Dragon & Phoenix
Power Struggles in the Imperial Court
In the last years of the reign of Emperor Wu the
families of two of his consorts, Wei and Li, intrigued and occasionally
fought in the streets. The old emperor responded by leaving neither of
them in a position to exercise outside-relative power after his death,
naming an infant related to neither as his heir, and leaving the highly
capable senior official Huo Guang
in charge as regent. “I want my youngest son set up, with you to
act the part of the duke of Zhou.” Huo controlled the court in
cooperation with Sang Hongyang and other generals and officials until
80, then accused them of plotting to depose the emperor and install one
of the regional kings, and exterminated them and their families. In 74
a successor was installed who seemed to be in the hands of the Li
family, outside relations from the reign of Emperor Wu. Amid repeated
references to Yi Yin (the minister who deposed the first ruler of the
Shang dynasty) and the duke of Zhou, Huo Guang secured the consent of
the dowager empress (his own fifteen-year-old granddaughter) and the
capital officials in deposing this emperor and putting a child on the
throne. Highly competent and ruthless, little interested in the
supernatural or in Confucian moral platitudes, Huo dominated the court
unchallenged until his death in 68. His relatives were driven from
power and exterminated in 66. [MOF, 74]
| For the idealistic Confucian,
the power of the outside relatives was a deplorable violation of the
ideals of selection and promotion of officials on the basis of merit
and of decision making based on principled discussion of the issues. A
more distant and more cynical observer might conclude that it was at
least a kind of solution to the inherent problems of hereditary
monarchy and was to a degree inherently self-limiting. As an emperor
came to adulthood, his empress and her relatives would form a faction
of their own. Sooner or later the dowager empress would die, her
relatives would lose their ultimate source of support within the
palace, and the relatives of the present empress would have a chance to
expel and replace them. Thus a kind of circulation of outside relative
cliques followed the passing of the generations. [MOF, 74-75] |
|
Wang Mang rose to power as an outside relative of an empress,
the mother of Emperor Cheng, who reigned from 33 to 7 B.C.E. The
Dowager Empress Wang was the center of power in her son’s reign, since
Emperor Cheng was not much interested in the hard work of ruling the
empire. One after another of her brothers and cousins was appointed
marshal of state and general in chief and effectively controlled the
central administration. The dowager empress was not involved in the
details of government, but her position was the ultimate source of her
relatives’ power. Her contribution was simply to be there, to stay
alive; she died in 13 C.E. at the age of eighty-four, her long life
having made possible the rise of Wang Mang through many twistings and
turnings to his ultimate seizure of the imperial throne. [MOF, 77]
From beginning to end, Wang Mang’s public life was full
of demonstrations of his humility and selflessness, and also of
ambition, political skill, and ruthlessness. We have to come to terms
with this mix of personal traits if we are to understand his actions,
his appeal to the people of his times, and his ultimate failure. Our
efforts are considerably complicated by the biases of the most
important source on his career, a long chapter in the History of Han
by Ban Gu, written in the first century C.E. Ban Gu was a member of an
extremely devoted and eminent family of ministers of the Later Han,
which rose out of the collapse of Wang Mang’s regime. A Confucian
moralist explanation of the fall of Wang Mang and the success of Later
Han had to show that Wang was brought down by his own moral failings,
not by bad luck or events beyond his control. Ban Gu’s account
presents, very skillfully and insidiously, a picture of Wang as a
power-hungry hypocrite. It records Wang’s many selfless deeds very
matter-of-factly, and it is only gradually that Ban Gu argues that none
of Wang’s acts of selflessness were sincere, that all were calculated
to make the best possible impression and to advance his career. [MOF,
78]
 In 1 B.C.E. envoys from a foreign people came
to the capital and presented a white pheasant. It was an auspicious
sign; foreigners had presented a white pheasant to the duke of Zhou. In
1 C.E. various courtiers proposed that the grand dowager empress should
grant him new honors, including the title “Duke Who Brings Peace to the
Han” (An Han gong). Wang
declined repeatedly, insisting that others were more worthy than he.
After his closest associates all had been granted lesser honors, he
finally accepted and was given full power to control the government and
make decisions on behalf of the boy emperor. In 2 C.E. the elaborate
process was begun that would lead to the selection of a wife for the
boy emperor. Wang Mang firmly and repeatedly refused to have his
daughter included among the young women considered, but hundreds of
officials urged that she be selected, and finally he gave in. Now if
the boy lived to adulthood there would be a new Empress Wang, and
the family’s power as the ultimately successful outside relatives would
be unchallengeable.
