The Second Boy Emperor of Han

The fourth emperor of the Han dynasty changed his name three times. He was born Liu Shan, became Liu Yi when he was given a kingdom, and became Liu Hong when he was given the throne. Each change marked a step up in rank, and each was ordered by someone else. The pattern holds for the rest of his life: he went from marquis to king to emperor inside three years, was dead four years after that, and never once chose where he stood.
Then, after he was dead, a further thing was decided about him. He was declared not to be his father's son — a finding that made the next emperor's throne secure and erased the entire line of Emperor Hui from the imperial succession. It is one of the most contested decisions in the history of the early Han.

1. A Boy with Three Names

He was a son of Emperor Hui, born to a woman of the rear palace whose name the sources do not give — the same neutral designation, "a son of the rear palace," that the histories use for all six of Hui's surviving sons. In the fourth month of 187 BC, when the empress dowager began distributing titles to the children in preparation for making her own family kings, he was made Marquis of Xiangcheng. The two histories spell the title differently, a small sign of how thin the documentation for this boy is. At that point he was called Liu Shan.
In the seventh month of 186 BC, the King of Changshan died without heirs, and the throne of that kingdom was given to him; with the appointment he was renamed Liu Yi. Two years later, in the fifth month of 184 BC, the empress dowager deposed and killed the boy emperor she had installed in 188, and brought Liu Yi from Changshan to the palace, where he was made emperor and renamed Liu Hong. The renaming on accession was not unusual — an emperor's personal name became taboo and was often altered — but three names in four years, none of them chosen, is a fair summary of his position. A name, in his case, was not an identity; it was a position label, issued with the post.
His brothers received the same treatment. Liu Qiang was made King of Huaiyang and died young in 183 BC. Liu Buyi was made King of Changshan and died in 186. Liu Chao was given Liu Yi's old kingdom of Changshan in 184. Liu Wu was made Marquis of Huguan and promoted to King of Huaiyang in 183 when Liu Qiang died. Liu Tai was made Marquis of Changping in 184, King of Lü in 181, King of Jichuan on the abolition of that title, and King of Liang in 180. Six boys, six sets of titles, all conferred by their grandmother, all designed to place members of the Liu clan in territories where the Lü settlement needed them. The empress dowager was not building a family; she was building a framework, and the boys were the beams.

2. The Last Appointment

He was made emperor to fill a gap, and the gap had been created by his predecessor's death. The empress dowager did not declare a new reign era, and Sima Qian explains why in the same six-character phrase he uses for the earlier boy: not declaring a first year, because the empress dowager was running the affairs of the empire. For four more years, from 184 to 180 BC, the years continued to be counted under her, and the emperor continued to be the reason she could govern.
Those four years are the least documented reign in Western Han history. There is no decree, no audience, no appointment, no policy attributed to him. What the sources describe, in a steady list, is the consolidation of the Lü family. Lü Tai had already been made King of Lü in 187 BC. In 181 BC her nephew Lü Lu was given the kingdom of Zhao, and another nephew, Lü Chan, was made chancellor. When she fell ill in 180 BC she moved them into the military commands: Lü Lu as commander-in-chief of the Northern Army, the garrison of the capital, and Lü Chan in charge of the Southern Army. A Lü daughter was married into the imperial family. By 180 BC the two armies at Chang'an, the chancellery and three of the kingdoms were in the hands of one family, and the emperor, nominally the source of all authority, was a boy in a palace who signed nothing and decided nothing.
This arrangement worked as long as one person was alive. In the summer of 180 BC the empress dowager fell ill. She understood precisely what her death would mean, and her last instructions were military: she put the seals of the Northern and Southern Armies formally in the hands of Lü Lu and Lü Chan, and warned them not to escort her coffin out of the palace — not to leave the capital for the funeral, because the moment they were outside the walls with the court, they would be at the mercy of the men they had spent eight years outranking.
She died in the seventh or eighth month — the two histories calculate the date differently — and within weeks the settlement she had built came apart.

