The History of China - #2 - Origins 2: Five Emperors, Twelve Islands

Episode Date: November 26, 2013

This episode, we enter the second half of our gaze into the Chinese origins mythos. Focusing on the Five Emperors descended from the Yellow Emperor, this period marks the beginning of the transformation of the Huaxia People from settled tribe, to dynastic feudal kingdom. There will be betrayal, cataclysmic flooding, bird kingdoms, the Vietnamese, magical earth, and – of course – dragons. UPDATE: as of 08/28/2016, this episode has been fully rebooted from the ground up. Enjoy! Transcript Available (paywalled): Transcript Become a Patron: Click Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic

characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 2. Five Emperors, Twelve Islands Last time, we ended with the reign and eventual passing of the final mythical sovereign, the Yellow Emperor Huangdi, in 2598 BCE. Today, we'll explore the second stage of China's prehistoric origin story as it begins to traverse the chasm between mythology and what we begin to consider historic fact. That is, the period of the five great emperors. As with the four three sovereigns, we have a bit of a historical disagreement over how many five emperors there actually were. All individual lists, of course, have the correct number, that is, five,

but there is some disagreement over who's in and who's out. In all, we get six main contenders. So, as with last episode, we'll be fair and take a look at all of them. We start, then, with the emperor Shaohao. He's kind of our odd man out in the story, as only a minority of sources, albeit a sizable one, include him as one of the five emperors. We'll discuss more on the why of that in a little bit. In the traditional oral mythos, Shaohao was born of the union of a weaver goddess and the planet Venus as they floated together along the Milky Way. As such, it's quite appropriate

that his name can be translated as Child of the Summer Sky. Regardless, after descending to Earth, he established a great kingdom to the east of the Huaxia Chinese Empire. It was a kingdom of birds, which is to say, literal, actual birds. His Lord Chancellor was a phoenix, his Minister of Education a hawk, and his Prime Minister a pigeon. Because, after all, why not? Upon the death of the august Yellow Emperor, however, he left his bird kingdom to his son and assumed the Western throne. However, there is a somewhat more grounded, let's say, version of Xiao Hao's reign.

Rather than the product of some cosmic one-night stand, this version tells us that Xiao Hao is the oldest son of the Yellow Emperor. Xiao Hao would become the Emperor in, at least according to our timeline, 2597 BCE, upon the death of his father, Huang Di. Over the course of his reign, he would expand relations with, and eventually politically incorporate the territory to the south of the main Huaxia Empire, belonging to a people called the Lou Lou, or the Yi. Though they would recognize the dominance of Emperor Shaohao, they remained a largely culturally autonomous people ever after, having never submitted to full integration with the

burgeoning Huaxia collective. In fact, even today, the Yi people are recognized as a distinct minority people within China itself. They remain primarily herders, farmers, and nomadic hunters in the difficult, mountainous regions of southeast China, including what today includes most of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi provinces, as well as northern Vietnam and Thailand. Their estimated modern ethnic population is somewhere around 7.8 million. As emperor, Xiao Hao's rule was largely peaceful and uneventful. And that's good for him, but kind of sparse for us. So we'll move on. His son, named Jiao Ji, proved himself

dishonorable and unfit to rule, and so Xiao Hao wisely sought out a more suitable candidate to succeed him. We'll come to see that this will be one of the defining aspects of the period of five emperors, and one of the main reasons it's not remembered as a dynasty as such, unlike the dynastic successions that will follow. The five emperors period is marked by a distinct lack of primogeniture succession, or even direct father-to-son succession at all. Although our six rulers today are one and all the blood of Huangdi, only one is going to end up being the son of the previous emperor, and him not even the son who had been selected to rule. Well, we'll later be discussing the emperors and kings of China in terms of successive lines. Right now it's kind of more of an erratic

