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      Wang Mang’s son, Wang Yu, worried that this power grab would eventually backfire and that Emperor Ping would purge the Wangs once he got old enough to plot and scheme on his own. To cover himself against that eventuality, Wang Yu conspired with the emperor’s maternal clan, the Wei family, to remove his father from both the regency and the land of the living. When Wang Mang discovered this, he ordered his son to commit suicide and then wiped out all of the Weis except for the emperor’s mom. The emperor, now thirteen years old, resented Wang Mang for killing all of his uncles and cousins, but he died before he could act on the resentment. Everyone suspected that Wang Mang had poisoned him. This was 6 CE.²

      Okay. Start paying attention again.

       The Brand New Dynasty

      The story so far: The Han dynasty had unified and stabilized China for two hundred years. Then it hit a bump in the imperial succession. Wang Mang, former army commander and nephew of the dowager empress, was regent of China, but the young emperor he was supposed to be taking care of had just died mysteriously. Naturally, this thirteen-year-old emperor left no children behind. In fact, there were no surviving male offspring of any of the four previous emperors, all the way back to Emperor Yuan (with whom we started this story), so Wang Mang backed up a generation and looked into the offspring of an earlier emperor. He handpicked the youngest one he could find to be the new emperor, a one-year-old prince, Ruzi (which translates as “Infant”). Wang Mang, of course, stayed on as regent until the new prince reached adulthood, which didn’t seem likely in the hands of these people.

      In 9 CE, Wang Mang tired of waiting for the baby emperor to get old enough to be worth killing, so he packed off Ruzi to an early retirement. (That’s not a euphemism. Ruzi survived another sixteen years on a comfortable estate.) Wang Mang declared himself to be the first emperor of a new dynasty, called, appropriately, the Xin dynasty (the “New” dynasty).

      As brutal as this history sounds, these few years of Han dynasty backstabbing killed what—a hundred people at most? This by itself doesn’t earn a place on my list. The problem is that it distracted the imperial household from tending to the necessary business of running the empire, and it undermined the legitimacy of the court. China had burned through three child emperors in sixteen years and was now in the hands of a usurper.

      Wang Mang was a strict Confucian fundamentalist, so much so that he executed three sons, a nephew, and a grandson for breaking various laws,³ and he spent an inordinate amount of his reign trying to restore lost rituals and procedures of the ancients. He claimed to have conveniently discovered a lost manuscript of Confucius that supported all of his reforms.

      Being a traditionalist, he returned to older forms of cash used when Confucius was around. Spades, knives,^b and shells supplemented coinage for the first time in hundreds of years. He ended up issuing so many different kinds of money that no one could acquire the familiarity they needed to spot counterfeits, so the people didn’t trust any of the money in circulation. The economy sputtered to a halt.

      As a usurper himself, Wang Mang knew firsthand that emperors should not trust their ministers, so he kept a tight rein on his subordinates. Because he refused to delegate many important but tedious tasks, the work never got done. For example, Wang tried to restructure the pay scale of the civil service, but he got so wrapped up in the details that the civil servants went without pay for years on end. Naturally, they turned to other sources of income, most of them illegal.

      Like so many idealists across history, Wang wanted to restore the lost good old days when (so he imagined) big families of free citizens on small farms formed the backbone of society. To this end, Wang tried to break up the big estates of the nobility. He set a maximum for the amount of land any family could own, and then redistributed the surplus land to their neighbors. This earned him no friends.

       Mandate of Heaven

      Traditional Chinese political philosophy puts great stock in the Mandate of Heaven. Under this theory, Heaven will favor a just emperor with peace and prosperity, but if the ruler is not favored with peace and prosperity, then clearly Heaven finds him odious. It is perfectly acceptable—indeed, a sacred duty—to overthrow an ill-favored emperor. Heaven quickly showed its displeasure at Wang Mang.

      The Yellow River (or Huang Ho) is definitely the deadliest geographic feature known to man. As the center of trade and irrigation, the river keeps China alive, but far too often the silt-choked river clogs with sediments and overflows its banks, carving a new path to the sea across the adjacent plain and whichever hapless towns and villages might stand in the way. Several floods of the Yellow River have the distinction of being the only natural disasters in history to have killed over a million people. Including the subsequent famine and disease, 7 million died in the flood of 1332–33; 900,000 to 2 million, in 1887; and 1 to 4 million, in 1931.⁴

      With the Chinese government distracted by palace intrigues, civil engineers fell behind in repairing the irrigation systems that were vital to life in China, among them the levees that kept the Yellow River in its banks. In 4 CE, the Yellow River jumped out of its riverbed, spreading flood and famine. In 11 CE, it jumped again.⁵

      Wang Mang’s Xin dynasty might have survived if it hadn’t been for these disruptions. When divine anger began to show itself, a prophecy that the Han dynasty would be restored to power started circulating. Secret societies soon sprang up.

       Red Eyebrow Rebellion

      In 17 CE, a new gang of rebels started a life of banditry in the coastal provinces of the lower Yellow River that had been hit hardest by the floods. Called the Red Eyebrows after the streaks of red war paint they smeared on their foreheads, the rebels knocked down all of the armies the Xin dynasty sent against them. Finally, Wang Mang sent a giant force to crush them, which scored a few successes and inflicted a lot of retribution on rebel sympathizers, until the Red Eyebrows destroyed the Xin army at Chengchang in 23 CE. The Red Eyebrows scrounged up Liu Penzi, a fourteen-year-old member of the Liu clan (the former ruling family of the Han dynasty), whom they declared emperor.⁶

      Meanwhile, several smaller bands of rebels in central China between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers fell under the spell of another branch of the Liu family and consolidated into a larger threat, called the Lulin, or Greenwood, Army after the rugged mountain (Lu-lin, translated as “green wood”) that had served as their first refuge. The Greenwood chief was Liu Yan, a sixth-generation descendant of a former Han emperor, but ironically he proved far too competent and charismatic to keep his supporters. The other Greenwood leaders preferred a weak nonentity whom they could manipulate, so they conspired and connived and elevated Liu Yan’s third cousin, Liu Xuan, to the rank of declared emperor instead.⁷

      Wang Mang sent another massive army, said to be almost 500,000, although it probably wasn’t, to crush the Greenwood forces, said to number less than 10,000, although that probably wasn’t true either. In June 23 CE, as the Xin army besieged a Greenwood garrison in the town of Kunyang, Liu Xiu, younger brother of the former leader Liu Yan, gathered fresh rebels in the countryside and moved to relieve the siege. The Xin commander underestimated the strength of the approaching rebels and took an arrogantly trivial force to brush them aside. When the Greenwood rebels beat this small unit, the Xin soldiers fled back toward the main army, spreading panic and pessimism. Then the Greenwood forces inside Kunyang attacked out the town gates, while

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