The History of China - #68 - S&N 12: Dam It, Wu!

Episode Date: June 26, 2015

Going back about 50 years to the beginning of the 6th century, we move South once more to visit the new Dynasty that has destroyed the Qi: Liang, and it’s founding Emperor Wu. In this first half of Wu of Liang’s reign, wars will be fought, religions will be adopted, and a massive dam will be constructed as a siege weapon.Time Period Covered: 464-517Major Figures:Emperor Wu of Liang (née Xiao Yan) [r. 502-549]Prince Xiao HongXiao Baojuan, Emperor of Southern Qi [483-501]Xiao Baorong (Emperor He of Southern Qi) [r. 501-502]Chief Engineer Chen ChengboGeneral Kang XuanGeneral Zhang BaozhiEmpress Dowager Hu of Northern Wei 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 This week's episode is brought to you in part by Audible.com. With now more than 200,000 books, magazines, comedy sketches, and just about anything else you can think of

available. Audible is the leading provider of audio entertainment on the web. And you can now get a special trial offer of one free month's service and a complimentary audiobook download by using the web address audibletrial.com slash THOC for your free audiobook download, and great deals on all of Audible's amazing catalog. Once again, that's audibletrial.com slash THOC for your free download. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 68. Damn it, Wu. Last time, we watched as the once-mighty Northern Wei succumbed to betrayal and ultimately its

own division into eastern and western halves. But the tumult is far from over in northern China. Before we continue on with the ongoing chaos up there, however, we're going to swing south today and give some well-deserved attention to the just-founded Liang Dynasty, which, markedly unlike Northern Wei at the dawn of the 6th century, saw a period of remarkable stability under the reign of its founding emperor, Wu. While the first half of the 6th century would prove to be the undoing of Northern Wei, it was actually a period of relative stability for the

south. Given that his reign is just so long, just shy of 47 years in fact, we're actually going to be going ahead and splitting his period on the throne into two parts. Today, we'll be covering his origin story, rise to power, overthrow of the southern Qi dynasty, and the rough first half of his reign. And next time, his later reign and eventual death and succession. And of course, all the excitement surrounding that. The man who would be Emperor Wu was born in 464 as Xiao Yan, under the Liu Song dynasty. He was the third of seven sons born to his mother, Lady Zhang, and his father, Xiao Shunzhi,

who was a nobleman whose family claimed heritage all the way back to the early 2nd century BCE and to one of the greatest prime ministers of the Han dynasty, one of the dynasty's chief founders in fact, Xiao He. So suffice it to say, they had some reason to consider themselves a cut above. A far more contemporary familial link, however, was to the Liaosong general Xiao Daocheng, which should sound somewhat familiar, because he would ultimately lead a successful rebellion against Liaosong and established the Southern Qi Dynasty with him at its helm in 479 as its Emperor Gao, which we covered at length in episode 64. This connection to the eventual conqueror of the south would prove to be a great boon for young Xiaoyan's father and their family as a whole.

Both during the rebellion and then after in the imperial palace, Emperor Gao took Xiao Shunzi into his close circle of trusted advisors, resulting ultimately in a promotion to the Marquis of Linsiang, as well as a generalship. Xiao Yan himself was considered both handsome and intelligent, and along with his high birth, he had little trouble finding a suitable marriage. He would take a wife at the age of 17 or 18, around the year 482, to a girl named Qi Hui. She was a descendant of the Liu Song royalty, and the two would together have three daughters, but no sons. He began his career in the imperial officialdom by serving as a military assistant to the Prince of Baling, the son of the then reigning emperor. This appointment

went very well for the youthful Xiao Yan, and the prince gave him a glowing review, quote, Mr. Xiao will be Shizhong before he turns 30, and his honor will be innumerable after he turns 30, end quote. And by the way, Shizhong is a rank in the imperial officialdom, roughly equating to personal attendant to a high imperial office, a rather mid-level official posting that was nevertheless, as made evident by the tone of the Prince of Baling's appraisal, was no mean feat to land at such a young age. Xiaoyan displayed a particular gift for literary

works and became well-known as one of a very small group of young officials who kind of became the dead poet society of the 5th century southern China. In 490, Xiaoyan's father died, prompting him to quit his position and go into a customary period of mourning. By 493, however, he had returned to public service and had found a position working with the new prime minister of southern Qi, another of the emperor's sons, Xiao Ziliang. The prime minister having befriended the nine members of the earlier poet society, and recalling his great work, snatched Xiao Yan up for his own staff. Once the aging emperor Wu died,