zigzag. These guys were more concerned with the actual fitness to rule over bloodline and birth order, a state of affairs that would not be repeated in a significant way in the Middle Kingdom for about, oh, 4500 years thereafter. And yet some still wonder why we call them Sage Kings. Xiao Hao ruled over his expanded empire for 84 years. As mentioned, he denied his son the throne and instead selected his half-brother's son, Zhuang Shu, to succeed him. He then died in 2514 BCE. There is, however, another vein of historical thought, specifically in the Shiji, asserting

that Shaohao never ruled. Instead, there was a period of extended interregnum between the death of the Yellow Emperor and the eventual election, yes, you heard that right, election — of Zhuanshu to the imperial throne. Despite this seeming schism in the quasi-historical record, fortunately we can all reconcile with the universally recognized successor, or not, to Xiao Hao, Zhuanshu. Zhuanshu was the Yellow Emperor's grandson, the progeny of one of his younger sons, Chang'e. Though there remains the theory that he had been elected after a period of interregnum, the main narrative sticks to the tale that he was raised by his uncle, Shaohao, to be his assistant, starting at the age of 10. Thus, learning the intricacies of the court system and what it took

to govern, Zheng Shu would become the heir and eventual successor to the throne 10 years later, when his uncle died in, again, 2514. Emperor Zhuanzhu's reign, like his predecessors, was largely free of strife. Having been an adept student of astronomy his whole life, in the 13th year of his reign he reformed the calendar, based on detailed observations of the movements of the celestial bodies overhead. In addition, he initiated a series of religious reforms aimed at discouraging the still-prevalent local shamanism in favor of a more general, and thus state-controllable, system of worship.

He also forbade marriage to close kin, so there will be no more of those uncle-daddies on his watch. Probably the most important, or at least the most interesting, myth about Zhuanshu's period of reign was that it would be at this point that heaven and earth were to be separated once and for all. As we went over toward the end of last episode, at the beginning point of the current universe, the two places, if we're to call them that,

were both interconnected and porous. If you're a fan of Tolkien and the whole Middle-earth mythos, we might make strong parallels to the idea of the Undying Lands of the West, Valinor. In Tolkien lore, initially this literal land of the angels and eternals could be reached by ship, until that proved itself to be a tremendously bad idea, and the Valar moved Valinor so that it could never again be reached by non-magical means. Well, that's pretty much exactly what happens during Zhenshu's reign, too. We get one of the earliest tellings of this separation of heaven and earth from a book called the Shangshu, meaning the Venerated Documents, which is dated as having been written

in the 4th century BCE. It's in the chapter titled Lüxing that gives us the following account, quote, We are told that the Miao people created oppressive punishments which threw the people into disorder. following account. cut communication between heaven and earth so that there would be no ascending and descending. After this had been done, order was restored, and the people returned to virtue." Now, we might take a story like this at just face value and simply write it off as little more than fantasy. But historian Kuang Chiu-chang argues that to do so would be missing the larger truths contained within the story, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Namely, that it's a representative accounting for the metamorphosis of ancient Chinese society into a socially stratified one. Much like the Three Sovereigns period we covered

last time, roughly outlining the progression of the Chinese tribes from hunter-gatherer nomads to a settled farming culture that more or less matches with what anthropologists and archaeologists have subsequently been able to put together about such social formations, we're going to find that the era of the five emperors likewise serves as a metaphorical explanation for the development of later and more complex social structures as well. Chang explains this particular myth of dividing heaven from earth as, quote, symbolizing the defining threshold in the rise of stratified society on China's way to civilization. Before Duan Shu and the two gods Chong and Li made heaven inaccessible, in the Yangshuo period, for example,

heaven was open to every household that had or could hire a shaman, end quote. This division between heaven and earth, then, is symbolic of the holy implements and the ability to converse with the supernatural and otherworldly, the implements of religion and right, being concentrated into the hands of the wealthy and politically powerful. This might sound like comparatively small potatoes, but we do see similar stratification time and again across early human history all over the world. How do the people with power justify their monopoly on that money, land, and law? Why, divine sanction, of course. And when that divine sanction is ostensibly granted,

