The History of China - #72 - S&N 16: As The World Burns

Episode Date: August 31, 2015

In the post-557 world, the three new major powers of China must confront the wide ranges of changes and struggles they must each face now that the political order of the entire empire has been turned on its head. This time, we look at the situation in the south as Northern Zhou and Chen vie for control over the central reaches of the Yangtze River.Dates Covered: 557-568Important Figures:Northern QiWarlord Yuwen Tai [d. 556]Yuwen Jue (Emperor/Heavenly Prince Xiaomin) [r. 556-557]Yuwen Yu (Emperor Ming) [r. 557-560]Yuwen Yong (Emperor Wu) [r. 560-578]Duke Yuwen Hu of Jin (Regent of Northern Zhou) [r. 557-572]ChenGeneral Chen Baxian (Emperor Wu) [r. 557-559]Chen Qian (Emperor Wen) [r. 559-566]General Wang Lin (Liang Loyalist Rebel Leader) [555-560]Crowned Prince Chen Chang [d. 559]Prime Minister Hou Andu [d. 563]Warlord Zhou Di (Rebel Leader) [r. 563-565]Chen Bozong (Emperor Fei) [r. 566-568]Chen Xu (Emperor Xuan) [r. 569-582] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 72, As the World Burns Welcome back! Now that we've all returned safe, sound, and recharged from our trip to the US, it's time to once again enter the fray of the late stages of the Age of Disunity as we wind our way towards its inexorable endgame. But it has been a month now, so it does behoove us to spend at least a moment or so to recap. When last we left China of the mid-6th century, specifically in the year 557, we'd undergone pretty much a complete shuffle of caste.

In the north, the once fearsome Wei dynasty of the Xianbei tribes had fractured into rival factions, first with both sides clinging to the shreds of former imperial legitimacy by appointing puppet emperors and naming themselves Eastern and Western Wei respectively, before at last throwing off those transparent covers, overthrowing the nominal emperors of the Tuoba-turned-Yuan-turned-back-to-Tuoba clan, and formally enthroning their respective warlords as the emperors of Northern Qi in the east and Northern Zhou in the west in 550 and 557, respectively. Meanwhile, southern China had undergone its own series of bloody revolutions and civil wars following the departure of the Liang Emperor Wu and his stabilizing influence.

In the aftermath of Wu's death, the Liang dynasty had quickly crumbled, due to in no small part its own internal divisions, but all the more so thanks to the disruptive influence of the lackey-turned warlord Hou Jing and his flight south. Hou Jing had, of course, after fleeing the despised son of his departed master in Western Wei, briefly taken asylum in Liang before opting to instead seize the empire outright. He'd marched on the capital and seized it with little resistance, taking the imperial Xiao clan hostage and claiming first de facto regency, then outright imperial usurpation over the Liang

Empire. Of course, virtually none of the regional lords were inclined to agree with this changing of the guard, and as such waged a multi-front war on both Houjing and one another. The end result, by 557, did see Houjing killed, but also the entire western half of what had been Liang annexed by Northern Zhou, and the eastern portion claimed by the general, Chen Ba Xian, and his new and eponymous Chen dynasty. All that remained of the once mighty Liang state was a tiny rump bordering Chen, Zhou, and Qi, and existing only as a vassal state of the regent lord of Northern Zhou, Yu Wuntai. So four states, all of which except Western Liang, with both new names and new ruling dynasties, and with the entire civilization buckling and straining under a seemingly never-ending

series of crippling civil wars and social unrest. Ready? Alright then, let's hit it. This episode will be focused primarily in Southern China, looking at the post-game for what had been the Liang Dynasty, and what was now divided between northern Zhou in the west and the Chen dynasty in the east. Also with that little blurb calling itself western Liang, right smack dab in the middle. Then next week, we'll round out our look at the post-557 carnage by swinging up to

focus on northern Qi in the northeast and their ongoing tiffs with both their rivals in Zhou and the Rurankanid far to the north. So, that said, let's refresh ourselves on northern Zhou, the who's, the where's, and the why for's of this newly established successor state to western Wei. As with northern Wei before it, Zhou was ruled by one of the many Xianbei tribes that had come from the northern steppes of Asia in centuries past. Up until 557, the ruling clan had been the Tuoba, directly related to the Northern Wei emperors of old.

