Original subtitles

In the early years of the third century, around the year 207 AD, a Chinese poet by the name

Ts'ao Chih made a journey back to the place of his birth, a city called Luoyang.

At this time, the lands of China were in chaos.

The armies of rival warlords were now tearing the country apart, and so his journey can’t

have been an easy one.

Ts'ao Chih was the son of a powerful warlord in the central plains of China, but he was

also a notorious drunk.

He had embarrassed his family to such an extent that he was exiled, and he now returned to

the only other place he knew; his hometown of Luoyang.

Luoyang had once been a prosperous place.

For centuries, poets had written about its bustling life and its leafy avenues full of

blossom, leading up to grand palaces and temples decorated with thousands of bronze statues.

It had been the capital of China in the golden age of the emperors which had lasted for more

than 400 years.

But Ts'ao had heard that Luoyang had suffered in the recent wars.

Still, when he came over the crest of the Beimang Mountains to the north, nothing could

have prepared him for what he saw stretching out beneath him.

The entire city of Luoyang was a blackened ruin.

Later, he wrote a poem about what he saw.

I climb to the ridge of Beimang Mountain and look down on the city of Luoyang.

In Luoyang how still it is!

Palaces and houses all burnt to ashes.

Walls and fences all broken and gaping, thorns and brambles shooting up to the sky.

For Ts'ao Chih, the blackened ruins of Luoyang became an emblem of the golden age that had

now passed.

Only decades before, China had been ruled by a single emperor from a dynasty known as

the Han, and a period of prosperity had reigned.

The Han were the first lasting dynasty to unite China under a single banner, and people

believed that this golden age would never end.

But now the poet Ts'ao Chih walked among the ruins and ravaged fields of the former capital,

and felt his memories rise up from the soot-stained stones.

I do not see elders from former days.

I only see young men.

I turn aside, for the straight road is lost.

The fields are overgrown and will never be ploughed again.

I have been away such a long time that I do not know which street is which.

How sad and ugly the empty fields are!

A thousand miles without the smoke of a chimney.

I think of the house I lived in all those years; my breath catches and I cannot speak.

As he walked through those ruins, Ts'ao Chih must have asked himself; how had the first

great age of Imperial China come to such a devastating end?

Why had the people of Luoyang left this city to burn and crumble into the earth?

In the centuries to come, would the golden age of the emperors ever return?

My name’s Paul Cooper and you’re listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed

into the ashes of history.

I want to ask, what did they have in common?

What led to their fall?

What did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their

world?

In this episode, I want to look at the fascinating story of China’s Han Dynasty, an iron age

kingdom that forged the first true Imperial power in China.

I want to tell the story of how this remarkable society rose out of the warring states of

China’s Bronze Age, and how it reached out its first tentative hands to make contact

with the empires of the west.

Finally, I want to explore what happened to bring the ornate palaces and towering temples

of China’s first emperors crashing down in ash and flame.

If you’ve ever seen footage of a car crash in slow motion, you’ll have some idea of

what that looks like.

The two cars, inching towards each other frame by frame, the crash test dummies with their

blank stares, strapped securely into their seatbelts.

When the collision happens, both cars crumple together, solid metal rippling and buckling.

Our story starts with a car crash taking place in the slowest motion you can imagine.

Up until about 180 million years ago, India was part of an immense supercontinent called

Gondwana which covered much of the Southern Hemisphere.

But between about 180 million and 160 million years ago, deep in the earth’s liquid mantle,

an enormous plume of magma rose up and began to shift the plates of the earth’s crust

above it.

Gondwana broke apart, and the landmass that is now India tore away from it and out into

the ocean.

India moved north slowly at first, about 5 centimeters a year.

But then, around 80 million years ago, it sped up.

Part of the reason for this is that the Indian Plate is believed to be only about 70-100

km thick, about half as thick as the other plates that made up Gondwana.

Powered by the vast currents of molten rock beneath it, this lighter plate now ploughed

northwards at a rate of 15cm every year.

This is about the same rate as your hair grows, but in terms of continental plates, it was

a speeding juggernaut.

Right in the path of this runaway plate was the continent of what is now Asia.

These two landmasses hurtled together with the same inevitable force as those speeding

cars.

Somewhere between 70 to 35 million years ago, the impact occurred.

Over millions of years, inch by inch, the Indian Plate made contact with the mainland

of Asia.

Across an impact zone stretching for 2,000 km, the rock of the Asian Plate began to crumple.

As the Indian Plate was crushed beneath it, Asia rocked and buckled, and a great mountain

range rose up, the highest in the world.

These are the Himalayas.

This crash is still going on.

Behind the impact zone, marked by the dramatic snow-capped peaks of the world’s tallest

mountains, the earth’s crust has been pushed up like soil before a plough.

The result is a vast arid steppe, a table of land broken by salty lakes and glaciers,

and with an average altitude of over 4,500m, the Tibetan Plateau.

The formation of this plateau had a number of enormous effects for the climate of this

region.

Rain clouds from the Indian Ocean find it impossible to cross the Himalayas, and so

to the south, the mountains create an enormous reservoir of cloud, bringing the yearly monsoon

rains to India and Southeast Asia.

But behind the mountains to the north, the situation is quite different.

Here, the Himalayas have created what’s called a rain shadow.

This is where barely any rain falls and where vast deserts have formed.

But it’s to the east of this plateau that our story really takes place and where another

unique landscape has been formed.

On its eastern edge, the Tibetan Plateau drops off dramatically into a rolling mass of mountains

and valleys, and finally into an enormous stretch of wide, silty plains.

These stretch for nearly 2,000 km, between the snowy walls of the plateau in the west,

and the Pacific Ocean in the east.

These plains are home to a number of enormous rivers.

The tens of thousands of glaciers in the highlands of the Tibetan Plateau act as a kind of water

tower, releasing a steady flow of meltwater that cuts its way through the rocky mountain

passes before spilling out into the plains in long, meandering routes.

Among these great watercourses, two of the most impressive are the Yellow River and the

Yangtze.

The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world after the Nile

and the Amazon.

It flows for 6,300 km from the mountains to the sea, from an altitude of 5 km right through

the centre of what is today modern China.

The Yangtze meanders through deep, dramatic valleys and stone gorges, and it's a relatively

peaceful and stable river.

The Yangtse has maintained a steady course for much of its history and has discharged

into the sea at the same point for the last 11 million years.

But to the north of the Yangtze is its sister, the Yellow River.

This waterway is far more changeable and deadly.

In its upper reaches, the Yellow River passes through a region known as the Huangtu, or

the “Yellow Earth” Plateau, a landscape made up of some of the most easily eroded

soil in the world.

As a result, the Yellow River contains the highest amount of silt and sand of any river

on earth, and this colours it the distinctive yellow-brown that gives the river its name.

This huge quantity of silt gives the soil of the northern Chinese plains an enormous

fertility.

But it also creates a number of challenges.

As the river flows, this silt constantly builds up at its bottom, and the riverbed slowly

rises.

At times, it can even rise to be higher than the land around it.

When this happens, the river bursts its banks and floods vast areas of the countryside around

it.

In the most dramatic cases, the river can change its course entirely, sometimes sweeping

across the landscape for hundreds of kilometres and washing away everything in its path.

Historically, this kind of devastating event has occurred about once every hundred years.

Human activity has been verified in this region as far back as 27,000 years ago.

Rice first began to be cultivated along the Yangtze River around the year 8,000 BC, while

wheat, barley, and millet were best suited to the drier lands in the north.

Farming of these calorie-rich foods gave rise to an advanced culture known as the Jiahu,

who experimented with written symbols on the walls of caves as early as 7,000 BC.

The first true villages were founded in the fourth and fifth millennia, and the population

of this region began to boom.

The Bronze Age brought the smelting of bronze from copper and tin, and it began here around

the year 3,000 BC.

A culture known as the Longshan domesticated the water buffalo for use in field work, and

they also developed the plough and sophisticated irrigation techniques, boosting the productivity

of this already fertile land.

In the third and second millennia BC, China’s first villages grew into towns, and these

towns into its first major cities.

In ancient Chinese conceptions of the world, the lands between the Yangtze and the Yellow

River were the heart of all goodness.

This was conveyed using the word huaxia, a word that contains a sense of grandness and

beauty.

One ancient writer, Yen-Yew, spells this out quite clearly.

Inside is the Chinese Empire, and outside are the barbarous nations.

