The History of China - #124 - 5D10K 1: Live By the Sword...

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

Zhu Wen has proclaimed the dissolution of the Tang and the formation of Later Liang, with him as its Emperor Taizu... but there are more than a few people ready, willing, and able to object rather strongly to that claim... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Before getting into the thick of things today,

remember that mysterious, oversized, possibly ticking box on Zach Twamley's desk over at When Diplomacy Fails? Well, we ended up calling the bomb squad, and when they ever so gently opened it up, it turned out to be an explosion of podcasts, that is. Zach, the lunatic that he is, is chin-deep in his five weeks to run wild, in which, in order to celebrate his fifth anniversary,

he's been releasing two shows every single day, because he is an absolute madman and must be stopped. As it turns out, however, I am, in fact, an accomplice. Forgive me, Mom, since he and I recorded one of his upcoming collaborations on the Boxer Rebellion. That will be coming out on June the 19th, so you should, of course, give it a listen. But you might actually have a tough time being able to even find it, given the metric ton of new content Zach has been unleashing upon this unsuspecting Earth. Again, that's When Diplomacy Fails, Five Weeks to Run Wild, by Zach Twemley.

And now, on with the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 124, Live by the Sword. We are back, and I have returned from a week-long trip up to Beijing, where I and about a hundred or so of my students went to a rural area called Baihe for camping, community service, and a really cool trip to the Jinshan section of the Great Wall that was built between the 14th and 18th centuries. It was an excellent five days with absolutely perfect weather. We really, really lucked out since a rainstorm blew in literally an hour before we arrived

and got rid of all the air pollution, and so it was bright and sunny for the entire trip. And I personally relearned just how very, very easily my skin burns in high mountain sunshine, but I do highly recommend it. The trip, I mean, not the sunburn. Anyways, we've reached a new era in Chinese history, and the empire is now in the process of fragmenting into competing warlord states that will try, and most will quickly fail, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. That's right, it's the five dynasties and ten kingdoms period. Or, if we were really striving for accuracy here, the Sixish dynasties and couple of dozen kingdoms period. But hey, who's counting, right?

Today then, we're going to kick off where we left off, the northern half of China, where one of those regional warlords in particular has just gotten around to officially proclaiming the end of the Tang. He is the most powerful of them all, Zhu Wen, and he's officially claimed the title of emperor for himself and established his own new dynasty, that of later Liang. Of course, his competing regional warlords have, shall we say,

differences of opinion on the legality of that claim. One major aspect that jumps out when looking at this period versus other more unified periods in the vast stretch of Chinese history, is the nature of political power and its relationship to… well, relationships. In the good times of a dynasty like the Tang or the Han, personal connections between power and people was, if not exactly irrelevant, then at least highly abstracted or at least of far less import than, say, the religious,

social, and legal basis of that power. That is to say, most of the Tang emperors were powerful, not because they were chummy with all the right people in court, but instead that they were considered the holders of the mandate of heaven. That is, they were divinely appointed to be the literal link between the spiritual and material universes, a fact that no one took lightly. You may recall monarchs like Taizong and Xuanzong, yes, both of them, being able to simply overawe even the most stubborn of their officials by simply the weight of their majesty and, yeah, awesomeness. They were often aloof, distant, something beyond human, which I know is a concept difficult for a lot of us

modern folk to really grasp, but was absolutely the reality for most people in most times and places across human history. When God himself reaches down and says, yeah, this guy is my guy, you don't start asking questions. Furthermore, even those founders of dynasties like the Zhou, Han, and Tang, who often had begun their careers on the ground in the thick of it with their troops, were, at the end of the day, able to point to their crushing military victories that ushered them into power and say, That's how I know heaven wants me on the throne. It's a stark contrast, then, between that and the situation at the end of the Tang. Sure, there were powerful regional governors, but following the terrible fate meted out to the last guy who had tried to abruptly usurp the throne, I refer of course to Huang Chao, they had gotten a rather different message.