Xiao Yan managed to do a good enough job of both avoiding potentially lethal court intrigue and completing his jobs admirably. So that while the Qi dynasty began to founder, Xiaoyan was able to deftly hop from one post to another as the imperial princes and the revolving door of emperors in the dynasty's final years came and went. Between 493 and 497, he served as advisor to two prime ministers, and then the defending general of the city of Shoyang, and then as the baron of Jinyang. In 1495, he distinguished himself as a front-line general against a Northern Wei invasion and was subsequently sent on a personal mission by Emperor Ming to arrest and execute a potentially

rebellious prince in Si province. Even as the Southern Qi dynasty sang its violent swan song, Zhao Yan managed to enhance his personal fortunes from the government's failure. When full-scale civil war broke out in 497, he was once again one of the imperial court's trusted battlefield commanders, and was instructed to lead a task force to assist the offensive in Yong province, and then appointed the captured territory's imperial governor and defender the following year, based in Xiangyang city. He proved to be able and honorable enough that he retained that post as governor once southern Qi's penultimate emperor, the 15-year-old Xiao Baozhuan, took the throne in 498. The following year, Xiaoyan's wife, Shi Hui, died, and he once again retired from public life to mourn her.

He would never again remarry, though he would take several concubines over the course of the rest of his life. Once he had again emerged from his mourning period, Xiaoyan began to receive rather disturbing reports and rumors from the capital. Though the emperor was still young, and as such did not yet fully possess his imperial authority, word had nevertheless percolated throughout the society that he was violent, capricious, and frivolous. And so, Xiaoyan began to make preparations in secret, preparations for war should it become necessary. He also attempted to persuade his brother, the governor of Bing province, to do the same, but proved unable. His own preparations would prove well-timed, since the following year, the emperor, suspecting, rightly I should mention, that many of his high officials were indeed plotting his overthrow,

acted preemptively and began a massive purge of his administration. We discussed this order of events in more depth back in episode 64, but as a quick refresher, he initially ordered two of his scheming advisors executed. Then, in rapid-fire succession, he ordered the deaths of a prince who had risen up in rebellion against the initial executions, and then his generals and major backers. This was followed by yet another unsuccessful rebellion, this time led by the senior general of southern Qi. The mood among the empire's central administration was one of terror, distrust, and palpable fear that at any moment the emperor might order their head next. As a result, the military governor of Yu province

defected along with his territory to northern Wei in mid-500. This defection, of course, prompted a direct intervention on the part of the emperor, and he ordered his top general, Cui, to retake the province. But once his army was fielded, the general turned it right back around, declared against the now-stunned emperor, and then occupied the capital. At this, Xiaoyan's brother, the one who had refused to prepare to rebel against the emperor, rallied his own force and countermarched on Nanjing to successfully relieve the siege of the imperial palace and restore the emperor. For his valorous actions, Emperor Bao Juan promoted Xia Yan's brother to prime minister, but that accolade would not last long. The emperor had grown so paranoid and

mistrustful that his accusations soon landed on his new prime minister, and he too was executed. Upon hearing that his brother's life had been taken by the mad monarch, Xiaoyan at last resolved that the time had come to take the emperor off his throne, and then his head from his body. He declared his rebellion in late 501. Xiaoyan managed to convince the governor of the powerful Jing province that the imperial army that was currently en route to his own Yong province was also going to attack Jing. The fabrication worked, and Jing province mobilized against the imperial force, surprising the army as it passed through its territory, killing its commander, and dispersing its troops.

In the spring of 501, the two rebel commanders declared their chosen successor to the throne of Liang, the emperor's younger brother Xiao Baorong, as Emperor He. While the governor of Jing stayed with his new would-be emperor at their rebel stronghold, Xiao Yan took his own army to besiege the capital of southern Qi and depose the old emperor. He arrived outside Nanjing, which you might recall was wall-less at this time, in late fall or early winter of 501, and quickly took the outer city and placed the imperial compound itself under siege. Late that winter, unable to lift the rebel siege of