The barbarians are covetous and greedy of gain; their hair hangs down over their bodies,

and their coats are buttoned on the left side.

They have human faces, but the hearts of beasts.

The ancient Chinese believed that the further you moved away from this centre, the more

the good qualities of the people faded.

One text called the Book of Documents, dated around 500 BC, contains a particularly precise

version of this world view.

It describes how the virtue of the lands’ inhabitants reduces in steady increments of

500 li, or about 400 km, the further you get from the centre.

The central 500 li is the Imperial Domain.

500 li beyond is the Domain of the Nobles, and beyond that the Domain of Peace, where

they cultivate the lessons of learning and moral duties.

But as you move away from the capital in these increments of 400 km, things start to look

a little different.

500 li more remote, is the Domain of Restraints.

The first 300 is occupied by the tribes, the other 200 by criminals who have been banished.

The most remote 500 li is the Wild Domain.

In the south, these wild domains were the hilly lands south of the Yangtze.

The people there were what the early Chinese called the Southern Barbarians.

To the west, the Wild Domain was the icy plateau where few could survive.

In the north, it was the Gobi Desert, and beyond that, the wide grassy steppes of Mongolia

and Siberia.

A 5th-century Mongolian poet named Altun, would later write a description of this bare

and level land.

Under the dark mountains where the sky is like the sides of a tent stretched down over

the Great Steppe, the sky is gray, gray!

And the steppe wide, wide.

Over grass that the wind has battered low, sheep and oxen roam.

So, this is where the people of early China found themselves, hemmed in by the mountains

to the west, the jungle and the sea to the south and east, and the harsh deserts to the

north.

But within their fertile square of land, their early civilizations flourished.

The first millennium BC in China was a time of rapid change and feverish invention.

The land’s large population had led to the swift development of complicated society,

and advanced technologies soon followed.

The people here learned to coat bronze in chromium to increase its resistance to corrosion,

and inventions like the blast furnace and bellows later led to the production of cast

iron, replacing bronze as a cheaper alternative.

In agriculture, iron tools and mechanical devices like the multiple seed drill led to

a production boom.

The invention of complicated pulley systems and differential gears allowed the use of

waterwheels and other mechanical devices to power everything from flour mills to furnaces,

and they also allowed the invention of ingenious mechanical toys.

One early emperor was buried with an entire mechanical orchestra that could play their

instruments and sing through pipes in their mouths, all powered by running water.

One kind of vehicle was even invented known as a south-pointing chariot.

It had a mechanical gear system on board, powering a device that always pointed south

without the use of magnets.

The crossbow was invented during this time too, and it was in widespread use in Chinese

armies nearly 2,000 years before it became a fixture on European battlefields.

Examples have even been found of repeating crossbows which used delicate mechanisms to

fire multiple bolts in quick succession without the need for reloading.

One Chinese inventor even invented an early form of pinhole camera in order to view solar

eclipses.

This era of development and ingenuity is known as the Spring and Autumn Period.

But with the rapid development of technology, upheaval soon followed.

The spreading use of iron meant that production of weapons and armour had become cheap and

easy.

Large armies could now be supplied by anyone with the wealth to do so.

This ushered in an age quite fittingly known as “The Warring States Period”.

The period of the Warring States saw countless feudal kingdoms fighting and conquering one

another, coalescing together like beads of mercury on a table.

The historian Sima Qian recalls this as a dark time in Chinese history.

The land was torn by the strife of the warring kingdoms.

Men honoured deceit and power, and scoffed at benevolence and righteousness.

They put wealth and possessions first, and courtesy and humility last.

Some commoners became so rich that their wealth was counted in the hundreds of millions, while

among the poor there were those who could not even get enough dregs and chaff to fill

their bellies.

Soon, they had settled into seven large kingdoms locked in constant competition.

Among these, the two that matter most to our story are the Kingdoms of Han and the Kingdom

of Qin.

For some, it must have seemed like the wars would never end.

But out of the violence of this time, one of the seven warring states, the state of

Qin, rose to eclipse all the others.

Qin was the furthest west of these kingdoms, with its back to the steep walls of the Tibetan

Plateau.

The King of Qin, a man named Qin Shi Huang, was an enthusiastic reformer who revolutionised

his kingdom’s society and administration.

He moved to reduce the power of aristocrats and landowners, and strengthened the central

government of Qin to collect taxes directly from the peasantry.

The Qin also used the latest military tactics, making an unprecedented use of cavalry, still

a relative rarity in Chinese armies to mount guerilla raids on their enemies' supply lines

and river crossings.

For years, Qin Shi Huang bided his time and increased his power.

When all his preparations were ready, he struck with lightning speed.

He first attacked the Han, the Qin’s much smaller neighbour directly to the east, and

he took their capital of Shinjeng in the year 230 BC.

Next, Qin Shi Huang struck northward at the state of Zhao, who surrendered two years later,

and he took the northernmost state of Yan two years after that.

In less than a decade after setting out on his campaign, Qin Shi Huang had conquered

all the lands between the mountains and the sea.

For the first time in its history, one man would now rule over all the kingdoms of China.

Qin Shi Huang crowned himself as China's First Emperor.

He declared that he held his position through a kind of divine authority, the Tianming,

or the “Mandate of Heaven”.

It’s thought that the name of the Qin Dynasty is what has given us the word for China today.

For the most part, Qin Shi Huang ruled his empire just as he had ruled his kingdom; it

was a reign of ambitious reforms and territorial expansion that saw the young Empire of China

grow even further.

But the Emperor Qin’s reign was also not without its troubles.

He suffered three separate assassination attempts, narrowly escaping each time, but these attacks

filled him with paranoia.

He became terrified of death and soon began to tour the whole empire, talking to all the

wise men he could find, and trying to discover some secret, some medicine or magic spell

that would allow him to live forever.

As his life wore on and his health got worse, his search became desperate.

He began to execute scholars whose potions and elixirs had no effect on him.

At one point, he even sent a fleet of ships out into the ocean, carrying hundreds of young

men and women in search of the legendary Penglai Mountain, which was supposed to lie somewhere

out in the Southern Sea and where he believed a 1,000-year-old magician might live.

These people never returned, perhaps wisely considering how Qin Shi Huang treated those

who failed him.

During these later years, the emperor became mortally afraid of "evil spirits", and he

had workers build a series of tunnels and passageways between each of his more than

200 palaces, believing that if he travelled unseen, they would find it more difficult

to target him.

Soon, this paranoia turned into tyranny.

He turned his rage against the scholars who were unable to unlock the secrets of eternal

life.

At one point, it’s even recorded that he burned the books kept in the libraries of

the capital, as the historian Sima Qian recalls with bitterness.

The Confucian scholars loathed the Qin for having burned the Book of Odes, and the book

of documents, and mercilessly put to death the scholars who expounded them, while the

common people hated its harsh laws, so that the whole world rose up in rebellion.

At this time, everyone began to speak ill of the Qin.

During his fourth tour of Eastern China, the emperor became seriously ill.

It’s thought that his court physicians had been giving him pills full of the liquid metal

mercury, believing that it would extend his life.

Of course, mercury is actually highly poisonous.

Prolonged exposure can damage the entire nervous system, causing depression and bodily tremors,

as well as delirium and hallucinations.

If Qin Shi Huang was taking mercury, this might explain some of his strange preoccupations

towards the end of his life.

When the emperor fell ill, it seems likely that his doctors would have increased his

dosage.

The First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, died in the year 210 BC, and his dynasty died

with him.

For all of its immense historical significance, the Qin Dynasty barely lasted more than fifteen

years.

The First Emperor Qin Shi Huang left very specific requests for his burial and to this

day, they stand as a testament to his greatness, but also to the madness that plagued him in

later life.

He was buried in a vast mausoleum, one of the most remarkable constructions of the ancient

world.

It was built in the form of an enormous underground palace, an exact replica of the one he lived

in during his life.

This buried palace was filled with life-sized models of the courtiers and bureaucrats who

had served the king, fashioned with meticulous detail in terracotta, their lifeless eyes

open and staring forever.

The buried palace was also guarded by an army of thousands of terracotta soldiers, each

with a slightly different face.

In total, it’s estimated that Qin Shi Huang was buried with 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots

with 520 horses, and 150 soldiers on horseback, a full retinue of royal bodyguards to protect

their king in the next life.

