Atrocitology - Matthew White

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grips of a deadly epidemic, until a team of wandering Taoist healers, Zhang Jiao and his brothers, developed a cure. Considering the state of medicine in this era, if their cure actually worked, then the disease may have been imaginary or something that ordinarily went away on its own. Maybe their cure was a placebo or just a rumor. There’s even a slim chance it was some esoteric folk wisdom that is now lost. In any case, as the brothers traveled throughout the empire tending the sick, they accumulated a large, grateful following. They listened to complaints of suffering and injustice, and they offered hope. In time they became leaders of a large secret society of discontented commoners. Passwords and rituals bound them together, and every member recruited more members from trusted friends and neighbors.

      Finally the Zhang brothers rose up against the tyrannical power of the palace eunuchs. For identification in battle, the rebels wore yellow headscarves (traditionally but misleadingly translated into English as “Yellow Turbans”). They scored tremendous success in the beginning, defeating at least three major armies thrown against them.

      Other revolts erupted in the wake of the Yellow Turban success. The Five Pecks of Rice Rebellion (so called because that was the initiation fee for membership to the secret society) established a theocratic kingdom in Sichuan in 184. Although this kingdom was destroyed rather quickly, the movement eventually turned into the Way of the Celestial Masters, a Taoist cult that has fluctuated in and out of respectability across Chinese history.

      Within a year, however, the main Yellow Turban uprising had been beaten down and a half-million Chinese were dead, including the Zhang brothers.3 Independent bands lingered, and every time it looked like the last of them was crushed, another insurgency would erupt somewhere else. This finally ended when the last 300,000 armed rebels (along with civilian dependents, reportedly a million people in total) surrendered to the Han general Cao Cao, who kept this force under arms as a special unit under his own command.

       The End of the World

      In 189 Emperor Ling died without a direct heir, but Ling’s widow, the empress regent, and her brother He Jin, the army commander, elevated one of Ling’s relatives as Emperor Shao. The Ten Regular Attendants opposed the new emperor, so Shao summoned He Jin and the army to the capital at Luoyang on the Yellow River plain to scare them into obedience. As the army camped outside Luoyang, the Ten Regulars forged an imperial order instructing General He Jin to meet with his sister in the palace. Once he was away from his army, the eunuchs had him ambushed and killed. They displayed his head from the city walls to frighten the army, but this only made the soldiers angry. The army stormed the city and massacred all of the eunuchs, depantsing every man they found who wanted to be spared so they could look for genitalia.4

      With leaderless soldiers and pantless bureaucrats running amok in the capital city, chaos spread throughout China. General Dong Zhuo pulled his army off the northern frontier and moved to Luoyang, defeating everyone who stood in his way. He replaced Emperor Shao with Shao’s younger brother, ruling as Emperor Xian. More armies converged on the capital to drive away Dong Zhuo, who burned Luoyang to the ground and retreated to the secondary capital at Chang’an. Within a year, Dong Zhou was assassinated by an ambitious subordinate, who kept Emperor Xian as a hostage and a pawn in the civil war that was sweeping across China.

      By now, all of the large armies that had been raised to put down the Yellow Turbans had turned on each other. At first, two types of contenders fought for control of China. Landowning nobility raised peasant armies to quell local rebellions and ward off other ambitious aristocrats. Soon, however, these amateur armies were bumping up against the professional armies led by career officers who had recently been stationed on the frontier. Most of these conflicts ended in favor of the professionals, and soon the civil war was entirely in the hands of rootless armies instead of the nobility.

      There are five possible operations for any army. If you can fight, fight; if you cannot fight, defend; if you cannot defend, flee; if you cannot flee, surrender; if you cannot surrender, die. These five courses are open to you, and a hostage would be useless. Now return and tell your master.

       — Sima Yi to Gongsun Yuan’s emissary, Romance of the Three Kingdoms

       Red Cliffs

      After a few years, Emperor Xian escaped his captors and took refuge with Cao Cao, which conferred legitimacy on his war band. By 207, Cao Cao had beaten a string of rivals and united the Yellow River plain under his puppet emperor. In an earlier time, this would have been enough to count as a reunification of China, but the Chinese people had been expanding southward over the past few centuries, and these new frontier territories remained outside his control. These southern states combined their armies to repel any expansion southward by Cao Cao.

      When Cao Cao invaded in 208, he met the allied armies of the south at Red Cliffs, a rugged gorge of the Yangtze River. For a couple of days, the two forces watched each other across the river. Finally Cao Cao piled his army into boats and tried an amphibious assault against the opposite bank, but halfway there, the wind shifted, blowing his boats back to his side of the river. The enemy now launched fire ships on the new wind; these collided with Cao Cao’s boats and spread fire and chaos throughout the invasion force. With his fleet destroyed, Cao Cao abandoned the Yangtze and returned north.

      China’s split now solidified into the Three Kingdoms:

1. Cao Cao’s Wei Kingdom on the Yellow River plain inherited most of the Han imperial apparatus.
2. Sun Quan’s Wu Kingdom occupied most of southern China along the lower Yangtze River valley and toward Indochina.
3. Liu Bei’s Shu Kingdom was tucked into the broad Sichuan basin around the upper Yangtze River.

      Each of these kingdoms claimed to be loyal to the emperor and the legitimate continuation of the Han dynasty, unlike the other two territories run by rebellious usurpers. Liu Bei of Shu was the only warlord with actual roots in the imperial family, although it was a distant connection at best.

       Reshuffle

      When Cao Cao died in 220, he was still technically a subject of the Han emperor; however, his son Cao Pi (pronounced sort of like “soppy”) deposed Emperor Xian in favor of himself. This made the Wei Kingdom’s break with the old days official. It also provoked Liu Bei into declaring Shu a sovereign kingdom. Not to be left out, Sun Quan declared Wu an independent kingdom. In due time, these kingdoms were passed to their offspring.

      The dominant personality of this phase of history was General Zhuge Liang of Shu, one of the architects of the victory at Red Cliffs. Folklore credits his sorcery in calling up the wind which spread the fire that destroyed Cao Cao’s fleet. The Chinese remember Zhuge as a master tactician and the legendary inventor of many clever gadgets, such as a repeating crossbow, the box kite, the sky lantern, the dumpling, and a couple of things called the wooden ox and the gliding horse, which were traditionally pictured as gravity-driven walking machines but nowadays are assumed to have been two kinds of wheelbarrows.5 He is anachronistically credited with being the first general to use gunpowder, which he supposedly learned from a wandering Taoist sage—even though gunpowder didn’t appear until almost a millennium in the future. Basically, Zhuge gets the credit for every novelty that appeared in China during Late Antiquity.

      Over the next decade, General Zhuge attacked northward against the Kingdom of Wei, year after year. He attacked five times and was beaten back five times. Why does his complete failure to accomplish anything concern us? Because fighting off Zhuge Liang brought General Sima Yi of Wei to prominence as the savior of the kingdom.

      Now that the Kingdom of Wei owed its survival to a war hero in the Sima family, the Sima star was rising while the Cao star was setting. As the throne passed along from one Cao offspring to another, the emperors became less and less impressive, with shorter reigns, and the kingdom depended more and more on the grizzled General Sima Yi to keep things going.

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