The History of China - #67 - S&N 11 All The Wei Down

Episode Date: June 17, 2015

Though Northern Wei has been a beacon of steadiness amid the ephemeral Southern Dynasties, its time has come to an end. Wracked by ineptitude and betrayal, weighed down by jealous Empress dowagers, ambitious generals, and infant emperors, and with a society split between traditional customs and the new normal, it will devolve into civil war, mass purges, and – ultimately – a permanent split between East and West.Time Period Covered:515-535 CEMajor Characters:Grand/Empress/Dowager Hu (r. 515 - 528)Emperor Xiaoming (510 - 528)Prince Yuan Cha (d. 525)Erzhu Rong (492 - 530)Emperor Xiaowu’s Daughter (528 - ?)Yuan Zhao [Emperor Youzhu] (526 – 528)Emperor Xiaozhuang (r. 528 – 530)Gao Huan (496 - 547)Emperor Xiaowu (510 - 535) 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 the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.

Big shout out this week to Robert L., who has joined THOC's Imperial Court by pledging through our Patreon page. Many thanks, Robert, in officially pushing us over our first funding goal. If you too would like to become our patron, simply want more information, or want to see cool bonus material, please visit our Patreon page at www.patreon.com slash thehistoryofchina or our homepage at thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com.

Thanks once again to Governor Robert, and to all of you that have and continue to donate to the show. I hope you enjoy it. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 67, All the Way Down Last time, we finished off with Empress Dowager Hu of Northern Wei, ascending from lowly consort slated for death to the highest office in the land as regent to her five-year-old son, Yuan Shu, who had just begun his reign as Emperor Xiaoming in the year 515. She had managed to do so with the help and protection of an entire cabal of court officials dead set on releasing Northern

Wei from the grip of the then-Empress Dowager, Gao, and her uncle, the Prime Minister, Gao Zhao. And together, the coalition had succeeded in, the Prime Minister, Gao Zhao. And together, the coalition had succeeded in pushing the pair off the throne and into their graves. This time, we're going to follow the course of her regencies, and the decisions of hers that, along with trends far outside of her control, would ultimately lead to the destruction of Northern Wei entirely. As regent to the throne, Empress Hu is recorded as basically having done her best. She was noted as being fairly intelligent, caring, and willing to listen to criticism. Her biggest foible, in fact, seemed to have been her leniency and general slowness to make necessary reforms, as well as her habit of ignoring pretty much anything beyond

the walls of Luoyang itself, all of which ultimately earned her the derisive, but fitting, moniker, the Inattentive Empress. In fact, many of the decisions and actions that would rock Northern Wei's apple cart in the 520s and 530s, and ultimately overturn the whole thing, are ultimately attributable not to poor actions on Hu's part, but rather an overabundance of trust in her officials, and especially family members, to do the right thing themselves, and her own lack of action to then correct their inevitable mistakes. Unfortunately for her, and for Northern Wei as a whole, that would prove a very poor assumption indeed.

This trend was evidenced very early on in her reign, when in the winter of 515, she was forced to confront a popular uprising based in the Qi province. The provincial governor, the Prince of Zhao, had enraged the residents by executing several citizens without cause. To quell the brooding rebellion, she did relieve the prince of his command and recalled him to Luoyang. But once he arrived, far from punishing him, the Empress appointed the prince as one of the imperial ministers, owing to the fact that he had married her niece. Such displays of nepotism, while certainly not unique to Empress Hu or Northern Wei, did little to help her public image, or indeed surround her with trustworthy figures.

Meanwhile, along the northern border of Wei, abutting the ever-present threat of the Rouran Khaganate, a wholly different issue was festering along the walls. It had to do with the large-scale sinicization that Wei had undertaken beginning with the reign of Xiao Wen in the 490s. You remember, right? Xianbei culture was out, and Han was in. Clothing, architecture, religion, language,

family names. Ah, the times, they were a-changing. But what that meant to the families along the northern frontier was not just shifting fashion styles. It was a fundamental change in their families' statuses within Wei society. They, who were decidedly the more traditional elements of Wei, had guarded the realm for generations from the Rouran barbarians' frequent raids. It had been they who had conquered Wei, they who had united the north, and they who had crushed the soft Han Chinese and forced them to cower south of the Yangtze River. Before, these vanguards of traditional Tuoba Xianbei culture had held a place of honor within Wei society. But now, the sinicized Wei population had begun looking down on their traditional northern kinsmen. Indeed, many of their highest-ranking leaders, princes of the

imperial court, had been among those purged and demoted down to dukes or less. Military service guarding the realm against its many enemies, once a respected and honored position, entrusted to no less than the crowned prince of Wei himself, had in time come to be seen as dishonorable. A plight where the only of criminals and those who could not find anything better to do than remain along the frigid northern border. It is ironic, in a way, that Northern Wei society,