There was even a replica of the Imperial stables, where the bodies of real horses were buried

with terracotta figures of grooms kneeling beside them.

Nearby, a mass burial ground has been found, for the countless slave labourers who died

while being forced to build this complex.

At the centre of the underground palace was the emperor's burial chamber.

The historian Sima Qian describes how the floor was painted to look like the lands of

China, with its rivers represented by flowing streams of mercury.

The tomb was filled with rare artefacts and wonderful treasure.

Craftsmen were ordered to make crossbows and arrows primed to shoot at anybody who enters

the tomb.

Mercury was used to simulate the Hundred Rivers, the Yangtze, Yellow River, and the great sea,

and set to flow mechanically.

Above were representations of the heavenly constellations, below, the features of the

land.

While the tomb of Qin Shi Huang has never been opened, studies have shown that the soil

of the mound that covers it does contain an unusually high concentration of mercury.

One study even claims to show that the distribution of the mercury in the mound corresponds to

the position of China’s rivers.

The Empire of China was still a very new idea.

During Qin Shi Huang’s life, it had been a thin veneer over a still very divided land.

With the death of the First Emperor, the empire looked as if it might come crashing down.

The Qin state began to fall apart, and China fissured into 18 kingdoms who once again began

to war among themselves.

It looked like the old age of chaos was about to return.

But history had other plans.

This is due to a rather unassuming character, a common man named Liu Bang.

There's not much to distinguish Liu Bang during his early life.

He was born in the Kingdom of Han, and it's recorded that he liked to drink.

Nevertheless, he rose to the position of a local sheriff.

After the death of Qin Shi Huang, he was ordered to bring a group of slaves to the enormous

construction site where the old emperor’s tomb was being built.

But along the way, some of these slaves escaped.

Liu Bang knew that when he arrived, he would likely be punished for this mistake, and so,

he made a remarkable decision.

He broke the chains of all the remaining slaves and declared that he would rather fight as

a rebel against the empire than deliver them up to toil on the emperor's tomb.

Many of the slaves were so grateful that they took up arms and joined him.

Liu Bang and his followers took refuge at a place called Mount Mangdang, setting up

camp in the crumbling ruins of an old fortress.

From there, they watched the Empire of the Qin fall apart around them.

They soon entered the service of a rebel king, fighting what remained of the Qin Empire,

and Liu Bang showed extraordinary skill on the battlefield.

So much so, that the ancient historian Sima Qian attributes his military successes to

supernatural causes.

When Liu Bang was still a commoner, he once killed a great snake, whereupon a spirit appeared

and announced, “This snake was the son of the white emperor, and he who killed him is

the son of the red emperor!”

When he first began his uprising, he offered prayers at the altar of the soil at the city

of Feng.

He sacrificed to the warrior god Chih Yu, and anointed his drums and flags with the

blood of the sacrifice.

Whatever it was that set him apart, Liu Bang managed to capture the Qin city of Xianyang

for the rebellion, and he was crowned its king as a reward.

The civil wars raged on, full of complicated alliances and rivalries, until finally it

was only Liu Bang and his rival of the Chu family remaining, two great warlords dividing

all the lands of China between them along the great watercourse of the Hong Canal.

In China to this day, the two sides of a chess board are referred to not as black and white,

but as Chu and Han.

A few months of peace passed by as the players of this great chess game considered their

moves.

Then Liu Bang marched across the Hong Canal and attacked the Chu.

He was victorious and against all the odds, after eight years of bitter fighting, China

was once more united.

In the year 202 BC, the commoner Liu Bang, once a lowly sheriff from a small town, declared

himself the next Emperor of China.

He would return to his small hometown in the state of Han only once.

When he did, he wrote the following piece of poetry.

A great wind came forth, the clouds rose on high.

Now that my might rules all within the seas, I have returned to my old village.

Where will I find brave men to guard the four corners of my land?

On his coronation, Liu Bang took the name Han.

He set up his court in the city of Chang’an and took the new Imperial name Han Kau Tsu.

The age of the Han had begun.

I’ll take just a moment here to discuss the sources we have available on this era

of Chinese history.

The Chinese of the Han Period were exceptionally literate.

It’s thought that even in these early years, at least one person from every family would

have been familiar with at least a few hundred characters, enough to get by with everyday

things like calendars, simple letters, and official announcements.

At this point, paper had yet to be invented, and so books of this period were written on

strips of flattened bamboo, joined together with thread into long, clattering rows that

could be rolled up into cylinders and wrapped in cloth.

These books of bamboo slats are part of the reason that Chinese was traditionally written

from top to bottom.

From the earliest days, colleges were set up for the nobility, and charitable schools

for the poor.

The emperors supported scribes and scholars in writing grand historical chronicles.

As a result, even these early periods of Chinese history are very well documented.

One of the most remarkable of these documents was written in the first century BC by the

chief astrologer to the Imperial Court, a man named Sima Qian, who we’ve heard from

a few times already.

This book is known as “the Records of the Grand Historian”.

It’s a vast chronicle documenting Chinese history over a period of 2,000 years.

It begins in the age of the Yellow Emperor, the legendary ancestral father of all Chinese

people.

Sima Qian is a lively and colourful storyteller, and he loves to put direct speeches into the

mouths of his characters.

But it’s worth introducing a note of caution when reading his work and the other works

of Chinese history.

Sima Qian wrote his records mostly during the reign of the Emperor Wu, and so he presents

a typically flattering account of that emperor, acting as a kind of official propaganda.

But he was also a shrewd judge of human nature and employed one interesting trick to allow

some criticism of various official personalities to seep through.

Each of his chapters was named after a particular person, and he knew that the various lords

and ladies, and even the emperor himself, were unlikely to read any chapter of his work

other than the ones dedicated to themselves.

Sima Qian would fill these chapters with praise and flattery, and he would leave any criticism

to other chapters.

But it's clear this didn't always work.

There's only one chapter of the records that has not survived to this day; that’s the

one focusing on the Emperor Wu himself.

It's impossible to know whether Sima Qian never wrote this section out of fear of his

ruler or if the emperor read something in those pages that he didn't like and had the

document destroyed.

Another incredibly useful document is the Hanshu, or “the Book of Han”.

This was written in the first century AD by a court official named Ban Gu and his sister

Ban Zhao, who is the first known female historian of China.

Like virtually all histories that followed, the Hanshu was modelled on Sima Qian's work.

It records Chinese history from the reign of the first Han Emperor Han Kau Tsu up to

the year 23 AD.

It’s usually the best source, and sometimes the only source, for events during this period.

A final major text is the one written by Fan Ye, a historian and politician of the fifth

century.

This is the Hou Han Shu, or “the Book of Later Han”, and it covers the remainder

of the Han Period up until the year 220 AD.

While the previous Book of Han was written by contemporaries who witnessed at least some

of the events described, Fan Ye wrote the Book of Later Han from a distance of nearly

two hundred years.

He used a number of earlier histories and documents as sources, but we should always

bear this in mind that he was about as distant from these events as we are from the Napoleonic

War.

Alongside a number of other smaller sources, these are the texts we have to work with.

As we’ll find out, these scholars were supervised and sometimes terrorised by their emperors,

meaning that their accounts have to be supported with archaeological and other evidence.

But thanks to their diligent scholarship, a clear picture does begin to emerge of what

happened to bring China’s first great dynasty crashing down.

When the Han Dynasty came into possession of the newly-united China in the year 206

BC, it inherited from the Qin not just the young empire, but also the empire’s problems.

Sima Qian writes about this in the Records of the Grand Historian.

When the Han Dynasty came to power, it inherited the evils left by the Qin.

The able-bodied men were all away with the army, while the old and underaged busily transported

supplies for them.

There was much hard work and little wealth.

The Son of Heaven himself could not find four horses of the same colour to draw his carriage,

and many of his generals were reduced to riding around in ox carts.

The empire’s economy was on its knees, with prices spiralling out of control.

In the midst of all the chaos, rich merchants were taking advantage of the high prices of

grain.

People who were intent on making a profit by underhanded means began to hoard their

wealth, buying up the commodities on the market so that the price of goods shot up.

But easily the most pressing problem was the constant looming threat of China’s fearsome

neighbours to the north.

These were a people known as the Xiongnu, a word that is sometimes translated into English

as Hun.

Around the year 6,000 BC, the people of the Eurasian steppes had learned how to tame wild

horses, and in the intervening millennia, had developed a symbiotic relationship with

that powerful animal.