Some might be more powerful than others, but no governor was strong or secure enough to be able to produce that crushing, unquestionable military victory that would secure their claim to the mandate of heaven. Instead, most of them had realized that the far safer route to a lock on power was to quote historian Naomi Standen, to build their strength slowly, nurturing personal relationships, and rewarding the followers with the fruits of success, and were concerned not with overthrowing the dynasty, but with controlling the court, usually by assuming the role of the emperor's protector, end quote. By the year 901, Zhu Wen had effectively succeeded in that route and become by far the most powerful figure in the court and militarily unassailable in the field. But as much as that power had been based on battlefield victories, it was held together much more through a combination of friendships, submissions, and alliances.

He had a powerful coalition, but an inherently shaky one, and not anything he could confidently assert the mandate of heaven with. Nevertheless, from 903, when he assumed personal control over the emperor, up to 907, when he finally got around to taking the throne for himself, Zhu Wen did a pretty bang-up job of making sure that each and every position was filled with his own trusted men. Again, from Stand-In, During the move to Luoyang, Zhu gained formal control over the emperor's own forces,

the six imperial armies. Most of the troops had already been dispersed, and Zhu now had the last 200 killed and surreptitiously replaced with his own people. The emperor was now isolated amid household servants all chosen by Zhu, end quote. It almost feels like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something, doesn't it? Zhu had already, you might remember, killed off all the palace eunuchs and then filled their functions with, again, men personally loyal to him. Once he'd disposed of Zhao Zong and seated the 12-year-old Emperor

Ai on his throne, Zhu Wen then went on to finish this grisly job by instructing his right-hand man, Li Chen, to, by hook or by crook, get all of the remaining nobles and bureaucratic gentry not already under his payroll, replaced by either demotion, banishment, or convinced to voluntarily retire. Once they were suitably distant from the capital, he then followed this up with imperial orders of suicide and or just regular old assassination. Duan was not, after all, a man to settle for half measures. In the end, he would replace virtually the entire army

and ministers with men that he would personally select and had killed anyone who stood in his way, might have stood in his way, or seemingly even sneezed in the wrong direction. It sounds very dramatic, and to be sure, it was, but Stanton says that far from being some major shift in Juwon's tactic or methods for power, quote, this was just an extension of his earlier methods in the provinces, chief of which were straightforward military conquest and territorial domination. Zhu worked at the prefectural level, installing his own military officers

in every surrendered district unless it was politically unfeasible, chipping away at a province until he forced the governor's submission, end quote. Slow but steady wins the empire, as it were. The centerpiece of this whole enterprise was, of course, his army. Zhu I was through and through a military commander,

and he did not hesitate to send it against any and every act of resistance against his rule. Revolt or unrest wouldn't probably evoke a massive military counter-strike, it positively would, each and every time. The troops under his command were, as one might imagine, fiercely loyal as well, and Zhu held them to an almost obscene level of discipline. Scattered through his armies were his personal retainers. They seemed to have been fairly analogous to functions and thought policing of the political commissars of the likes of the French Revolution and the Red Army. These political retainers were to ruthlessly seek out any hint of disquiet in the ranks

and stamp it out. Soldiers in Zhu's army were required to be tattooed, further increasing group cohesion. And lastly, there were the standing orders that stipulated the group execution of any unit whose commanding officer was killed. And that is quite the order there. I'm not sure if I liken it more to Qin Shi Huang or Joseph Stalin, but it's right up there. With these positively draconian rules in place, what would possibly inspire such men to stick with Ju-1 through all of this? To put it plainly, the loot was too good to turn down. The constant warfare and defensive campaigning over the years gave even the lowliest soldier

in the ranks ample opportunity for enriching themselves on a seemingly endless supply of pillage and loot. And for those commanders who had proven themselves and entered Jew's tiny circle of trust, the potential rewards were far greater still. The promise of prefectures or even provinces of their own to personally command, and of course, tax into the ground. One of the really striking aspects of Jude's command team was how relatively little of it was composed of his own family. Sure, he did employ some of his blood relatives, but unusually for the period, they did not compose some vast block in his inner circle,

nor did any great number of his adopted sons, as he only ever took a few of those. Instead, the vast majority of his inner circle of loyalty came from two groups of battle-hardened military officers, those who had either defected to Zhu's side during his fight against Huang Chao decades before, or those who had remained loyal to the rebel emperor unto the end, and had only then surrendered to Zhu when the writing had been on the wall. Now, if that sounds a bit strange, trust the guys who refused to defect to Zhu when the writing had been on the wall. Now if that sounds a bit strange, trust the guys who refused to defect to you in the first place, well then at least Zhu

