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發表於 2005-3-13 19:48:29
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Inventing the Romantic Kingdom in its Initial Stages:
The Resurrection and Legitimization of the Shu Han Kingdom
Before the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (2 of 4)
Simon Shen
II. Resurrection
As we have come across, the image of the Shu Han Kingdom after its immediate collapse was nothing but a temporal and regional political entity. The whole process of romanticizion was started in a low profile manner in the fourth century. After its unification of China, the Western Jin Dynasty soon faced the challenges of decentralization and non-ethnic Han rebellions. From 311 to 316AD, the minority Xiongnu captured both Loyang and Changan, the Jin capitals, resulting in the collapse of the dynasty and the beginning of the period of disunion (c.317-383AD). The Jin royalty continued their reign in the southeast (known as the Eastern Jin Dynasty, 317-420AD), while other areas of China fell under the control of roughly sixteen kingdoms. According to Huang Fanguang, a Chinese scholar focusing on this period, historians are hard-pressed to understand the domestic policies of these brief kingdoms because of the disappearance of primary sources. As a result, most scholars have not realized that the Shu Han myth originated as early as the fourth century, resulting in the understandable unfamiliarity of stage one to most people. In fact, this period laid the foundation for the future transfiguration of the Shu Han image because it helped prolong the regime even if only in name. Although the designers in this stage were not typically supporters of Shu Han, their practices distinguished the kingdom from its regional predecessors and successors, initiating a legend with unintended consequences.
Because the legacy of the Shu Han Kingdom was still vivid in the minds of contemporaries after Jin fell in the north, some insurgent kings purposefully forged links between themselves and the Shu Han leaders, or even claimed direct kinship with the Liu family, leading Liu Bei to become their spiritual co-founders. Two different strategies for using the Shu Han image can be distinguished. The first was devised by rulers seeking national appeal for their regimes, such as the Xiongnu leader Liu Yuan who founded the Han-Zhao Kingdom in 304AD.
Although Han-Zhao comprised only less than a third of the northern region of China, including Loyang and Changan (see map 2), Liu Yuan still aimed at replacing the Jin Dynasty and unifying China. In order to attract popular support, gain favor from the ethnic Chinese, and challenge the legitimate status of the Jin Dynasty, Liu Yuan awkwardly linked his Xiongnu ancestry with the Han emperors and named his new kingdom “Han.” Liu’s self-identification as a Han descendant was based on the following logic: the Xiongnu leader shared the same surname with Han royalty, Liu, because one Xiongnu ancestor had married a Han princess four centuries ago – which was ironically a shameful story to Liu Bang, the founder of the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-9AD). As the Xiongnu king proudly told his ministers,
The Han Dynasty has lasted for a long time and has granted lots of merits to the people. I am the nephew of the Han descendants. As the Eastern Han has demised, why can’t I succeed the Han throne?
As a symbiotic side-effect, Liu Bei, the Shu Han founder claiming the same family membership, was naturally welcomed to Liu Yuan’s arbitrary ancestor list. Without the tangible legacy within the Shu Han region, Liu Yuan relied on official and religious ceremonies linking him and his alleged Han ancestors. As recorded in the Zi Zhi Tong Jian, when Liu Yuan formally founded his kingdom,
[he] officially honored Liu Chin, the last Shu Han ruler, as “Emperor Xiao Huai”; built three main royal temples to worship Liu Bang, Liu Xiu and Liu Bei as the “Three Great Ancestors (san zhu)”; and constructed five lesser temples to worship the “Five Lesser Ancestors (wu zong).”
This is the first known record in history paralleling Liu Bei with the founders of the Western and Eastern Han Dynasties. More important, the status of Liu Bei in the Han-Zhao temple was placed even higher than that of many genuine Han emperors, such as the famous Emperor Wu (141-87BC). Thus, a symbolic Shu Han resurrection was unconsciously prompted by Liu Yuan’s efforts, by which the Shu Han rulers were posthumously legitimized as heirs to the Han Dynasty.
The Badi minority leader, Li Xiong, who founded Shu Han’s regional successor, the Cheng-Han Kingdom (304-347AD), made another calculation. Establishing his kingdom in Sichuan, Li Xiong had no evident ambition to expand his kingdom beyond the Shu Han boundaries (see map 2). Unlike the Xiongnu, who dreamed of unifying China, the Badi were content to control Sichuan alone as a regional power. The Shu Han experience thus became a historic justification for the existence of a new Sichuan regime, and a recent precedent to inculcate indigenous Sichuan people with separatist sentiments. By paralleling itself with Shu Han, Cheng-Han succeeded in maintaining its regional hegemony with little territorial ambition for thirty years, as other powers neither recognized nor focused on it.