They lived nomadic lifestyles, travelling on horseback in vast populations, moving from

grazing land to grazing land and living without the need for agriculture.

By at least the first millennium BC, these nomadic groups of horse riders had become

a military threat to the settled societies of the Chinese plains.

The Records of the Grand Historian gives one description of the Xiongnu people.

The Xiongnu are mountain barbarians.

They move about in search of water and pasture, and have no walled cities or fixed dwellings,

nor do they engage in any kind of agriculture.

They wear clothes of hide or wraps made of felt or fur.

They have no writing and even their promises and agreements are only verbal.

The little boys start out by learning to ride sheep, and shoot birds and rats with a bow.

Thus, all the young men are able to act as armed cavalry in time of war.

It’s clear that the settled armies of the Chinese, despite all their technological advantages,

found these nomadic armies incredibly difficult to fight.

The Records of the Grand Historian speaks with particular contempt about the battle

tactics of these nomadic warriors.

If the battle is going well for them they will advance, but if not they will retreat,

for they do not consider it a disgrace to run away.

Their only concern is self-advantage and they know nothing of propriety or righteousness.

The kingdoms that bordered the lands of the Xiongnu were under constant threat of raids

and invasions.

Faced with this danger, the Chinese had for centuries resorted to desperate measures.

From as early as the 7th century BC, they began building walls to defend the valleys

and plains of the north.

During his reign, the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang had approached this problem with a characteristic

boldness.

He ordered that these scattered fragments of wall be joined together, closing any gaps.

By the time he died in the year 210 BC, a single defensive barrier now ran the whole

length of the empire’s northern border.

For a time, this offered some measure of protection, but at the same time that the Han Dynasty

was being formed, all the disparate tribes of the Xiongnu were also coming together.

They joined forces under the rule of a single ruler who took the title of Shanyu.

This word, Shanyu, would change over the centuries to one day become the title of Khan, the title

that would be taken by the fearsome Genghis Khan.

Taken together, the vast wastes that the Xiongnu ruled over were the largest empire in terms

of land mass on earth at the time.

As the new Empire of China rose in the river plains, this Shanyu was preparing for war.

After the death of Qin Shi Huang and the civil war that followed, the Shanyu spotted his

chance.

Xiongnu horsemen poured into any Chinese territory that lay to the north of the border wall.

With every Chinese army tied down, they met with no resistance.

When the empire was restored under Han Kau Tsu, the Shanyu become more cautious for a

time.

But it was only five years into the reign of the Han that he struck again.

The Emperor Han Kau Tsu was nearing the age of sixty when the armies of Xiongnu horsemen

thundered into the province of Shanxi, looting and burning cities as they went.

Han Kau Tsu was a confident military leader, and rightly so.

He had defeated all his rivals in the civil war, and he knew how to command an army.

But he was about to find out that fighting the swift and mobile cavalry hordes of the

Xiongnu was a very different kind of challenge.

Han Kau Tsu marched out to meet the Xiongnu.

But in the rocky mountain passes, he was struck with an ambush.

With no warning, Xiongnu cavalry poured down the valley sides with the thundering of thousands

of hooves, and tore into the Chinese army on all sides.

The ancient Chinese poet Ch’ü Yüan, writing in the third century BC, records what a battle

during this time must have felt like.

The enemy roll up like clouds.

Arrows fall thick; the warriors press forward.

They menace our ranks; they break our line.

The horse on the left is dead; the one on the right is smitten.

The fallen horses block our wheels; they beat the sounding drums.

The warriors are all dead; they lie on the field.

Their swords lie beside them; their black bows in their hand.

The Emperor Han Kau Tsu was utterly defeated.

He retreated back to the walled city of Baideng, locked the gates, and peered fearfully from

the city’s ramparts.

The Xiongnu encircled the city and besieged it.

We can imagine the dust that the thousands of horses would have thrown up, and the low

drumming of their hooves sounding through the earth.

Han Kau Tsu had only a limited supply of food, and it looked in that moment like the Han

Dynasty was about to be an even shorter reign than even the Qin before them.

But after seven days of the siege, some creative diplomacy at the Chinese court came through.

Spies had been sent to bribe the wife of the Shanyu and bring him to the negotiating table.

The siege was lifted, and the Emperor Han Kau Tsu was allowed to return to his capital

a much-humbled man.

From this point on, he abandoned the idea of a military solution to the barbarian problem.

Instead, he pursued a policy of diplomacy and appeasement.

This policy was known as ho-chi’in, or “the marriage alliance”.

It saw Imperial China pay vast amounts of tribute to the Xiongnu in the form of what

they called “Imperial Gifts”.

These were fixed amounts of silk, wine, rice, and other kinds of food that the Xiongnu couldn't

grow in their barren lands.

But the treaty also carried with it a more humiliating condition.

The Han emperor was forced to send his eldest daughter to marry the Shanyu.

Every time a new Shanyu came to power in the barbarian kingdoms, the treaty stated that

he would be given a Chinese princess as a wife.

For the next hundred years or so, this would be the policy of the Han Empire.

In exchange, the Xiongnu agreed to stop their raids on the borders of the empire.

For a time, an uneasy peace set in.

But for a number of reasons, that peace wasn’t to last.

The peace brought about by this compromise ushered

in some measure of stability, and Imperial China began to take on a more stable and prosperous

form, even with the exorbitant tributes it paid to the Xiongnu.

As the year 130 BC approached, China had become a wealthy land.

The historian Sima Qian recalls this time of plenty.

The granaries in the cities and the countryside were full and the government treasuries were

running over with wealth.

In the capital, the strings of coins had been stacked up by the hundreds of millions until

the cords that bound them had rotted away and they could no longer be counted.

In the central granary, the grain overflowed and piled up outside, where it spoiled and

became unfit to eat.

But Sima Qian also writes with something of a melancholy note, that trouble was already

approaching on the horizon.

It has ever been the law of change that when things reach their period of greatest flourishing,

they must begin to decay.

Part of the reason for this is that Han Kau Tsu’s policy of appeasing the Xiongnu was

no longer protecting the empire.

Large armies of horsemen were now regularly raiding deep into the northern provinces,

at one point even coming as close as 160km from the Imperial capital.

During the reign of Emperor Jing, more than 10,000 citizens living in the border regions

were abducted and taken away to live as slaves.

One poet and politician of the time named Chia Yi, wrote with bitterness about what

he saw as the empire’s humiliation.

The situation of the empire may be described just like a person hanging upside down.

The Son of Heaven is the head of the empire.

The barbarians are the feet of the empire.

But the Shong-no are arrogant and insolent on the one hand, and invade and plunder us

on the other hand.

Yet each year we provide them with money, silk, floss, and fabrics.

So, the feet are put on top, and the head at the bottom.

Hanging upside down like this is something beyond comprehension.

Chia Yi and others like him were largely ignored by the rest of the Chinese court.

Many nobles still remembered the ambush and defeat of the Emperor Han Kau Tsu and his

narrow escape at Baideng.

They feared the Xiongnu and preferred to continue the policy of appeasement.

Despite this, there was a small but vocal faction beginning to form at court who wanted

to see China fight.

But it wasn’t until the reign of an emperor named Wu, that they began to get people’s

attention.

In his later life, the Emperor Wu cut an imposing figure.

Traditional portraits show him as a broad man, built like a barrel and wrapped in swathes

of Imperial blue silk.

He is painted with a furrowed brow and a delicate moustache framing a thick black beard.

But when he came to the throne in the year 141 BC, Wu was only 16 years old.

What he lacked in age, he made up for in tenacity.

Wu sat on the Imperial Throne for 54 years, a record that would remain unbroken in China

for nearly two millennia.

Over this time, he led Han China through a period of rapid centralizing reform.

He founded an Imperial University to train young scholars, and even developed an organisation

known as “The Imperial Music Bureau”, which was in charge of cultural matters relating

to music and poetry.

But all of this would be useless if he couldn’t solve the problem of the Xiongnu threat.

In the year 133 BC, at the age of 24, the Emperor Wu summoned a council to decide what

should be done.

For the first time, the words of the pro-war faction at court resonated with the young

ruler.

Wu decided on a bold and aggressive new strategy.

The Han Empire would no longer cower behind its walls.

Instead, it would confront the Xiongnu head-on.

Wu’s plan was to lure the ruling Shanyu south with his army and into a carefully laid

trap.