must have figured that such a deep loyalty could be counted upon absolutely. There is a lot of value to be had, after all, in a dog that does not go looking for a bigger bone to chew on. Now this personal style of control would work well while Ju-won's domain was small enough to still effectually manage it at that level, but years of victory and expansion would force him to revise his post-conquest replacement with his own men. There were, after all, only a finite number of said own men, and by 901, in fact, he found himself forced by the threat of overextending his inner circle to leave in place those governors who had surrendered to his armies. Though, to be sure, he did tend to take their respective families as hostages for their continued obedience.

He wasn't born yesterday, after all. That policy, however, would come back around to bite him when Zhu opted in 904 to sleep with the wife of the governor of Binzhou, prompting the governor to immediately renege on his promise of obedience. The following year, 905, would see Zhu perform yet another blunder when he rather clumsily tried to turn an ally of his into a subject by force. Though he'd successfully install two of his own governors in the two Qingnan provinces, when he, against ministerial advice, it should be noted, tried to press his advantage by marching south to Huainan as well, he found to his shock

and dismay that the governors weren't about to surrender, and his armies now being so far extended was running his coffers dry. Thus, in the end, he was forced to call his forces off in humiliation and return home. This would prove to be the limits of Lider Liang's southern boundaries and Zhu Wen's reach. All right, so Zhu Wen assumed the role of Emperor of Lider Liang in early 907, as we already looked at in the last couple of episodes. As usual, historians from here on out, and as such I as well, refer to him by his temple name, Taizu, but it's worth remembering that he would have never been called that name in his life, but rather honorifics like Bixia, Shengshang,

and Tianzi, meaning your majesty, holy and exalted one, and son of heaven, respectively. I should point out, though, that historians go back and forth on his name. Some of them, such as Standen, never refer to him really as Taizu, but rather continue to refer to him as Ju-1. So just be advised that if I call him Ju-1 or Taizu, I'm referring to the same person. And really, this whole formal accession to the throne and succession of dynastic names was, like so many things in the imperial court, just so much theatrical three-title monty that simply confirmed what had already objectively come to pass. That Emperor Taizu was in total command, and had been for all the years since he'd whisked Zhaozong away from Chang'an. Well, there was one big substantive change, at least, and that was the capital city.

Taizu received and at last accepted the adolescent Emperor Ai's abdication, in neither Chang'an, which was still, you'll remember, a burned-out deathscape that would never again recover completely, nor in Luoyang, which is where the now-suddenly-former emperor yet resided. Instead, Jiwen received the letter in his own headquarters and base of operation, Bianzhou. Now, I certainly don't expect you to recall this city, since it's undergone several name changes and total reconstructions since we last brought it up at the tail end of the Warring States period, when it was burnt to the ground by King Zhen of Qin when he'd conquered the state of Wei as a part of his campaign for the first Chinese empire to become Qin Shi Huang.

Ah yes, the good old days. Well anyways, that technically made Bianzhou one of the eight ancient capitals of China. And, as it was now not only Taizu's home sweet home, but also a thriving trade center along the Grand Canal thanks to Tang-era reconstruction efforts, that made it a prime candidate to resume its long-dormant place as an imperial capital. But perhaps wishing to avoid Tang-era associations, and instead wanting to evoke the total victory of the ancient Qin Emperor, Taizu opted to change Bianzhou's name to its Qin-era moniker,

Kaifeng meaning literally, expand the borders. And so, under later Liang, Kaifeng would be made the new prime capital, with Luoyang remaining as the secondary capital. And Chang'an? Well, screw that place. It had its capital status revoked entirely. No love for Chang'an. Ironically for Taizu, whose power and claim to the throne was based entirely on the strength of his armies and his unbeatable martial prowess, his impetus to finally seize the throne had actually been a deeply

embarrassing military failure, wherein a rebellious general had managed to infiltrate one of Taizu's army encampments in Weibo with a strike team of a thousand men and surprise and slaughter more than 8,000 later Liang soldiers, as well as their families. This had resulted in the loss of control of the Hebei region and had forced Juwen's hand in giving Emperor Ai the boot. The upshot of all this was that, rather than coming into the throne on the coattails of a grand victory that would seal his claim to the mandate of heaven, Taizu entered the office embarrassed, embattled, and at what Stanton calls his, quote, military anti-climax, end quote. If military conquest stood as the heart of the legitimation of a new dynastic order, then what in the world did this hot mess mean?

