The chase resumed. By the time Xiang Yu reached the Huai River, his 800 men were reduced to a hundred. As he approached the Yangzi, they were down to twenty-eight. Promising them three last victories, he was as good as his word. Thrice they charged against impossible odds and each time they broke through the Han ranks. It was Heaven which was destroying him, said Xiang Yu, and ‘no fault of my own in the use of arms’.
On the Yangzi – it was just west of Nanjing – a boat was waiting. Safety beckoned. It was from across the river in erstwhile Wu that he had set forth eight years earlier. He still had supporters there; he could yet rule there. But ‘how can I face them again?’ he asked. ‘How could I not feel shame in my heart?’ So saying, he dismounted, and presenting ‘Dapple’ to the kindly boatman, turned back and strode on foot towards the Han host.
In the final scuffle Xiang Yu killed ‘several hundred’, according to Sima Qian, while suffering ‘a dozen wounds’. Faint and bleeding, he then recognised an old acquaintance who was now a Han cavalry officer. His last words were spoken soldier to soldier.
‘I have heard that Han has offered a reward of a thousand catties11 of gold and a fief of ten thousand households for my life,’ said Xiang Yu. ‘So I will do you a favour!’ And with that he cut his own throat and died.12
JADED MONARCHS
On 28 February 202 BC, with Xiang Yu dead and Chu subdued, Liu Bang of Pei ‘assumed the position of Supreme Emperor’. At this point in his narrative Sima Qian ceases calling him ‘the king of Han’ (‘Liu Bang’ and ‘Lord of Pei’ had long since been dropped) and switches to his posthumous imperial title of Gaozu. History would adopt this title exclusively, commemorating him as Han Gaozu, ‘the Han Great Progenitor’ (or sometimes Han Gaodi, ‘the Han Progenitor-Emperor’). The first commoner to rise to the dizzy heights of emperor, he would be the last for 1,500 years. Founding a dynasty from such obscurity was no small achievement, and the Grand Historian, writing at a time when the strongest of all the Han emperors occupied the throne, acknowledged a remarkable lineage by hailing its imperial progenitor.
Yet in 202 BC the future of the Han dynasty, and that of China as a unitary empire, was far from assured. The territorial colossus amassed by Qin had been so severely shaken that the chances of the Great Progenitor’s progeny controlling the most extensive and enduring of all ancient China’s imperial constructs looked remote indeed. South of the Yangzi watershed Han’s writ scarcely ran at all; it was contested in the east and north, and vigorously repudiated on the northern frontier where the Ordos region, so laboriously fortified by the wall-minded Meng Tian, was quickly abandoned.
A long reign would have helped, but Han Gaozu lived only seven more years (202–195 BC), most of these being spent suppressing rebellions and fending off incursions. Helpful too would have been a strong successor; instead he was followed by a timid teenager (who was at least his son), then two infants (who were probably not his grandsons). Falling an early prey to the palace intrigues that attended every minority, by 190 BC Han authority was being wielded, and the throne effectively usurped, by the Dowager Empress Lü, Gaozu’s bride from the days when he was a nonentity in Pei. Qin’s imperial phase had lasted a paltry fifteen years; Han’s looked likely to last only slightly longer.
All along there had been something less than convincing about Liu Bang’s rise to power. As he candidly admitted, success had been achieved despite his capabilities rather than because of them, and at the expense of some hefty compromises. To win support he had had to appear to repudiate Qin repression. That meant dismantling the legalist state, disowning its penal authoritarianism, lessening the burdens of taxation and conscription, and cultivating a more consensual ideology and a more approachable persona. Yet without unchallenged authority, strict regulations and access to unlimited manpower and revenue, an effective government was scarcely possible. It was the old problem of the tactics and behaviour appropriate to winning an empire being unsuited to ruling it. Gaozu must needs ‘change with the times’.
His personal reformation was gradual. The hard-drinking habits of a life in the field continued. The emperor liked nothing better than a bacchanalia of brimming cups, earthy jokes and clumsy horseplay in the company of cronies from Pei. Heavy drinking meant frequent ‘visits to the toilet’ (as Sima Qian’s English translator puts it), where bad things happened; people didn’t come back, they got slandered in their absence, cornered by ‘wild bears’ or, in the case of one young lady, cornered – then urgently ‘favoured’ – by the emperor. Toilets were not nice places. Then as now, the excrement was collected for manuring the fields; along with adjustable ploughs and the development of a seeding machine for drill sowing, this is thought to have contributed substantially to increased agricultural yields under the early Han. The dung accumulated beneath the privy in a noisome pit. Here rootled hogs and briefly, in 194 BC, ‘the human pig’, described as a blind, dumb, demented creature without ears, feet or hands but of a distinctly womanly form. This was the once lovely Lady Chi after the Dowager Empress Lü had finished revenging herself on one whose only crime was to have given birth to an imperial contender. ‘Empress Lü was a woman of very strong will,’ says Sima Qian. Huidi, her teenage son who had just been enthroned as Gaozu’s successor, was so horrified by Lady Chi’s fate that he too then ‘gave himself up each day to drink’ and played no further part in affairs of state.
Sima Qian’s Shiji treats of the Dowager Empress Lü in its section on ‘Rulers’, as if it was she who was Gaozu’s successor, while Huidi (‘Emperor Hui’, the di suffix signifying ‘emperor’) gets no separate treatment, just occasional mentions. From Gaozu’s death in 195 BC until her own death in 180 BC, the dowager empress most emphatically ruled while emperors barely reigned. Huidi’s only achievement was to encourage Shusun Tong, the dynasty’s expert on ceremonial and ritual, in the elaboration of a Han dynastic mystique.
A noted Confucian scholar with a large following, Shusun Tong had joined Gaozu in his ‘King of Han’ days, had then stage-managed his enthronement, and thereafter set about introducing some decorum into the imperial court. This was not easy. Gaozu was so contemptuous of formal erudition that he was known to snatch off the cap of the nearest scholar to use as a chamber pot. Yet while informality was all very well in reaction to Qin sobriety, even the emperor was irked when drinking companions burst in on his lovemaking. What was needed, said Shusun Tong, were rules of protocol and court ritual. The emperor somewhat doubtfully agreed. ‘See what you can do, but make it easy to learn…it must be the sort of thing I can manage.’
A task force of scholars was assembled, the texts duly scanned, and a month spent practising the new choreography in a specially built pavilion. When Shusun Tong was ready, he invited Gaozu’s approval. A sigh of relief greeted the emperor’s ‘I can do that all right’. The new ceremonial was immediately introduced, and at the 199 BC New Year’s celebrations, when nobles and officials from all over the empire came to pay court, ‘everyone trembled with awe and reverence’. Gaozu at last ‘understood how exalted a thing it is to be an emperor!’13 Shusun Tong was rewarded and, during Huidi’s reign, he devised and orchestrated the ancestral rites to be accorded to the deceased ‘Great Progenitor’ and his successors.
But it was one thing to indulge Confucian ideas of ritual and decorum, quite another to embrace Confucian notions of rulership. Gaozu was too busy shoring up his authority to set an example of moral excellence; arguably his empire was too unruly to respond to it. Laws and taxes were essential, not least because, without them, there would be no point to the amnesties and remissions with which he and his successors rewarded