It was an incredibly risky plan and it relied on total secrecy.

The bait in this trap would be a city called Mayi, a wealthy frontier town that acted as

a trading post between China and the northern deserts.

To help with the deception, the Chinese hired the services of a local trader and smuggler.

He crossed over into the Xiongnu lands and asked for an audience with the fearsome Shanyu.

We can imagine the Shanyu sitting on his throne in a large tent made of stretched yak skin,

surrounded by crackling braziers, twirling his long moustache.

The smuggler would have bowed deeply and delivered the speech he must have been rehearsing on

the whole journey.

He said that he had killed the town magistrate of Mayi and taken over its government.

He said he was willing to offer the whole city up to become part of the Xiongnu Empire

if the Shanyu would only come and take it.

The Shanyu was ecstatic.

He agreed to ride out immediately and claim the city of Mayi.

It seemed like the Chinese plan was going perfectly.

But the further the Shanyu marched into the Chinese lands, the more he began to feel that

something wasn’t right.

His horsemen met with little resistance and as he got closer to Mayi, he began to notice

how empty the roads were.

In the fields outside the city, he saw herds of cattle, but no herdsmen guarding them.

The Shanyu ordered his men to halt, and sent out scouts.

They managed to capture a Han soldier and under interrogation, this man told them what

waited nearby; the massed force of the entire Han Empire, 300,000 infantry and chariots

concealed and waiting for him to step into their trap.

The Shanyu immediately ordered a retreat.

With the ambush betrayed, the Han forces burst out of hiding and tried to chase him.

But the infantry could never keep pace with the Xiongnu horses, and the Shanyu fled back

to his lands without losing a single man.

He must have been shaking with rage when he crossed back into the desert, and he resolved

to get his revenge.

He immediately ordered a devastating series of raids on Chinese border towns.

Pillars of black smoke must have risen over the horizon for weeks.

The Chinese ambush had failed.

The mood at the Imperial Court darkened and the pro-war faction was blamed for the failure,

but the Chinese now had no other option.

With their intentions revealed, they would have to go to war.

The Records of the Grand Historian recalls what happened next.

After the unsuccessful attempt to ambush the Xiongnu at Mayi, peaceful relations came to

an end and the barbarians began to invade and plunder at the northern border.

Armies had to be dispatched time and again and could not be disbanded, causing extreme

hardship to the empire.

In order to fight this war, the Han knew that they would have to change their tactics.

The armies of infantry and chariots, effective in the civil wars fought in the river plains,

were now all but abandoned.

The war chariot was next to useless in the rocky terrain of the far north, and infantry

moved too slowly in the wide open deserts.

Instead, the Chinese shifted their focus to cavalry.

They would now develop large, armoured horse units to match their Xiongnu enemies.

The Emperor Wu recognised that the horse was the weapon of this new age of warfare, and

so, he made securing a reliable supply of trained warhorses a major focus of his government.

He would eventually maintain a supply of 300,000 horses, but even these were not enough.

The government began loaning breeding horses to farmers for a period of three years in

exchange for a portion of some of the foals they gave birth to.

They even introduced a policy that allowed a family to excuse up to three of their male

members from military service if they presented one horse to the government.

Soon, this policy began to pay off, as the Records of the Grand Historian recalls.

The Han generals every year led forces of twenty or thirty thousand cavalry in attacks

on the barbarians.

The war for the north raged on for decades.

But for a number of reasons, the Han slowly began to gain the upper hand.

For one thing, the desert country behind the wall had only a strategic importance to the

Han, but it had great economic importance to the Xiongnu, as shown by one Imperial edict

celebrating the victories of a cavalry commander in the north.

The general of the swift cavalry led forth the troops.

At Mount Ku-Yu-en, ascending the hills and gazing out across the sea of sand, he executed

the enemy leader, cutting down his pennants and seizing his war drums.

He seized a great multitude of the enemy, taking 70,000 captives, snatched the food

supplies of the enemy, and penetrated deep into their territory.

The Xiongnu Empire was built out of trade, taxes, and tribute paid to them by weaker

kingdoms.

As the war dragged on, they began to suffer a downturn in all three.

They had to raise taxes on the regions that remained under their control, and their population

grew resentful.

Soon, more and more of the smaller tribes in the Xiongnu coalition began to question

whether they had backed the losing side.

As the years of war dragged on, marginal kingdoms began to peel away and the trajectory of the

war became clear.

It’s at this point that a narrow strip of land between the Tibetan Plateau and the Gobi

Desert began to become an important part of this story.

This place is known as the Hexi Corridor.

Today, the Hexi Corridor is the site of China’s G30 highway in Gangsu province.

Standing on this long and lonely stretch of motorway today, with cars zipping along it

through the desert, it’s hard to imagine that this was once a major battlefield in

a war for the very existence of the Chinese state.

If you were a Chinese trader who wanted to make the lucrative journey to the west, you

had a very limited number of options.

The Tibetan Plateau was an impassable barrier along the whole length of the empire while

in the south, there were heavily forested mountains and impassable, unmapped jungles.

To the north, there was the desert, which would spell certain death to any travellers

foolish enough to try to cross it.

But there was one way through.

This was a narrow stretch of land where the Tibetan Plateau finally drops off to the north

and looks out over the Gobi Desert.

Water running down from the hills has created a number of fertile oases at the foot of the

mountains, providing fresh water and rest for travellers on this dangerous journey.

The Hexi Corridor, stretching for 1,200 km, is the only possible route to the west in

the north of China.

So, anyone who controlled the corridor controlled the flow of trade from one side of the mountains

to the other.

For centuries now, the Xiongnu and other nomadic tribes had grown rich from taxing this trade,

but now the Hexi Corridor was the battlefront of the bitter and grinding war for the north.

For the Chinese, the logistical challenges of conducting a war across this desert landscape

were enormous.

This letter sent to a later emperor by one of his counsellors describes in detail the

difficulty of supplying an army in the barren Xiongnu lands.

The land is for the most part sandy and salt, with scarcity of water and plantlife, and

before the army has been out a hundred days, the oxen will all die out, while the quantity

of provisions still left will be more than the men can carry.

The country is very cold in the autumn and winter, and exposed to high winds in the spring

and summer, which would necessitate a vast amount of pots and boilers, firewood and charcoal,

a weight that would be utterly unmanageable.

There would be a want of dried food and water to drink, and the cares consequent on sickness

and epidemics among the troops.

The Xiongnu were also masters of hit-and-run tactics, and would attack Chinese supply lines

whenever they could.

So, as they pushed the Xiongnu back along the Hexi Corridor, the Han did what they did

best; they built walls.

The Han extended the existing segments of their great wall so that it now ran the whole

length of the corridor, creating a fortified highway between the wall and the mountains,

guarded by garrisoned forts.

The Book of Han recalls the construction of this enormous defensive work.

The roads were skirted with lookout towers.

Cities were built outside the wall, and military colonies were established for protection.

These sections of wall weren’t the elegant snaking lines of stone walls that you’re

probably imagining when you think of the words “Great Wall of China”.

The most famous sections that always appear in photographs were built much later, after

the fourteenth century.

The Han-era walls were rough-and-ready constructions made of rammed earth.

They were built using frames of rose willow and layers of rushes, filled with desert clay

and gravel, packed together and left to dry in the sun.

But they were immensely effective.

These walls have also withstood over 2,000 years of erosion in the elements of the Gobi

Desert, and many of them still stand, magnificent against the barren desert.

Every 5 km along the wall, a beacon tower stood, usually about 7m high.

If enemy troops were sighted, the men in the beacon towers would light a fire designed

to produce smoke by day or light by night.

This cry for help would be passed on in both directions along the wall, and a Han cavalry

army would soon be dispatched to meet the threat.

These walls completely neutralised the Xiongnu’s fast, mobile tactics, and restricted their

ability to move around the landscape.

This final move by the Han slowly choked the life from the Xiongnu war machine.

In the early decades of the first century BC, the Xiongnu truly began to fall apart.

Former members declared independence and joined the Han in carving up its territories.

By 60 BC, they had split into five groups that engaged in a series of suicidal civil

wars.

In 53 BC, the Shanyu sent his son to China as a hostage, and two years later, he went

in person to the Chinese court to deliver his surrender.

It had taken more than 80 years since the Emperor Wu’s failed ambush at Mayi.

But the war against the Xiongnu had been a remarkable success.

