The History of China - #61 - S&N 5: The Forgotten God-King

Episode Date: April 14, 2015

Emperor Taiwu has been described as "Northern Wei's Teddy Roosevelt", and overshadows many of the Tuoba emperors to follow his reign of conquest and war. But the most forgotten of those successors, his grandson Emperor Wencheng, may have actually been far more responsible for the longterm success and stability of Wei than most realize. Though Taiwu gets all the glory for conquering the North, poor, unsung Wencheng would be the one responsible for keeping and governing it.[Show Notes]Timeframe: 452-465Major Figures:Emperor Wencheng of Northern Wei (née Tuoba Jun)Empress Dowager ChangConsort LiConsort/Empress FengCrowned Prince Tuoba HongBuliugu Li (Li the Bulgar)Yuan HeRouran Khaganate Gaoche Turkic TribesMajor Locations:Pingcheng (N. Wei capital)Yungang GrottoesHexi CorridorMajor sources:Scott PearceA King’s Two Bodieshttp://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.3868/s020-001-012-0006-6?crawler=true# Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the History of China. Episode 61, The Forgotten God-King Last time, we left both of our 5th century Chinese empires in a real bind. Both of them, within a year of one another, had had their respective emperors brutally assassinated and their dynastic stability thrown into question.

In the north, Wei was faced with the distinct possibility of winding up usurped by a court eunuch and going the way of so many other northern dynasties before it. And in the south, with Emperor Wen's death, so too ended the golden era of the southern states known as the reign of Yuanjia, heralding a decline into ultimate infighting and eventual collapse. Today though, we're going to be exploring one of the often forgotten eras of northern China, the one right after Emperor Taiwu's death. And make note, this isn't exactly what I'd planned on going in. This episode was one that I thought was going to cover some nobody, an emperor

that was little more than a flyby in terms of importance. Someone who was a kind of placeholder, who we'd spend maybe half an episode on before moving down south to see what was going on in Liu Song. But the more I researched it, and the more information I came across, the more it became bleedingly obvious that Emperor Wencheng of Northern Wei, far from being some placeholder, was actually one of the linchpins of the entire Northern Wei state, both during his reign and in the century to follow. And in large part, the reason he's so often forgotten by just about everybody, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, is that his reign, and indeed his entire life,

was completely overshadowed by the emperor who came before. His own grandfather, Emperor Tai Wu, who we'll get someone referring to a little while later on as East Asia's Teddy Roosevelt. Tai Wu, the glorious conqueror, who unified Northern Wei through decades of war, fire, and blood. That certainly is hard to compete with, image-wise. But what he had left to his grandson when he got himself assassinated in 452 was the fact that he had conquered a vast empire,

but had never bothered trying to govern it in anything more than a cursory way. That would be the task left for, and the story of, Emperor Wencheng. After the fires had died down, the smoke cleared away, and the bodies burned. That is the story that maintains an empire, and doesn't simply conquer it. And that is the story we are going to explore today. The emperor who lived and died in the shadow of his grandfather, but without whom all those conquests might have simply unraveled like so many empires before and after. The emperor who did all the real work, but got none of the glory.

Emperor Wencheng of Northern Wei. I'd like to begin today with the aftermath of Emperor Taiwu's assassination. Now, we discussed the outcome of Emperor Taiwu's assassination. Now, we discussed the outcome of this event rather thoroughly last episode, but a little recap couldn't hurt. The eunuch, Duke Zhong'ai, had in 451 engineered a campaign against Taiwu's crowned prince, Huang, that would force the Wei Emperor to order the executions of many of the prince's closest confidants, and ultimately result in the heir to the throne taking his own life for fear of being the next arrested. The fact that there was no evidence whatsoever to back up those accusations eventually came to light, causing