Stanton writes, quote, Since the Tang's military forces were negligible and Zhu had been adopted as the dynasty's protector, clear-cut conquest of the old dynasty by the new would have been awkward. Yet, without an unequivocal military victory to demonstrate that he was fulfilling the will of heaven, Zhu's claim to the throne rested on his control of the capitals, the Tang emperor's abdication in his favor, and above all, the continuing allegiance of governors

who had troops and resources to defy him. End quote. Even Taizu's older brother, Zhu Quanyu, was said to have castigated his brother's ill-timed and rushed overthrow of the Tang. In the Zizhi Tongjian, Sima Guang has Quanyu castigating Taizu as such, saying, quote, how can you destroy overnight the Tang house's three-century rule

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Come, visit ancient Egypt, and experience a legendary culture. In fact, the official annals documenting Taizu's life and reign, all commissioned and approved by the emperor himself of course, would later take great pains to document all of the extensive supernatural portents declaring Juwen the legitimate successor, and all the loyal heroes stating loudly and publicly their undying devotion to later Liang, even if it meant their own personal doom. This kind of over-the-top melodrama would simply have to suffice to make up for the lack of justification that unambiguous military conquest would have provided. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the other warlords of the North and South were taking a

rather different tact than pledging their undying loyalty to this so-called Emperor Tai Tzu of later Liang. Instead, these powerful Jie Du Shi, such as Li Keyong in Hedong, Li Maozhen in Fenxiang, Yang Xingmi in Hainan, and Wang Jian in Sichuan, all pointedly retained some version or another of the Tang reign era calendar, an unequivocal rejection of Taizu's move to usurp the empire. That said, even though they all agreed that Taizu's overthrow of the Tang was totally not cool, none of them seemed to quite agree what exactly they could or should do about it. Li Ke Yong, for instance, insisted on the restoration of the Tang to power and merely

retained his dynastic imperial title as the independent Prince of Jin, though in this he was pretty well alone. In contrast, the likes of Wang Jian suggested that all of the Jiedushi should declare themselves local emperors, in part to water down the efficacy of Taizu's own new title. Oh, you're an emperor now, huh? Well, so's everyone else. Big deal. Li Maozhen seemed to have liked this idea, but his own proximity to Taizu's power base and his own military impotency kept him from openly declaring himself as an emperor, although he did adopt all the imperial regalia and trappings for his use. In spite of Li Kejong's protestations, Wang Jian would indeed declare himself Emperor

Gaozu of Sichuan and the Central Plains of Chongqing in 907, which would collectively be known as Former Shu, our first of the ten kingdoms in the south. But he would quickly be joined that same year by the kingdoms of Wu, Wu Yue, and Chu, encompassing the modern provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui, and Jiangxi in the cases of Wu, Zhejiang and Shanghai in the case of Wu Yue, and Hunan and Guizhou in the cases of Chu. I should note, however, that while former Shu's leader proclaimed himself Huangdi, none of the leaders of Wu, Wuye, or Chu would take that step and settled for the lesser title of Guo Wang, meaning king rather than emperor.

Meanwhile, in the far northeast, the Jiedushen chieftain of the Khitan, Ye Lu Abaoji, was acclaimed as the Kayan of the Khitan in 907, which would set in motion the formation of the Liao dynasty, which traces its origin to Abaoji's initial election here and now. Though it wouldn't be until 916, after he had crushed two of his brothers who objected to his refusal to relinquish the title of Kayan to one of them, since as per Khitan tradition, it wasn't a lifetime gig, but only a three-year rotation with elections each time under a curl tie. It wasn't until after that point that Abaoji would formally adopt the title of Celestial Emperor, adopt Chinese-style governmental practices, including designating his eldest son as his heir rather than submitting the question to another curl tie, and instituting