the palace from their position within, the last supporters of Emperor Xiao Baozhan turned their cloaks and assassinated the beleaguered monarch in order to save their own skins. Emperor He of Qi was not summoned to the capital, but remained at Jiangling City. Xiaoyan quickly seized true power for himself, having himself promoted first to the Duke and then the Prince of Liang and ruling in the Empress Dowager's name. All the while, he was quietly killing off the remaining imperial princes who would have a significant claim to the throne should anything unfortunate happen to the nominally reigning Emperor He. In late spring 502, Shaoyan at last summoned He to the palace. But as the imperial cavalcade was en route, Shaoyan then dispatched another

message, this time ordering the emperor to cede the throne to him. And wham bam, the southern Qi dynasty was over and done. Emperor He, subsequently demoted to the Prince of Baling, joined the long list of ex-emperors who needed to make his bucket list real short because he didn't survive more than a few days after his dethronement before being assassinated by the order of the new Liang Emperor. Alright, so that's everything that we've covered in previous episodes, so now that we're done reminiscing and all caught back up to the present of 502, let's continue on. Xiaoyan, victorious, assumed the throne, taking his principality's name and applying it to his newly established dynasty, Liang. Though again, as always, his imperial title was posthumous.

He'd be known to history, and therefore to us, as Emperor Wu of Liang. And as a quick side note, by my count, this marks somewhere between the 27th and 33rd reigning monarch to incorporate the character Wu, which again means warlike or martial, as his name in full or in part, depending on whether you start at the Zhou dynasty, when the monarchs were still called kings, or Wang, or if you begin at the Qin empire and the establishment of the true imperial title Huangdi, respectively. So, the more you know. Wu of Liang set out establishing his dynasty by naming his heir.

He selected his infant son, Xiaotong, to be crowned prince. And though this seemed only natural, in fact, it rather perturbed Wu's nephew and adopted son, Prince Zhengde, who became obsessively jealous that he had not been named by his adopted father. After all, he had been adopted for specifically that purpose. This situation was exacerbated when Emperor Wu then rescinded the adoption entirely and returned him to his younger brother, Zhengde's birth father. Talk about cold-hearted. This desire for the throne, jealousy at being passed over, and understandable resentment at then being subsequently rejected by the man he'd come to call father, would come, as we will see next episode, to dominate Prince Zhengde's life.

As emperor, Wu quickly showed himself to be hardworking and diligent, as well as money-conscious. There would be no great construction projects to bankrupt the state and enrage the peasantry on his behalf. But as for his family members, that was something of another story. Like so many across time that had been given almost absolute power, many of Wu's brothers, cousins, and clan as a whole, now imperial royalty after all, would come to abuse their newfound statuses to further enrich themselves at the country's expense. And forebodingly, Emperor Wu, who credited many of those same people,

and especially his brother the Prince of Linchuan, the brother whose son he'd adopted and then returned, with having been instrumental in him ascending to the throne, well he turned a rather large blind eye to their corrupt behavior. In spite of being generally seen in a positive light by the populace, Emperor Wu was nevertheless forced to deal with two immediate challenges to his usurpation of the throne. Both rebellions were led by provincial governors, Jiang and Yi respectively, both of whom were under the idea that with this newcomer on the throne, their own positions might suddenly be rather tenuous. Regardless, both rebellions were quickly snuffed out by the Liang imperial

armies, and by winter of 502, the governor of Jiang had been defeated in combat and fled to northern Wei. In the following spring, the governor of Yi, which is most of modern Sichuan for the curious, realized the jig was up and surrendered to the loyalist general charged with suppressing the uprising. The state of peace would not last long, however, as in the autumn of 503, the Emperor of Northern Wei initiated a military campaign to seize the south and then re-establish the Southern Qi dynasty as a puppet state to the north, as we discussed in episode 66. Between 503 and 506, north would make modest territorial gains along the border between the two states, but never came anywhere close to the grand ambition of reseeding the

Qi dynasty in Nanjing. But of the whole conflict between Wei and Liang, the most interesting and bizarre moment would play out in the fall of 506. As the army commanded by Prince Xiao Hong, Emperor Wu's younger brother, camped outside the city of Luo Kuo to defend it from the Wei army that threatened it, one night the imperial prince suffered a bad bout of what has come to be understood as a night terror. Now for those of you who might be unfamiliar with night terrors, they're something wholly different from a regular nightmare. Night terrors have, in recent decades, been found to be a related parasomnial disorder to sleepwalking.

Now, I'm certainly no psychologist, so please take this as such, but from my understanding, the chief differences between nightmares and night terrors is that while nightmares occur as a dream and are almost entirely within a person's mind as they sleep, night terrors virtually by definition involve the sufferer screaming and shouting in terror and with eyes wide open. Through the duration of the episode, they are inconsolable and can often either not see at all or don't recognize even people who are familiar to them, and they may lash out dangerously. And they may also run away from or lunge at an unseen terrorizing force. And the other main difference between nightmares and night terrors is that while

we often remember at least parts of our nightmares after waking, sufferers of night terrors typically have no memory at all of the episode. Quite frankly, it sounds to me like one of the most bizarre and terrifying things someone could witness in another person. Them bolting upright in the middle of the night, staring at nothing, or something you cannot see, and screaming bloody murder, lashing out and attacking it, or running away, as though the invisible tormentor is attacking them. And then the next day, they have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Yeesh. Now, not only am I not a psychologist, but I am certainly not a psychologist who lived in the early 6th century China.

So it is of course impossible for me to diagnose this with any real accuracy, and I'd be silly to try. Certainly the people of the time wouldn't have known the real cognitive cause of whatever was going on with their prince. Although it generally seems to be accepted by more modern historians that Prince Xiaohong suffered from a night terror outside of Luo Kuo, because his actions are described in the ancient texts almost exactly like is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the middle of the night, he bolted stark upright and began howling and screaming at apparently nothing. Then he ran off into the night, continuing to yell and scream and trying to get away from whatever it was that was so disturbing him. Moreover, though we don't know the exact age of Prince Xiao Hong, we do know that he was the younger brother by at least several

years to Emperor Wu, who would have in 506 been about 42, and so quite possibly putting the prince within the peak age for adult night terrors, which are the 20s and early 30s. Naturally, this whole incident would have been even more terrifying to the prince the men was encamped with than it would have been to me. Their commander had just run off into the dead of night, seemingly mad from terror and being chased by something invisible. And of course, they wouldn't have had the DSM-4 to look up what a night terror is. In all probability, they thought that he was being haunted by evil spirits or the like. 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. Taken in that light, it's not hard to understand why they, confused and certainly shaken and leaderless throughout this whole disturbing ordeal, likewise broke and fled, leaving their defensive encampments of more than a year empty. Subsequently, the next day, the city of Luo Kuo was taken by Northern Wei without any combat at all. In spite of this bizarre, embarrassing defeat, Liang's wartime

prospects would turn around shortly after its loss of Luo Kuo. By early the next year, 507, the Wei main army's advance against its next major target, Zhongli City, would be pushed back and turned into a rout by the Liang defenders. In the aftermath of such a stunning reversal of fortunes, major hostilities were concluded by Northern Wei, beginning a peace between the north and the south that would last for a period of almost seven years. The territorial losses Liang had incurred, however, continued to sting the pride of the southern emperor. Thus, in 514, he launched a striking new plan to recapture the strategically valuable city of Shouyang, which sat along the Huai River. And though I call it a new plan,

it was in fact based on a very old, and very risky, Chinese wartime strategy for besieging otherwise unseigible cities, letting the river do the work for them. Emperor Wu's plan was an inversion of the ancient Zhou dynasty tactic that had once made standard practice of destroying dams upstream to destroy cities downstream. Instead, Wu's plan was to build a massive dam just downstream from the targeted city. Once completed, the barrier would block the Huai River entirely and create a reservoir behind it, drowning Shouyang at the bottom of its newly formed lake. The plan was as bold as it was dangerous, and when he approached his engineers with the details, they begged him to reconsider.

From the Zizhetongjian, quote, to this, the hydraulic engineer Chen Chengbo declared to the emperor, I can only accomplish what the land itself allows. Within the Huai River, much sand and silt is carried along. The river's base is not solid, and the dam will surely fail. Instead, the emperor listened to Fu, Fashu, and Yongmin, and the false will surely fail. Instead, the emperor listened to Fu, Fa Xu, and Yong Min, and the false prince You Wei, and ordered General Kang and his army to accompany the imperial engineers and protect them in constructing the dam. End quote. What engineer Cheng was arguing was that the Huai River contained far too much sediment in its waters and along its base

to safely dam. The extra mass from the mud and dirt that lined the river bottom would be constantly shifting underneath and render the construction highly unstable. Moreover, the constant buildup of the mud pushing against the back of the dam would cause further strain. Thus, it was likely that instead of flooding Shouyang, the dammed river would burst through and devastate the Liang territories downriver and the citizens who lived there. Wu, however, was unfazed. In spite of his engineers' protestations, he ordered the construction project to move forward under the command of General Kang Xuan. Under General Kang's management and protection,

the massive dam began to rise, and the Northern Wei forces stationed within Shouyang took notice. How could they not? By 515, the Empress Dowager Hu of Northern Wei had been notified of the ongoing construction project and the danger it posed to the garrison city. In response, she ordered her own General Li Ping to mobilize against the Huai River Dam, break through General Kang's defensive Ping to mobilize against the Huai River Dam, break through General Kang's defensive lines, and destroy the work in progress. But Kang's army held fast and drove back the attackers. At last, in the height of summer 516, the dam was officially completed,

and that really was a massive achievement. The Zizhi Tongjin describes its dimensions as, quote, End quote. out of the native Qiulutri's wood, and with a military base built upon it." Okay, I don't expect you to know Li's and Zhang's, so let me translate those archaic units of measurement. A modern Li is exactly 500 meters, though the pre-modern Li ranged from between 400 to 600 meters long depending on the time and place. Still, a half kilometer per li is a pretty good estimate. And the other unit, the Yizhang, is based on the length of 10 forearms, but is standardized as 3 and a third meters. So, as that, we can get an idea of just how massive this construction project had been.

The dam was 4 and a half kilometers long, 67 meters tall, with a base width of 467 meters and a width at the top of 150 meters. Or to put it in a way that's easier for my American brain to process, it was 2.8 miles long, 220 feet high, and between 490 and 1500 feet thick from top to bottom. Just for a little comparison here, the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, probably one of the most famous dams in the U.S., if not the world, is 1244 feet long, 726 feet tall, and ranges between 45 and 660 feet thick from top to bottom. Or, for a modern Chinese comparison, the Three Gorges Dam along the Yangtze River is 1.45 miles across, 594 feet tall, and between 130 and 377 feet wide top to bottom.

So this dam, built out of wood, whereas the two modern comparisons are solid concrete, and completed 1,500 years ago, was half as tall as the Three Gorges, twice as long and about five times as thick. This thing was monstrously huge and would be a technological and engineering marvel even today. And it was large enough that General Kang's entire army, a force that the Zizitongjian states was 200,000 but that's probably a pretty hefty exaggeration, even built a base for itself on the top, probably with plenty of room to spare. Nevertheless, the costs of undertaking the project

were massive, and not just in material cost, but to the lives of the workers who had been instructed to complete it. The Zizhi Tongjian states that out of every 10 workers assigned to the dam, between 7 and 8 of them ultimately perished on site, with the vast majority of the deaths attributed to a combination of poor working conditions, overwork, and the diseases that ravaged the construction camps regularly. But in spite of the tremendous death toll, at last the work was done and the dam completed. The water levels of the Huai River began to back up and rise, and sure enough, Xiaoyang City began to flood. Its residents largely abandoned the city

and camped on the ridges above it, where all they could do was watch their homes slowly be devoured by the rising water. Everything was proceeding nicely, so nicely in fact that Emperor Wu thought it a good idea to recall General Kong to the capital and celebrate his glorious success. In his stead, the emperor appointed another general, Zhang Baozhe, to oversee the ongoing maintenance of the structure. But General Zhang proved to be no equal of his predecessor, and had only limited knowledge of the dam's structures, the ongoing risks of the project, or how to effectively combat the accumulating stresses and strains continually placed on a two-mile-wide wooden dam built on a base

of mud and sand. Suffice it to say, engineering marvel or not, gravity, water pressure, and a constantly shifting floor made what was coming almost inevitable. It had been a miracle that the Huai River Dam had been completed at all, much less had lasted as long as it did. But in the ninth month of 516, the impending disaster struck. Again from the Zizhetongjian, quote, In the ninth month, the Huai River Dam exploded with a sound of cracking thunder that could

be heard more than 150 kilometers away. With the wreckage was carried off the Huai garrison's military base as well, with more than 100,000 men carried down to the sea and their doom, end quote. But those 100,000 workers and soldiers would have been by no means the only ones destroyed by this man-made catastrophe. The floodwaters flowed south, carrying off a general and his entire army who were en route to inspect his lands. But the ancient histories, as is almost always the case for China, fail to even consider the actual level of destruction such a disaster would have wrought,

by which I mean its toll on the peasantry. Since the Huai River was the main body from which the farmers of the lands between the Yangtze and the Yellow River took their irrigation, untold numbers of farmers, entire villages, and settlements would have been devastated or simply swept off the face of the earth along with everybody inside. We might in fact look at a 20th century example of a similar catastrophe, the intentional breaching of the Yellow River's dams in 1938 by President Chiang Kai-shek to stave off the Japanese Empire's invasion of the mainland. The Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party of China, estimated that maneuver cost more than 800,000 lives, though more modern analysis by historians like Diana Leary estimated a much lower number of only 400,000 to 500,000 dead, 3 million displaced, and 5 million affected.

The 516 Huai River dam's collapse was almost certainly not nearly as devastating in terms of sheer numbers as the 1938 Yellow River flood. China's population, after all, had grown by approximately 10 times between the 7th century and the early 20th. But it does at least serve to show how an event like a major dam breach would have the capacity to kill or affect millions of people. Regardless of the actual death toll, which will unfortunately be forever unknown to us, one thing was clear. Emperor Wu had messed up big time. His grand strategy to drown Shouyang had devastatingly backfired, just as his chief engineer had predicted it would, and left the fortress city thoroughly soaked, but otherwise intact and still under Northern Wei's control. And of course, that had all come at an untold cost to his own fortunes and the lives of his subjects.

Shouyang City and the remainder of the lands north of the Huai River would remain beyond his grasp for almost another decade. So we're going to shift gears here and finish out today's episode with a bit of a pivot to another aspect of Wu of Liang's reign that will also factor in heavily next week in the back half of his reign, his religion, Buddhism. Now certainly Wu of Liang was not the first emperor of China, or even of southern China, that had dabbled in Buddhism. Now, certainly Wu of Liang was not the first emperor of China, or even of southern China, that had dabbled in Buddhism.

We know of course that many of the northern emperors had long since taken to the religion, but even among the southern emperors, many had accepted the religion's tenets and practices. But as for Wu of Liang, according to Mark Strange in his publication, Representations of Liang Emperor Wu as Buddhist Ruler in 6th and 7th Century Texts, quote, On May 7, 504, a crowd of 20,000 religious and laypeople thronged to the main chamber of Zhongyun Hall in the Liang Imperial Palace at Jiankang. The founder of their state and ruler of two years, Liang Emperor Wu, had summoned them.

When they had assembled, he composed a declaration in which he renounced his family's affiliation to Taoism End quote. He identified the doctrine of the Buddha as the only true way, and in the middle of the 510s, the religion's tenets had come to dominate his administration's policies. 517 would prove to be the year that he broke with the traditional Confucian tenets of imperial custom on several fronts. According to the Book of Liang, On the Bingzi day of the third month, the emperor issued a decree forbidding the palace physician to use living things to make medicine. Furthermore, none of the decorations on the patterned brocades produced by the officials in charge of weaving at court were to take the form of deities, people, or wild beasts in making inner clothing, since cutting them out was an abuse of humanity and compassion. Consequently,

he offered prayers to heaven and earth and at the imperial ancestral temple for the abolition of the principles of killing. He wished to apply this to all sentient beings. Live sacrificial victims at the suburban altars and the ancestral temples were all replaced by dough replicas. The sacrifices to mountains and rivers did not adopt this, though. At this time, since live sacrificial victims were excluded from the imperial ancestral temple, no more bloody food was used. Although the nobility and senior officials adopted a contrary view in their discussions, and both those inside and outside the court created uproar, the emperor ultimately did not heed them. In the tenth month, in winter, the food offerings at the imperial ancestral temple

made use of vegetables and fruit for the first time. End quote. So all of a sudden, clothesmakers cannot embroider animals into their clothing, and moreover, the ancient sacrifices to the gods and the ancestors, heaven and earth, have been fundamentally changed to a vegetarian substitute, and this did not sit well at all with many in Liang and beyond. In fact, it generated considerable controversy, both during his reign and after the fall of Liang, and continued to generate debate over whether Wu's turn to Buddhism may have been a driving factor in his own eventual violent downfall.

We are, however, going to leave off there today, with the destruction of the Huai River Dam and Emperor Wu's turning to a vegetarian lifestyle, and likewise religious offerings. But next time we'll be launching into the middle portion of his reign, the ongoing and repeated clashes with Northern Wei, even as the North itself began to unravel, and the long-term ripples of his fundamental shift in the foundations of Chinese religion and society, and how the two factors, and his own familial dramas, would ultimately conspire to bring him down. Thank you for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage,

host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.