it's only smart to then shut the door on that question once and for all by making sure that you, and only you, or at most a very small elite priest class that's in your corner, can legitimately talk to the gods after that. It wouldn't do to allow every Tom and Jane across town to be able to independently ask the heavens if their ruler really deserved to rule after all. Regardless, after a rule of supposedly 78 years, Zhanshu died having appointed a man named Ku as his heir. In spite of having somewhere between two and ten sons, he denied them all title or inheritance for reasons unknown. Ku was the grandson of the Yellow Emperor and cousin to Zhuanshu.

Though he assumed the title of Emperor, it remains unclear which territory or territories exactly Ku actually held. Indeed, upon the death of Zhuanshu, there were reports of a rebellion flaring up. The leader of this rebellion was a descendant of the old deposed Flame Emperor, whose aim was usurping the throne from the heir apparent, Ku. This ember of rebellion, however, was swiftly stamped out by Ku's army, who then wasted no time formally ascending to the throne. Emperor Ku had interesting travel arrangements, which varied by season. During the springs and summer, he opted to travel rather conventionally by horseback. Through the winter and fall months,

however, he really brought on the flair by traveling on dragonback. Though Ku had proved his battle bona fides in putting down the would-be usurper's rebellion, he proved himself much more a lover of arts than of war. More than anything, he's remembered as an avid composer of song and an inventor of musical instruments, including drums, bells, chimes, pipes, ocarinas, and flutes. And I say that he is remembered for inventing these items, but in fact the sum total of his contribution was ordering a subordinate to invent them. In classic managerial fashion, someone else does all the work and the king takes all the credit. Ku would take four

wives over the course of his reign, all at the same time, which would become a celebrated Chinese imperial tradition. It is good, after all, to be king. Once each of his wives had borne him a son, Ku found he needed to resolve a bit of a quandary. Which of his sons ought to inherit the empire? Which was still quite the open question, since since after all there was nothing in the way of precedent. At least, not yet. To resolve this potential dilemma, he consulted an oracle and asked which of his sons would rule the empire after him. With typical soothsayer nebulousness, the oracle opaquely stated that they all would. And like the daily newspaper horoscope, if you read it the right way, it's vague enough to end up being sort of true...ish. The two eldest sons, Zi and Yao, we'll deal with more in a minute in detail,

as they're going to become emperors in their own rights right after we're done with Ku. So, so far so good, Oracle. The two younger brothers, though, were deemed unfit to rule by their father. However, the story is such that the third son, Xie, would ultimately be known as the pre-dynastic founder of the Shang Dynasty that will rule from 1600 to 1046 BCE, and is the first dynasty that is considered to be more than mostly fiction. The youngest brother, Huo Ji, would also be remembered as the dynastic founder, specifically of the Zhou Dynasty that would take power after the Shang's fall and rule from 1045 to 256 BCE.

Having rightly deemed the Oracle's cryptic advice to be pretty much useless, oh, they'll all rule Yao, that helps narrow down the choice, thanks for nothing, Oracle, Emperor Ku snubbed his eldest son Zhi and named little brother Yao to be his successor, which, as you might imagine, gave Zhi the world's biggest chip on his shoulder. And Zhi certainly was given time to nurse his grudge, because Ku would rule for another two decades, taking Yao under his wing and showing him the ropes of governance before dying in 2366 BCE after a 70-year reign. So now we have Yao, having dutifully paid respects to his departed father and waiting out the customary mourning period before assuming leadership over his people. But what's this? Why, it's elder

brother Zhi who's going to receive his proper due come hell or high water. And with dear old dad now out of the way, no silly little designated air clause is going to stand in his way. Before Yao could react or move to oppose his brazen maneuver, Zhi had seized power and declared himself emperor, thank you very much. Rather than raise much of a fuss, the Huaxi empire pretty much just shrugs its shoulders and says, yeah, okay, I guess that works too. Yao, it would seem, was simply out of luck. Unfortunately for Zhi, seizing the throne appeared to have been just about the last good,

or even notable, decision that he would make. In spite of the fact that he's routinely listed as one of the five emperors of this period, there is very little written about his reign. This is most likely because, as we'll soon see, it will be a rather short reign indeed. A mere nine years, in fact. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt.