3. The Curtain Comes Down

The first move came from the east. Liu Xiang, King of Qi, was the son of Liu Fei, the elder half-brother of the late Emperor Hui, and his kingdom had been trimmed more than once to supply territory for the empress dowager's arrangements. He raised troops and marched west, announcing that he was coming to punish those who had been made kings without right. His brothers were already inside the capital: Liu Zhang, Marquis of Zhuxu, an officer of the palace guard, and Liu Xingju, Marquis of Dongmou, both of them brave, both of them with reason to resent the present arrangement.
Inside the court, the grandee Zhou Bo and the chancellor Chen Ping worked on the armies. They could not attack the Lü commanders directly, so they used a friend. Lü Lu was persuaded by a friend, Li Ji, that if the Lü family gave up its military commands and retired to its territories, the crisis would end harmlessly — a promise made to be broken. Lü Lu handed over the seal of the Northern Army. Zhou Bo entered the camp, assembled the troops, and gave an order that has become one of the most quoted lines of the period: those who were for the Lü clan should bare the right shoulder, those for the Liu clan the left. Every man in the camp bared his left shoulder. The army had changed sides in the time it took to take off a sleeve.
What followed was extermination rather than arrest. Liu Zhang killed Lü Chan in the palace precincts; the palace gates were closed, and the Lü family was hunted through Chang'an and killed wherever found, men, women and children, without trial and without distinction. Zhang Yan, the son of the empress dowager's daughter, was stripped of his kingdom because he was not of the Liu blood. Within days the clan that had governed the empire for eight years had ceased to exist as a political force.
It is worth being precise about what the coup was. It was not simply the Liu clan reclaiming its throne from outsiders. The two groups that made it — the great ministers of the founding generation, and the cadet branch of the imperial house descended from Liu Fei — had different interests from the start. The ministers wanted a stable court in which their own positions and their own families would be safe. The kings of Qi wanted the throne, and had a real argument for it: Liu Fei had been the eldest son of the founder. They had been allies for a few weeks. They were rivals the moment the fighting stopped.

4. "None of Them Are the Emperor's Sons"

The problem for the ministers was the boy on the throne. He was the emperor, he was legitimate in the ordinary sense, and he had brothers holding three of the largest kingdoms in the realm. If he grew up and ruled, he would rule with the knowledge that the men now in charge had destroyed his grandmother's family — and, more to the point, that a rival branch of the family had tried to take his throne. In the autumn of 180 BC the great ministers met privately and agreed on a solution. Sima Qian records the deliberation:
"The young emperor, and the kings of Liang, Huaiyang and Changshan, are all not really the sons of Xiaohui. The empress dowager used trickery to give them the names of other men's sons, killed their mothers, and raised them in the rear palace, making Xiaohui treat them as his own and setting them up as heirs and kings, in order to strengthen the Lü family. Now that the Lü clan has been destroyed, if we leave in place the people she set up, then when they come of age and take power, there will be none of us left. Better to choose the worthiest of the kings and make him emperor."
The clause that matters is the reason given for urgency: not the boys' blood, but the fact that they would remember. When they grow up and take power, there will be none of us left. The ministers were not defending the purity of the imperial line; they were protecting themselves from the consequences of what they had just done. The dubious parentage was the instrument that made the killing lawful, and it was produced at exactly the moment it was needed.
Whether it was true is a question the sources cannot settle, but they lean strongly against it. Four points are usually made. The first is that the Basic Annals describes all six boys as sons of the rear palace, which is the ordinary official language for the emperor's own children, and it does so in passages written before the coup. The second is that when Liu Xiang, King of Qi, rose in revolt, he wrote to the other kings describing the boy on the throne as "the emperor," and complained about the Lü family, not about an impostor — if the throne had been occupied by a man of unknown blood, that would have been a far better argument for raising troops. The third is the timing: in the week after the coup, before any decision had been reached about the throne, the ministers left Liu Tai, King of Jichuan, in possession of a kingdom and indeed transferred him to the larger kingdom of Liang, while stripping Zhang Yan for not being of the Liu clan. The boys were still being treated as Liu princes at the moment when, on the official account, their imposture was already known. The fourth is a matter of common sense: the empress dowager already had a palace full of imperial sons to draw on; if she wanted to pass a child off as the emperor's, one would have been enough. Supporting six is not how you keep a secret, it is how you advertise one.
Against all this stands a tradition on the other side, but it is a late one. Zhang Shoujie, writing a commentary on the Records in the Tang dynasty — eight hundred years after the fact — quotes an earlier gloss explaining that the women of the rear palace had first been taken by men of the Lü family and entered the palace already pregnant. Liang Yusheng, the Qing scholar, dismissed the suggestion outright as fabrication. That is the whole of the case for the prosecution: a Tang gloss, offered as an explanation for a decision taken in 180 BC by men who had a reason to need one.