Tai Wu to deeply regret his rush to justice and mourn the unnecessary death of his son deeply. Dong Ai, afraid that his scheme would be discovered, thereafter arranged the assassination of Tai Wu himself in 452, and then seated his youngest son, Prince Yu, on the throne briefly, before deciding that he too was unacceptable and arranging his death as well. From there on, however, the jig was up. Zong-Ai was discovered, arrested, and executed in one of the most painful ways possible, the full extent of the Five Punishments. One of the major reasons that Zong had ultimately been brought down was the fact that he had adamantly refused to consider the son of the deceased Crown Prince Huang, whom Confucian

tradition had stipulated should have been the heir of Wei. Thus, following Zonghai's downfall, the 12-year-old grandson of Taiwu, Prince Tuoba Jun, was at last placed on the throne of Northern Wei in late 452 as Emperor Wencheng, his name meaning civil and successful. But if the officials who had backed Wencheng's rise to power had thought his ascension the end of Northern Wei's problems, well, they were about to be sorely disappointed. With such a young monarch on the throne, many Wei officials took the perceived weakness of the imperial seat to settle some scores of their own within the imperial court. Such infighting had been kept well in hand by the strong rule of Tai Wu,

but with such a stabilizing influence now in his grave, the Wei imperial court quickly set itself ablaze in a conflagration of mutually assured destruction. Between 452 and 455, at least ten major government figures would ultimately be killed or caught in a scheme of their own and executed by the new emperor, including two commanders-in-chief, a prime minister, and six imperial princes. It's relatively unclear as to how much Wancheng himself was involved in this series of purges, since as a miner, his imperial seal may very well have been used by his minders for their own ends. Now you may recall the major purge of all things Buddhist under Wencheng's grandfather, known historically as the First Disaster of Wu, that had been officially ongoing since

445, and had been Wencheng's own father who had most vociferously opposed his father's genocidal dictums in that regard. That being said, according to the historian Scott Pierce of Western Washington University, in his excellent publication in the Frontiers of History in China, entitled A King's Two Bodies, quote, we have little sense that Wenchang himself had any great interest in Buddhism. End quote. Indeed, in spite of the fact that the great resurgence of Buddhism would begin under his watch, and one of the greatest historical monuments to the faith would be built just ten miles outside his own capital,

there has never been any indication that he visited it at all. Nevertheless, at the insistence of his own advisors and minders, as well perhaps as some sense of loyalty to his father's own convictions, Emperor Wenchang officially ended Northern Wei's prohibition on their religion in the winter of 452, and signaling his administration formally burying the hatchet of his grandfather, Wenchang even went so far as to personally shave the heads of five monks as a symbol of the imperial throne once again embracing Buddhist thought altogether. In spite of this reconciliation, though, he nevertheless followed the custom adopted by his grandfather

and received Taoist amulets upon his accession, once again a sign of his own personal ambivalence toward the faith. I'd like to take a moment here and really laud Professor Pierce, because it's through his own research that I've been able to understand Wen Cheng as anything more than a placeholder, and displaying the extent of which under his reign, the entirety of Northern Wei fundamentally changed. To give you a sense of the main thrust of his publication, the authors put forth the idea that a monarch must necessarily occupy two social spaces. First, his physical living self as a fallible human politician. But second, as a mystical body,

which was imperishable and would be reinvested in the next occupant of the throne. For all the flaws of the king, the assumption of the community was that there must be a king. Now, since Wencheng had never been officially declared the crown prince, his own mother had managed to avoid the grisly fate of prospective Wei Empress dowagers. Nevertheless, she would die in late 452, prompting Wencheng to posthumously declare her and his late father Emperor Jingmu and Empress Gong. But the fact that his mother had managed to avoid the Touba price of nobility wouldn't change the fact that tradition was tradition. In 454, his consort, Lady Li, would give birth to Wencheng's oldest son, Touba Hong. And two

years later, the toddler would be proclaimed the crown prince, meaning game over for consort Li. It would in fact be the emperor's nursemaid and newly elevated empress dowager, Cheng, who urged Wen Cheng to, quote, conform to the old practices, end quote, and order Li's death, which he reluctantly did that year, and thereafter proclaimed another of his consorts empress. Though that had indeed been the long-standing policy of Northern Wei, it seems quite likely that the Empress Dowager's insistence on her fellow consort Li's death had less to do with conforming to ancient murderous tradition and more to do with getting rid of a rival using a very convenient legal cover.

