Chapter 11 Eunuchs, queens, relatives and cronies

Of the 13 emperors in the Eastern Han Dynasty, only Guangwu Liu Xiu and Ming Emperor Liu Zhuang were adults who practiced Zuo.And except for the last Zen emperor Xiandi who lived in Cao Pi at the age of 54, none of them lived to the age of 40.Emperor Huan was 36 when he died, and Emperor Ling was 34, which is considered a long life.Emperor Shang, Emperor Shao, Emperor Chong, and Emperor Zhi did not have the opportunity to celebrate their 10th birthdays.Therefore, the political situation in Luoyang is always manipulated by eunuchs, queens and relatives. In 159 AD, Emperor Huan Tu general Liang Ji.He discussed with the eunuch and sent more than 1,000 guards to suddenly surround Liang's mansion and "receive the seal and ribbon of the general", forcing Liang Ji and his wife to commit suicide.Since the momentum of the relatives has eased slightly, the eunuch's arrogance has increased again.

However, after Liang Ji was the founding hero Liang Tong, his family already had three empresses, six nobles, seven marquises and two generals, and several young emperors were arranged by him.Emperor Huan was also established by him. The first queen of Emperor Huan was Liang Ji's sister.This person is called "Domineering General", and he has been powerful both at home and abroad for 20 years.It's just that Empress Liang had passed away at this time, and Emperor Huan Liu Zhi, who had been a puppet emperor for 12 years, was unwilling to reconcile after all, so he launched this coup.It's just that his hope of independence has never been realized.During his tenure as emperor, another "disaster of party imprisonment" came.Many people think that the reason for the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty was due to "the relationship between Huan Ling", Zhuge Liang wrote this relationship in his "The List of Former Teachers".

Today we want to determine the cause of the fall of the Han Dynasty, which cannot be seen from the surface of the original materials. "Book of the Later Han Dynasty" collected many documents at that time, in which there are countless sayings that bad people oppressed good people, and good people resisted bad people.We can also ask: How can there be so many good people as high officials when there are bad people as dictators in the court?Moreover, the long-term struggle between the middle and middle courts did not result in a confrontation between moral forces and evil forces. Why could this confrontation not continue after the fall of the Han Dynasty, and caused a long-term split between the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties?

"Liang Ji Biography" in "Book of the Later Han Dynasty" said that this man was arrogant, extravagant and promiscuous, and he did everything. However, in addition to pointing out that he had a disagreement with his political opponent Li Gu because of his heir, the article actually talked about the good or bad of his policies.However, the biography also brought up Liang's wife, Sun Shou, who was also alleged to have committed adultery.Its original text is "Shou is beautiful and good at acting as a demon, making eyebrows, bluffing makeup, falling off the horse's hair, bending the waist, smiling with carious teeth, thinking it is seductive".

These words cannot be directly translated into today's language.In contrast, we have to imitate the tone of classical novels and say: "That lady is also beautiful. Sometimes she has deep eyebrows, sometimes she smiles frequently, her face is thinly powdered, and her eyes are watery. She When I look back and smile, the message goes right down to the root of my white teeth. She has black hair, pulled into a big bag, easily hanging on the side of her hair, and walks in a way that is inappropriate. All in all, there are thousands of All kinds of enchanting and swaying appearances."

The original text uses the secret of composing a fu, adopts a few newly created words with puns, and uses the most economical method to describe complicated situations, but also includes repeated parts in parallel. The more free the mood, the more in line with the author's needs.However, whether Sun Shou is flamboyant or not has nothing to do with Liang Ji's domineering, and it is far from what we want to know about the political situation of the Eastern Han Dynasty today. If we want to investigate the reasons for the fall of the Han Dynasty, we also need to refer to the following background:

The promotion of academics in the Eastern Han Dynasty was very effective.The Taixue in Luoyang has 240 rooms and 1850 rooms.By the time of Emperor Huan, there were 30,000 Tai students.However, those who teach their studies privately gather hundreds or thousands of disciples at every turn.However, the subject matter of lectures is extremely narrow, usually neither humanities, but especially traditional political thought.Under the condition of "students who are good at learning will become officials", these scholars lack the means to develop their ambitions other than becoming officials.Sometimes reading is indeed a ladder to promotion and wealth. If you do well, generations of ministers will establish a family.It's just that this kind of opportunity is rare, some of them are stumped in their official careers, some are "guests", and there are many conceited and lofty. While reading sage books, they develop an atmosphere of committing righteousness and committing suicide. Domination, but also forcing others to replace social order with personal morality, these many conditions constitute the source of the party's disaster.

The inability to expand the civil law was also a serious weakness of the Han Dynasty.After the Han law inherited the Qin law, the provisions were complicated and the content was simple.Especially for the accumulated capital accumulated by the middle class of rural society, there has never been a proper disposal, and they are afraid that the small owner farmers will lose their land and become homeless, so they regard "merger" as a daunting way. "Hou Han Shu" Baiguanzhi mentioned the governor, and the later edition quoted Cai Zhi's "Han Yi" as an annotation, which mentioned the edict of Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty dispatching the governor. Zong Hao is on the right, the fields and houses exceed the system, the strong bully the weak, and the many tyrannize the few."The "Sili Xiaowei" in the Eastern Han Dynasty had the same supervising dean, and was also the governor of the area near the capital, and he was an honorary official position.Obviously, although 300 years before and after, some people still think that he was acting in accordance with the former imperial edict when he was appointed as the captain of Sili at the end of the Han Dynasty.However, the meaning of Emperor Wu's wartime mobilization plan is ambiguous, and if applied to a Taiping society with a relatively developed economy, it will definitely cause disputes.

