The World

Capricious and increasingly murderous, Wudi became ever more improvident. He built vast new palaces, embarked on expensive tours, executing grandees who failed to feed his vast entourage, and staged elaborate sacrifice rituals on the sacred Mount Tai to confirm the Mandate of Heaven.^* Empress Wei came to be overshadowed by his beloved Consort Li, whose brother won laurels in central Asia, winning fame as the Flying General. But the Xiongnu hit back, defeating a Han army. In 99, when the Flying General’s grandson Li Leng defected to the nomads, his friend the court historian Sima Qian went to intercede with the emperor – with atrocious consequences.

Wudi believed that history was as important as war: it legitimized the dynasty. But it had to be the right history. Wudi commissioned his grand scribe – part historian, part astrologer – Sima Tian to write the first full Chinese history, known today as the Shiji, Records of the Grand Historian. When Sima Tian died in 110, he passed his quill to his thirty-five-year-old son Sima Qian, who recalled him ‘grasping my hands with tearful eyes’ and saying, ‘Don’t forget what I intended to write down.’

Sima Qian, an attendant of the emperor, who had served in the army against the Xiongnu, set to work. Scribes like Sima used a writing brush, ink slab, knife and seal to write on narrow wooden strips, silk being used only for important documents. Like Polybius, his contemporary in Rome, he believed in world history ‘to examine all that concerns heaven and man, to penetrate the changes of past and present’. But the history of the past is always about the present: when he criticized ‘expedient’ royal advisers and denounced the First Emperor’s cruelties, he offended his own paranoid emperor.

In 99 BC, Sima Qian interceded with the emperor for Li Leng – ‘to widen His Majesty’s view’ – at which the emperor accused him of Grand Insult and sentenced him to death by suicide, a sentence that could be commuted on payment of a fine or castration. Sima did not have the money and refused to kill himself, so he was forced to choose ‘the punishment of rottenness’. He dreamed of his book being read in ‘villages and great cities’ but ‘since I regretted that I had not finished [the book], I submitted to the extreme penalty without bitterness’ – the shame of castration, performed in the silkworm chamber, where mutilated men were kept like silkworms in a warm, airless room, believed to help prevent infection. He survived, was promoted to court archivist/astrologer and palace secretary and finished his classic history. But his involvement in intrigues was not quite over.

In 96 BC, after a dream about an assassin and killer puppets, Wudi was convinced by his chief of security that his illnesses were the treasonous work of black magic. In a spiralling vortex of denunciations and witch-hunting, he ordered foreign shamans to excavate the palaces to find magical dolls and unleashed witchcraft trials against his own ministers, executing no less than six of his chancellors, butchering entire clans, tens of thousands of innocent people. Even Wudi’s own daughters were sucked into the vortex and executed. Killing sons was sometimes necessary for monarchs – but not daughters.

Wudi’s eldest son Ju with Empress Wei was the heir apparent, but at sixty-two the emperor fathered a son with a younger concubine, Lady Gouyi. Wudi’s security chief framed Prince Ju for witchcraft and for wishing his father dead – probably no more than the truth since the emperor had been on the throne for so long. As tension rose, Ju – realizing he was being framed – forged an order from Wudi and killed the security chief, before rushing to explain himself to his father. So, backed by his mother the empress, he tried to seize power.

After five days of fighting in the streets of Chang’an, the emperor restored order, Empress Wei committed suicide, her clan was eliminated and Ju hanged himself. All the emperor’s sons – and anyone who had shown any hesitation in backing him – were killed except the baby. Yet the witch-frenzy changed China forever, liquidating the old clans and creating a vacuum that was filled by officials of obscure birth.

Finally, the emperor realized that his henchmen had framed his son. Grieving and blaming himself, he issued his public Repenting Edict of Luntai, but now punished the family of his Consort Li who had managed to destroy most of the Wei family. The Li were killed to the ninth degree.

The only heir left alive was the boy, now aged nine, born to Lady Gouyi. In 88 BC, the emperor appointed him as his heir but, fearing the mother would become too powerful after his death, he summoned the young woman and ordered her arrest: she kowtowed in amazement, at which he ordered, ‘Out, quickly! You can’t be saved!’ He had her killed.