That, however, is just my own reading of the incident and speculation. Maybe she was really just that committed to Tuoba tradition. And while we're on the subject of the Tuoba as a people, it's worthwhile to take a moment and really reflect about their significance to the larger sweep of Chinese history as a whole. We've been dealing with the Tuoba, who called themselves in their own language the Tabgak or Tabgach or something to that effect, since their emergence from among the Xianbei back in the late 4th century. From among the tumultuous 16 kingdoms, it's quite easy

to see them as potentially yet another steppe clan that has temporarily come to power, and like virtually all the rest, will eventually be subsumed from within or without. But looking ahead from now to their effect on the political climate of northern China, and eventually to the whole of China, their significance becomes more clear. The success of the northern Wei state to unite the north is in many respects the direct precursor to the reunification of China as a whole under the Sui and then Tang dynasties in the early 7th century. And it all begins, really, with the necessary transformation of what it meant to be the emperor of Northern Wei and the several masks of power Wencheng would be the first to create and then wear. Okay, so what do I mean by all that? You'll certainly recall the kind of emperor Wencheng's grandfather had been. Taiwu had been, for lack of a better word, a tyrant, a conqueror, an iron-fisted man

of indomitable will, whose sheer strength of command and force of personality had shattered the last of the 16 kingdoms and quite nearly driven southern China under Liu Song to its knees. As mentioned before, with him at the helm, almost no imperial official had dared openly defy imperial dictum or engaged in the kind of wholesale bloodletting that would mark the opening years of his successor's reign. But unification is a double-edged sword. It was one thing to take territories and kingdoms by force. We've had many conquerors throughout time that have seized and held territories through military force and a policy of terror alone. Alexander the Great, Qin Shi Huang, Gao Zu of Han, Cao Cao, Attila the Hun,

and more recently, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Hitler, Mao Zedong. But more often than not, once those fire-and-blood conquerors, or to take a phrase directly from Dan Carlin, those historical arsonists, once they are killed or die off, their conquests all too often collapse back into anarchy, or at the very least, political disunity. Keep in mind that the year Wencheng was born, 440, was the same year his grandfather was marching tens of thousands of captives north to his capital, Ping City, and thereby displacing entire populations, families, and societies in an effort to quell the rebellions against his still newly established rule.

And in mentioning the Wei capital, I must pause here to point out that for the last couple of episodes, I've been erroneously continuing to refer to the capital of northern Wei as Shengle. But due entirely to my own oversight, I'd continue to reference the old capital, when in fact Wei had moved its capital all the way back in 398 to Pingcheng, or Ping City, which is today called Datong and is about 180 kilometers southeast of Shengle, on the border of modern Inner Mongolia. So for Wencheng to pick up where the likes of Taiwu had left off, namely a vastly expanded conglomerate of peoples, ethnicities, and states all fused together through warfare and fear of the ruthless dictator at its helm, but also a state in which the central ruling

ethnic body had basically reached the limit of its power and ability to instill and maintain that rule-by-fear mentality, well, it would require something special from a man who would be Tai Wu's successor. A completely different philosophy of government. According to Pierce, quote, one of the forms this took was religion. He would also have to begin to placate and calm his subjects. One of the ways we see this was with a series of reign titles, imperial advertising slogans of a sort, with names like Establish Peace, Great Peace, and Harmonious Tranquility. Slogans are all well and good, of course, but in order to solidify, and given the turmoil surrounding his accession, even live long enough to receive the throne?

Wencheng had needed supporters on the inside, in positions of power, to even have a shot at surviving, much less bring about the level of change necessary to stabilize Northern Wei's legacy. Of the advisors who had assisted him to power, two stand out. The first is known as Buliao Gu Li, or sometimes rendered in Chinese as simply Lü Lì, which is rather obviously a phoneticized name. Paul Budeberg suggests it as more of a nickname, really. Lì the Bolgar. Which seems as appropriate as anything, so that's what we'll go with. Lì the Bolgar had been Taiwú's Minister of the south, and it had been he who had scooped up young Prince Jun as he hid in a deer reserve along with his nursemaid in the midst of the

political instability following his grandfather's death. There had, after all, been more than a few who might have profited through the demise of Taiwu's grandson and heir. Instead, the Bulgar had taken the young prince on horseback to the capital, Pingcheng, where the second and equally exalted member of the coalition to see Prince Jun to the throne, Yuan He, had stood ready to open the city's outer gate and allow the royal prince entrance. Both Yuan and Li would survive the internecine conflict that gripped young Emperor Wenchang's early reign, and both would emerge as his closest confidants and trusted advisors. Here, however, Pierce also points out that, quote,

