The History of China - #33 - Xin 2: The Red Eyebrow Rebellion

Episode Date: August 5, 2014

All hell breaks loose for Wang Mang's Xin Dynasty when the Yellow River flooding its banks in 11 CE combines with the Xin's own incompetent response, leading to famine, rebellion, and a complete breakdown of the social order and the dynasty itself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 31, The Red Eyebrow Rebellion. Before we get back into the reign of Wang Meng this week, I feel I ought to address a couple of points of order. First, my apologies for the delay in getting this week's episode out. I was out on my week-long summer holiday, and wouldn't you know it, I just plumb didn't get around to recording it on time.

Hopefully there are no hard feelings. The second, and somewhat related point, is that I'm beginning a new position within my school while still working half-time the old one, and I'm of a mind that, at least for the getting-comfortable period, progress on the history of China may slow down. I'm not 100% sure of this as of yet, but I'd like to, at worst, not have to slow down any further than becoming semi-weekly a la the History of Byzantium podcast, and again, the idea being temporarily. And ideally, I won't need to slow down at all.

I'll update you all when the workload becomes a little bit more clear. So with those two clerical details out of the way, let's pick up right where we left off. Last time, we had left the usurper emperor Wang Meng of his Xin dynasty in an unenviable position. His attempts at internal reform and wealth and land distribution had fallen flat. So flat that his own vassals had refused to enact them and demanded the emperor rescind the measures. Rampant inflation and counterfeiting of currency had accompanied Wang's disastrous foray into currency reform, and internationally, the situation looked little better. Wang's Qin emissaries had systematically offended and made enemies of virtually all of China's neighbors and vassals, from the Xiongnu, to the Nanyue, to the Joseon, to even the far western kingdoms of Shiyu.

This had been accomplished through ham-handed attempts at deception, and reneging on the promises and statuses conferred under the Han. But as I mentioned at the end of last week's episode, though the situation was certainly not good, it didn't by itself necessarily spell catastrophe for the nascent dynasty. That final straw had yet to come, and is what triggers the events of today's episode. As first minister, then regent, and now emperor, Wang Meng was quite frankly obsessed. Obsessed with the notion of a Confucian utopia, as modeled by the rose-tinted mythical accounts of the early Zhou dynasty. Wang Meng, good Confucian that he was, desired perfect efficiency of government, and to that end,

he and his top officials spent their days and nights poring over ancient texts, researching legends, and attempting to determine how best to re-implement their ideal system. They had no time for personal pleasures or relaxation, little for sleep, and as for the emperor himself, carried on with an almost inhuman schedule. Due to the nature of his own rise to power, you'll remember burrowing his way to the top from within by playing the part of ever-faithful servant, Emperor Wang Meng therefore had some trust issues. Just as a thief believes that everyone steals,

Wang naturally believed that anyone he displayed trust toward within his own administration would eventually turn on him bereft of anyone he could at eventually forced to delegate at least something, anything, to those he felt he could trust. His eunuchs, because yeah, that always works so well. The great irony of it all was that in devoting every waking hour to their research and readings, and refusing to delegate any of the responsibilities of state to someone who wasn't running a perpetual sleep deficit, Emperor Wang seemed to have forgotten one little detail, actually running the affairs of state, which continued to pile up and up and up, untended. Many counties, even years after Wang Meng had come to power and they had submitted their

relevant petitions, still remained without imperial magistrates. In that vacuum, local officials, as would happen, became ever more corrupt and oppressive of their subjects. Wang Meng's trusted eunuchs, who had been entrusted by their employer to screen reports and decide which to relay to Wang Meng or not, had no definite system of deciding which to send up the chain and which to throw on the later pile, and it seemed to have been left pretty much entirely to their personal likes and dislikes. Predictably, a great many important petitions ended up in the dislike pile and would never reach the emperor's attention. Even more seriously, though, was the continued lack of official salary system. Han had had a

well-defined and clearly laid out system of salaries and stipends for every level of imperial officialdom. But Xin had none of that, since Wang Long had decreed that the whole system had to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. And while yes, Emperor Wang had certainly meant to get around to actually implementing that new salary system and all, hadn't there been a petition about it somewhere over there in that stack? Maybe in the dislike pile? Not well. For more than six years, the officialdom of Xin went completely without a salary,

since none was forthcoming from Chang'an, no matter how many petitions they submitted. So if there was no official salary, what were they to do? Why, extort and demand bribes from their populace? What else? It wouldn't be until 16 CE that Wang Meng's bureaucracy, meaning Wang Meng himself, would at least get around to enacting its long forthcoming revised salary system. A region's annual salary would be determined by its prosperity that year.