5. The Night of the Killings

The removal of the emperor was done in two stages, and the first stage was a conversation.
Liu Xingju, who had taken part in the coup and received no reward, asked to be allowed to clear the palace. He went in with Xiahou Ying, the old Duke of Teng, the same man who had lifted Liu Ying out of the road when his father tried to abandon him. The two of them came before the boy emperor and told him: "You are not of the Liu family; you have no right to be established." Sima Qian then records the emperor's reply, and it is the only sentence the histories ever give him. He said: "Where are you going to take me?" Xiahou Ying answered: "Out, to a residence." He was lodged in the office of the Privy Treasurer, and the imperial carriage was sent to fetch the Prince of Dai.
Dai was Liu Heng, son of Liu Bang by a concubine, a quiet man who had governed a frontier kingdom for sixteen years without attracting notice. The ministers chose him over the King of Qi, who was the grandson of the eldest son and had a stronger claim, for a reason they stated plainly: Qi's mother's family, the Si, were "wicked people," and to install him would be to create a second Lü family; Huainan was too young and his mother's family was also bad; but the Prince of Dai was the founder's eldest surviving son, known for kindness and filial conduct, and his mother's family, the Bo, were careful and good. The man chosen to rule the empire was chosen because his in-laws were easy to manage. The argument that had been used to depose a boy two weeks earlier was the same argument used to elevate his successor.
Liu Heng entered Chang'an and took the throne. In the eleventh month of 180 BC, before Liu Heng had been formally enthroned as Son of Heaven, officers went out by night and killed the boy emperor and his three brothers — the kings of Liang, Huaiyang and Changshan — each in his own residence. The Basic Annals gives the sentence in one line, which is the whole of the funeral they received.
What makes the killing peculiar is the logic of the pretext. It was not a trial and not an execution; it was a decision about category. If the boys were sons of Emperor Hui, then killing them was regicide four times over, and the men responsible were the worst criminals in the empire. If they were not, then they were commoners who had usurped the imperial name, and killing them was the restoration of order. The accusation had to be true because the alternative was unthinkable for the men who had made it — and it had to be applied to all six of them, not just the one on the throne, because a single surviving son of Emperor Hui would have been a claimant for as long as he lived. That is why the case cannot be settled on the merits of the charge alone: the completeness of the killing is itself the strongest evidence that the charge was a necessity rather than a finding.
Cai Dongfan, the late-Qing popular historian, put the sympathetic case about as well as it can be put: whether the young emperor and his brothers were Hui's sons or not cannot be determined — but the several of them were without guilt and without fault, and were killed to the last; and even if they were indeed of mixed blood, their deaths were pitiable. His verdict, and the near-consensus of modern scholars, is that they were almost certainly Hui's own sons, and that the sentence passed on them in the autumn of 180 BC was one of the founding lies of the Han dynasty: a lie that bought the throne for Wendi and a clean conscience for the men who had made him emperor. The second boy emperor had ruled for four years without issuing a single order. He is remembered for one thing: an accusation, made after he was dead and no longer able to answer it.