and really many of the steppe societies that would at various points throughout history come to rule over parts, and sometimes all of China, would almost inevitably come to scorn and look down upon their own roots, and favor taking up Chinese customs so totally. Their way of life along the arid steppes had been one of the most pivotal factors in them being able to overcome China's more than formidable, but ultimately static defenses, and seize the empire for themselves. And yet, almost as soon as they'd done so, they began casting off those old traditions wholesale in favor of the very people they'd just swept aside. And of course, the ultimate irony is that many of these victorious conquerors would in time become so Chinese

that they would in turn be crushed by another, more traditional step-tribe, and the cycle would start all over again. Regardless, one of these northern clans that was finding itself increasingly disparaged by the very people they guarded, and its historic rights and privileges more and more stripped away, was the Arju clan, who so happened to be a semi-sinicized branch of the Xiongnu people. Their name, appropriately enough, stemmed from the fact that they had, during the reign of Northern Wei's founding emperor, Daowu, been given as payment for their help in his conquests a region called Xiurong, along the Arju River. Clearly, back in the beginning of the 5th century, they had been among the elite of Tuoba

Xianbei society. Yet by the turn of the 6th century, they, like so many others of their ilk, were increasingly marginalized within the society they had helped to found. In 515, the leader of the Arju clan was the 22 or 23-year-old Arju Rong, who had even by then earned a reputation for his ambition, strict military mind, and ferocity in combat. His ambition to achieve a rank higher than that of mere northern landowner made itself manifest when he managed to secure a marriage to one of the late Emperor Wencheng's grandnieces, offering him an inn to the exclusive imperial club, even as it, at least in his view,

was beginning to crumble. For now, the young leader of the Arju clan had put himself into a strong position within Northern Wei's power structure, but it will take a crisis within that structure for him to really come to the fore. So we'll go ahead and circle back around to him once he really takes the center stage. For now, though, we'll leave him to tend his cattle and guard the walls, while we head back to the capital, Luoyang. In 519, a serious uprising swept through the capital city. This revolt was led not by agrarian farmers or peasants,

but far more dangerously, by soldiers within the army. The reason for their unrest stemmed from, what seems to me at least, a phenomenally boneheaded maneuver by the imperial court. One of the officials, whose name I won't trouble you with, got the bright idea to change the regulations concerning the appointment of civil service positions. That is to say, who could and could not get one of those lucrative, powerful government jobs. This official's proposed change would effectually have barred any and all soldiers from serving as a civilian official, ever. Naturally, this didn't go over well with the guys with the swords,

a detail that the court officials had clearly forgotten to take into account. One does not simply tell their own army to go jump in a lake. So the guys with the swords pick them up and begin to riot across Luoyang, eventually storming the Ministry of Civil Service's headquarters, as well as the family manor of the official who had dared attempt to lock them out of power. There, things got really ugly when the angry mob of soldiers killed the official's father and seriously injured both him and his brother. Ultimately, order, at least of a sort, was restored when Empress Hu negotiated a settlement with the rioting soldiers. She promised that she would reject the proposed changes to civil service requirements if the soldiers would stand down. Further, virtually all of the participants would be officially pardoned for their uprising, but only if they surrendered eight of their leaders to

imperial custody and judgment. They had gotten what they wanted, although the eight arrested ringleaders did pay for it with their lives. This was still the army after all, and straight-up mutiny when you don't like a policy proposal could not go entirely unpunished. Even with these eight executions, though, the damage had been done, and the way imperial court had been, at least in terms of the balance of power between the civil and military branches, irreparably weakened. The army had managed to bully the imperial court into getting its way. For her part, Empress Hu only exacerbated her and her government's plate through her actions, and lack thereof, concerning graft and corruption. As before, she turned a largely blind eye to her officials' improper conduct, and as a result, managed to bungle

her way into house arrest. How did this happen? Well, she had been carrying on an affair with Xiaoming's uncle, her late husband's brother, the Prince of Qinghe, who had as a result effectually taken control of the regency as of 519. In and of itself, this was not nearly as bad of a situation as it might have sounded, because Qinghe was actually pretty good at his job, and was spending much of his time doing his level best to curb the rampant corruption the Empress had let overrun her administration. But when he turned his attention on the crooked dealings of another royal uncle, Yuan Cha, things got hairy.