The higher the crop yield, for instance, the bigger the official salary. And if that description doesn't set off an alarm bell ringing in your head, consider. If a region were to, say, undergo a drought or a flood, by this new salary system, it would suffer huge budget cuts as a result, effectively doubling the economic damage. But hey, it's not like we ought to be expecting a major flood anytime soon, right? Right? In 11 CE, silt buildup in the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River caused it to break its banks and split into two channels, inundating vast swaths of the Chinese heartland.

The catastrophic flooding engulfed much of Shandong and northern Jiangsu provinces and wiped out the majority of the empire's annual crop, and a massive famine ensued. The catastrophic flooding engulfed much of Shandong and northern Jiangsu provinces and wiped out the majority of the empire's annual crop, and a massive famine ensued. This can arguably be called the single event that turned Wang Meng's reign from merely off to a rocky start to illegitimate usurper doomed to failure. Virtually overnight, prophecies and rumors began to swirl around the empire that Wang Meng's incompetence as emperor had resulted him losing the mandate of heaven, if indeed he had ever held it at all.

Over the course of the following six years, the empire would continue to founder and suffer, while its ruling dynasty continued to seemingly ignore that suffering and dawdle away at ancient legends and clearly dead on arrival reform measures. And when widespread suffering meets official indifference or ineptitude, resistance is bound to spring up. There would ultimately be two major rebel factions that would spring up across Wang Meng's empire, though neither began as a direct oppositional force to the throne, or even a political force whatsoever. The first rebel group we'll look at has one of the most unlikely founders and origin stories I've come across. In Haichou County in Shandong, the mother of a minor civil servant received word in 14 CE

that her son had been wrongly executed by the county magistrate over a trifling offense. History would come to call this grieving woman, fittingly, Lu Mu, or Mother Lu. Mother Lu, it so happened, was a substantial landowner in the region. According to the book of later Han, her property holdings were worth many millions of coins. Swearing vengeance, she sold off her lands and with the resulting fortune recruited thousands of impoverished peasants with a whole list of grievances against their local government and the imperial court it represented, as well as purchasing a virtual arsenal of weaponry for them and supplies.

In the year 17, Mother Lu, assuming the title of General, led her peasant army to the capital of Haichu County to take the city by force. After capturing the magistrate who had murdered her son, she beheaded him and sacrificed the head over her son's tomb. Reports get a little fuzzy at this point, but it seems that her success against the local government stemmed copycat movements all across the deeply dissatisfied country. Her army soon grew to tens of thousands strong, and according to reports, she led them out to sea to begin a life of piracy. It turned out that the pirate's life wasn't for her, though, and the following year she took ill and died. She never knew it, but still, in taking vengeance for

her son, Mother Lu sparked what would become an unstoppable conflagration of rebellion against the civil authority that seemed to have utterly abandoned its own populace. Now leaderless, but no less unsatisfied with their lot in life under the Xin regime, the greater bulk of Mother Lu's followers would ultimately join up with a separate band of rebels led by Fan Chong, another native of Mother Lu's home county, who had taken up arms in the year 18 after seeing the effectiveness of Lu's assault on Haichu. The joint rebel force would come to be known as the Cimei, or Red Eyebrows, after their signature battlefield paint to differentiate themselves from imperial

forces. But though they had become a military force to be reckoned with, up until this point it is notable that the red eyebrows still hadn't developed any significant political ambition beyond the regional level. Indeed, they seemed to be quite content to be a merry band of painted-up brigands, each sharing the spoils of their loot in a remarkably democratic fashion. Leadership was collective and determined through consensus, and within their sphere of influence, the only hard and fast laws they apparently enforced were that murderers would be put to death and causing injury to someone meant that the offender was thereafter responsible for the care of the victim until they had healed. Red-eyebrow leaders