his own reign era, thus formally beginning the Liao dynasty. But hey, details, details. We'll have plenty of time to flesh out the Liao. Much more than the ephemeral five dynasties, and ten kingdoms at least, that's for sure. Back down south, virtually to a man, all of the major governors of both north and south had roundly rejected Zhu Wen's claim to the throne of China. And that could mean only one thing. More war. Lots more war. But in the spring of 908, in the middle of a campaign to keep the vital city of Luzhou out of Taizu's hand, Li Kayong took seriously ill and rapidly died at the age of 61. He had designated his eldest son, the 22 or 23-year-old Li Cunshu, as his heir, but stipulated that he be placed in the care of Ke Yong's

adopted brother, Li Ke Ning, who was a far more experienced military commander than the green-horned scion of the one-eyed dragon. This decision to name his eldest child by blood rankled many of Li Ke Yong's adopted sons, though, most of whom were older and more experienced, and thus held no respect for the young man. Though initially protected by his uncle's insistence that he was the legitimate heir of Ke Yong, his adopted brothers repeatedly disrespected and refused to listen to the new Prince of Jin. Some even going so far as to refuse to bow to their lord and counseling Li Ke Ning that he

ought to overthrow Chunshu and install himself as the governor-general of He Dong. Cunning refused this council and even threatened to execute those who pressed the issue, but found himself more and more moved towards accepting such suggestions when even his own wife, persuaded by those same adopted brothers, began urging him to act against the Prince of Jin. But though Li Cunshu was indeed as green as they came, he was no idiot, and he had no small measure of his father's propensity toward bold and decisive action. Informed of the continued conspiracies encircling him, he decided to strike first, inviting on March 28th, 908, not only his uncle, but as many of his conspirator brothers as he could uncover, as well as their highest-ranking

officers, to his house under the pretense of a grand feast. Once they had all arrived and the gates shut tightly behind them, a contingent of guardsmen that the Prince of Jin had hidden away emerged and surrounded the helpless guests, slaughtering them one and all. In the wake of this Black Dinner-esque scenario, and with his claim to power over Jin now secure and free of familial scheming, Li Cunshu would turn his armies to the besieged city of Luzhou, personally leading one half of

his army in a pincer maneuver against the encamped forces of later Liang and crushing them, thus lifting the siege. With this victory and Lucidi once again safely in his possession, the Prince of Jin would take the space and time provided by later Liang's routed forces to gradually rebuild and rearm his territory's armies. Sima Guang puts it in the Zizhi Tongjian, quote, As Herong was a small territory that lacked resources for military recruitments, he strengthened the training for the soldiers. He ordered that cavalry soldiers walk on marches, and that without seeing the enemy, they not mount their horses. Once orders and duties were distributed, all soldiers were to follow them and not exceed their bounds, not exchange duties, not linger in places, and not avoid dangers. Whenever the

soldiers were to be divided into several prongs of attack, they were to rendezvous at the appointed time, and that if they were late for more than fifteen minutes, they would be executed. This is how he was able to eventually conquer the territory east of the Taihang Mountains and occupy the lands of the Yellow River. He had well-disciplined soldiers." Over the years of 909 and 910, Li Cunshu was joined by Li Maozhan of Fengxiang in the cause of restoring the Tang Dynasty, and the two city-states operated as allies in that cause. Though, in spite of repeated attacks on cities like Xia City that autumn, the governors under Emperor Taizu proved largely loyal to their sovereign and called on Liang reinforcements rather than flip over their

restorationist cause, resulting ultimately in negligible gains for the allied states of Jin and Qi, as well as a considerable boost in Taizu's own perceived authority, since his governors had stood fast behind his claim to power. This enhancement of his legitimacy was, of course, badly needed. Yet even now, it wasn't nearly enough to take anything or anyone for granted. Taizu's favored method of control had been, and yet remained, coercion, intimidation, and making sure that no single one of his officials or commanders possessed enough power to challenge him from within. Moreover, any gains in his status remained fundamentally undercut by the very continued fact that whatever his title, he was

still just one among many regional rulers, and that list seemed to grow longer each day. Any sense of Taizu being truly the sovereign of the Middle Kingdom was likewise undermined by the very type of person that Zhu Wen fundamentally was, a control freak micromanager rather than serene lord on high. He now had formal access to the administrative apparatus of the state, which should have been fully capable of not only more effectively governing the realm than any single man could do on a day-to-day basis, but also could have provided Taizu with ready-built means of displaying the kind of symbolism and demonstrations of virtue