If you were a Chinese merchant around this time, you could now travel along a secure

and well-maintained road along the whole length of the Hexi Corridor.

Eventually, you would reach the end of the Han fortifications, which ended at a wide

portal known as the Yumen Pass, or the Jade Gate.

This was the exit gate to the lands of China, and beyond it lay the wide, unknown world.

If you stepped through the Jade Gate, you would see a vast desert of shifting sands

stretching out ahead of you.

This is the Taklamakan Desert which fills an enormous geographical feature known as

the Tarim Basin.

The Tarim Basin is easily visible from space.

It's an enormous flat oval cut out of the Tibetan plateau, a great sandy eye in the

very centre of the Asian continent.

Today, this desert is in the very west of modern China in the province of Xinjiang,

on its border with Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kashmir.

Today, half the people of the Tarim Basin and the province of Xinjiang belong to the

Uyghur ethnicity, who are still a persecuted ethnic minority.

The music you're hearing now is a traditional song of the Uyghur people, recorded in the

ancient oasis town of Turpan.

For millennia, this kind of music has drifted over the shifting sands of this desert while

trade caravans passed by in their thousands.

But for the Chinese of the time, this wild area beyond their walls was known only as

the Western Regions.

The Taklamakan desert is the world’s second-largest shifting sands desert, with over 85% of it

made up of dramatic sand dunes.

Crossing the desert itself is very difficult, so trade caravans, often made up of Bactrian

camels, would skirt along its edges in the shadow of the snowy mountains that make up

the rim of the basin.

All of these caravans met on the far side of the desert in the ancient trading city

of Kashgar, where a famous stone tower stood.

Here, Chinese merchants would reach the end of their journey.

They would sell their goods here to merchants who came from the other side of the mountains,

from the exotic and distant lands to the west, and who knew the routes through the dangerous

paths into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Many goods originating in China passed west in this way, even before any diplomatic contact

was made.

Tea was one of these products, as well as fine items of carved jade and the newly-developed

technology of porcelain.

But by far the most valued of Chinese exports was a miracle material that was of immense

value to all the people of the world.

That material was silk.

Silk is a natural protein fibre produced by the larva of a particular kind of moth.

During their larval stage, these moths are called silkworms.

They like nothing better than to chew on the green leaves of a tree known as the white

mulberry.

People as early as the year 3,600 BC have recognised the potential for this remarkable

material.

At first, people would go out into the forest and harvest wild silk from the trees.

But soon, more purposeful cultivation of silkworms began.

Over the centuries of breeding by humans, the silkworm has become a domesticated species.

Compared to its wild cousins, domesticated silkworms have increased in size, digest more

efficiently than wild slkworms; they lay more eggs and spin larger silk cocoons, and have

become more tolerant of handling by humans.

All of this means that they have increased their silk production capacity tenfold.

But unfortunately for the silkworm larva, they will never reach adulthood.

When they enter the cocoon phase of their lifecycle, they are killed, either lowered

into boiling water or pierced with a needle.

The whole cocoon is then painstakingly unravelled, generating a single, unbroken thread that

can be spun and turned into fabric.

It can take up to 2,000 cocoons to make one silk dress.

But silk was so soft and smooth, shimmering in the light and holding resplendent colours,

that it was immediately in enormous demand all over the world.

Outside of China, silk was worth many times its weight in gold.

The Han Chinese may have been surprised to know just how far their textiles traveled.

Julius Caesar famously wore a silk cloak to the theatre, and began a fashion craze among

the Roman nobility.

The Egyptian Queen Cleopatra was an avid collector of silk items, and silk has also been found

in Viking graves.

We've even found traces of silk in the hair of an Egyptian mummy of the 21st Dynasty,

dating to around 1070 BC.

After taking the Hexi Corridor, the Han chased the Xiongnu out of the Western Regions.

They soon absorbed these sandy cities into their empire, these towns clinging to the

edge of this vast, desert basin.

Soon, the whole of the Western Regions was under Han control.

For the first time, China was in charge of its own trade routes to the west.

By the end of the first century BC, the territory of Han China had taken on a strange shape.

It now comprised the large central plains around the Yangtze and Yellow River, but it

also included the Western Regions in the Tarim Basin.

These two areas were joined by the narrow chain of the Hexi Corridor.

It was an unusual shape for an empire, but the size of the Han territories had now more

than doubled.

The Han had also ground down those people who they called “the southern barbarians”

who lived in the hilly country south of the Yangtze.

The Han now occupied lands right up to the borders of modern Vietnam.

Han China was now one of the largest empires on earth, and the other great powers of the

world were beginning to pay attention, as the Records of the Grand Historian recalls.

All the barbarians of the distant west craned their necks to the east and longed to catch

a glimpse of China.

The Emperor Wu had transformed the empire from a frightened and unstable entity into

a confident Imperial state.

But in his old age, he became plagued with the same kind of paranoia as the Emperor Qin,

nearly a hundred years before.

He began doling out excessive punishments to members of the court who he believed were

spreading rumours about him.

The most tragic case is the punishment of Sima Qian, the old historian who spent his

life writing his text, the Records of the Grand Historian, which we’ve already heard

so much from in this episode.

One of Sima Qian’s friends, a general fighting in the north, was captured in battle with

the Xiongnu, and he was denounced as a coward by the emperor.

Only one man stood up to defend him in the Imperial Court.

That man was Sima Qian.

The Emperor Wu was enraged by this, and he sentenced the old historian to death.

It was expected that any member of the court would take their own life before the sentence

was carried out, but Sima Qian refused.

He wanted to finish his great historical work before he died.

In the end, the emperor commuted his sentence to only the second most severe punishment

– to be castrated and turned into a eunuch.

After the cruel sentence was carried out, Sima Qian was given a role as a palace secretary,

and it’s here that he finished the work that stands as the only great record of the

reign of Emperor Wu.

As the emperor's mental state deteriorated, more similarities with the Emperor Qin began

to arise.

He also toured the country, talking to wise men and searching fruitlessly for the secret

to eternal life.

Whether he also started taking mercury pills is unknown.

But in the year 88 BC, the Emperor Wu fell suddenly ill.

He died a year later, at the age of 69.

One ancient poem called “The Dew on the Garlic-leaf,” was often sung at the burial

of the kings and princes of China, and we can imagine that it may have been sung at

the funeral of Emperor Wu.

How swiftly it dries, the dew on the garlic-leaf, the dew that dries so fast to-morrow will

fall again.

But he whom we carry to the grave will never more return.

The palace women would have wept, and the court held a solemn wake.

The king was first placed in a bath of ice to help preserve his body, and then he was

wrapped in fine silks.

Pearls were put into his mouth, and his body was completely covered in a suit made of small

plates of the precious stone jade, sewn together with gold thread.

He was placed in a great coffin carved from catalpa wood, painted crimson red and adorned

with ivory, covered with designs of dragons, tigers, and the sun and moon, while eunuchs

stood by guarding his body with weapons.

The Emperor Wu had turned the Empire of Han into one of the largest and most powerful

societies on earth.

But he had fallen to the same curse of paranoia and tyranny.

He wasn’t the first Chinese emperor to fall prey to this fate.

As we’ll see, he was also far from the last.

As is so often the case after the long rule of a successful king, the reign of Emperor

Wu was followed by a series of relatively inept successors.

But it was under the Emperor Cheng that the empire would experience its first slide into

real disintegration.

For the first time, it looked like the Han Dynasty was coming to its end.

Cheng was a type of emperor that you’ll soon start to find familiar.

He was lazy and incompetent, and he was more interested in cockfighting and chasing after

beautiful palace women than administering his government.

He left much of the affairs of state to his relatives who belonged to the Wang clan.

They wasted no time in gathering large amounts of personal power and wealth, and meanwhile,

corrupt and greedy officials continued to plague the government.

As a result, rebellions broke out throughout the country.

Emperor Cheng died in the year 7 BC.

His young nephew took the throne, but by this time the Wang family had become too powerful.

Among these, one man had been going on a personal propaganda campaign to amass a vast body of

support among the common people.

This was a man named Wang Mang.

Wang Mang is a remarkable character.

He was a Confucian scholar and a great speaker, and by all accounts was immensely popular

among the peasants.

At one point, the Imperial Palace even received a petition written on 500,000 rolls of bamboo,

demanding that Wang Mang be given the highest political offices in the land.

The source of Wang Mang's popularity isn't hard to see.