But that imperial stewardship had been in name only since 535, when the powerful general Yuan Tai had poisoned the reigning emperor who had fled to him seeking, ironically, protection from another general of Wei, Gao Huan. Yuan had then appointed another emperor and assumed a puppet dictatorship over him. General Yuan had never assumed the imperial mantle, but the charade was dispensed with almost as soon as the old man died in 556, leaving control of the empire to his third son, the 14-year-old Yuan Zhe, who swiftly overthrew the Tuobai Emperor and established himself as Emperor Xiaomin of Northern Zhou in February of the following year. Well, I say emperor, because for all intents and purposes, he was.

But interestingly, though Xiaomin changed the dynasty, assumed the throne, and was given a regnal name, he very conspicuously avoided using the word emperor, or in Chinese, Huangdi, as his title. Instead, he took the title Tianwang, meaning heavenly prince or king. Though unusual, this alternate title had precedence from at least the 16 kingdoms period, where regional rulers, especially those from among the five tribes, had used the title as a kind of intermediary stage between prince or king and outright son of heaven. So we might think of the move as a shrewd one

on Xiaomian's part. You get all the benefits of being emperor and with much less hubbub from the rabble about that ugly word usurper. Nevertheless, it's very common to refer to a heavenly king simply as emperor, and so to keep things simple as possible, that's what I'll do too. Right off the bat though, there was trouble brewing within the almost imperial household. For though Xiaomin had claimed the throne with the assistance of his kinsmen,

there was in fact little love lost between him and several of his powerful family members. Chief among those with beef against the new emperor would be the very man who had been most instrumental in getting him to take over the throne in the first place, his father's cousin, Yuwen Hu, the powerful Duke of Jin. Given Xiaomian's relative youth and how beholden he was to his distant cousin, his first act in office was to proclaim Duke Hu as his regent, allowing the duke to dominate the political landscape of Zhou. Suffice it to say, there were those who did not take very kindly at all to Hu being so rapidly elevated. Within a month of

Xiaomin's enthronement, there were already rumblings of discontent with this new political situation, which would ultimately result in two public executions of dukes and another's overthrow and forced suicide later that year. Yuan Hu was clearly not fooling around. Emperor Xiaomin, meanwhile, had begun to develop his own plans to dispose of the family member who had been so necessary to get him on the throne, but now seemed more and more a hobble about his leg. He entered into plans with several of his father's key officials to quietly dispose of the Duke of Jin. These plans were foiled, however, when, in an almost comically predictable fashion,

the plot was leaked to Yuan Hu, resulting in the Duke disbanding the imperial guard and deposing the young monarch. Taken completely by surprise, Xiaomin had only been able to barricade himself in his private chamber, where he ordered both his personal eunuchs and his concubines to arm themselves and prepare to fight off the attackers. What would have likely been a gruesome scene indeed was averted, however, when Duke Hu's top commander managed to talk Xiaomin into surrendering

peacefully under the obviously phony promises that he wouldn't be harmed. When he did surrender, like almost every other emperor before and after, he was demoted, imprisoned, and finally executed. Xiaomin was succeeded by his elder brother, Yuwen Yu, who would be known as Emperor Ming. Now you might be thinking, wait a second, did he just say that the younger brother came into power ahead of his older brother? Isn't that against some Confucian tradition or something? The answers are yes, and yes. But even though Xiaomin had two living elder brothers waiting in the wings, it had been decided by the imperial court that the third brother should become the first emperor of the Zhou dynasty, because his mother was noble herself, whereas both of

Yuan Tai's elder sons had been born of mere concubines, and thus deemed lesser. Ming was 23 upon taking the throne in Chang'an, and as such in little need of a formal regent. Nevertheless, he kept his cousin Hu on in that role for some time. Even so, by the spring of 559, Yuan Hu had formally ceded his powers back to the imperial person directly, though he would, critically, retain control over the Zhou military apparatus. This assumption of full political control over the Northern Zhou Empire was marked the following year by Ming casting aside the lesser title of Heavenly Prince and officially taking up the mantle of Huangdi once more, ruling truly as

emperor in now name as well as function. In spite of him being remembered as a generally capable and wise ruler, hence his posthumous name being Ming, meaning understanding or brilliant, it would prove a rather short-lived state of affairs, since, yep, old cousin Hu still held control of the army and was none too thrilled about this idea of being bumped further and further out of the loop. By 560, Yuan Hu had had enough and ordered his lieutenant, Lian, to poison a batch of sugar cookies bound for the emperor. In due course, Ming ate the toxic snack and began to succumb to its effects, falling gravely ill. As he lay on what would be his deathbed,