Obviously, none too pleased that his affairs were undergoing imperial audit, Yuan Cha convinced the ten-year-old emperor, Xiaoming, that the prince of Qinghe was actually plotting treason against him. He then took the emperor into his protective custody, and then ordered the arrest of both Qinghe and the empress dowager herself. The prince was executed by imperial order, and the empress placed under indefinite house arrest. And just like that, it was Yuan Cha in the driver's seat of Northern Wei. And that power would ultimately prove to be his undoing. Though, it would take a while. Because if he'd been corrupt before, the absolute control over the empire only served as a multiplying factor. He was incapable as an actual administrator,

and cared little for such affairs anyway. Instead, he liked to party, and his frivolous expenditures on wine, food, and women would ensure that he'd face ever-mounting resentment and eventually revolts from the population. The situation would be made all the worse by his ill-advised assistance to restore a recently deposed Roran chieftain. Now this was likely a bid to secure the Khanate as an ally of Wei, and would prove successful, at least at first, and only through extensive financial and material backing that his government could ill afford. Moreover, once the Roran chieftain had retaken his throne, he turned right around and began

raiding northern Wei all over again, proving the whole affair to have been an expensive, pointless boondoggle. All of this served to spell the end of Yuan Cha. After several abortive attempts to restore the Empress Dowager between 520 and 522, the backlash against Yuan Cha finally got off the ground in 523, appropriately enough, beginning on the very border regions that were most affected by the Rouran raiding parties. In spite of clear advance warning, Yuancha refused to ease the burdens of the northern garrisons, and they, quite simply at the end of their collective rope, rose against the central government.

By itself, this was not nearly enough to have hoped to achieve much of anything. After all, the northern garrisons were far removed from the capital. A backwater, really. But the years of abuse, neglect, and corruption under Yuan Cha—and Empress He before him—had turned almost the entirety of Northern Wei into a powder keg of anger and resentment at the de facto regent's incompetence, and the rebellion of the six garrisons would serve nicely as a spark to touch the whole thing off. The revolt spread quickly, and within the year had engulfed almost the whole of the northern empire. With Yuan Cha trying, and failing, to stamp out the fires of rebellion before they

burned his whole operation to the ground, the Empress Dowager realized that her chance had come. In conjunction with her son, the Emperor, who had by now realized that trusting Cha had been a super bad idea, and another sympathetic court official, she was able to talk her way back into the throne room, and then convince Yuan Cha that he really would be better off not trying to personally command the Imperial Guard, and she knew just the guy who could run them in the most effective way.

Yuan, curiously, wound up agreeing with her, and allowed the Imperial Guard Corps to be placed under the command of the suggested official, who, needless to say, was absolutely in cahoots with the Empress. In the summer of 525, with all her restorative ducks in a row, she just straight up declared herself regent again, and then ordered the house arrest of Yuan Cha, because how do you like them apples? And there was nothing Yan could do about it. You know, in retrospect, giving up command of the Imperial Guard was probably a bad idea. He would ultimately be commanded, along with his brother, to commit suicide. And that was the end of Yuan Cha. With Empress Dowager Hu now back in

the driver's seat, perhaps she expected those pesky agrarian revolts to die along with Yuan. But wouldn't you know it, replacing a super corrupt official with an only marginally less bad Empress Dowager did not exactly calm the popular sentiment. And so, on and on the revolts went, with virtually none of the countermeasures the Empress or her court sent against them having any real or lasting effect. In mid-February 528, Emperor Xiaoming had his first child with consort Pan. The child was a girl, but Empress Dowager Hu, perceiving an opportunity to perhaps stem the still-ongoing civil strife, declared that the emperor had actually produced

a son and issued a general pardon. Suffice it to say, it did not work. Might we try, I don't know, correcting our policy errors and cleaning out the deadwood of government? No. Just issue pardons. That'll probably do it, right? At this point, little Emperor Xiaoming wasn't actually so little anymore. He was 18, in fact. Several years an adult by imperial standards. And yet, for some reason, Mommy Dearest still had a death grip on this state decisions, that he was becoming more and more convinced were kind of supposed to be his. And so he began looking around for someone who could help him out. Someone with an army.

Someone who maybe wasn't actively rebelling against him. Preferably someone who had a personal relationship with him. Someone reliable. And as it so happens, there was a guy who happened to meet all of those requirements, Arju Rong, way up in Xiorong. Why, Arju commanded a sizable army,

and he wasn't part of any rebellion against the throne. That said, he pretty much ignored or just paid lip service to imperial orders, mind you, but hey, you take what you can get. And hey, Xiaoming had actually taken Arju Rong's daughter as a concubine not too far back. Why, this was perfect. And so, Emperor Xiaoming sent word to Arju, asking him to help end his mother's regency, which was, I should note, nominally held by the Empress Dowager's lover, but that's just splitting hairs, really. It just so happened that Arjurong had been preparing for more or less exactly this. He'd been watching with ever-increasing disgust the

Empress Dowager drive the state into the dirt through her ongoing toleration of corruption and naked favoritism toward the men who had taken her fancy. He therefore had been amassing his forces in preparation to strike the capital and remove her and her puppets from power. All this under the guise of preparing for a strike somewhere totally else, not Luoyang, definitely not. Interestingly, this force-massing had actually seemed to touch off Empress Hu's spidey sense. Something didn't seem quite right, so she issued several Tie Chuan, literally meaning iron tickets, and which served almost the exact function as a get-out-of-jail-free card from Monopoly. She issued these get-out-of-jail-free cards to several of Arju Rong's lieutenants.