When Emperor Huan put Liang Ji to death, the Eastern Han Dynasty still had 61 years to live.However, Liang Ji was not attacked for promulgating improper laws, because the Luoyang court could not talk about creating institutions or implementing policies at that time.Even if there is a problem in the frontier defense, or there is a natural disaster and civil uprising, it can only be dealt with temporarily, just like treating the head when a headache is treated, and treating the foot when a foot is hurt.The regular business of the imperial court is nothing more than etiquette and personnel affairs, and personnel affairs are nothing more than appointments, removals, rewards and punishments.Liang Ji's opponent, Li Gu, also came from a family, and his official position was as high as Taiwei (Minister of Military and Political Affairs). He once suggested that "power should go to relatives, and politics should return to the state."Liang Ji's party members also accused his subordinates of "the rich family's wealth, or the son-in-law's marriage, and there are forty-nine people in the official certificate."It can be seen that there is already a trend of party struggle between the two parties, and the focus is on personal grievances and interests.

The reason why the Han Dynasty did not collapse immediately was that under the imperial court, many local officials were still working loyally. The biographies of the officials in the "Book of the Later Han" list 14 officials who were praised for promoting farmland or advocating enlightenment, and several of them survived until the end of the Han Dynasty.Those who are similar to them have not left their names in the history.That is to say, the cruel officials in the biographies of the cruel officials regard "violent" as "capable". Although their personal conscience and virtue are deficient, they still serve the public.It's just that they go their own way, and these data also show that a unified government cannot control the national crisis with a proper legal system.

In 165 AD, Li Ying's second appointment as Captain of Sili, sharpened many potential conflicts.The background is that many people lend money to buy fields in the countryside, usually as guests.If local officials intervene, they will find that the backstage bosses of these people are all dignitaries in the court.And the most authoritative one is Zhongchang servant Zhang Rang, who is the head eunuch. According to the legend of the eunuchs in "Book of the Later Han Dynasty": "For guests who ask for concessions, there are hundreds of thousands of cars." Li Ying took Zhang's family for surgery ten days after he arrived in office.Zhang Rang's younger brother Zhang Shuo, who is also the county magistrate of Yewang County, was accused of being "corrupt, cruel and immoral".Li Ying personally led the officials and soldiers to capture Zhang Rang at his home. As soon as he was interrogated, he was immediately executed.Emperor Huan also accused him of killing him without asking.Li's defense was not in accordance with the law, but was based entirely on classics and history, and he emphasized that Confucius had executed Shaozhengqing for seven days as a Kou of Lu, and he had been a lieutenant of Sili for ten days, which is really too late.He got away with this argument, and there were ups and downs in the future. Finally, when the eunuchs of the Lingdi Dynasty were fighting with celebrities, he was detained and tortured to death. More than a thousand of his disciples were also imprisoned.It happened in 169 AD. For the disputes that occurred during this period, we decide who is right and who is wrong.The biographies of Danggu also mentioned that many famous people killed eunuchs and practical guests, even those who were pardoned, and their mothers were also killed, and hundreds of people were massacred at a time.People at the time still said that "Ji Gang was ruined", but we can only emphasize that this is the result of social evolution, and the legal system cannot be adjusted accordingly, so we have to replace the law with morality.Besides, eunuchs, empresses, relatives and cliques were not the real reasons for the disintegration of the Han Dynasty, they were just tools for millions of facts.Zhang Rang was the leader of the eunuchs, and he later opposed He Jin, a relative who was a general.But He Jin is only the half-brother of the Empress Dowager, while Zhang Rang has a daughter-in-law who is the younger sister of the Empress Dowager He.Therefore, many political disputes still arise in the family. Traditional historians write that the death of the Han Dynasty was either attributed to the favorite eunuchs among Huan Ling, or to the rebellion of the Yellow Turban bandits, or to the summoning of Dong Zhuo's soldiers into the guard.In fact, the large-scale civil war began after the eunuchs had been purged, the Yellow Turban had been flattened, and Dong Zhuo had died.The Battle of Guandu in 200 AD had already started a long-term split before the fall of the Han Dynasty.On the one hand, Yuan Shao, representing the emerging local forces, was the seventh patriarch Yuan Liang who started his career as an academic.Yuan Anju Xiaolian was the prefect of the county, and Sikong (minister of the Ministry of Industry) and Situ (minister of civil affairs).Since then, there has not been a descendant of the Yuan family who is not a prominent official in the Eastern Han Dynasty.Yuan Shao himself served as Huben Zhonglang General (commander of the Guards) and Sili Xiaowei.The Yuan family has four families and three lords, and the disciples and old officials are all over the world.Yuan Shao marched into Guandu with a force of 100,000 troops, supplied with more than 10,000 carts from Hebei.It was Cao Cao who resisted him.At this time, he still wanted to maintain the central government of the Eastern Han Dynasty.His righteous ancestor Cao Teng was an eunuch, and he was educated by the crown prince (that is, Shun Emperor Liu Bao) as an official servant of the Huangmen.Cao Song, Cao Cao's father, was the adopted son of Cao Teng, and Cao Cao himself was filial and honest.Most of his army was made up of Yellow Turban descendants, and their supplies were obtained from garrison fields.That is to say, both personnel and materials are generated outside the existing system. It is a pioneering work in the history of the world to turn a schoollord into a warlord.The fall of the Han Dynasty proves that a political system that completely negates the concept of individual self-interest can only control a simple society. Once the situation is complicated and everyone has different opinions, they cannot help each other.Today we read the "Xi" made by the heroes in the late Han Dynasty, which is no different from the "power-on" of the warlords in the early Republic of China.At this time, even if they want to cooperate, they cannot find a logic for cooperation.