The normal Han practice was to grant
the father of a new imperial wife a large amount of land and gold;
emperors, after all, were supposed to set an example of filial piety
and generosity to their relatives. Wang Mang accepted these gifts, but
lived much more frugally than most of the great men of his time. He
abstained from meat and rich dishes at any time when there was a food
shortage in the empire, advised the grand dowager empress to dress more
simply, and made large contributions of money and land to relief of the
poor and hungry. Many other great men, it was said, followed his
example in making such contributions. Wang also used his own funds to
support large numbers of scholars at the capital, which enhanced his
reputation for generosity and put some of the best talent in the empire
at his disposal. [MOF, 79-80] |
It is not easy to explain Wang Mang’s decision
to
abandon his declared intention to return power to the Han prince some
day and to take the throne himself. The grand dowager empress was still
alive as the ultimate guarantor of his power. In 9 C.E. he had the Han
prince married to one of his granddaughters, setting the stage for a
still longer continuation of outside-relative power. Perhaps Ban Gu is
right, and usurpation had been his goal all along. Perhaps there were
weaknesses in his position that we cannot see from our limited sources
that impelled him to this step. We do know that at the end of 8 there
was a great rush of reports of portents that Wang should become
emperor. Messengers from Heaven appeared to various people in their
dreams. As a message on a stone was being examined, a wind arose, and
when the cloud of dust subsided there was a pattern of silk on the
ground that was interpreted as another message from Heaven. An official
proposed a reinterpretation of the abortive prophecies of 5 B.C.E. to
mean that a regent would change the reign period. Finally, a metal box
was presented to the ancestral temple of Emperor Gao, founder of the
Han, in which there were two documents one reporting that the Lord of
Heaven was sending a seal to Wang Mang, the other reporting that the
Red Emperor, Emperor Gao, was transmitting the mandate to the Yellow
Emperor. When this was reported to the court, Wang Mang rushed to the
temple of Emperor Gao and declared that he finally was convinced that
he no longer could evade Heaven’s command that he should take the
throne and found a new dynasty. The name of his dynasty, in fact, was
to be New (Xin). [MOF 84]
[The Ceremonies of Zhou]
is the perfect expression of a strand in Chinese political culture of
what might be called bureaucratic idealism, which envisions a realm in
which all major facets of human life are organized according to neatly
nesting hierarchies of bureaucratic terms, boundaries, and practices.
The result is not totalitarian repression but social equity,
spontaneous good order and generosity, and ceremonies maintaining
proper order among men and between the cosmic and human orders. [MOF,
81]
It was to the Ceremonies of Zhou
and other real and imagined Zhou precedents that Wang now turned to
guide a series of far-reaching policy initiatives....Several different
kinds of coins, some of them replicating the knife and spade shapes of
some of the late Zhou states, were instituted and made compulsory for
certain transactions; it seems clear that the proportion of
valuable metal in some of the new coins was lower than in the previous
Han coinage, and that this was in fact a debasement of the coinage.
Most people refused to accept the new coins, and the policy was widely
resented....
Most
important of all was his proclamation that henceforth there would be no
private landholding; all land would be known as the king’s fields
and would be subject to confiscation and redistribution. Immediately,
rich families having more than one hundred mou
(about thirty-three acres) of land were to distribute the excess over
that amount to their distant relatives or neighbors. Slaves were not
freed, but it was forbidden to buy or sell them. Wang justified these
measures as first steps toward the restoration of the well-field
system, which he said had been inhumanely destroyed by the Qin.
Little is known about what measures were taken to
enforce this remarkably sweeping change. We are told that the buying
and selling of slaves was pretty effectively disrupted. It also is
clear that these measures aroused the opposition of the entire landed
elite. Wang was forced to rescind them in 12 C.E. [MOF, 85] |
Ban’s account of Wang’s last years shows an
increasingly tyrannical government, arresting thousands of people for
violating the monopoly on minting coins, conducting executions the year
round (in gross violation of the harmony of Heaven and humanity, which
restricted them to autumn, the season when the natural world dies).