It seemed quite feasible that she was not so subtly hinting that they ought to off their lord commander and then cash in their iron ticket and get off scot-free, rather than the usual death penalty for lordicide. This assassination, non-request, did nothing to improve Arju's opinion of the Empress Dowager, to be sure. And so, when the imperial missive from Xiaoming arrived at his doorstep, asking, nay, ordering him to march his army on the capital and remove the Emperor's mother and her two lackeys-in-chief from their positions, why, General Arju Rong was only too happy to oblige. Once the Northern Army was in motion towards the capital, the Emperor seemed

to have waffled a bit in his commitment, since he wound up dispatching a second message, this time ordering General Arju to halt. This would prove an inadvisable move, to put it mildly, since it was his second message that finally tipped off the Empress Dowager to the fomenting coup. If an emperor trying to take control of his own throne can really be called a coup. Anyways, under the advice of her two lackeys, whose heads, after all, were on the shopping block far more than her own, she was convinced to poison Emperor Xiaoming, her own son. The histories, though, make it sound like it wasn't nearly as horrifying a decision for Empress Hu as we might think. She had apparently never forgiven her son for ordering the execution of her lover, and her own imprisonment back in 520 at Yuan Cha's behest. That is to say,

she killed her son, in no small part, over an eight-year-old grudge against a ten-year-old boy. Nice Empress Hu. Real nice. Emperor Xiaoming collapsed dead from his dose of poison at the end of March 528. In his stead, Empress Hu initially, and quite rashly, placed his only child on the throne, and declaring the 50-day-old baby the new sovereign. This was a very strange decision, not because of the child's age. There had been more than a few infant emperors, after all. But rather, because of the child's sex.

She was a girl. Such a situation was highly unorthodox, and in fact has generated disagreement for more than a millennia, since the infant girl emperor's placement on the throne preceded the reign of Wu Zetian, commonly considered China's first and only female sovereign, by more than a century and a half. Now, it is of course true that real state authority was never even remotely in the tiny hands of the infant girl emperor, who I keep referring to as such because her given name was sadly not recorded. It's also true that this state of affairs would last for mere hours before it was unceremoniously undone. But on the other hand, we have had dozens of official emperors who could lay claim to exactly zero actual power. And we also had

emperors that held the position for a period of mere days before losing it in one way or another. The infant did, officially, hold the title of Huangdi, though it was of China only in pretense, whereas Wu Zetian would be of a united China. Most historians and source documents do not list the infant girl emperor in the official list of sovereigns, since she was just a historical hiccup, but it's still very interesting to think that, even if only briefly, a female sat the throne of Northern Wei more than a century before Empress Wu could lay claim to that honor herself. But as I said, that situation was quickly dismissed as untenable. Empress Dowager Hu admitted that the infant was a girl, and within the span of a few hours, she was deposed and replaced with one of her cousins, the two-year-old Yuan Zhao,

known to history as Youzhu, meaning the Young Lord. All this baby emperor juggling by the Empress Dowager provided a crucial opening for General Arzhu Rong, who had stationed his army within striking distance of the capital at the city of Shangdong. When news reached his ears of the imperial deceit, he pounced, declaring that her lies proved that she was unfit to be regent and refusing to recognize the two-year-old Emperor Youzhu as legitimate. Historian Wei Shou, the chief author of the Book of Wei, couched Arju's decision to move forward in a manner that suggests it was nothing less than his divine destiny when he wrote, quote,

He met the opportunity of Xiaoming's death by poisoning, the hearts of the people were lost, and they hoped that someone would express the voice of the righteous to start a just uprising like Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Huan of Jin. End quote. Then and there, in his military field camp, Arju named his own candidate for the throne, a 21-year-old cousin of the late Xiaoming's named Yuan Ziyou, the Prince of Changle,

who enjoyed widespread popularity and a reputation for shrewd decision-making. Arju and Ziyou engaged in a secret set of communications in which Ziyou agreed to the offer, and with his two brothers, the Prince of Pengcheng and the Duke of Bacheng, respectively, together left the capital and joined Arjurong's force on the march. In return for proclaiming Zeyu the new emperor, he proclaimed Arju the prince of Taiyuan. But while titles and proclamations were all well and good, they were nothing more than empty words unless and until the capital was taken and the Empress Dowager removed. This would prove to be startlingly easy. As the rebel army approached Luoyang, Empress Dowager Hu's lover,

who was also the tool through which she controlled the regency, up and fled the city entirely. And then, two of the city guard generals just up and surrendered their entire forces without so much as a fight. In the words of Wei Zhou, quote, Just like that, the city was Arju's to sack. And sack, his army did.