Ming's final act was perhaps the shrewdest of his reign. He called his younger brother, Yuan Yong, to his side, and instructed that he, rather than his own young sons, be proclaimed the new emperor once Ming had died. In so doing, Ming undercut what would have likely been a long and potentially catastrophic chain of child emperors, controlled by their cousin the Duke of Jin, and instead placed on the throne someone he knew could root out their treacherous cousin once and for all. Still, it would prove to be a dangerous and difficult time for the newly enthroned Yuwen Yong, since he was 16 or 17 at the time. Because of his age, the Duke of Jin was able to use his relative youth to reassert his claim on the regency, and with it, hold on to imperial power. The youthful emperor managed to stay in the regent's good graces

by doing what came most naturally to him, remaining silent and invisible. Even his elder brother, Ming, had observed of Yong prior to his death, quote, he did not often speak, but whatever he spoke was always right, end quote. So, for the time being, Regent Hu had free reign of the Northern Zhou court and government, with the young Emperor Yu Wanyong seemingly serving as little more than window dressing, just the way Hu liked it. In 561, almost undoubtedly at Regent Hu's request, he named his cousin the Dazongzai, meaning Chief Minister of State Affairs, a post that carried with it authority over all six of

the ministries of the imperial government, specifically the ministries of personnel, revenue, rights, defense, justice, and finally, works. In short, all roads now led straight to Yuanhu. It wouldn't be until the mid-560s that Emperor Yuan Yong would at last begin earning the name that he'd be remembered by, when hostilities once again erupted between the north and the south and the northwest and the northeast. His government would be forced to mobilize its armies against that of Chen, as well as northern Qi.

And it is through these reopenings of hostilities that Yu would receive his moniker of the Marshal. That's right, everyone. Let's all say it together now. Emperor Wu. But before we get back to that brooding conflict between Zhou and Chen and Qi, we're going to head southeast and survey the goings-on of the newly established Chen dynasty at Nanjing. As you'll recall, following the collapse of the Liang state in 557, the portion of the south that hadn't been annexed into northern Zhou outright had instead fallen under the sway of the general Chen Ba Xian. In 557, he forced the final Liang emperor to yield the throne to him and established the Chen dynasty with him at its helm as yet another Emperor Wu. Fortunately for us, we can pretty much toss him

out right off the bat and not have to worry about two Wus at the same time, since he died in 559 from a sudden illness. Baxian only had one son, and since he was being held prisoner within Northern Zhou at the time of the elder emperor's death, the imperial court was forced to overlook him for the throne and instead secretly recall his nephew, the 37-year-old Prince Chen Qian, to the capital. Once he'd arrived, the inner circle of officials informed Chen Qian of his uncle's death and named him the formal successor. He'd be enthroned in late 559 as Emperor Wen of Chen. Even with the formalized passing of the imperial torch from Liang to Chen, however, it's hardly surprising, especially given the nature of the civil wars that had been ongoing

across Liang for the prior decade, that there would be certain elements unwilling to simply roll over and accept that the Liang dynasty and and their position within it, was gone for good. Not only did the vassalized western Liang state endure for the time being, but within Chen itself, rival military commanders refused to submit to Chen authority. Among these loyalists, perhaps the most notable commander was General Wang Lin, who had, since the death of Emperor Yuan in 555, maintained a sizable force to the far southwest at Changsha, independent of the consolidation efforts of first the subsequent one-and-a-half Liang emperors, and then the Chen dynasty that

replaced it. Between 557 and 559, General Wang sought and gained additional support for his anti-Chen campaign from northern Qi to the northeast. And when Emperor Chen Ba Xian unexpectedly died in 559, prompting that minor succession crisis we just discussed, General Wang felt that he'd found the moment to strike. Wang formally declared the grandson of the penultimate emperor of Liang, an 11 or 12 year old named Prince Xiao Zhuang, the legal heir of the Liang Empire, and declared that the Chen clan's usurpation was illegitimate. In short order, he commenced his invasion of the southeast, plunging his army eastward along the southern bank of the Yangtze