One of the signs of real change at Wei court was the fact that the regime was no longer completely dominated by males, as it had been since at least the time of its founder, Daowu. A new pattern of politicking had appeared in the courts of northern China that it might be plausible to suggest culminated two and a half centuries later in the reign of the female emperor Wu Zetian. Pierce asserts that Wenchang's eventual empowerment of his nursemaid was a clear break from tradition. But in fact, that was not entirely the case.

It is true that Wenchang's elevation of his wet nurse to a full empress dowager was a first within Northern Wei, but it had been in fact Tai Wu who had begun the tradition when he had elevated his own wet nurse to nurse empress dowager. Wencheng then was providing yet another boost to the power of the position by making her a full empress, but it doesn't seem quite as out of left field as Pierce seems to assert. Regardless, with this new promotion came a very real shift in power for the nursemaid-turned-empress dowager. As mentioned before, it appears to have been Empress Chang who insisted successfully on the death of Consort Li after the birth of Wenchang's son, and therefore potentially becoming a rival for eventual power.

Wenchang's choice of empress, Consort Feng, was also the direct result of Empress Dowager Chang's influence, a decision that would come to dominate the Wei imperial court for decades to come. So what might have prompted the admittedly still quite young emperor to trust Lady Chang with so much political power and so completely? Several historians, including Song Qirui, Li Ping, and Pierce as well, suggest that it may in fact have been the nursemaid herself who had hidden and protected the emperor-to-be during the turmoil surrounding Tai Wu's assassination. And so he may have felt, quite rightly, that he owed her quite a

lot, even his life. I should temper that, though, by noting that it remains a point of contention, and we can't really definitively say one way or the other. Still, it's an interesting idea, at least. Emperor Wencheng's reign was a pivot away from the policies of Tai Wu. The empire that had been won through conquest could not hope to long be governed through such violence. Tai Wu, whose very regnal name, it should be pointed out, translates loosely as the Great Martial Emperor, had been an excellent leader for an expansionist power. In a great comparison, Peirce calls him East Asia's Teddy Roosevelt, and it's an apt moniker.

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Come, visit ancient Egypt and experience a legendary culture. But his governing skills had been rather underdeveloped, what with all the constant warfare. As such, the state he'd left Northern Wei in upon his death was something close to a complete mess. Quote, Again and again, on an ad hoc basis, ministries were established, then abolished. was something close to a complete mess. Quote, End quote. It would be up to Wencheng to turn that corrupt disaster into a state that could long survive Taiwu's departure. And by this measure, he did a pretty commendable job.

He began with anti-corruption efforts. Warfare, after all, is expensive, and Northern Wei had found out over the course of Taiwu's long, successful reign just how correct Sun Tzu had been in the art of war when he had written, quote, If the campaign is protracted, the resourcesers of Northern Way had been thoroughly diminished, near drained. The on-the-fly nature of Taibu's governor appointments and tax collection officials had, unsurprisingly, hardly been helpful, and over the span of his reign,

had been helping themselves to enormous quantities of ill-gotten tax revenues skimmed off the top, with little if any oversight to hem their greed in. But that was all about to change under Wencheng's stewardship. Tax policy was streamlined, legal precedents set or refined, and while virtually every other area of law was being significantly relaxed and punishments reduced from their wartime intolerance of dissent, in the area of corruption, Wencheng's administration would actually increase the penalty to that of death. Wei society, civil and military alike, was also undergoing fundamental changes. As its period of conquests continued to recede into memory, so too was the civilian

population able to get off of their long-standing war footing and back into something more resembling normality once again. Crimes with milder penalties, imprisonment rather than execution most often, meant a surge in the prisoner population, and it would be Yuan He who suggested how best to deal with that new social strain, a shift that would deeply impact what was arguably Wei's central single standard of power, its military. Yuan convinced the emperor to use convicted felons as replacements for the dwindling northern garrisons that guarded against the ever-looming threat of the real-round Khaganate.