As the now clearly victorious rebel army plundered its way through the capital and encircled the palace, Empress He, in what appears to have been a desperate attempt to save the womencled the palace, Empress He, in what appears to have been a desperate attempt to save the women of the palace, ordered the whole bunch of Xiaoming's concubines to take vows of Buddhist nunnery, and to shave their heads in the style of Buddhist tonsure. It seems as though she felt that not even a rebel army would dare harm or rape holy nuns. And though she too underwent tonsure, she never did take the actual vows of nunnery. There's little indication as to whether the plan on the whole worked or not,

and the concubine's turned nun's collective fate remains unwritten. But as for Empress He herself, the haircut wouldn't prove nearly enough to save her from Arjurong's wrath. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy. He was a man of contradictions, a tyrant and a reformer, a liberator and an oppressor, a revolutionary and a reactionary. His biography reads like a novel, and his influence is almost beyond measure. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast, and every month I delve into the turbulent life and times of one of the greatest characters in history, and explore the world that shaped him in all its glory and tragedy.

It's a story of great battles and campaigns, political intrigue, and massive social and economic change, but it's also a story about people, populated with remarkable characters. I hope you'll join me as I examine this fascinating era of history. Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. When he at last entered the palace, General, or excuse me, it's now Prince, Arju Rong, ordered the palace officials to welcome their new sovereign emperor to the palace, Xiao Zhuang of Northern Wei. He, the new emperor and his retinue, burst into the throne room where the Empress Dowager and the two-year-old Emperor Youzhu could do little but await their arrival. The now hairless Hu attempted to explain

her actions and convince the general to spare them, but she may as well have saved her breath, because Arju was hearing none of it. He ordered both the Empress Dowager and the infant emperor weighted down and then thrown into the swirling depths of the Yellow River. And that was that. But the murder of the Empress and the infant would be far from the end of it. David Graff wrote in his book Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900, On May 17th, Arju Rong ordered his troopers to cut down more than a thousand officials and courtiers who had come out of the city to tender their submission. This event would be known to history as the Heyin Massacre, and other sources, such as S. Wise Bower, put that number as high as 2,000 civilians slain in cold blood.

Why? hadn't stopped to get a real clear count of the size of Arju Rong's invading army, which was quite a bit smaller, it turned out, than he felt comfortable occupying the enemy capital with. When his advisors began warning him as much, and that civil resistance might spring up once the population of Luoyang had time to realize just how thinly spread the usurper's force was, he came to the conclusion that something drastic would need to be done. The Haiyin Massacre, then, was meant to preemptively cut the heads off of as many potential vipers before they had the opportunity to coil and strike. Still, the details of the mass slaughter are brutal. By announcing the misinformation that Emperor Xiao Zhuang was going to offer sacrifices to heaven and earth. When the officials arrived to observe and participate in the rituals,

Arju's officers surrounded the unarmed group and coldly cut them down one by one. So, I suppose, in a sense, there was indeed a tremendous sacrifice made to heaven and earth at He Yin, just not the kind the officials had been expecting. But even this wouldn't mark an end to the culling. Realizing that the new emperor's two brothers would really only serve to hinder his own ambitions, Arju sent assassins to take care of them, while placing Xiao Zhang under what amounted to house arrest within his army camp. The new emperor, seeing exactly what was what, sent a message to General Arju saying, hey, you want to be the emperor? Just say the word, and the throne is yours.

Just please keep my head attached to my shoulders. The idea had certainly crossed Arju's mind, and he considered the proposition carefully. Emperor Arjurong. Yeah, that's got a nice ring to it. Or better yet, Emperor Wu. That certainly hasn't been done to death already. But while he was potentially debating which imperial name to assume, his personal sorcerer gravely warned him that neither he nor his associates were favored by heaven to become the emperor, effectively a pronouncement of doom should he dare try. And so Xiao Zhuang would remain the figurehead. And at a subsequent ceremony, Arju formally bestowed full imperial power back to the emperor, with the minor exception of retaining ultimate command over the military might of Northern Wei, rendering him, in effect, Northern Wei's generalissimo. Optics, everyone. Optics. Arju then... suggested.

