The Marquis of Beixiang

There are emperors who lose a throne and emperors who never had one, and then there is the case of a man who was given a throne for seven months and afterwards, in the official history of the dynasty he briefly headed, was not given a chapter. The Book of Later Han devotes an annal to twelve emperors of the Eastern Han. It does not devote one to him. His name is Liu Yi, he held the title of marquis of Beixiang, and he was the grandson of Emperor Zhang through a collateral line that had been settled in the provinces for two generations. For seven months in 125 he was the Son of Heaven. The record of those months runs to a few sentences, and almost all of them are about other people.
What the record does contain is a sequence of decisions, each of which was defensible at the moment it was made, and none of which survived the year. A widow chose him because he was a child of her own husband's house and not a threat. Her brothers took the government. When he fell ill they looked for a younger child. A group of palace servants killed three officials in one night and put his cousin on the throne instead. He died, and the history closed over him so completely that his burial place is not recorded either.

1. The Marquis

The house of Beixiang was not a poor one, but it was a remote one. Liu Yi's father, Liu Shou, had been made king of Jibei in the year 90, in the second year of the Yongyuan era, and the kingdom lay in the plain north of the Yellow River with its seat at the city of Lu. The Jibei line came from Emperor Zhang himself, which made Liu Yi a grandson of that emperor and a great-great-grandson of the founder. It also made him something more useful: a member of the imperial Liu family who was not the son, the brother, or the nephew of the reigning emperor.
That last point was about to matter a great deal. The reigning emperor, Liu Hu, had come to the throne in 106 as the son of a deposed crown prince and had reigned for nineteen years. He had one surviving son, Liu Bao, who had been his heir from 120 and had been stripped of the position in 124 at the insistence of an empress who had no son of her own. By the spring of 125 there were therefore two candidates in the palace, and both of them were compromised: a son the empress had broken, and a father whose line an earlier empress had ruined. Liu Yi, three hundred miles from either problem, was the only candidate about whom nothing bad had yet been said.
He is not recorded as having been consulted. He is not recorded as having objected, or accepted, or said anything at all. The histories do not tell us when he was born, and they do not tell us how old he was when he died.
The life this produced was not one that prepared a man for a throne. Since the reduction of the kingdoms under Guangwu, the kings of the Later Han had been kept in their own territories under a body of regulations that reads like a list of prohibitions: they could not come to court without a summons, could not receive visitors from other provinces, could not employ men from outside their kingdom in office, and could not marry into the families of officials. Liu Yi's father had held Jibei for thirty-five years without once being called to the capital. The marquis himself is not recorded as having set foot in Luoyang before the spring of 125, and when he arrived it was in a procession escorting a dead emperor.

2. The Empty Throne

In the third month of 125 the emperor died on the road, coming back from a progress to the south. The empress Yan was with him, and so was her brother Yan Xian, who held the rank of general of chariots and horse.
What they did next was, in the cold judgement of the history, the beginning of the end for them. They said nothing of the death until the court was back inside the capital, and by then they had the seals and the machinery of a new succession in their hands. They also kept Liu Bao, the discarded heir, out of the mourning, on the ground that a son who had been removed from the succession had no standing to conduct his father's funeral. The Book of Later Han records the motive in a phrase that is unusually blunt for it: they were afraid of what would happen to them if the young man came back.
In the fourth month they buried the emperor and, on the same authority, set Liu Yi on the throne. He was given the posthumous machinery of an emperor, the empress became empress dowager and moved into the court, and Yan Xian was confirmed as general of chariots and horse with the right to sit in counsel. The era name was not changed, so far as the record shows; the year continued to be counted as the fourth of Yanguang. That silence is worth noticing, because an era name is the cheapest thing a new reign can give away, and the new government gave away nothing.
He was called, in the histories, the marquis of Beixiang. He was not called emperor. The title by which he is known is the title he had held before, and the Book of Later Han never upgrades it.

3. Seven Months

For seven months the government was conducted in the name of a man about whom nothing is recorded. What is recorded is a purge. Yan Xian and his brothers were not patient men, and they began by removing the officials who had influence they could not control. The general-in-chief Geng Bao was accused on a charge the history does not detail and destroyed. The regular attendant Li Run, who had been one of the men who brought the present regime in, was accused and dismissed. A memorial was put forward proposing that all the masters of writing, the men who carried the business of the empire from the palace to the provinces, should be drawn from the Yan family's own circle of dependants.
Two men refused to go along with it. The grand tutor Feng Shi and the chamberlain for ceremonials Liu Yan, both of whom had been appointed under the dead emperor, declined to sign the memorial, on the ground that the offices of the empire were not the property of a consort house. They were dismissed from their posts. That is the whole of their appearance in this account, and it is the only act of resistance the seven months produced.
The empress dowager herself is not a stranger to the palace. Yan Ji had been made empress in 114, in the first year of the Yuanchu era, and her brothers had been given office in the capital as soon as she was crowned. What the histories give her is a handful of sentences, and in them she is capable and she is frightened; the fright is the part that governed the spring of 125. A woman who had watched the Deng family, which had held the regency for fifteen years, be destroyed within a year of the old empress's death, had reason to think that the power of a consort house does not survive a change of reign.
The empire they were resisting for was in poor condition. The Qiang war in the west had been running since 107 and had eaten through three provinces; the registers for the year 125 show, by the history's reckoning, districts in which the people had taken to eating one another. A drought in the central plain was followed by flooding in the Huai valley. None of this was caused by the marquis, and none of it was relieved by him. It is simply the background against which a court was fighting over a sickbed.
He fell ill in the tenth month. The history says he was gravely ill, and it says nothing more about him at all: no age, no symptom, no physician, no words. After this sentence he disappears from the record, and the rest of the account is about men who are still alive.