Criminals would thereafter be sent to man the walls, often for life and with no chance of returning, and against a terrifying enemy that could strike without warning at any time. It reminds me of nothing so much as the Night's Watch from George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. And now their watch begins, indeed. But with the expansion of civil government instead of a purely wartime government, more levers, cogs, and gears, all turning at the same time, necessitated more hands pulling and spinning those levers. That is to say, more bureaucracy. The great dictator leading his glorious armies on horseback was all well and good, but actual governance would require far more moving

parts than any single person could hope to effectually manage by themselves. Thus, even as the power of the central state grew, so too did the Byzantine nature of its decision-making process. Of this, Pierce states, quote, while it is clear that for good or ill the buck had once stopped with Tai Wu, the situation at Wenchang's court was more murky. One gets the sense of backroom bargaining amongst various groups or individuals. Still, at times, it is clear that a decision had been made and then imposed on the young emperor. Perhaps part of the reason Wenchang took so many trips out of the court was that he felt suffocated at the Pingcheng court with its various political actors. End quote.

With Northern Wei shifting back into, or I suppose in the case of Wei itself rather than Chinese politics as a whole shifting into for the first time, a multifaceted governmental apparatus rather than a single-minded conquest state, Emperor Wancheng was forced to confront and deal with an aspect of rule that his predecessor had never been forced to face, presenting multiple faces of rule to different segments of his own population. In this, Tai Wu had gotten off fairly easily. His public persona was essentially stable across all levels of his empire, what might be thought of today as a cross between Attila the Hun and, as Pierce put it, Teddy Roosevelt. He, quote, delighted in showing himself on horseback, hunting down both man and

beast, end quote. And this served his reign in two regards. First, and probably most importantly, for his own soldiers and armies. As a supreme military commander, it was his sacred duty to command his troops from the front of the charging cavalry line. It's very important to remember that though they now dressed, spoke, and ate as the Chinese did, they were still descendants of the nomad peoples of the steppes, and as such, personal bravery and valor in combat would have been held above almost all else. The other half of Tai Wu's image as a fearsome hunter of both man and beast was to serve as a recurring nightmare for those who had, did, or might someday stand against him. By showing that he would ruthlessly hunt down any who betrayed his will, he commanded an aura of terror and awe in those his armies conquered.

For Emperor Wencheng II, these images remained important. Stories tell of him slaying three tigers in one day, and of shooting an arrow over an entire mountain more than 4,000 feet high when all of his soldiers' arrows hadn't even made it close to the top. And for Wencheng, as with Taiwu, such feats of strength and skill, or if one chooses not to take some of the more fanciful ones literally, at least they're telling, served a, in the words of Tom and Alson, quote, demonstration of the ability to rule, the means of projecting an image of vigor and authority, end, demonstration of the ability to rule, the means of projecting an image of vigor and authority, end quote. But as the emperor who planned to govern more than conquer,

it became far more important for Wencheng to develop a public face more nuanced and more magnanimous than the image of terror and violence projected by his grandfather. Wencheng's court had taken significant steps to, again according to Pierce, quote, root out corruption, and so give peace to the peasantry and some real meaning to the reign titles.

These intentions are seen in another anecdote of the 461 progress, describing interactions of the emperor and the Chinese farmers of the flatlands that lay below Pingcheng. According to Wei Shu, wherever the emperor's carriage went, he would personally meet with the seniors to ask of the people's hardships. He then proclaimed that for subjects over 80 years,

one son should not be called up for corvée. End quote. According to some interpretations of unfortunately badly damaged sources, it appears that Wencheng may have on at least one occasion performed as a part of their lives, traditions, and beliefs, not just some foreign warlord bearing fire and blood. And this policy of soft power seems to have paid dividends, even in ways that had forever eluded the far harder Tai Wu. The Gaochat Turkic clans, for instance, so named by the Chinese because the wheels on the axles of their nomadic carts were very high and had many spokes, hence their name being called the Tall Cart People,