River, driving towards the capital Nanjing and supported by northern Qi forces commanded by the general Murong Yan. The Liang loyalist army would clash against the Chen military outside of Dongguan in the spring of 560, where initially neither side proved able to seize the upper hand. Meanwhile, Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou, or far more importantly, his regent, Duke Yuan Hu, had heard of General Wang's eastward mobilization, and its military commander took extra special note of the fact that Wang had left little more than a skeleton force to defend his own capital region at Jiangxi. Thus, as Wang duked it out at Dongguan against the Chen army, the army of Zhou moved in behind him and began to lay siege to his own territories. The bad news was then compounded when the stalemate

with Chen broke against General Wang, routing his army and forcing him to flee. But flee to where? Northern Zhou blocked his path back to his own citadel, and so, with his would-be Liang emperor in tow, Wang Lin was forced to flee northeast, all the way into Northern Qi territory and beg for asylum. He was granted it and given a generalship within the Qi military, but the hope of a truly restored and independent Liang Empire ended in 560 with his defeat. The territories he'd held along the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, since 555, were subsequently divvied up between Chen and northern Zhou, or to be perfectly accurate, its leashed vassal, western Liang.

And it's here that the far larger conflict was touched off. As I'd mentioned earlier, the only son of the first Chen emperor had been in northern Zhou captivity for some time up to this point, hence why he had been the first emperor's nephew who had been declared the new Emperor Wen in 559. Now I'm not terribly clear whether the action was supposed to be conciliatory or in fact a clever gambit to cause a division within the Chen clan, but once the war between Wang Lin and the Chen dynasty had ended, Yuan Hu opted to release his captive southron, crown prince Chen Chang, back to his homeland. Why might this have been an oh-so-clever ploy to cause strife within Chen?

Because with the former crown prince out of prison and back in Chen, that could, and indeed would, cause a succession crisis. After all, the newly-minted Emperor Wen had only gotten the job because Crown Prince Chang was locked up. And even that had been contentious enough. When Emperor Chen Baxian had died, the Empress had stood in opposition to naming her nephew the new monarch instead of her only son. Against her and leading the court, however, had been the powerful minister, Hou Andu, who had passionately argued in favor of placing his preferred candidate on the throne. After all, he had stated to the Empress, according to Volume 8 of the Book of Chen,

quote, Still, the four corners of the world burn in conflict yet to be pacified. End quote. Minister Hou then menacingly approached the Empress's throne, while clutching the hilt of his sword and continued, quote, anyone who would speak against this course of action ought to be executed, end quote. Ho then requested that the Empress yield the Imperial Seal to his care,

effectively ending the discussion and any further say she might have in the state of affairs. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. discussion and any further say she might have in the state of contemporaries and the conclusions of historians, Grey History dives into the detail and unpacks one of the most important and disputed events in human history. From a revolution based on hope and liberty, to its descent into the infamous reign of terror, there's plenty to discuss and plenty of Grey to explore. One can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So if you're looking for your next long-form, binge-worthy history podcast, one recommended by universities and loved by enthusiasts,

then check out Grey History, The French Revolution today. Or simply search for The French Revolution. Meanwhile, the now-released Prince Chong began to make his way south, towards the Yangtze River, and towards Nanjing. On his way, he began to pen letters to his cousin, the new emperor, and by the accounts of the Book of Chun, they were very impolite indeed. Unfortunately, what was actually written didn't make it into the annals, written as they were a century after the fact during the early Tang dynasty. But Emperor Wen apparently took whatever was said as a demand to cede the throne to Chen

Cheng outright. He then considered doing exactly that, telling his Prime Minister Hou, quote, the Crown Prince is returning. I shall make ready to retire and accept the principality. End quote. Minister Ho, however, having just gone to the mat to get him the top job, urged his liege to make no such rash action, stating, quote, even in the time of the ancients, no emperor was ever allowed to simply retire. Though I am but your humble and foolish servant, I simply cannot accept this edict. End quote. Which, okay, we know that's not strictly true. Plenty of emperors retired, or more often were retired, to a farm upstate.

