and Chen Tai said that he could think of something more and not of anything less, and Sima Zhao said no more. He wept so long and so hard for the dead emperor that he was said to have brought up blood and died of it not long after. That such men were counted among the regent's own is the reason the affair could not be smoothed over: the murder was committed by the government, and the government itself had men in it who could not be told to forget. In the end the empress dowager was persuaded, on the petition of the regent and the ministers, to let him be buried with the rites of a prince rather than a commoner, and the body was carried out to the bank of the Chan river, some distance north-west of Luoyang, in a plain procession with a few worn carriages and no funeral banners, and the people of the city came out to see it and turned away in tears. Then the court brought forward a son of the prince of Yan, the Duke of Changdao township, who took the throne as the heir of the emperor Ming and changed the era to Jingyuan; the manner of his accession belongs to the history of the reign that followed.
No posthumous name was ever given him, and no tablet for him was set up in the ancestral temple, and this is the fact about him that the form of the histories records. Chen Shou gave annals of their own to the three men who made and held Wei, Cao Cao and Cao Pi and Cao Rui, one book each, and then put the three rulers who came after them into a single book, the Annals of the Three Heirs, in which a deposed prince, a murdered boy and a surrendered last emperor share an entry and a style. The Duke of Gaogui takes the middle place. It is the same arrangement, by a different hand, that was given to the last rulers of Wu, and it carries the same judgement: these were not, in the end, treated as emperors. The name over the annals is not his, it is the dukedom he held before he was anything. Where a posthumous name would have summed up a reign in a word, the record gives him back a rank he had as a child, because the dynasty that killed him would not give him a word of its own and the dynasty that came after had every reason not to.
The verdicts that grew up around him would not leave the case alone. Chen Shou's own is in two halves, and the second half is the sort of thing a man writes when he serves the men who won: he was precocious and clever, said Chen Shou, fond of questions and fond of eloquence, and had in him the elegance of the emperor Wen; and he was rash and violent and provoked his own destruction. The first half is the private record speaking, and the second half is the court that employed him. Later ages reversed the proportion. A scholar of the late Ming called him, of all the rulers of the period, the one who went deepest into the classics. A critic of the Ming said that with his talents and a little patience he might have held the state together a while longer. And a man of the Yuan, having read the whole affair, said that the emperor had waited and prepared for years and struck when he struck, and that the failure was not cowardice. The most telling of all the later judgements is not a judgement on him but on the men who killed him, and it is a saying from centuries afterward, put into the mouth of a ruler of the Northern Wei, who had a regent of his own to be rid of and is remembered for it: better to die as the Duke of Gaogui died than to live as the emperor Xian of Han lived. The line is not his and not contemporary; it comes from a later age reading back into the summer of 260 a choice that it wanted to believe a man could make. It is a way of saying that he could have lived and would not. And the men of the dynasty that killed him could not stop turning the deed over among themselves: at a banquet a generation later one of Sima Zhao's own officers was taunted in an argument with the question, where is the Duke of Gaogui now; and an emperor of Jin, told the whole story of his ancestor's rise by an old minister, covered his face with his hands and asked how the house could last. It did not. The murder bought the family a throne and left it a debt; and the young man who was carried out to the Chan river with no banners and no posthumous name is the one whose name is remembered with the deed.
He had nothing to give his reign but the way it ended, and that is the thing he gave it. He was the only sovereign of the three kingdoms who turned out in person against the man who ruled over him. He knew the odds; he said the thing was settled and that a man might as well die as not, and he said it to men of whom two were already on their way to betray him. What he chose was not the throne, which he never had, but the manner of leaving it, and by leaving it in blood in his own street he made the murder of a sovereign the fact that the rest of the dynasty would have to carry. The dukedom that history put over his name is not an honour. It is a summary of what was done to him, and it has outlasted every title the men who did it took for themselves.