had in 429, during the early reign of Tai Wu, been subjugated by Wei, and then forcibly relocated to the northern fringes of the empire to serve as a kind of buffer state against the Rouran raiding parties. And they hadn't liked that situation very well at all, and had been in perennial rebellion against the Wei emperor ever since. Nothing Taiwu had thrown at them had ever calmed them down for very long. And finally, in 464, Wancheng got the idea that since the stick hadn't seemed to be working, and would probably never work, it might just be time to try the carrot. Thus, that spring, Wencheng journeyed north to the Yin Mountains,

one of his and his clan's historic retreats, sort of like Camp David for modern US presidents. But rather than simply stay there, he opted to press on to the far more dangerous Hexi Corridor, now controlled by the Gaochia clans. And there, at the primary settlement of the people who had not fifteen years earlier risen in major revolt, and with minor insurrections almost yearly thereafter, Wencheng had arrived and simply observed.

Now I should of course point out that the Emperor of Northern Wei was by no means alone in this trip. That would never have been allowed. In all likelihood, he had with him a core of his most battle-hardened and loyal guoren, or countrymen in modern parlance, which was something of a looser definition than we might think of today. For instance, one of Wancheng's closest Guo-ren was Li the Bulgar, clearly not even of the same ethnicity, much less tribe or nation as the Tuoba Xianbei monarch. One might think of such connection as more like battle brothers, someone who, though not

technically related, was treated as family and oftentimes even closer than blood relatives. Kinsmen, perhaps, might be somewhat more appropriate. Now, elite guard though that was, it would have been vastly, ridiculously outnumbered by the Gaochu stronghold. Wencheng had, after all, decided to pay his visit during the largest annual gathering to offer sacrifice and prayer to the great blue sky, Tengzhi, and therefore his force was almost certainly faced with tens of thousands of Gaochou warriors within. There must have been no small amount of tension, but in the end, Wancheng's gesture of goodwill in coming to observe and take part in the holiest

of ceremonies won the day. The Gaochou were greatly pleased that the emperor himself had visited them and taken such keen interest in their way of life and sacred rites. But what might have been the single biggest shift for which we can give credit to Wencheng's regime will circle us back around to Buddhism. He had, of course, ended the prescription of the religion, allowing it, thanks in no small part to the prior actions of his father, to spring back into northern China almost immediately, and largely intact. But it would be Wencheng and his court's policies of not only embracing Buddhism,

but kissing it full in the mouth, that would be its greatest contribution to the religion and the state's continued survival north of the Yellow River. To be sure, Taiwu's nominal death warrant on Buddhism was never in practice, nor likely ever really intended to be, carried out to its fullest. Heck, his wife and son were active, ardent Buddhists fighting the prescription every step of the way. Even Cui Hao, the advisor who was the tip of the anti-Buddhist spear in Northern Wei, even his wife was a devout Buddhist. Clearly, for all the actual destruction and

death the anti-Buddhist edicts had entailed, there was quite a lot of political theater going on as well. Pierce even wonders if, in the vein of teenagers being drawn to those things their parents forbid, Tai Wu's prohibition on Buddhism may have actually attracted even more followers to its precepts, ensuring that it would bounce back all the faster following the great martial emperor's demise. It's an interesting possibility, to be sure. But it would be Wencheng's court that would take the religious plunge that Da Wu had avoided when suggested by his own adherent, and Taiwu, had outright abhorred.

That is, to associate the body of the emperor himself with that of the Buddha itself. Pierce states, Thus began the recasting of Northern Wei as a Buddhist state, which reached its point of highest development decades later in Luoyang. Early steps in this process began during Wencheng's reign. Shortly after Wencheng's enthronement in 452, an edict was issued explaining that Tai Wu, who had sought only to root out corruption within the Buddhist community, had been misunderstood by his officials, and that their heir apparent, Huang, had been grieved by what happened.