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It was during this period of time, it's worth noting, that the Huasha people, perhaps through their allies in the south, the Yi tribe, first became aware of, and would subsequently directly encounter a people calling themselves the Van Lang tribe, who we know today as the Vietnamese. The specific circumstances of Zhi's downfall, however, are unclear. Some sources say that Yao was able to mount a successful coup and depose his elder brother, while others report that Zhou was stricken with an illness and died, thus paving the way for Yao's ascension. Regardless, in 2356 BCE, through either virus or coup d'état, Ku's second son was finally able to put that emperor training he'd received from his father to good use at long last.

Yao was just 20 years old when he took up the mantle of rule, but he proved himself more than equal to the job. He would be extolled for millennia as being morally perfect, and a sage-king among sage-kings. It was the rule of Emperor Yao, in fact, that would most often be used as a model for the reigns of future dynasties. So we're now some 500 years into our story, and we've at last come to a point where consensus is that, at the very least, these next few guys actually physically existed in some form. Our current Emperor Yao, his successor Shun, and Shun's successor Yu are often regarded as possibly being the chieftains of the allied tribes of this region, who would collectively move their coalition into a state of real unification under a hierarchical government, all on its way to the

feudal imperial system into which it will ultimately coales government, all on its way to the feudal imperial system into which it will ultimately coalesce. But anyway, back to the story. Yao is said to have invented the game of Go, known in Chinese as Weiqi. Now if you haven't heard of Go, that's understandable, but unfortunate, because it's quite a fun game. It remains wildly popular throughout Asia, and is also pretty popular in the West. Go is a board game for two players using two sets of tiles, one white, one black, a bit like checkers. Players take turns by placing a tile on the intersections of the game board's grid with the objective of encircling their opponent's pieces.

At the end of the game, the player who controls the most area of the board via encirclement wins. You can find a lot of free Flash versions through Google, and I really suggest you give it a try, as it's very easy to pick up but involves a deceptively deep amount of strategy. The computer on my phone, for instance, destroys me each and every time I try. Yao invented this game in a high-minded but ultimately futile attempt to change the nature of his eldest son, Danju. Danju was reportedly a vain and vicious playboy with few, if any, redeeming attributes.

His misdeeds and lack of virtue were so widely known that ultimately his father would be forced to banish the prince and disinherit him from the throne altogether. He also had two daughters, Ehuang and Nuyin, who will become important in just a little bit. But now begins the Catastrophe, capital T, capital C, one so great that it will span the reign of three emperors, an event known as Da Hongshui, or the Great Flood.

Due to shallow riverbeds, outlets that could carry water away from the floodplains choked with debris, and large marshy areas prone to flooding anyway, the waters of both the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers begin to unpredictably flood with devastating effect. From the Book of History, Emperor Yao is quoting as having said, quote, Like endless boiling water, the flood is pouring forth destruction. Boundless and overwhelming, it overtops hills and mountains. Rising and ever rising, it threatens the very heavens. How the people must be groaning and suffering. End quote. The waters would rise so

high that, according to the story, the whole of the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys, which is to say pretty much the entire kingdom at the time, was turned into nothing less than a shallow sea dotted with islands for a period of the year each year, with only the peaks of the tallest mountains of the region remaining safe from its effects. Obviously, something had to be done to stem the damage and prevent the entire land from being destroyed. Yao consulted with his four chief advisors, known as the Four Mountains, and they recommended appointing someone in charge of dealing with this problem altogether. Though initially reluctant of the candidate they put forth,