seemed to have no early designs on lofty titles. Within the organization, leaders were called sanlao, tongshe, and zushe, meaning county educator, county clerk, and sheriff, respectively. Notably absent were any claims to generalship or princedom, at least for now. In 19 CE, the imperial throne at last got around to responding to the Red Eyebrow's actions in Shandong, but in one of the most bizarrely head-scratching ways imaginable. The rebellion was clearly agrarian in nature, a response to the failures of the state government and the undue burdens it continued to place on the local populace. And so it's anyone's guess what Wang Meng was thinking when he accepted an official

named Tian Kuang's advice that the appropriate response would be to raise the surrounding county's taxation levels, which, no surprise, only aggravated the various rebel factions against the throne even further and rallied yet more peasants to their cause. Let's now take a minute to look at what would become the other major force against the Xi'an throne, the group known as the Liu Lin, so named because of the mountain they were initially based out of in Hubei. As with much of the nation, in 17 CE, Hubei had suffered from an extended famine, only made worse by the glaring incompetence of the imperial government and the corruption of the local magistrates, of course. As such, the majority of the region's inhabitants were reduced to eating wild plants, grass, tree bark, as well as turning

to thievery, banditry, and even reports of cannibalism to stave off starvation. Two local men, Wang Kuang and Wang Feng, found themselves the de facto arbiters of the ever-increasing disputes between the starving residents, and as such they quickly rose to lead them. The course the two laid out as their ranks swelled to between 7,000 and 8,000 was to pillage and raid villages far from city centers for food. They chose these particular targets because, as a group, the Lulian simply wanted to survive the famine, and hoped that afterwards they could return to their normal lives in the surrounding cities, which would obviously have been impossible if

they were branded as outlaws and thieves there. The Lulian continued to grow to more than 10,000 strong as a result of their raid successes. From Chang'an, Emperor Wang Meng sent messengers to the rebel leaders, hoping to persuade them to disband and offering a blanket pardon if they did so. This, more than anything, displayed the startling ignorance Wang Meng had for the plight of his own people. The Lulin couldn't simply disband, because at the moment, banditry was the only way they were capable of feeding themselves or their families. The messengers ultimately returned to Chang'an to deliver their reports. Though some did report honestly the rationale of the Lu Lin and that the emperor's harsh policies

of increasing taxation and stripping social services in times of crisis had made it impossible to make an honest living, Other messengers had a better sense of their own career trajectory than to do something as silly as tell an unwanted truth to power. They placated the emperor, assuring him that his policies were working well in the region, and these so-called Lulene rebels were nothing more than a band of lawless thugs, looting and pillaging because they were quite simply evil men. No extra points for guessing which side the emperor chose to listen to. He dismissed those who had told him of the hardships in Hubei from his service and would thereafter make no further attempts to pacify the rebels,

but instead to stamp them out by force. Wang Meng would at last take military action against both the Lulin and the Red Eyebrow rebellions. Against the Lulin, he dispatched a force of 20,000 soldiers led by the governor of Jing. The Imperial and Lulin forces, who by this time numbered between 30,000 and 50,000 bandits, met in the Battle of Yundu, resulting in a major victory for the Lulin. Thousands of Imperial troops were killed in the melee, and the Lulin were able to capture the imperial army's cache of supplies and arms. As the government troops fled and retreat, they were temporarily cut off by one of the lieutenants, Ma Wu, but were ultimately allowed to continue home, since the rebels didn't want to inflame imperial opinion against them

any more than necessary. Instead, the Lulin had a victory raid of the countryside, capturing many local women to take with them once they returned to their fortress within the Lulin Mountain. The campaign against the Red Eyebrows fared little better. Wang Meng initially dispatched two of his key officials, Jing Shang and Wang Dang, to lead armies to the region and root out the insurgents. But in what seemed to have been the running theme of Wang Meng's entire reign, what looked good on paper turned into an embarrassing snafu in the implementation. Wang Dang and Jing Shang may have been given the ranks of generals, but military commanders they were not, and it showed.

They proved completely unable to keep the soldiers under their command in line, and right out of the gate, military discipline began to break down. Once in Shandong, many of the soldiers stole, pillaged, extorted, raped, what have you, the local populace, with little their commanding officers could seemingly do to keep them in line. As a result, even among those civilians who had remained lukewarm to the Red Eyebrows up to this point, support for the rebellion against the raping and pillaging Imperial Army skyrocketed. In 22 CE, after repeated defeats and setbacks against the Red Eyebrows under Fan Chong, the Imperial force under Wang and Jing was in shambles, and all that capped off by Jingshan being killed in battle.

Emperor Wang Meng had had enough, and sent two of his senior-most generals, Wang Kuang and Lian Dan, to Shandong, to crush the rebels once and for all. The pair headed a massive force, reportedly more than 100,000 strong. As could be expected, the overwhelming number of imperial troops ensured numerous early successes for Generals Huang and Lian, including their notable capture of Wulan City in winter of 22 CE. But never the decisive battle they and the Emperor were hoping for. Time and again, Fan Chong's red eyebrows managed to stay one step ahead of capture or defeat while inflicting significant casualties on the Xi'an army.

This was compounded by Wang Kuang's refusal to allow his men to rest and insisted that they push onto the Red Eyebrows' stronghold, Rav Liang. This would prove the undoing of the Xi'an army's attack into the region, as the exhausted imperial troops quickly collapsed against a ferocious Red Eyebrow onslaught. Though Wang Kuang was able to escape alone, his fellow general Lian Dan was killed in the fighting. This would end the Qin's ability to effectively field a force against the Red Eyebrow rebels, and would leave it entirely unprepared for the Lulin to pop up on their doorstep mere months later. I say pop up because in spite of their success against the regional

force sent against them, the Lulian had been almost completely defeated afterwards by a foe no amount of spears could have defeated. Disease. In 22 CE, some half of the Lulian rebels were killed by an unknown plague that swept through their ranks of 50,000. In its aftermath, the remaining rebels had to split into three disparate groups. It wouldn't be until late that year that they would be called back together by someone with more than just day-to-day survival on his mind. Someone who had watched Wang Meng's usurpation with disgust for more than a decade and was prepared to act. His name was Liu Yan, a distant member of a cadet branch of the imperial clan in exile. Liu Yan, along with his younger brother Liu Xiu, had convinced two of the Lulian

forces to assist him in attacking the capital of Nanyang prefecture. He planned, along with his brothers and several cousins, to kidnap the prefectural governor and call for the people of the region to join him. The Loyan had initially been hesitant to ally themselves with Liu Yan, who they saw as brash, with a quick temper, and hungry for personal power. It was the younger brother, Liu Shou's deliberate and careful demeanor, however, that finally convinced them that the Liu rebellion must have been thoroughly planned out. Almost immediately pointing out the fallacy of that conclusion, news of the plan leaked, resulting in several of the conspirators barely escaping with their lives and their families

executed. Liu Yan was forced to change his plan and persuaded the two branches, known as the Xin-Xi force and the Pinglin force, to join with him, and they had significant military success. Encouraged, Liu Yan made a frontal assault against Wangcheng, the capital of Nanyang Prefecture, in the winter of 22, but suffered a humiliating and costly defeat which almost drove the coalition apart then and there. It was only the timely arrival of the third Lulin branch, the Xajang force, that convinced the other two to stay. Thus, under Liu's command, the rebels made a surprise attack on Zhen's rear, seizing all of the food and arms of the prefectural army. During the Chinese New Year of 23,

Liu crushed Zhen's force and killed him and his assistant in battle. Thrilled at such victory, the Lulian leaders began to claim for themselves the title of generals, seize cities, create quasi-governmental organizations, and send out propaganda attacking Wang Meng and the Xin dynasty. Though Liu Yan's victories greatly bolstered his reputation and potential claim to the Han throne, it came at the cost of engendering the jealousy of other rebel commanders. Along with the brashness that made his own men wary of following him, the Lu Lin rebels soon began to look for another, perhaps more suitable, more pliable, claimant to back. They would arrive at yet another local rebel leader, and distant cousin of Liu Yan, named Liu Xuan,

who fortunately for us, because quite frankly there are too many Liu's in this story already, went by the nom de guerre, General Geng Shi. Geng Shi was considered to have a weaker personality than his cousin Yan, and so in early 23 CE, he was proclaimed, over Liu Yan's repeated objections, the restored Emperor Geng Shi of Han. Liu Yan, we can only imagine gritting his teeth at the injustice of it all, was forced to take his place as mere prime minister. So all that pomp and circumstance about restoring the Han dynasty is well and good, but guys, we have a war to fight here, so can we get on with it already? Excellent. As you can imagine, news of the Han Dynasty having reconstituted itself was sufficient to rouse even Wang Meng from his fevered pouring

over tomes of Confucian documents. He decided that decisive action needed to be taken. To that end, he mobilized virtually the entire bulk of his military to crush it completely to lead this force of more than four hundred and thirty thousand soldiers to the walled city of Kunyang in Henan, about 500 kilometers southeast of the capital, Chang'an. Make no mistake, the rebel force was vastly, absurdly outnumbered by the army xin brought to bear against them. Between the initial defeat at Nanyang, the general rigors of warfare, and being relatively dispersed anyway. The Lulin inside the wall of Kunyong numbered something between 9,000 and 10,000 against the force about 43 times its size. Naturally, the first reaction was to scatter and flee, with plans to regroup another 500 kilometers south at Jingzhou,

along the southern border of modern Hubei province. But Liu Xiu, the commander of the Kunyong defenders, refused, along the southern border of modern Hubei province. But Liu Xiu, the commander of the Kunyang defenders, refused and instead advocated that they fortify the city and await the coming storm. He reasoned that a scattered army in flight would be easy pickings for the oncoming Qin military. Further, while his men battened down the hatches, Liu Xiu himself would ride out to rally all the supporting troops he could from the north. One might forgive the Xin commanders Wang Yi and Wang Xun for being overconfident.

They outnumbered the rebel force, some 43 to 1 after all. And beyond that, they headed the finest soldiers in the whole empire, against this band of thieves and brigands. And while the Lu Lin huddled behind their city walls, the Xin had brought with them massive seedworks to go over them, and sappers to tunnel under them. Indeed, Commander Wang Yi must have felt perfectly justified when he stated that his army would, quote, annihilate all in my path, massacre the town, and dance in its blood, end quote. And thus, he laid siege to Kunyong in late June of 23. But surprisingly, and a testament to how thoroughly the Lulian had managed to fortify the city on such short notice, the defenses held, and held, and held.

The siege towers were repulsed, the sappers counter-tunneled, and the Sheen self-assuredness soon turned to frustration and flagging morale that somehow this insignificant band was standing firm against the full might of the imperial army. The Luling in fact managed to hold on until July 7th, when at last Liu Xiu returned with a thousand more men at his back and began harassing the flanks of the besiegers. Meanwhile, a further 3,000 soldiers had secretly made their way to the Xinri and attacked their main camp. General Wang Yi, at this point still underestimating the Han forces,

in spite of all the tenacity they had shown thus far, led some 10,000 men alongside Wang Xun to meet this new, bothersome enemy. Before departing, he ordered the rest of his besieging troops to stand their ground unless he personally ordered them to attack. But once they had engaged in battle, after minor losses, the other units were hesitant to assist, and Liu Xiu killed Wang Xun in combat. At that, the Lulian forces inside Kunyang burst out of the city gates and charged into the massed Xin units. The far larger Xin forces, utterly demoralized and paralyzed following the unexpected death of their commander,

suffered a total collapse and were routed into the countryside. Adding to the misery of the Xi'an army was a sudden rainstorm that caused a flash flood, drowning many of the fleeing men. Unable to rally his panic-stricken troops, Wang Yi was forced to withdraw with only a few thousand of his soldiers east to Luoyang. Those others who managed to flee largely deserted and went home, wanting no more part in what suddenly had become a losing war. As news of the tiny Han force completely scattering the enormous Qin army percolated through the empire, the entire nation rose up in full revolt against the throne, seemingly simultaneously. There could be few clearer signs that Wang Meng had lost the mandate of heaven than his entire host being crushed by a fourth, not even a tenth its size.

Shortly thereafter, Liu Yan was finally able to capture Wangcheng, and Emperor Gengxia entered the city and declared it his temporary capital. However, even at this uncertain period and with victory in reach, infighting began to eat around the edges of the rebel coalition. The first major incident of Emperor Gengxia's regime would claim Liuyan himself. Gengxia and his court were fearful of Liu Yan's capabilities and keenly aware that many of his followers still had a rather large axe to grind that he had not been made emperor. When one of his supporters, Liu Ji, was particularly critical of Emperor Geng Shi, he had him arrested and planned

to execute him. Liu Yan tried to intercede, but Emperor Gengxia took the opportunity to execute Liu Yan as well. However, ashamed of what he had done, he spared Liu Yan's brother Liu Xiu, who would ultimately be promoted to the Marquis of Wuxin. Gengxia reformed his burgeoning army into two strike forces, one targeting the imperial army remnant licking its wounds in Luoyang, while the other was charged with besieging Chang'an directly. In both directions, peasants lined the Han army's paths, praising them, offering supplies, and signing up to join them in their final push to victory. In October of 23, the Han army arrived at the gates of Chang'an and began beating down the already skeletal imperial defenses.