But since, as it happened, the army and the state had had much business, he never had leisure to make amends. In fact, that same year is actually the first time a physical embodiment of a Tuoba monarch being portrayed as a Buddha outright comes into the historical record. From Hurwitz's Treatise on Buddhism and Taoism, quote, The officials were commanded by Imperial Edict to have made a stone likeness of the Emperor's person. When it was finished, on both the face and the soles of the feet were black pebbles, which mysteriously resembled the moles on the upper and lower parts of the emperor's body. Within two years, this early experiment in melding Wei emperors with Buddha himself would go mainstream, and was expanded to all past and future emperors of Northern Wei,

beginning with the five monarchs who had already reigned, each being cast as a 16-foot-tall bronze Buddha statue. But that wouldn't be the end of Northern Wei's elaborate and insanely expensive foray in diffusing religion and political legitimacy. About a decade later, in the early 460s, a new, much grander project would be begun some 10 miles outside of the capital, Ping City. The Yungang Grottoes would be officially started, a project that would ultimately span from 465 through 494 when official imperial patronage ended, but then through private patronage all the way until uprisings in the region would permanently halt the construction in

525. The project would result in more than 51,000 individual Buddhas being carved into the sheer rock faces of the Shilla River Valley, and at tremendous expense. Among the 51,000 Buddhas, some of the largest and most ornate depict the Northern Wei emperors themselves, an enduring reminder that the two had become one. In the words of the

contemporary scholar Wang Jianxun, quote, Buddhist had become emperors, and emperors, Buddhist, end quote. Yet, curiously, in spite of all this, there is little evidence that Wenchang himself was ever more than remotely interested in Buddhist precepts, as I mentioned before. For all the tremendous effort and expense his government would throw into associating him and his family with the divine, including shaping the land itself to reflect as much, there is no record of him ever actually visiting the Yungang grottos. In spite of his famously frequent travels over the course of his reign, and in spite of the fact that they were less than ten miles away from his capital. Certainly, many around him—his wife, his son, many of his close advisors and confidants—were

Buddhists, and many devoutly so, and so if it's to be believed that he personally harbored no strong feelings one way or the other, his tacit support of policies that he wasn't particularly gung-ho about, but meant a lot to his supporters and would give his reign further stability and legitimacy, does stand to reason. Emperor Wencheng would ultimately succumb to an unknown affliction or condition in the summer of 465, at the age of only 26. Yet in spite of the ridiculously young age, there is no foul play evidenced in histories,

and by all accounts his death was a natural, if untimely one. He would be succeeded by his eldest son, Crown Prince Tuoba Hong, as Emperor Xianwen. But before Wencheng leaves the stage, what shall we make of his reign? He was an emperor characterized by a series of early childhood traumas, one where a sudden, violent death loomed over him, and then suddenly, with absolute power thrust upon him, and all in the remarkably long, dark shadow of his beloved grandfather

and predecessor, Taiwu. He took a personal situation, and indeed an entire empire, that could have easily been pushed into a far darker, more violent, revenge-filled, and tragic direction, and instead forged for himself, his children, and his dynasty as a whole, an image of a well-rounded monarch. A strong warrior, but never a conqueror. A benevolent patriarch, but not above justly punishing, impermissible behavior, a man and a god, all at once, all together. In the words of the compiler of the Book of Wei, by presenting himself as such, following the turmoil and fatigue of Tai Wu's iron-fisted reign,

he, quote, gave his error rest, fostered might, and made virtue widespread, and bound to his breast both those within the realm and those without. End quote. Next time, we'll move back down south to Liu Song and see what its own new emperor, Xiaowu, has been up to these past few decades. And just to forewarn you, while Wencheng was busy doing all that boring stuff like governing, creating sound policy, and stabilizing his state, Xiaowu had decided to party hardy. By which I mean massive incest, summary executions, and what else? Huge palatial construction projects. What could possibly go wrong?

Thank you for listening. Special thanks this episode goes out to Thrain, aka Thranit, who has not only decided to support the history of China on Patreon, but has also provided several very valuable suggestions about how I can better arrange show notes and website information to make it all more accessible to you. So thanks very much, Thrain. Your input is very much appreciated. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast.