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XIN DYNASTY

Death toll: 10 million

Rank: 14

Type: dynastic dispute

Broad dividing line: Han dynasty (legitimate) vs. Wang Mang (usurper) vs. the Red Eyebrows (rebels)

Time frame: 9–24 CE

Location: China

Who usually gets the most blame: Wang Mang

Another damn: Chinese dynasty collapsing

Happy Families Are All Alike

Contrary to what you would expect, traditional monarchies tend to be matriarchal. Let’s say you’re the emperor. Since inheritance passes through the male line, blood relatives of your father are all slotted neatly into the succession, which makes them all rivals. There is no reason for them to look out for your best interests. In palace intrigues, don’t count on help from your younger brother, because he’s next in line for the throne. Your father’s brother is third in line. If anything happens to you, they all move up a step.

On the other hand, women who have married into the imperial family have a more precarious position. The empress’s only connection to the court might be her relationship to you. If you die and your uncle inherits the throne, then your mother and wife are going to get shoved aside. The best they and their families could hope for is exile; the worst could be a bloody purge. For that reason, the families of your wife or mother are natural allies who will watch your back. The history of empires is replete with powerful dowager empresses, the wives of dead emperors, trying to hold onto power. One way to reduce the influence of your in-laws is to stay in the family and marry sisters (the Egyptian way) or cousins (the European way), but the Chinese had strict laws against incest that required the emperor to marry outside his lineage.

(You won’t like this next part. It has a confusing profusion of ancient dates and Chinese names,^a but you don’t need to stash them into your long-term memory. Just get a feel for the general texture of the events.)

Shortly after the death of the First Emperor (see “Qin Shi Huang Di”), China fell into civil war from which a new dynasty, the Han, emerged as the sole power. For almost two centuries, a reunified China moved along smoothly under the Han dynasty. When Emperor Yuan (which translates as the “Primary Emperor”) died in 33 BCE, his son, Emperor Cheng (the “Successful Emperor”), came to the throne and ruled quietly for the next twenty-six years. Cheng relied on his mother’s family, the Wangs, to staff his court. For example, command of the army went to the empress’s brother Wang Feng in 33 BCE and passed to Wang Yin (22 BCE), Wang Shang (15 BCE), Wang Gen (12 BCE), and finally to the empress’s nephew Wang Mang in 8 BCE. There was nothing unusual in this, but when Emperor Cheng died without a living son in 7 BCE, the influence of the Wangs abruptly ended.

The throne then passed to Cheng’s twenty-year-old nephew, his half-brother’s sickly son, the new Emperor Ai (the “Lamentable Emperor”). Cheng had been the son of Yuan’s Empress Wang, but Ai was Yuan’s grandson by way of another woman, his consort, Princess Fu, who now began to elevate her family to high posts in the empire. Emperor Ai, however, was homosexual and died childless in 1 BCE. Ai’s twenty-two-year-old commander of the army and probable lover, Dong Xian, was too slow in the subsequent scramble for power, so he was removed and driven to suicide by the resurgent Dowager Empress Wang. The Wangs set about purging all the Dongs that Dong Xian had hired, along with all of the Fus that Dowager Princess Fu had put into government.¹

The throne then passed to a nine-year-old cousin, Emperor Ping (the “Peaceful Emperor”), and Dowager Empress Wang appointed her brother’s son, Wang Mang, as regent. If you glance back a couple of paragraphs, you will see Wang Mang listed as army commander for the last year of Emperor Cheng’s reign. The Wangs reclaimed all of the positions they had lost six years earlier. The regent Wang Mang married his daughter to the child emperor in order to solidify his hold on power.

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 the rebel forces outside the town followed up their victory. A sudden thunderstorm and flash flood added to the confusion, and the Xin army fled and was massacred in retreat.⁸

Having lost two major armies in a single year, Wang Mang was doomed. In the race to reach the capital at Chang’an (Xian nowadays), the Greenwood Army arrived before the Red Eyebrows, so their candidate, Liu Xuan, became the leader of the restored Han dynasty. Chang’an fell after determined block-by-block defense. As the palace burned, Wang Mang was beheaded and cut into pieces so that everyone could have a keepsake.⁹

The New Han

Before Liu Xuan had a chance to settle in and enjoy being emperor, conspiracies began to surround him. The former Infant Emperor Ruzi was wooed out of retirement by a couple of minor noblemen, but their attempt to seize power failed. They were all executed.

To play it safe, Xuan quickly found an excuse to have his former rival, Liu Yan, executed as well.

Then several generals plotted to kidnap Xuan. They too were discovered and most of them were executed, but one of the survivors managed to chase Xuan out of Chang’an. Xuan regrouped with loyal generals and retook the city. Xuan was hardly back on his throne when the Red Eyebrows arrived and took Chang’an for themselves, installing their own emperor, Liu Penzi. The Red Eyebrows captured Emperor Liu Xuan but merely demoted him to lesser nobility and sent him away to herd horses so as not to stir up resentment. Soon, however, the people began to speak wistfully about the days when Xuan was in charge, so he was dragged into a dungeon and strangled.¹⁰

Liu Yan’s brother, Liu Xiu, was off fighting on the frontier. A legendarily prudent man, Liu Xiu had been lying low since Liu Yan’s execution on trumped-up charges a couple of years earlier, but with Xuan out of the picture, he declared himself emperor (25 CE) and marched his army against the Red Eyebrows. It was a tough campaign, but Liu Xiu prevailed and took Chang’an in 27 CE. He pursued the retreating Red Eyebrows and finally trapped them with overwhelming numbers. Sick of all of the killing, Liu Xiu held back the attack and offered generous terms of surrender: a general amnesty, a nice estate for ex-Emperor Penzi, and no mass executions. They accepted.

Liu Xiu’s restored Han dynasty would survive for another two centuries. He became known to posterity as the “Complete and Martial Emperor”—in Chinese, Emperor Guangwu.

Population Plummet

Despite a few temporary interruptions, China has existed as a political entity longer than any other nation on earth, and the civil servants of the Chinese Empire have been keeping detailed records for centuries. Many have been lost to fire, flood, war, and mice, but some fragments, copies, and summaries survive. Among them are sporadic census records going back several dynasties. Surprisingly, summaries of the Chinese census of 2 CE are largely intact, giving us the oldest reliable population figures of any society in history. Admittedly, there are a few discrepancies in the data, but most scholars accept that the population of China in 2 CE was around 57,671,400.

After that, census records show that China was in serious trouble. The recorded population plunged to 21 million in 57 CE, bounced up to 34 million in 75 CE, then worked its way up to 43 million by 88 CE. I know that’s a lot of numbers to spring on the unsuspecting reader in one sentence, but the upshot is that China appears to have lost close to 37 million people in a half century of war, flood, and famine, and the count was still almost 13 million short as the century came to a close. As bad as that looks, it’s likely that many of the 37 million missing people were still alive but hiding from tax collectors. The reduced census count of 57 CE probably indicates the government’s inability to find every person in China after a period of widespread unrest rather than a pure death toll.

Even so, most scholars believe that there is an actual population loss of many millions hidden somewhere in there. Depending on whom you read, the real population decline in China during the first century could be anywhere from 8 to 43 million. Scrounging around, I was able to find several different estimates. I have chosen the low-middle estimate of 10 million as a reasonable compromise.¹¹