The World

As a boy in his village, Liu had been nicknamed Little Rascal by his father for his mischievous laziness, yet he was also genial, cheerful and loyal. A late starter, serving as companion to a local lord and enrolling as a village policeman, he rose slowly, impressing those he met including a local gentleman who was so taken with his physiognomy, which he took to indicate a glorious future, that he married him to his daughter Lu Zhi. Now forty-seven, he joined a multifaceted civil war in which warlords set up their own kingdoms.

The Second Emperor floundered: in August 208, his eunuch, Zhao Gao, framed the Councillor, who was sentenced to the gruesome Five Punishments, a horror probably developed by the First Emperor that would endure for centuries: the victim was tattooed on the face, then the nose was cut off, the limbs dislocated then amputated, the genitals sliced off and the body cut in half at the waist.^* Zhao Gao staged a rebel attack on the palace, manipulating the Second Emperor into committing suicide, then appointing a biddable prince as king. But it was too late.

In July 207, Liu Bang – Little Rascal – attacked the capital, captured the last of the Qin and, to secure the loyalty of recently conquered populations, announced a reduction in the dynasty’s punishments. After five years fighting rival warlords, in February 202 Liu Bang routed his rivals and accepted the title Huang-di, emperor, known posthumously as Gaozu – High Progenitor – of his new Han dynasty. Emperor Gao divided the empire into kingdoms which he granted to members of his own family and, not far from the ruined Xianyang, he built a new capital Chang’an. While he took many concubines, his partner was still his original wife Lu, mother of a son and daughter, but he worried that the son was ‘too weak’. Instead he favoured a younger concubine Qi and her son Liu Ruyi, whom he promised to promote. This unleashed a vicious rivalry between the two mothers that would be a feature of many Chinese courts.

Gaodi, born a peasant, was a rough, unpretentious, hard-drinking soldier. Once, the emperor stopped by at his peasant homestead where, playing a zither, he sang about his unlikely rise:

Now my power rules all Within the Seas,

I’ve returned to my old village.

Where else would I find braves

To guard the four corners of my land?

Within the Seas was the description that the Han gave to China itself; the challenge was guarding its Four Corners, particularly from the horsemen of the north who formed a confederation that preyed on Chinese cities, and at times in future centuries would conquer the whole of China. These Xiongnu were led by Modun, who as shanyu – king – had united these horse-riding tribes into a federation that, reacting against Chinese expansion, extended across Manchuria, eastern Siberia and central Asia: the first of the three great steppe empires. In 200, the emperor attacked Modun, but the shanyu soon surrounded him. Desperate to escape, Emperor Gao recognized Modun, paid him tribute and gave him a Han princess as wife, the start of heqin – Harmonious Kinship – in which Chinese princesses were married to these rather sophisticated barbarians, who were also bribed with thousands of bales of silk. Modun got both.

Liu never stopped fighting. At a minor siege, he was hit by an arrow, dying slowly from the wound in the company of his old henchmen, reminiscing about their astonishing rise. His soft-hearted eldest son succeeded to the throne. But he was controlled by the Dowager Empress Lu, who was as terrifying as she was competent.

MONSTRESS: MEET THE HUMAN SWINE

Emperor Hui, upon his accession, was just fifteen years of age, and naturally his mother made all the policy decisions, including the decision to marry him to his cousin, but they were childless. When he fathered two sons by a concubine, Lady Qi, Empress Lu had the imperial couple adopt them as their own and plotted to have the real mother killed.