Yao ultimately deferred to the Four Mountains Judgment and named his distant cousin, Prince Gun of Chong, as the man responsible to control the floodwaters. Prince Gun concocted a novel solution. Earthen dikes. But not just any old earth would do. After all, previous attempts to dam the waters had just resulted in them being overtopped as the waters continued to rise. Instead, Gunn decided to steal a magical

substance from heaven known as Shirang, or Growing Earth. This Growing Earth would multiply upon itself manifold, thus growing the dam itself as the waters continued to rise. This, seeming like a great idea, was put into action immediately, and at first it worked like a charm. But after a time, it became clear that A. dams were only a stopgap measure that was doing nothing to stop the underlying problem, and B. earthen dams, even ones using magical mud, are not foolproof against raging torrents of floodwaters coming year after year. It wasn't long before the dams sprung leaks or even collapsed, resulting in still more devastation and social unrest.

Emperor Yao, now an old and increasingly weak man, took the dam's failures as a sign that he should bow out. Or at least that's the traditional version. Many modern Chinese historians, such as Sarah Allen in her 1981 book The Heir and the Sage, dismiss what I'm about to tell and instead chalk up the transfer of power to a far more sinister series of backroom plots against the reigning emperor of the day. The traditional story goes, though, that at first he attempted to abdicate to his advisors, the Four Mountains, but each refused him in turn.

Once again, however, they had a recommendation for the emperor, nominating yet another distant relative of Yao for the job, a man who until this point had been living in relative obscurity, Prince Shun. By this point, though, Yao was rather wary of the mountain's recommendations, and so he resolved to test drive Shun before committing to anything. To begin with, he installed Shun as the governor of a small prefecture and married his two daughters, Erhuang and Nuying, to him. Like their descendant brother, the two sisters had grown accustomed to living a life of extravagant

luxuriousness. But their husband, Prince Xun, convinced them to live as he did, simply, and willing to work alongside their people. This startling turnaround of his two seemingly intransigent daughters, combined with his able administration of his prefecture, no doubt greatly impressed Emperor Yao. Though the test was not yet complete, Xun was clearly marked for a meteoric rise. He was appointed successively to the Imperial Ministry of Instruction, then the General Regulator, and finally Chief of the Four Mountains over the course of just three years.

In each position, he set about putting the department's affairs in order with speed and efficiency. Finally convinced of the young prince's worth, Yao offered Xun the chance to rule alongside him as co-emperor. After all these tests and passing each with flying colors, Emperor Yao must have been surprised indeed when Xun turned his offer down. At first glance, it's hard for anyone to understand why someone would turn down being co-emperor, ultimately tagged to be the single emperor of all of the Huaxi Empire. But then again, remember the circumstances. Yao was offering responsibility and governance not over some idyllic land, but a veritable

disaster area with things going further south yearly. Not exactly what one would want to be offered. To his credit, Xun didn't scoff at the prospect, but merely insisted that there must be someone more qualified and virtuous to head the empire. We can only imagine that Yao must have glumly shook his head, and Xun realized that the only other real option was the Emperor's son, Danju. Licentious, petty, cruel, and thoroughly unfit for command of anything larger than a tankard of ale. Unwilling to subject the empire to that particular fate, Chun finally assented and took up co-command,

and in the process started the long-running imperial tradition of a truly worthy successor needing to be seen as not wanting to rule, and so ceremonially refusing the offer of the throne, or at times even simple promotions, once, twice, or even three times before finally, reluctantly, agreeing to do the job. It was in 2275 BCE that Xun assumed the title of co-emperor alongside the now more than 90-year-old Yao. The subsequent three years of co-rulership were marked by Yao ceding more and more of his authority to the incoming leader before retiring altogether. Yao would enjoy a retirement of 28 years before finally passing at age 119. Though he had initially declined the heavy burden of rule, now that Shun had risen to the challenge,