Yeah, suggested. Let's go with that. That Emperor Xiaozhuang marry his daughter, consort Arju Ying'e, the daughter who had previously married the late Emperor Xiaoming. But since Confucian ethics marked such a relationship as incestuous, Xiaozhuang demurred at first. Imagine perhaps being ordered to marry your stepmom. Not exactly you, but still enough to make you think twice.

Even so, Xiao Zhuang was convinced that the marriage would be a net positive for him, and so it went through. Ying'e would become the new Empress of Northern Wei. Now with this power-sharing arrangement settled, at least for the time being, Xiao Zhuang and Arju turned to deal with the other big problem they'd just inherited, the fact that Northern Wei had essentially been tearing itself apart in peasant uprisings and civil war for the better part of a decade under the incompetent stewardship of the late Empress Hu.

The garrisons all along the northern borders were still in full-on revolt, as was the Shandong Peninsula, and even one rebel commander in Shanxi claiming the title of emperor for himself. Truth be told, the only real section of northern Wei that Xiaozhang could really claim to hold without dispute was the capital itself, which was not the most secure of positions for obvious reasons. Generalissimo Arzu did not tarry and began making preparations at once to reunite his shattered empire. I mean, Xiao Zhuang's shattered empire, of course. The closest target was the army of the northern garrisons, led by the Xianbei chieftain Ge Rong,

who had been referring to himself as the Emperor of Qi now for some time. Ge's army, a force considerably larger than what Arju could hope to match, had commenced a siege of Ye City near the Yellow River. Nevertheless, Arju rode out at the head of a 7,000-strong cavalry strike force to take the encamped rebels by surprise. The horsemen took the besiegers utterly unaware and wound up easily crushing the numerically superior force and taking the so-called Emperor of Qi, Ge Rong, prisoner.

He was delivered in chains to Luoyang and then publicly executed later that winter. While the main imperial army was off on campaign, however, a new threat arose, backed by a very old enemy. The Liang Emperor Wu, wishing to capitalize on the factiousness and internal weakness of his dynasty's northern rival, had sent a member of the Yuan royal family, one of Xiao Zhuang's cousins, Prince Yuan Hao, back into Northern Wei as a kind of Trojan horse. Yuan Hao, you see, had defected to Liang following the He Yin Massacre,

and had recently been declared by the Southern Emperor the Prince of Wei, rendering him a claimant to the Northern Throne. Emperor Wu had then dispatched Yuan Hao, along with a large detachment of his own army, to make their way back to Wei, declare for the throne, and then seize the capital, which would, ipso facto, result in Northern Wei effectively becoming a vassal state of Liang. Thus, in the

summer of 529, while the bulk of Northern Wei's army was off on campaign in Shandong, Prince Yuan Hao and his southern army entered Wei proper, declared himself Emperor of the North, seized a fortress city, and managed to surprise and defeat a large portion of the Northern army as it attempted to return from its victory against the Shendong rebel faction. Surprised and alarmed, Emperor Xiaozhuang felt he had no choice but to flee the capital to the relative safety

of the northern banks of the Yellow River. With the capital undefended and largely abandoned, Yuan Hao was able to take it unopposed. Shortly thereafter, the majority of the provinces on the southern side of the mighty Yellow River professed their loyalty to the new regime, and Yuan Hao's victory appeared to be assured. He was in fact so confident of the inevitability of his triumph that he decided that this would be a great time to enact his own master plan. You see, Yunhao might have nodded along dumbly while the southern Liang emperor had explained that he would be at the head of a vassalized Wei state,

but yeah, no, he never meant it. Instead, he merely needed a force large enough to take the north for himself, which he'd then cast off when the time was right. And that time, he deemed, had come. He sent a letter to Emperor Wu, declaring that he'd taken the capital, all was well, and no more reinforcements were required, thanks very much. At the same time, he'd dispatched his general and the southern army to stave off Arjurong's impending advance to retake Luoyang. With any luck, the two generals would, I don't

know, kill each other off off and he'd get rid of two problems at once. And if not, well, he didn't seem to have quite made it that far in his plans just yet. The southern general Chen, however, proved to be no match for Arju's tactical mastery, and the northern generalissimo forced the Liang army into a rout when he ordered a daring night assault across the Yellow River to penetrate the enemy lines. Imagine that, crossing the always-dangerous and fast-flowing Huanghe, in the pitch black, no lights, no noise, and all so that if you were able to make it across without drowning, you'd be engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a larger enemy force, again, in the dead of night. A dangerous proposition, to put it mildly.