Disillusioned by the corrupt politics of the Imperial Court, the peasants of China were

desperate for something to change, and Wang Mang offered them that change.

He believed that all the modern reforms of the last few hundred years had led the empire

astray.

He was convinced that if the empire were run exactly according to the principals of the

ancient philosopher Confucius, then peace and prosperity would naturally follow.

At the age of 50, buoyed up by this groundswell of popular support, Wang Mang toppled the

young boy emperor and seized the throne for himself.

Wang Mang was not from the Dynasty of Han.

He was the first non-Han emperor to rule China in 200 years.

At the time, it must have seemed like the time of the Han had ended for good, crippled

by the corruption of its officials and the mismanagement of its politicians.

But the rule of Wang Mang was an unmitigated disaster.

Part of the problem was that since he himself had usurped the throne, he was terrified of

giving his advisors any power in case someone else did the same to him.

As a result, he tried to make all of the countless decisions of state himself which completely

paralysed the government.

When it actually came to putting his bold ideas into practice, Wang Mang ran into further

problems.

It turned out that there was more to administering an empire than choosing the proper music to

play at court and the proper ceremonies to perform in the temples.

One Qin Dynasty historian, writing in the 16th century, described his reign in the following

terms.

After he usurped the throne, he did not know how to comfort and guide the people, and felt

that he could ceaselessly deceive everyone.

Therefore, he caused both the Chinese and the foreigners to hate him.

The entire empire was already collapsing, but Wang Mang did not care, but rather buried

his head in what is old, believing that once he returned the government structure to the

old days, the empire will be peaceful.

He only sought to establish proper ceremony and music day and night, without spending

time on the important affairs of state.

Wang Mang also attempted some radical reforms.

He banned the private ownership of land, and this was enough to cause significant unrest

on its own.

But his real undoing would come from one of China’s deadliest and most unpredictable

natural forces; the great watercourse of the north of China, the Yellow River.

As we’ve already seen, the Yellow River was the most deadly and dangerous of China’s

rivers.

Every hundred years or so, it would change its course, bursting its banks and washing

away every town and village in its path.

As fate would have it, this once-in-a-century disaster occurred right at the time when Wang

Mang was sitting on the Imperial Throne.

The new emperor was completely unprepared for this natural disaster.

Peasants who lost their homes in the floods felt that the emperor had done nothing to

help them, and their resentment reached a fever pitch.

It wasn’t long before peasant revolts rose up around the country.

The most powerful of these were known as “the Red Eyebrows”, since they smeared their

foreheads in red paint before going into battle.

The widespread chaos and loss of Imperial control meant that the empire’s borders

began to come apart.

The nomadic Xiongnu began to once again gain power and confidence in the north, and Wang

Mang's lack of diplomatic skill caused trouble to erupt in the Western Regions, as the Book

of Later Han recalls.

The principalities of the Western Regions split up and formed fifty-five kingdoms.

Wang Mang, after he usurped the throne, demoted their kings.

Following this, the Western Regions became resentful and rebelled.

They therefore broke off all relations with China and altogether submitted to the Xiongnu

once more.

The Xiongnu, subdued by the Han Empire for nearly a century, now sensed weakness.

They launched a surprise attack on the empire’s outposts and seized the entire region of the

Tarim Basin right up to the Jade Gate.

From there, they poured along the Great Wall into the Hexi Corridor.

In just a matter of years, all the gains of the great Emperor Wu were undone, as the Book

of Later Han recalls.

The northern savages forced several countries to help them plunder the commanderies and

districts of Hexi.

The gates of the towns stayed shut in broad daylight.

Meanwhile, the Red Eyebrow Rebellion seized vast swathes of the countryside.

Soon, the nobles of China were joining the peasants in revolt, and one goal was now on

all of their lips.

They wanted to topple the Emperor Wang Mang and restore the Dynasty of the Han.

Eventually, the people of the Imperial capital of Chang’an also rose up in the streets.

They overcame Wang Mang’s guard, stormed the palace, and beheaded the emperor.

The Imperial Palaces were burned to the ground.

Wang Mang's body was cut into pieces and his head was delivered to the temporary Han capital

of Wancheng to be hung on the city wall.

There, the people’s anger was so fierce that they dragged the head down from the wall

and kicked it about the streets like a football.

The capital of Chang’an was now occupied by the Red Eyebrows.

Their leaders tried their best to keep order, but before long, the city’s food ran out

and the rebels began to riot and steal.

They burned many of Chang'an’s palaces and pillaged the city for days.

By the year 25, the Han Dynasty was restored under a new emperor called Guanwu.

But the capital of Chang’an was a smoking ruin and its palaces were just blackened skeletons.

One anonymous Chinese poet who stumbled on the ruins of an old palace, wrote the following

poem of mourning at the site.

Although we don’t know for sure which ruin he stood by, it may well have been the ancient

Imperial capital as it stood then in ashes.

The wind howls in the pines, the rats fly at my approach and hide under the old tiles.

What monarch once had this palace built, of which there only remain ruins on a mountain

side?

The owner of this palace had beautiful dancers, who are today one with the cold dust.

Of all this pomp, of all this glory, what remains?

A marble horse lying in the grass.

I should like to express my great sadness in an enduring poem, but I weep, and my pencil

trembles.

The restored Emperor Guanwu decided that he would move his capital from Chang’an to

the east, to the city of Luoyang.

These two phases of Han history are sometimes called the Western and the Eastern Han, or

more simply the Former Han and the Later Han.

Guanwu’s reign was a new dawn for the empire, and another chance for the dream of a stable

Imperial China that would stand the challenge of time.

A number of tests would now arrive that would determine whether the lessons of the fall

of Former Han had been learned.

These tests would determine whether this new incarnation of the empire would survive or

whether it too would end in ash and flame.

The new capital city of Luoyang was a beautiful place.

The shallow Gu River flowed right past its walls and diverted into a moat that encircled

the city, while the Luo River flowed two kilometres or so to the south, crossed by a floating

bridge of boats.

In the distance, the blue peaks of the Beimang Hills looked out over the city.

One Chinese poem from the Han Period in the second century describes the bustling streets

of Luoyang, full of life beneath the shade of its leafy trees.

On the eastern way at the city of Luoyang, at the edge of the road peach trees and plum

trees grow; flower matched by flower, leaf touching leaf.

A spring wind rises from the northeast.

Flowers and leaves gently nod and sway.

Up the road, somebody's daughter comes carrying a basket to gather silkworm's food.

Luoyang had been an important holy city for centuries.

It was smaller than Chang’an, about a third of its size, but its position on the rivers

and at the crossing point of various major canals made it better connected economically.

It was also further from the frontiers of the empire, making it a little safer than

the smoking ruin that was the former capital.

Once the new capital was established, much of the first century in China was spent rebuilding

after the fall of the Former Han and the destruction left by Wang Mang's disastrous leadership.

Vast construction works took place to dredge the bottom of the Yellow River, dig drainage

canals, and to avoid any more devastating floods.

New palaces were built at Luoyang to accommodate the Imperial Court, as well as religious institutions.

Guangwu ordered the construction of an altar to the Gods of the Soils and Grains.

He also ordered the entire Imperial library be moved to Luoyang.

It took 2,000 carts to transport all the books that were contained in these libraries across

the country to the new capital.

One poem written by the poet and historian Ban Gu around the year 65 AD, celebrates the

new Han emperor’s achievement in transforming the old city.

He refurbished Luo City, enhancing its imposing grandeur, making resplendent its order and

proportion.

He made the Han capital shine through the empire, controlling all eight directions.

Then, within the Imperial City, the palaces were glittering and bright; the hall courtyards

were divinely beautiful.

By the year 36 AD, Guangwu had crushed the Red Eyebrow Rebellion, as well as any lords

who still resisted.

He announced that the Imperial colour would from there on be the colour red, and he would

govern under the element of fire.

He had restored the Han Dynasty to power, but the empire was now a much-weakened state.

The long period of chaos had sapped its wealth, and in the north, the Xiongnu had resurged

as a power to be reckoned with.

The Chinese general Ban Chao was put in charge of reclaiming the Hexi Corridor and securing

the Western Regions once more.

This struggle once again took decades.

Ban Chao painstakingly beat the Xiongnu back along the Hexi Corridor, reclaiming the old

crumbling walls as he went.

By the year 91, the Han Empire was once again in control of the deserts and the trade routes

that ran through them.