4. The Sickbed

The men who were still alive had a problem. If the marquis died, the throne passed, by the logic the empress had already used, to the nearest adult male of the imperial Liu line, and the nearest adult male was the discarded heir whom they had kept out of the funeral earlier that year. They had no wish to see him emperor. They therefore resolved to find a child.
The history's phrase is that they intended to set up a young master. It does not say which child, and no later source supplies the name. This is one of those silences that is more irritating than a gap in a battle narrative, because a name would have told us whether they were looking for a cousin in the provinces or an infant in the palace, and whether they had already approached the family. All we have is the intention, and the fact that they were looking for someone who could not object.
Two things about the search are worth noting. The first is that it was the second time in six months that the court had gone outside the direct line for a ruler, and the second time it had chosen a child; the marquis himself was the result of the first search. The second is that the men conducting it were the same men who had chosen him, which means that his own elevation had been provisional from the beginning. He was placed on the throne not because he was the rightful heir but because he was convenient, and the same criterion that put him there was now being applied to remove him.
It is also worth noticing what the later label costs him. To call him the former boy emperor is to put him in a line with the two young emperors of the Former Han who were set up by regents and killed when the regents fell, and to imply that he was a legitimate sovereign who was murdered. The record supports neither half of that. He was set up by a regent's family, which is the same; but he was not murdered by them, and he was not, in the sense in which the official history uses the word, a sovereign. He was a marquis who was borrowed, and the borrowing was repaid within the year.
The eunuchs of the inner palace were divided. Jiang Jing and Fan Feng were with the Yan brothers. Li Run, dismissed earlier in the year, was not. And among the lower ranks of the palace service, the men who carried messages and opened doors and stood at the gates of the halls, there was a group that had been in contact with the discarded heir for some time. The history does not tell us how the contact was made. It names nineteen of them, and it gives their home commanderies, and it says that they swore an oath.

5. The Night

On the day the marquis's illness became grave, the men of the inner palace made their move. The seal of the palace changed hands, and before the marquis was dead the discarded heir had been brought out and set on the throne.
So the seal was used. The discarded heir, Liu Bao, was brought out from under the West Bell, where the palace servants had kept him, and was set upon the throne in the Hall of Established Virtue. He was eleven years old. The Yan brothers were arrested and executed. The empress dowager was moved out of the main palace to a separate residence, and the government of the empire passed to a group of men who had been eunuchs, palace servants, and dismissed officials six hours earlier.
The marquis of Beixiang was dead by then, or died within the month. The history does not say which, and it does not say where he was buried. This is the last sentence it gives him.

6. The Name

The Book of Later Han was written in the fifth century by Fan Ye, who had before him the records of the Eastern Han court and the earlier histories of it. Fan Ye gave annals to twelve emperors of the Eastern Han. He gave none to Liu Yi. Liu Yi's seven months appear as an appendix to the annals of the man who preceded him, in the same place where the history parks an interruption: after the main account, before the next reign begins, in a few lines that are mostly about the empress and her brothers. This is a decision, not an omission. The form of the official history is a judgement about what counts, and Fan Ye's judgement was that these seven months were a regency conducted by a consort house and an interruption in the succession, not a reign.
Later readers have been less careful. The marquis is sometimes called the former boy emperor, which puts him in a series with two Han emperors who were children and were deposed and killed, and which therefore implies a legitimacy he never had and a fate the record does not give him. The phrase is not ancient. It is not in the Book of Later Han, and it is not in the Tang commentaries on it. It belongs to a much later habit of tidying the past into a list of numbered reigns, in which every gap has to be filled and every filler has to be given a label.
His burial is not recorded. The annals that set down the tomb of every emperor who reigned even a year set down nothing for him; no mound is attributed to him and no place is named. The only durable trace he left is the word marquis, which is the one thing about him that was never in dispute, and which says exactly what he was: a man with a fief, borrowed for seven months and then given back to the obscurity he had come from.
The tidiest thing about him is the label he already had. A marquis of Beixiang is a man with a fief, and what happened in 125 is that a man with a fief was moved into a palace, kept there for seven months while other people governed, and moved out again. He is the clearest illustration the dynasty produced of the thing that was killing it: that the throne had become a position that could be filled by whoever controlled the palace, and that the control of the palace had become a thing worth killing for.