that was expected of a son of heaven. Things like acts of grace, and ceremonial bequeathment of titles, and the like. Instead, Jiuan paid little heed to this apparatus that could have granted him the kind of legitimacy he sought now solely through force of arms. Standen writes, quote, attention to such matters. We've already seen this indifference to the conventions of abdication and dynastic foundation, and he was willing to follow the custom of re-employing all of his predecessors' ministers only because they were already people he had chosen himself. His approach to the imperial

administration was little short of revolutionary, and although there was a symbolic value in promulgating a law code, as Jude did in 910, it retained nothing of the Tang Code, of which all copies were to be destroyed, end quote. His regime was one founded and fundamentally based upon the sole principle of personal loyalty to him, in so many words, a cult of personality. And now, in spite of possessing the tools to extend that authority and appeal to the whole of the realm, he made virtually no effort to do so beyond his established personal following. This is in pretty stark contrast to the ruling style of Li Cunshu, the Prince of Jin, who would in 923 go on to found the successor state of later Liang, known as later Tang. Markedly unlike his rival, and his father for that matter, Cunshu was far

more concerned with pursuing policies of good governance and to present himself publicly as a ruler possessed of imperial virtue. He would seek to unite the realm and reclaim the fallen mantle of the Tang, not solely through coercion, as with Liang's Taizu, but through concerted strategies designed to demonstrate his own worthiness of the mandate of heaven, backed, of course, by a hard core of judiciously applied military force. Regardless of style of governance, however, if Taizu thought that his accession to the throne was going to stop the wars that burned all across the empire, he was proven sorely mistaken. In 910, the Liang Emperor would once again commit a serious

strategic unforced error when he attacked and seized two prefectures in the northeast belonging to Governor Wang Zheng, with whom he had already sealed a marriage alliance. Based on a rather fishy report that Wang was in contact with the Prince of Jin, Paizu's attack, ironically but predictably, forced Wang Zheng straight into the welcoming arms of, you guessed it, the Prince of Jin. With this, the Northern Lords, who had until now either been carefully passive or actively friendly to the cause of later Liang, now flipped almost entirely and proclaimed their adherence to the Tang calendar system, thus rejecting their erstwhile alliance with Taizu, and leaving him dangerously vulnerable from what had only just been a protected flank. This issue was compounded when the Prince of Yan, a man named Liu Shouguang,

who likewise had been one of Taizu's nominal subordinates, began feeling out offers of alliance with those lords now allied to the Prince of Jin. Liu seems to have been rather in love with the idea of his own greatness, and sent replies out to several of the Prince of Jin's allies, calling on them to join his alliance against Taizu, which they all declined, knowing that it would be turning their backs on Jin in so accepting. Later in 911, Liu assented to join the Jin alliance,

but demanded that in return all of the fellow regional lords would agree to call him Shangfu, a name of honor hearkening back to the right hand of the ancient King Wen of Zhou in the 11th century BCE. The leaders decided to humor this rather ridiculous and vainglorious request, additionally naming him the Director of the Departments of State Affairs, itself a reference to the great Tang Taizong's position prior to his accession. We must imagine all of this happening with the other lords elbowing each other in the ribs and trying not to laugh at Liu Shouguang, the preening, self-important peacock.

Even Emperor Taizu seemed to have gotten in on the fun, for when he learned of all these superfluous titles being heaped upon the prince, he tacked on the position of Hebei Investigation Commissioner, a position that hadn't been used since the An Lushan Rebellion 160 years earlier. At this point, either Liu Shouguang figured out that his fellow governors were poking fun at him, and he got tired of it, or it all actually went enough to his head. But in either case, in the summer of 912, he essentially proclaimed that all these titles still didn't get him what he really wanted, which was the right to make imperial-level sacrifices. And so, he declared his own reign era and established the Great Yan Dynasty, to which I have to think everyone simply rolled their eyes. In any other instance, Emperor

Taizu would have turned and steamrolled this upstart underling. But as it so happened, he was in the final preparations for a long-planned campaign against his enemies to the north. Not only this, but Liu Shouguang had committed his own sizable army to the north as well, invading the province of Yiding before becoming swamped by a counterattack of some 30,000 Hedong and Khitan troops, reportedly led by the Kayan Abauji himself. This counterattack had reached all the way to the walls of Yu City, the Oshoguang's capital, who in desperation turned to Taizu for aid.