Because the regional appeal of the Badi has not attracted much historic focus, unlike the straightforward Han-Zhao ancestor-hunt, historians often neglect the Cheng-Han contribution to the Shu Han myth. In fact, the Cheng-Han policies aroused indigenous Sichuan separatist sentiment by substantially continuing or, more correctly, modifying the Shu Han legacy in the region. When the kingdom was founded, Li Xiong explicitly imitated the Shu Han policies in ruling Sichuan, such as appointing a Zhuge Liang-type hermit, Fan Chengsun – who was born in Zhuge’s time – as his chancellor. As recorded in the Jin Shu (History of the Jin Dynasty), Cheng-Han rulers also reintroduced the Shu Han chancellor’s internal legal reform in the territories to portray a continuation of regional policy, even if the policy was not welcomed by landlords in either regime. For instance, Li Xiong confiscated lands owned by the gentry and nobility, and forbade illegal land annexations that were commonly practiced in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. Such reforms were compatible with Zhuge’s attempt to use legal measures to promote the dignity of government in 214AD, including strict military and taxation laws, as he openly confessed,
I use the laws to scare people today, because people will know the grandiosity of the government when the laws are effectively enforced.
Moreover, although not explicitly documented by historic records, the preservation of Shu Han sites and relics during the period of disunion should probably be credited to the subsequent Sichuan regimes, including Cheng-Han. Famous Shu Han relics, including the palace of the White Emperor City, Zhuge Liang Temple and Liu Bei Temple, were extant for later poetic romanticization, and are still present today. The indigenous people were thus enabled to continue visiting and memorializing their old rulers, leaving the veneration of Shu Han leaders undisturbed even down to the twentieth century, as visitors have observed.
As an eventual U-turn, Cheng-Han also euphemistically imitated Han-Zhao’s ancestor-seeking propaganda. Because Li Shou, the fourth Cheng-Han emperor, was dissatisfied with the limited territorial achievements of his Badi ancestors, he turned to model himself on Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty and switched his nation’s focus from regional interests to the unification of China. Thus, he renamed his country from Cheng to Han in 338AD, naturally including Liu Bei and his son Liu Chan in his remote ancestor list. Ironically, Li Shou’s ambitious pretension burdened his small country, resulting in the annexation of Cheng-Han by Eastern Jin in 347AD.
Viewed from another angle, Shu Han was fortunate to have the period of disunion following within half a century of its collapse, because popular history is often distorted, especially by accounts exaggerating the merits of the founding emperors and the evils of the last emperors. Owing to “the interdepartmental obstructionism that is always inseparable from bureaucracy,” as British sinologist Denis Twitchett observed, Chinese official historians faced restrictions in providing objective biographies. The fate of other Sichuan regimes, among other regional dynasties, frequently demonstrated their diminished historic status. The principalities of Ba and Shu in the Warring-States era (403-221BC), for example, lasted for hundreds of years, but their histories were said to have been destroyed in the book burning ordeal of the Qin Dynasty (220-206BC) after earlier being involuntarily incorporated by the Qin state. The little-know Cheng Jia Kingdom (25-36AD) ruled Sichuan for eleven years during the founding years of the Eastern Han Dynasty, but even its status as a regional regime was thoroughly omitted by most historians.
Thus, if the Jin Dynasty had lasted for a century or centuries more, perhaps the Shu Han Kingdom would reasonably have followed the historic paths of Ba, Shu and Cheng Jia. In fact, the Jin Dynasty did try to eliminate the Sichuan regional veneration of the old Shu Han leaders and modify the Shu Han history by several measures. As a humiliating posture, the last Shu Han emperor, Liu Chan – who became a synonym for a foolish ruler by later historians –was put under house arrest in Loyang after his kingdom was destroyed. Chen Shou revealed Liu’s humble position in the Jin court:
Liu Chan was asked to move his whole royal family to Loyang. The Jin emperor told him, “… Now you become the Duke of Anle of our dynasty. As you cared about your people and surrendered to our great dynasty, your land is now safe… I really appreciate your decision!”
Moreover, in writing the history of Shu Han for the Jin royalty, Chen deliberately camouflaged Wei’s inability to defeat the Shu Han army, and exaggerated the setbacks of Shu Han policies. Russian literary scholar Boris Riftin even suggested that Chen made some personal attacks on the son of Zhuge Liang in the San Guo Zhi:
The Sichuan people memorialized Zhuge Liang, thus crediting his son, Zhuge Zhan, with most of the government decisions of other ministers after Zhuge Liang’s death. However, Zhuge Zhan was mediocre, his reputation was credited much more than he deserved.