But the exhortation worked, and instead Ho offered to personally send out a welcoming party to meet the returning would-be monarch en route. Emperor Wen assented to this notion, and dispatched Minister Hou to meet and greet his inbound cousin, and then turned back to consider how best to placate Prince Chong once he arrived. Offer him a nice, cushy principality, perhaps? Yeah, that sounds like it might do the trick. How about the Prince of Hengyang? Surely that should be sufficiently prominent. And so that's what he did.

He declared Prince Chen Chang the Prince of Hengyang, and then probably knitted his hands together, hoping against hope it would be enough. But Minister Hoan Du was not in nearly such a charitable mood over the threats against the emperor he was backing. And so when he'd proposed sending a welcoming party to meet with Prince Chen, be assured that he had made comically large air quotes with his fingers while doing so. A month after Hou was dispatched, he finally met up with

Chen Chang, who had at last entered Chen dynasty territory. This had been a really slow trip anyway, and he'd been further delayed all the more by that whole bub-bub surrounding General Wang Lin's little failed rebellion. So only now that hostilities had subsided along the Yangtze River had Prince Chong been able to cross the river into Chun proper. And there, waiting for him, was Hou Andu with an imperial escort befitting one so royal as Prince Chong. But as the party wended its way eastward along the banks of the Yangtze, the imperial escort turned into an execution. Prince Chang was killed by Hou's men,

and his body unceremoniously dumped into the mighty river they traveled along. Oh, you wanted to return to Nanjing, did you, Chen Chang? Well, now you can wave as you float by. When Minister Hou returned to the capital, conspicuously without the prints he'd been sent to collect, he sorrowfully announced that, gosh golly, the poor prince had taken a bad step and tragically slipped into the river and drowned. What a terrible, unpredictable, definitely not murder, tragedy. We can't really say if there was any kind of a knowing wink between Minister Ho and Emperor One

as he stated this, but suffice it to say, One shed very few tears over his cousin's untimely death, and shortly thereafter gave Ho command of a prefecture. No reason, you know, just cuz. All of this power and prestige went straight to Minister Ho's head, and how could it not? Between 560 and 563, amid war against Northern Zhou and combating a rising tide of regional warlords to the southeast, Ho Andu had become so influential that he'd begun to feel that he was just outright above the law. In short order, he, and those officers under him, grew arrogant and dismissive of Emperor Wen's orders, flouting the laws and knowing that

even if they were arrested for their misdeeds, their powerful ally would get them off scot-free in short order. Now Emperor Wen didn't like that, not one bit. But the trio of actions that finally pushed Hoan Du from barely tolerable to outright treasonous would all come about in the winter of 563-564. First, at one of the emperor's feasts, he had the gall to ask, repeatedly, how the emperor felt about his position compared to back when he was merely the prince of Linchuan. Though the emperor at first ignored the question, the second time he was pressed, one responded, quote, Although it was by the will of heaven, it was also through your contributions. End quote.

Following the feast, Ho pressed the issue further, by then asking one to lend him the imperial feast decorations for a feast of his own he'd be holding the following day. One, already in a dark mood, could do little but grumpily assent to the request. But when the emperor arrived at Ho's feast the next day, what he saw was beyond the pale in terms of impudence. Minister Ho had seated himself in the emperor's own chair, while his guests had been seated in the chairs of the imperial officials. But in spite of all these acts of insubordination, Ho's final strike might have actually been

unintentional. When a fire broke out at the imperial Chongyun palace, Ho was among those commanding the palace staff to put the fire out. As with any fire, time was kind of of the essence, and Ho entered the imperial residence to command his men. But critically, he did so in his full battle armor, a breach of etiquette that was way beyond forgivable. You must understand, to enter the palace armed and armored was the ultimate sign of disrespect towards the sitting emperor. You may recall that no one, save the emperor himself and his personal imperial guard, was allowed to carry arms of any kind within the palace grounds, and to do so was tantamount to declaring oneself equal to the Son of Heaven.

Maybe Ho hadn't really meant to. There was a fire, after all. Hardly time to change clothes in the middle of that kind of crisis. And maybe such a breach might have been overlooked had the minister not been spending his spare time thumbing his nose at the emperor every chance he got. But he had, and Emperor One was in no mood to let this final slight pass, and so began arranging events to put an end to this out-of-control minister. In the winter of 562, the plan was put into action. Emperor Wen was worried, justifiably,

that if he simply summoned Ho Undo to court, Ho might sense something was wrong and just, you know, refuse to come. He therefore arranged Ho to be promoted from one governorship to a somewhat more prestigious post. Rotating governors like this was pretty standard procedure. After all, an emperor didn't want his local officials to start getting too cozy with the local populace and start skimping out on tax collection and the like. So when Ho received the missive that he was being transferred, he thought little of it. On his way, as was customary, he stopped at the capital city to pay his respects, or whatever might have been left of them, to the emperor. And of course, one had arranged a feast to celebrate Minister Ho's arrival at Nanjing.

Who could refuse such a thing? But when he arrived in the banquet hall, Ho found not guests, but armed soldiers waiting to arrest him. Emperor Wen had caught his rogue minister in his trap and proceeded to issue an edict announcing his crimes and then order Andu to commit suicide the next day. But, in consideration for the tremendous help Minister Ho had been in putting him on the throne and then saving his reign, Emperor Wen did spare his wife and family from punishment and buried his body at imperial expense. One successor, Emperor Xuan,

would go further by posthumously naming Ho a marquis and then allowing his son to inherit the title, which was a rarity in imperial Chinese history. Emperor Wen would spend much of the rest of his reign contending with the spate of warlords who just wouldn't sit down already and quietly integrate back into the established political order. Among them, the warlord Zhou Di would prove to be one of his most tenacious and annoying foes, who had been since 563 in out-and-out rebellion against the throne from his base of operations in Fuzhou. Though the warlord's army proved no match for a toe-to-toe fight against the Chen imperial army, he had nevertheless managed to regroup in the wild of

Jin'an outside of Fuzhou and launch an incessant guerrilla campaign. Over the course of 564, these tactics would prove fruitful, and Zhou's guerrilla army was able to take and hold several stretches of the territory they'd previously been driven out of. But that would turn out to not be such a great turn of events, after all. That's the thing about guerrilla armies. They're really effective at prolonging a conflict, potentially almost indefinitely. But they come about only when the resistance force is not powerful enough to directly take and hold territory. Insurgent movements must be mobile and fluid, and that's why they're so frustrating to conventional military tactics. But holding territory takes away that flexibility and fluidity.

A guerrilla army willing to fight and die for a particular piece of land is no longer guerrilla. It's once more a conventional army that can be crushed like one by a superior force. And in 565, that's just what happened. The imperial Chen general, Zhang Zhaoda, was able to pin Warlord Zhou's army at their headquarters at Jinan, and in the course of the fighting captured and executed two of Zhou's top lieutenants, including his son-in-law. By that fall, it was all over. Zhou Di had been defeated on the field, and then adding insult to injury, betrayed by his own men, who had grown tired of failure, and turned him in to the Chen authorities. He was subsequently executed, bringing about an end to Emperor Wen's warlord problems to the south,

and granting the Chen empire, at last, a large degree of unity. But that period of relative calm would not last very long. The next year, in fact, 566, Emperor Wen took ill and died at the age of 44. The Chen dynasty was left to his son and heir, Crown Prince Chen Bozong, who, depending on the book you're drawing from, was somewhere between 12 or, probably more accurately, 14 or 15 at the time of his enthronement. He'd be posthumously given the regnal name of Fei, a name we have heard before, but reserved only for the unluckiest of monarchs. It means the abandoned or the overthrown. Needless to say, he will not be lasting for very long.

Given his youth, Emperor Wen had felt it prudent to leave the actual management of the state in the hands of a collective of capable court officials he trusted to keep things running smoothly until the new monarch could take up the reins for himself. Well, that trust to keep everything humming along almost immediately proved to be catastrophically misplaced. Right out of the gate, the ruling coalition factionalized into two mutually hostile parties. One of these factions was led by the emperor's uncle, Chen Xu. As for the other faction leaders, well, we're not going to worry about their names, because they last just long enough to be tripped up while trying to oust Chen Xu, and for their troubles were ousted themselves, with one suicided, and the other permanently demoted to a trivial position.

Boom. Suddenly the coalition, specifically designed to prevent the, oh, I don't know, single individual from wielding too much state power and getting eyes prevent the, oh, I don't know, single individual from wielding too much state power and getting eyes on the throne itself, was, wouldn't you know it, now dominated by a single power-hungry uncle. Whoops. By 568, Chun was in what you might reasonably describe as a reign of terror, with purges and executions all across the political classes, and all at the whim of Uncle Xu. Into this, the by now demoted brother of Emperor Fei had made some plans to assume the throne himself and end this nonsense, which of course Chen Xu learned all about. In response, he had an edict issued using the skill of the Grand Empress Dowager, publicly accusing Emperor Fei

and his brother of having conspired with those other two officials he'd had off in 566. But the edict went further, claiming to have apparently consulted with the dead and gone Emperor Wen, who had concurred that Fei was unsuitable for the throne, and what he really wanted was his good old brother Chunshu to rule instead. Seems legit, right? That winter, therefore, it was the boot for both the ineffectual Emperor Fei and his troublesome brother. Overthrown, demoted, assassinated, the end. Zheng Shu subsequently assumed the throne, as per his dead brother's quote-unquote wishes, as Emperor Xuan. But curiously, not right away. For reasons still unknown, he left the throne vacant for more than a month before finally doing what everyone surely knew he was going to do all along.

Nevertheless, the tyrannical nature of Chen Xu's ascent to power had put everyone in the empire on edge. And one official in particular, the governor of Xiang province, Hua Jiao, worried that his head might be the next on the chopping block once Xu formally took power, thanks to his close ties to several of Xu's now-executed political opponents. Governor Hua therefore sent messages to both Northern Zhou and its vassal kingdom, Western Liang, begging the two powers to come to his aid against the newly enthroned Emperor Xuan. Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou duly sent an army to aid the governor, by which of course I mean effectively annex his territory into Zhou proper,

along with the army sent by Western Liang with a similar mission. Even with this triple alliance arrayed against it though, the Chen army was able to easily break through the combined Zhou-Liang-Xiang forces and rout them. In the aftermath, not only had Chen managed to retain its hold on Xiang province, but had even forced minor territorial concessions from both Western Liang and Northern Zhou when they sued for peace in early 568. Now both adversarial with the rising southern power of Chen, which had just proved itself the military match of even the best Northern Zhou's army could throw at it,

the respective rulers of Northern Zhou and Northern Qi agreed to terms of peace between one another. At least until they could sort out this whole Xuan of Chen situation. Then they could go back to being the moral enemies they were born to be once more. But it is here that we are going to leave off today, an uneasy, sure-to-be-broken-soon three-way peace, as China continues to stumble and slaughter its way through the end stages of more than three centuries of disunity and near-constant civil war. But the good news is, if you really, really squint, is that we can actually begin to see the light at the end of this particular, extremely murky tunnel. I don't have it all quite worked out yet, and I may run into something that demands I take the time to stop

and examine it more fully, but I'm going to make the careful guesstimation that we're going to get to the magic year of 589 in the next three or four episodes. 589 is, of course, the usual end date of the period of disunity, but we've still got a lot of ground to cover before then. That said, next week we're going to be pressing forward, but not before swinging to the east and letting Northern Qi get caught up with the rest of our players into Thank you for listening. slash THOC, and you can get a free 30-day trial membership, as well as a free download of your choice. Even if you decide you don't want to keep going after 30 days, you still get to keep the book. So long story short, try audible.com slash THOC if getting a book for free sounds good to you. I'd like to make a recommendation, but I found it a thoroughly entertaining and engaging book throughout. It's called Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter,

and it traces the long, strange trip of the English language, from its proto-Germanic heritage on a tiny island in the northern Atlantic, to the world-spanning global language of trade, business, perplexing grammar, and thoroughly useless letter patterns we know and scratch our heads at today. And Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is narrated on Audible by John McWhorter himself, letter patterns we know and scratch our heads at today. And our magnificent bastard tongue is narrated on Audible by John McWhorter himself, and he is as witty and engaging through earphones as he is on print. So for that, and hundreds of thousands of other options, once again, please visit audible.com slash THOC for your free audio download.

400 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.