And in what may in fact have been the only time in his life, Taizu was prepared to overlook this blatant disloyalty from his subordinate, the declaration of this so-called Great Yin, and instead rode into Liu's rescue. Standen writes, The war seems to have been marked by greater-than-usual ruthlessness. Liu Shouguang conducted a registration of his population, in which even the literary classes were tattooed as soldiers,

and Zhu Wen is said to have slaughtered all the inhabitants of the first town he took, regardless of age or infirmity, so that flowing blood filled the city. The Hedong scouting force, too, resorted to brutality when they cut the arms off of some of their later Liang captives and sent them back to Juwan's camp with a message that convinced Ju that the main Hedong army had arrived. Accordingly, he withdrew southward, and when he found out he'd been fooled, his shame reportedly worsened his health. End quote. In spite of the assistance of later Liang, Liu Shouguang's position would prove unwinnable. Besieged from the north, he was also beset by treachery from within. In his province of Changzhou,

his own son, the governor, was murdered by a subordinate, who then offered the province to later Liang, which Taizu seized without so much as a word of protest over the killing of his ally's son. Others broke away and submitted to the killing of his ally's son. Others broke away and submitted to the Prince of Jin, and still others would swear fealty to the Khitan Kayan. By early 914, his realm torn to shreds and his capital of Yu City wracked by a half-year-long siege, Liu Shouguang was forced to surrender and met his execution alongside his father, leaving both the provinces of Jin and He Dong far more enriched and now rivaling Later Liang in sheer size. But Zhu Wen, the Emperor Taizu of Later Liang, would not live to see this ominous turn of events for his dynasty. In fact, he wouldn't live to see

the autumn of 912. At age 51, his health was in free fall, and there might be a bit of confusion about the date here, but his eldest son and heir had either died that previous June or maybe several years prior. But in any case, that had thrown the succession plans into question as the emperor approached the end of his life. In spite of having at least seven blood sons, Taizu opted to name his eldest adopted son, Zhu Youwen, as his crown prince. This had in turn enraged Taizu's second son, Zhu Yougui, who felt cheated, understandably, out of his inheritance. It also didn't help that the deathly ill emperor had issued an order commanding Prince Yougui out of the capital and out to a province, which seemed ominous indeed to the prince as it had been long-standing tradition

in later Liang for the emperor to first banish an official and then order their execution. Both green with envy and fearing for his life, Prince Yougei then entered into a conspiracy with the palace guard to murder his father that July. Prince Yougei was successful in assassinating his father, and then in the dead emperor's name ordered that his younger brother, Youjun, execute their adopted brother, the heir, and then, in the dead emperor's name, ordered that his younger brother, Yo-jun, execute their adopted brother, the heir, and then declared that Taizu had, gasp, been assassinated, by his own heir, that treacherous Prince Yo-1. We always knew he wasn't real, family. It was a bold plan, and it worked out perfectly,

as Ju-Yo-Gway succeeded Taizu to the throne in 912. Oh, was I implying perhaps that it was perfect for Yougui? I actually meant that it was perfect for Yougen, the younger third brother who had placed the knife in the adopted brother's back, as the following year he'd slide another blade between the ribs of Yougui, which, wouldn't you know it, left the throne open for him to take, becoming Emperor Mo. In the case of Taizu and Yougui both, the old axiom applied, live by the sword, die by the sword. And so here we sit on the cusp of 915, just seven years after the dissolution of the Tang, but already with nine independent regional powers at play, later Liang, Jin, Fengxiang, Hedong,

and the Khitan in the north, and former Shu, Wu, Wuye, and Chu in the south. But all this has just been setting the board for the real games to come, and believe me, the fun is just getting started in the Five Dynasties period. Next time, we'll begin the second phase of this fractious and dangerous period, the war for supremacy. Thanks for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans.

I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.