And one General Chun had clearly considered impossible and or insane, since when Arju's strike force went ahead and did it anyway, he and his men were taken completely by surprise. The southern army, taken in their beds, collapsed into chaos and panicked flight through the deadly darkness, pursued all the while by the spear tips of the Wei imperial army. General Chen tried to re-rally his army, but failed, and Yuan Hao, the claimant to the throne without which this whole northern odyssey was pointless, was caught and killed as he attempted to flee back to the capital. With the Liang emperor's plot now officially KIA,

Arjuwang was once again free to turn and crush the last of the revolts in the north, at last reunifying northern Wei. But it was a victory that brought little in the way of peace or stability for the already shaky state. Emperor Xiaozhuang, while making all the appropriate congratulatory noises following the Generalissimo's successes in the field, was privately rather miffed that Arju hadn't managed to take an errant spear through the chest during the campaigns or something. This was because his victory over the rebels and the Liang pretender had rendered him virtually

a folk hero among the populace, a situation Xiao Zhuang feared would lead him to once again consider the idea of usurpation. Arju began dropping little hints, too, as did his daughter, the Empress, that, you know, the nine bestowments would make a really great congrats on winning the war present. But Xiao Zhuang, rather hilariously, played dumb and simply pretended he didn't understand the meaning of the winks, nods, and nudges the Arjus were lobbing his direction. And all the while, the emperor was doing anything but sitting idly by and awaiting his seemingly inevitable overthrow.

To the contrary, he had begun a plot of his own, one that would hit the ground running in the autumn of 530. The empress Arju-Ing had become pregnant in the winter of 529-530, and was due to give birth that autumn. As such, Arju-Rong requested permission to visit Luoyang and be present for his grandchild's birth. Several of the Emperor's co-conspirators wanted to arrange for an assassination once the Generalissimo had entered the capital, while others wished to slaughter his associates within the capital before he could personally arrive,

and then send the imperial army against him, judging that he was too dangerous to let inside at all. Before Xiaozhuang could make up his mind, though, word of the plot wound up leaking to Arju through his brother, Arju Shilong. But the Generalissimo simply couldn't believe that his little puppet emperor would dare make a move against him, and so he came to the capital anyway.

And when he arrived, like a noontime duel in the Old West, the city held its breath and waited to see which side would draw down first. Arjurong seemed to have been so completely confident of his control over the situation that he actually entered the imperial palace completely unarmed, and with only a token personal guard. This show of peace took the emperor by surprise. What kind of a man comes to a gunfight without even a knife? And he considered calling the whole assassination off,

but was convinced by one of his cousins that, no, that ship had already sailed, and armed or no, it would be folly of the highest order to allow the general to leave the imperial palace alive. Thus, under the pretense of the empress having given birth, Xiaozhang summoned both Arzurong and his chief lieutenant to the palace, where the two were ambushed and killed. He then issued a general pardon across the empire, since he had been studying the historical accounts of what he and his advisors had deemed to be the closest event to his current situation. The assassination of the figure Arju himself had long been compared with, the Han Dynasty general Dong Zhuo, whose reign of terror and human meatballs we discussed at length back in episode 37. He had come to the conclusion that the cause of the subsequent instability

and collapse of the Han Empire had been a result of a failure to forgive the general's associates following his own execution, and thus forcing them to rebellion and further strife. As such, in addition to the pardon, he issued the brothers of the departed Arju Rong an iron ticket apiece. Again, the empire's official get-out-of-the- get out of the death penalty free card. This would, however, prove ill-conceived. Arju Rong's brothers weren't looking for a pardon, they were looking for revenge. But Arju Jilong's reply was chillingly accurate. If his brother hadn't been safe from the emperor's assassins after doing so much for Northern Wei, then such a token was meaningless. And he rejected the overture. Instead, he and his other brother departed from the capital city, declaring yet another distant

relative of Xiao Zhuang, somebody named Yuan Ye, the prince of Changguang, the true emperor, and raised their flags in rebellion. Meeting up with a third Arju brother and his personal army near the new year of 531, the now sizable rebel force, although it should be noted still markedly smaller than the imperial army, turned back around and together advanced once more on Luoyang. In the dead of winter, their cavalry units were able to perform what by now was a time-honored battle tactic of the northern peoples, crossing the frozen Yellow River on horseback and taking the opposition unawares. Taken by surprise, the imperial defenders collapsed utterly, and the brothers Arju were able to storm Luoyang with little resistance.

And I'd just like to take a moment as a podcaster's aside to say, really, Luoyang city guard? You were surprised by this? This has been the standard military tactic of Northern Wei since its inception, and well before besides. And you didn't see it coming? Regardless, Emperor Xiaozhuang was taken captive and his infant son murdered, while the capital city of Wei burned, its women were raped, and its officials slaughtered en masse. Arzhu Zhao's trusted and capable lieutenant, General Gao Huan, wrote a letter to his commander, urging him not to harm the emperor. But Arju Zhao refused to answer and subsequently strangled Emperor Xiao Zhuang to death.