Riftin suggested that the way Chen criticized the heir of Zhuge Liang as the over-assessed noble might be Chen’s personal revenge made to the Zhuge family, because the son of Zhuge Liang had once punished Chen when Chen was serving the Shu Han government. Riftin, of course, believed that Zhuge Zhan was not a mediocre.
Lastly, we can assess the importance of the resurrection of Shu Han by contrasting its fate with that of the contemporary Wu Kingdom. Wu was militarily stronger and territorially larger than Shu Han, but later regional rulers never used it for political messages, perhaps because its territory was fully occupied by the subsequent Eastern Jin Dynasty, which had no need to forge a new ancestry for national appeal fifty years after its foundation. Wu’s strong regional stance and lack of unifying ambitions also discouraged regimes from appealing to the entire nation to claim it as their predecessor. Thus, because of the aloof attitude of insurgent rulers toward it, in contrast to Shu Han, the Wu Kingdom was not a candidate for romanticization in Chinese history.
* * *
Sadly, both images of Shu Han credited to the Xiongnu and the Badi, the legitimate national government and the indigenous regional hegemon, respectively, did not match the historic facts in the Three Kingdoms era. Here the article will explain the exiled nature of the Shu Han Kingdom and its distinction from an indigenous regional regime, and will reserve arguments against the asserted nationwide Shu Han legitimacy for the next stage.
Although contemporary historian Ray Huang explains the division of the Three Kingdoms by his term “geopolitics,” suggesting Sichuan was already isolated from central China in the third century, the Shu Han regime was in fact alien to the indigenous people. Although the Shu Han policies were imitated by the later Sichuan regime of Cheng-Han, they were in fact dictatorial orders issued by outsiders from the region. Already noticed in the Cheng-Han Kingdom by some officials, although not agreed with by the royalty, participation of indigenous Sichuan people in the Shu Han government was negligible. When Kung Zhuang persuaded Li Shou, the fourth Cheng-Han ruler, to hire more indigenous Sichuan people in the government, he reminded Li of Shu Han’s alien posture to the Sichuan people:
Please refer to the historic example:… when Liu Bei ruled Sichuan, those in power were coming from the north and the east. Sadly, when Shu Han was conquered, most outsiders were slaughtered.
In fact, indigenous people of the Shu Han Kingdom were not too satisfied, as implied by Qiao Zhou, one of the few Sichuan elites serving in the Shu Han government. In his Essay on Enemy Kingdoms petitioned to Liu Chan in 257AD, Qiao warned the last Shu Han emperor,
Riots will break out when people can no longer tolerate their current hardships; the country will collapse when the ministers don’t care about the people, and the officials are brutal to citizens…If wars are constant, and a mishap comes, even the wisest will be unable to show the way of safety.
Switching sides to serve the Jin government after the collapse of Shu Han, Qiao, representing indigenous interests, was already discontent over the Shu Han regime. The description in his petition implied that with a primary focus on external warfare against the Wei Kingdom, Shu Han rarely set any long-term goals in developing Sichuan except extracting the region’s resources to expand its territories. Some Sichuan landlords also resented the Shu Han distrust toward them in government, as shown by how the strict social control imposed by Zhang Yi, the Yunnan governor-general, stirred up the Lao Zhou rebellion in 231AD. The Shu Han control over Sichuan was indeed fragile, as proven by the gesture of local elites who did not provide any support to the regime when the Wei army besieged Chongqing in 263AD. As the leading indigenous scholar, Qiao was even the first Shu Han official to propose surrender.
In short, the Shu Han regime was only an exiled government based temporarily in Sichuan, dominated by elites coming from present-day Hunan and Gansu, not caring much about the region at all. “Governors, but no government,” suggested Japanese historian Hisayuki Miyakawa, correctly noting that “the attitude of the native southern subjects was conditioned by the individual character of the local official.” Just as few historians would argue that the Nationalist government’s temporary settlement in Sichuan during WWII (1937-1945AD) was a beneficial interlude for the indigenous Sichuan people, the position of the Shu Han regime was indeed similar.
Nevertheless, the combined Xiongnu glorification and the Badi continuation of Zhuge Liang’s legacy rescued Shu Han from possible disappearance. Without attempts to link Shu Han with other indigenous powers in the period of disunion, the Sichuan people would not have developed fond memories toward the regime for long. By the same token, without gestures equating Liu Bei with the same historic status as Liu Bang, such good feelings would have been impossible to extend to China as a whole. Although Cheng-Han and Han-Zhao collapsed in a matter of decades, the image of Shu Han among fellow Chinese was nonetheless reinstated, if not yet romanticized; such a reinstatement was vital for the next stage of the mythmaking process. (2of4)
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