Wang is shown as more and more out of touch, not wanting to hear about
rebel advances, but refusing to allow his commanders to mobilize or
move their troops on their own initiative. Pursuing the lore of omens
and correspondences that had justified his seizure of power, in 21 he
ordered a wide search in the empire for women to enter his household:
“Because the Yellow Lord had 120 women, he became an
immortal.” He also
sent men to violate the temple of Emperor Gao of the Han, chopping up
its doors and windows, whipping its walls with the whips used to whip
criminals. He spent vast sums on splendid ceremonies at the temples of
his ancestors; he had come a long way from the times when he did not
eat meat if there was hunger anywhere in the empire. Even in these late
years, however, Ban records one case in which Wang paid attention to a
comprehensive denunciation of his policies and followed one part of its
recommendations. The monopolies were abolished, but at the end of 22,
much too late. [MOF, 88]
 |
A classical education was supposed to be a preparation for a moral
life, but especially for service as a minister of the emperor. Since
women did not serve in the bureaucracy, the incentives to give girls
such an education were not so strong. But it seems likely that Ban Zhao
received almost as good an education as her brothers. In an age when
the importance of good order and good example within a great family was
widely acknowledged, such an education of an upper-class girl may have
been more common than it was later. But the Ban family had an
exceptional heritage...and there cannot have been very many women who
got such a thorough classical and literary education. It began under
her father’s direction, and after his death her much older brothers
probably helped to teach her and find teachers for her. [MOF, 92-93]
In 96 or 97 Ban Zhao was back in the capital, beginning
the golden years of her influence and prestige at court....She was a
well-educated young woman with an excellent reputation for virtuous
conduct, diligence, and filial piety. Her entry into the palace, or her
later rise in the hierarchy of palace women, may have resulted from the
emperor’s efforts to work out a respectable and controllable set of
relations to his ladies and their relatives....She taught the Classics,
astronomy, and mathematics. She also was commanded to compose poems on
unusual gifts and other special occasions....
The emperor also ordered Ban Zhao to
come to the imperial library and use its documents to complete her
brother’s [i.e. Ban Gu’s] history [i.e. the Han Shu or “History of the Han Dynasty”]. The sections left unfinished at his untimely death
included the table of high officials and the essay on astronomy. Ban
Zhao completed these very difficult sections. She explained them and
the rest of the history to court scholars who found parts of it hard to
understand; one of them assisted her in the final editing work. She
seems to have been a full participant in the literary and intellectual
activity of the court, discussing texts and issues with men and women
and teaching their sons and daughters. [MOF, 96-97]
Ban Zhao had made of her life a fine embroidery of
scholarship, personal integrity, and a political astuteness that owed
much to her reading of history and all that she heard from her brother
and other participants in capital politics. But she also was the
product of a long tradition of ideals of feminine behavior and of her
own experiences as a daughter-in-law. Women should be modest, retiring,
diligent in their household duties. It is up to them to keep peace in
the household, winning the acceptance of the mother-in-law by modesty
and diligence in waiting on her, earning the respect and friendship of
brothers- and sisters-in-law. A good name is more important than
anything else. Frivolity, gossip, loud chatter with women friends are
to be avoided.
Ban Zhao embodied and taught, especially to
Dowager Empress Deng, a pattern of integrity, of modesty and yielding
in inter-personal relations, of not overreaching or wanting too much
power, that was rooted in these feminine virtues and that served her
and her imperial pupil very well. She also wrote, for the younger
generation and for generations yet to come, a famous statement of these
principles called the Nü Jie
(Admonitions to Women)....In it she brought up one issue on which she
found herself out of step with her own time and on which later
generations heeded her much too seldom:
| Now look at the gentlemen of the present age. They only know
that wives must be controlled and that [the husband’s] rules and
precedence must be established. They therefore teach their boys to read
texts and commentaries. But they do not understand that husbands and
masters must also be served, and that proper relationships and
ceremonies should be maintained. But if one only teaches men and does
not teach women, is that not ignoring the essential relation between
them? According to the Ceremonies,
children are taught to read beginning at the age of eight, and by the
age of fifteen they should be ready for thoughtful study of the
Classics. Why should [the education of girls as well as boys] not be
according to this rule? [MOF, 98-99] |
|
Needle and Thread
Chill autumn gleam of steel,
Fine, straight, and sharp,
You thrust your way in and gradually advance,
So that things far apart are all strung into one.
Needle and thread, your orderly traces
Seem to have no beginning, but join far and wide
Going back, twisting, flaws are mended,
As smooth as the fine coat of a lamb.
How can we measure your work?
All of it makes your memorial stone.
You’re found in the village home,
And in the great noble hall.
[MOF, 95]
|
|