After mere days, they breached the city walls on October 4th and commenced with ransacking the capital, along with slaying any Xin loyalists who had been stupid or unlucky enough to yet remain. The city's young men, either having real sympathy and common grievance with their conquering army, or possibly just seeing their very last chance to jump off this sinking ship with their skins intact, rose up en masse and stormed the imperial quarter. They burst into the endless Weiyang Palace and fought their way past the final thousand diehard loyalists to the Qin emperor.

Finally, in his inner sanctum, Wang Meng was surrounded, taken, and executed via decapitation, along with his daughter, the former Empress of Han. Credit for the execution is a bit muddled, as those present are written to have turned on one another, demanding to be acknowledged as the one who killed the usurper. Dozens of people died in the ensuing scuffle. In the turmoil, Weiyang Palace, at more than six times the size of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the largest imperial palace ever constructed, was burned to the ground.

Wang Meng's lifeless body was cut into pieces, and his head was ordered to be delivered to the provisional capital and the waiting Emperor Geng Shi to be hung from the city wall. However, the populace of Wangcheng, still furious at the ruinous decade the Xin emperor had put them all through, took down the severed head, cut out its tongue, and then kicked it around like a soccer ball. Eventually, it was recovered by imperial forces and sent to be preserved and kept locked away within a court vault. There it would remain for the remainder of the Han dynasty through the period of three kingdoms until it was at last destroyed in a fire during the Jin

dynasty of the 3rd through 5th centuries. And so ended Wang Meng, and with him, the ever so brief, but ever so disastrous Xin Dynasty. Wang Meng is, if nothing else, a complicated figure. He is at once easy to demonize for the havoc his reign wrecked on his country, and yet he is also easy to sympathize with. He had a vision, a dream that was China, and how could he have known that the Yellow River was going to come along and destroy all his hard work? Okay, yeah, he did a pretty good job of digging himself a hole well before that sealed the deal.

He was at once ruthless and caring, revolutionary, even startlingly modern in his policies, yet convinced they hearkened back to a bygone era of peace and prosperity. He displayed remarkable aptitude in getting himself into the driver's seat of empire, and yet proved astoundingly bungling in actually pulling the levers of power once he got there. And in the end, between the flooding, famine, government incompetence, and rebellion, more than 25 million people lay dead, almost half the population of China at the time. I'll leave off with the Qing Dynasty historian Zhao Yi's summation

of Wang Meng's reign and failure. Quote, As a result, the empire boiled like water, and the peoples rose against him. Many know that Wang Meng's defeat was because the people missed the Han dynasty, but they do not know that the reason why the people missed the Han dynasty was because of Wang Meng. When Wang Meng first became regent, he accomplished many great deeds to become the basis for his greater evil acts, but these were only acts of

ordinary treacherous men. After he usurped the throne, he did not know how to comfort and guide the people, and felt that he could ceaselessly deceive everyone. Therefore, he caused both the Chinese and the foreigners to hate him. The entire empire was already collapsing, but Wang Meng did not care, but rather buried his head in what is old, believing that once he returned the government structure to the old days, the empire would be peaceful. He only sought to establish proper ceremony and music day and night, and he sought to create explanations for all of the Confucian classics

by making tortured interpretations without spending time on the important affairs of state. Before he could complete his ceremonies and music, he was already killed. This kind of behavior is even more childish than a three-year-old child. There is a common contemporary idiom, foolishness is but a form of trickery. But for Wang Meng, his trickery was only a form of foolishness. End quote.

Next time, the Han is back. Emperor Geng Shi takes command of the empire in law, but in truth, his weakness will lead to further tensions, especially with the Red Eyebrow Army. But since a smoldering ruin is no place to establish, or rather re-establish, a dynasty, the first order of business will be to move the imperial seat from Chang'an to the new capital, and, uh, old capital, Luoyang.

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