he endeavored to mold the kingdom into his image. First and foremost, he sought to deal with those who had long sucked at the former emperor's teat while driving the land into further suffering and ruin. At the top of his list was our old friend Prince Gun of Chong. You'll remember him as the guy whose whole claim to fame was building magical earthen dikes to stem the as-yet-still-ongoing floods. In the face of his whole project being an undeniable failure, Gun had against all odds not only managed to retain his position as the commander of flood control, but had doubled down on his already discredited plan. But it was worse than it might initially seem to be. You see, not only would these earthen dams leak and crumble, and not only had Gunn been so confused by his damn idea that he had forgotten his actual charge had been to stem the flooding itself,

not just control its effects, his failure had now just reached a critical threshold, a failure event horizon, if you will. For four years since their weakness had been made apparent, Gunn's dams had continued to grow up and up as the floodwaters continued on unabated, up and up and up until they quite simply could go up no further, and all collapsed in on themselves, unleashing a cataclysmic torrent on the countryside. This devastation was only compounded by Gunn's other fatal misstep. He had made the grievous error of calling into question the new emperor's legitimacy. After all, Shun, though a prince, was of modest, perhaps even

peasant-like origins. Gunn himself was of much nobler birth. With the very stability of his empire, not only physical but moral and legal as well in the balance, Shun had no choice. An example would have to be made of this uppity failure, Gun. The emperor arrested the prince and locked him away in a prison on Feather Mountain, where he'd live out the rest of his life under lock and key. By this point, for much of a given year, the Huaxi Empire looked less like a farmable river valley it had been founded as, and more like a series of islands adrift in a shallow sea. Realizing this unique impediment to traditional means of rule,

Shen opted for a new strategy to better manage his territory. Bureaucracy. He divided his empire into twelve zhou, variously translated as province or prefectures, each of which would be directly administered from the highest point in the area. It's notable that even in modern Chinese script, the character for prefecture is virtually identical in form to the word for large island or continent. Resolving once again to get to the root of this perennial disaster, Emperor Shun made the interesting decision to appoint Prince Gun's son, Yu, to the task his father had so abjectly failed.

Talk about pressure. Hey, we imprisoned and executed your dad because he didn't solve this problem. We'd like you to do better, you know. Or else. Yu, however, wouldn't make the same mistake as his dear departed father. Rather than merely controlling the symptoms through dykes, Yu opted to attack the root of the flooding himself. In his own words, quote,

I opened passages for the streams throughout the nine provinces and conducted them to the seas. I deepened the channels and conducted them to the streams. End quote. Having studied the waterways intently, Yu focused on implementing and expanding drainage systems, dredging the river bottoms, draining marshlands that greatly impeded water flow, and constructing massive irrigation channels into the newly created farmable areas. How was such a monumental task accomplished, you might ask? Why, earth-boring yellow dragons and massive mud-hauling tortoises, of course. Or, if for some reason you want the less awesome version, through years and years of back-breaking labor

by contingents of peasant workers. Personally, I'll be sticking with the dragons and tortoises, thanks very much. His efforts were a resounding success, and Yu, having done nothing less than save the entire kingdom, was hailed as a hero and declared Great Yu Master of the Waters. Having accomplished what had seemed to be an impossible task, one that had raged on for more than 20 years and flummoxed even the best and brightest in the land, Emperor Shun declared you his heir. It must be noted that once again, the emperor found his own son to be a complete disappointment, unworthy of the throne. His kingdom once again peaceful and productive, Emperor Shun would reign for a period of 50 years until 2195 BCE, when, having taken suddenly

ill while traveling, he perished. And so we come at last to the end of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors mythos, and to the very edge of our first true Chinese dynasty, the Xia. Next time, we'll begin our analysis of the four-century period of Xia control over the Yellow River Valley, beginning with the rule of the man who had just saved the kingdom from drowning outright, Hugh the Great. Thanks for listening. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, the French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous reign of terror,

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