Despite this, Gao remained nominally under the Arju's command structure, and he was then commissioned to lead a contingent of troops east of the Taihang Mountains, ostensibly to seek food. Spring 531, though, would prove to be the final nail in the coffin for Gao Huan's faith in the Arju brothers. He had been preparing to attack several rebel commanders. Instead, however, they met with him privately and were able to convince him that the Arjus had become corrupt and hated by the people, and that it was his duty to overthrow them. Gao, who had already been suspicious of the Arju brothers' motives and methods, was convinced,

but he also knew his men would need further proof. However, whether that proof was real or manufactured, well, on that he was a little bit more flexible. He determined that the most expedient way for solidifying his men's allegiance to him was by forging orders from Arju Zhao, indicating that the Arjus intended to enslave the lot of them as servants for his own troops. The soldiers bought it, and when he declared a rebellion in summer of 531, they supported him. Initially, Gao Han's rebellion formally continued to recognize Emperor Jiamin. However, by the fall of 531, Gao had declared another distant relative of the imperial Yuan clan, Yuan Lang, as the new emperor. Despite Gao's reputation for being a capable soldier, his army was still quite weak, and at first, most key members of the Arju

clan didn't even take him seriously. This was a situation that Gao found he could take advantage of by playing the already distrustful brothers against one another instead of allowing them to unite against him. The rumor mill he was powering did its job and spread rapidly, inflaming the previously existing conflicts between the members of the Arju clan, and resulting in several of the coalition's key members to withdraw back to their home territories. With the fields now equalized, Gao then defeated Arju Zhao in battle that winter, forcing him to withdraw as well. In spring 532, Gao captured the important stronghold Ye City and then used it as a base for his subsequent operations. In spite of his successful misinformation

campaign, blood did indeed prove to run thicker than water, and the Arjus, no longer laughing at this minor opposition, soon reconciled and launched a combined assault on Ye in an attempt to force Gao Huan's army to either flee or surrender. However, in spite of the Arjus' numerical superiority, Gao's army, safely ensconced behind Ye's defensive fortifications, defeated them all and forced them to retreat. Two of the Arju commanders

attempted to retreat to Luoyang, but another general named Sui Chen rebelled against the Arjus from within Luo Yang itself, and killed Arjus Xuelong and another of his brothers, while simultaneously defeating and capturing the two retreating brothers and then delivering them to Gao. Emboldened by this unexpectedly decisive victory, Gao then marched on Luo Yang. Once within the capital's walls, he offered the throne to his emperor of choice, Xiao Zhuang's distant cousin, who accepted and took the throne as Emperor Xiao Wu. Xiao Wu initially deferred to Gao Huang, who continued to command the largest army within Wei.

Additionally, Xiao Wu married Gao's daughter and declared her as his empress in late 532. However, the relationship between the emperor and the general soon soured, since Xiaowu began increasingly suspecting that Gao had designs on the throne for himself. By mid-534, the empire had once again factionalized between the emperor and the supreme military commander. Emperor Xiaowu soon prepared a campaign against Gao, but the general saw through the emperor's plot and preemptively marched once again towards Luoyang, whose top ministers, believing that the imperial troops were not strong enough to resist Gao,

urged the emperor to flee the capital westward towards the ancient capital, Chang'an, and Xiaowu took the out. His decision to flee, rather than make a stand for Luoyang, would earn him the derisive historical moniker, Chu Di, meaning the emperor who fled.

It would also mark the end of Northern Wei as a political entity. Xiaowu would be escorted to Chang'an by his loyal retainers, where he would establish Western Wei, and thereafter refuse all of Gao Huan's overtures for him to return to Luoyang and resume the status quo. Ultimately, Gao, frustrated that Xiaowu was giving him the silent treatment from way out west, would give up the ghost and declare another imperial clansman, the Prince of Qinghe,

emperor, and he was enthroned as Xiaojing. Though he possessed Luoyang, he would also move the capital of the newly formed Eastern Wei to Ye City, thus formally and permanently dividing the empire in two. Though we've reached the end of the juggernaut that was Northern Wei, the tumult is really only just beginning in the north. We've reached the beginning of the end of the southern and northern period, but there's quite a bit left before we get there. Next time, though, we'll be shooting back south again to catch up with the newly established Liang Dynasty and the long and storied reign of its founding emperor, Wu of Liang.

Thank you for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy and I'm Rich and we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history.

Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.