This re-opening of the route to the west came at a uniquely interesting time in world history.

In the decades since the Han had last controlled the Western Regions, a new power had risen

up in Central Asia, known as the Kushan Empire.

In the mid first-century, this Buddhist empire had grown to cover much of Pakistan, Afghanistan,

and Northern India.

This is significant because it created a stable and unified territory that stretched across

Central Asia.

Touching the Kushan Empire on the west was the Parthian Empire which stretched across

Iran, much of the Middle East, and into Turkey.

Even further to the west, the Han Chinese had heard of an even greater power that rivalled

even their own, a mysterious empire of enormous wealth centred on a vast inland sea.

This was the first time in history that four large empires formed an unbroken chain from

the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.

The general Ban Chao recognised the potential that this unique moment in history could hold.

In the year 97, he summoned one of his most trusted men, a man called Gan Ying.

He told Gan Ying to journey as far west as he could and to find out more about this great

faraway empire on the other side of the continent which they knew only by the name Da Chin.

Gan Ying travelled for what must have been many months, down the Hexi Corridor, through

the Gate of Jade, and across the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert.

From there, he crossed the mountains through the dangerous snowy passes and into the high

valleys of the Kushan Empire.

He would have traversed the arid lands of Pakistan and passed the snow-capped peaks

of Iran, then crossed over the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where the city of Babylon

still stood and where the ruins of Sumerian and Assyrian civilizations were still crumbling

into the sands.

Finally, he reached the frontiers of the great Empire of Da-Chin, an empire that we know

by the more familiar name of Rome.

Later, Gan Ying wrote down everything he had learned about this exotic empire.

Its territory extends for several thousands of li.

It has more than 400 walled towns.

There are several tens of smaller dependent kingdoms.

The walls of the town are made of stone.

They have postal relays at intervals which are all plastered and whitewashed.

There are pines and cypresses, as well as trees and plants of all kinds.

Gan Ying made detailed notes about the customs and ways of the Romans, which seem to have

greatly impressed him.

They shave their heads, and their clothes are embroidered.

They have screened coaches for the women and small, white-roofed one-horse carts.

When carriages come and go, drums are beaten and flags and standards are raised.

He was also amazed to hear about the system for appointing Roman emperors, although it

does seem that the Romans gave him a slightly sanitised version of their political system.

Their kings are not permanent.

They select and appoint the most worthy man.

If there are unexpected calamities in the kingdom, he is unceremoniously rejected and

replaced.

The one who has been dismissed quietly accepts his demotion and is not angry.

But Gan Ying never actually made it to the city of Rome.

He reached the shores of a sea that may have been either the Mediterranean or the Persian

Gulf.

There, some Parthian sailors discouraged him from continuing his journey.

They gave him this dire warning.

"If you encounter winds that delay you, it can take two years.

That is why all the men who go by sea take stores for three years.

The vast ocean urges men to think of their country and get homesick, and some of them

die."

It’s possible that these Parthians wanted to continue to control the lucrative trade

running between Rome and China, and they didn’t want any Chinese ambassador cutting out the

middle man.

But it’s also possible that Gan Ying made this story up.

Perhaps he was simply tired of his journey and wanted to go home.

At the sight of the lapping waves of the Mediterranean, he may simply have decided that he would make

something up and head back to his family.

After all, who back home would ever know?

At this time, Rome and Han faced each other from opposite sides of the Eurasian landmass.

They were roughly comparable in size, population, and complexity.

While Rome governed an area of about 5 million square kilometres, Han at its height commanded

6 million.

While Rome governed nearly around 56 million people, Han governed over 60 million.

Around the time that Gan Ying made his epic journey across the continent, it’s thought

that half of all humans on earth lived in either the Roman or Han Empires.

Gan Ying was perhaps the first recorded man to travel the entire length of a route that

would be of enormous importance for the history of the world.

This would become known as the Silk Road, named after the Chinese silk that poured along

it in such vast quantities.

It became a highway connecting the east and the west, and would later spread inventions

like gunpowder, paper, porcelain, and the compass right around the world.

The opening of the Silk Road was one of Han China’s enduring achievements.

But already the stormclouds were gathering.

The days of the Han Empire were numbered.

The reason for this would be found not in the barren wastes of the north, but in the

very heart of the empire.

In fact, within the capital and the Imperial Palace itself.

The Imperial Court of Han China was a place of elegance, refinement, and beauty.

Wealthy people in beautiful clothes would mill about its Outer Court while fine music

and incense would have drifted on the air.

But this was also a battleground just as deadly as any in the desert lands to the north.

It was well-known that anyone who had access to the emperor, and who the emperor trusted,

could use their influence to amass a great amount of personal power and wealth.

So, people would stop at nothing to gain this kind of influence for themselves.

The Imperial Palace was one of the most heavily-guarded places on earth.

Very few were ever allowed to even set foot in it, and no men were allowed to remain there

after dark.

There were only two kinds of people who were allowed regular inside access to the emperor.

Throughout the second century AD, they were locked in a bitter struggle over who would

control him.

These two factions were the palace eunuchs and the palace women.

The first of these factions, the eunuchs, were despised and mistrusted by society but

held in an immense amount of trust by the emperor.

A eunuch, simply speaking, is a man who has been castrated.

In ancient China, this was typically carried out as a punishment for adultery or other

promiscuous behaviours.

If he survived his punishment, the newly-castrated man was then taken to the Imperial Palace

and forced to work there as what was called a special attendant, essentially a form of

high-class slavery.

In less-common cases, a man volunteered to become a eunuch in exchange for the secure

position in the palace staff.

There were a number of reasons why eunuchs were prized as Imperial servants.

One reason was the sexual jealousy of the emperors.

With multiple wives and consorts, it was considered too risky to have uncastrated male guards

and attendants in their vicinity.

But another reason was the paranoia of the emperors.

It was commonly believed that since a eunuch couldn't produce a son and heir, he would

be less inclined to use his influence to amass personal power.

Crucially for the later history of Han China, this belief turned out to be very mistaken.

The use of eunuchs in China as the servants of rulers goes back to at least 3,000 years

ago.

But in the Later Han Dynasty, their use as palace attendants increased dramatically.

Eventually the Imperial Court would be home to more than 2,000 eunuchs.

They acted as fetchers and carriers, bodyguards, nurses, butlers, maids, and cooks.

They were virtually the only men that a young emperor would meet until he became an adult.

Because of this privileged access to the Inner Court, these thousands of eunuchs soon formed

a kind of shadow government within the Imperial Palace.

The second faction was the palace women, and more specifically, the Empress Dowagers.

An Empress Dowager was the wife of an emperor who had died.

While her husband had been alive, she had enjoyed a supreme position in the Royal Court,

the focal point of adoration and influence.

But once the emperor was dead and his body was interred in the stone tombs on Beimang

Hill, the Empress Dowager’s position became incredibly insecure.

In order to maintain her influence, she would need to be clever, and to gather allies around

her.

In the polygamous society of early Imperial China, an emperor could have a number of wives,

and this meant that the court could soon become quickly overpopulated with Empress Dowagers,

each of them fighting and jockeying to maintain their influence.

These two factions, the eunuchs and the Dowagers, fought as much within their groups as between

them.

Empress Dowagers were constantly poisoning each other and their children, and several

were put on trial for attempting to use witchcraft against another.

Meanwhile, the eunuchs plotted against each other endlessly.

But over the next century, these two groups would sink their teeth into every emperor

of China.

The result was that the emperor become just another chess piece in this complex and deadly

game.

The emperors of the second century were not chosen for their skill or popularity, but

simply for how easy they would be to control.

For this reason, these emperors were very often children.

One extreme example of this is the fifth emperor of the Later Han Dynasty, the Emperor Shang.

He was a newborn baby who was crowned in the year 106 AD at an age of little more than

100 days old.

His mother was a Dowager Empress, wife to the previous emperor.

All of her other children had died in mysterious circumstances, quite probably murdered by

other jealous Empress Dowagers.

Now, the tiny Emperor Shang was her best hope at maintaining her status at court.

If her surviving child could be emperor, then her position was assured.

We have detailed records about what was involved in the pomp and ceremony of a Chinese Imperial

coronation.

We can imagine that the drums and gongs, the marching soldiers, the music and the chanting

of ceremonial words all going on around the oblivious newborn emperor as he lay in his

crib with his tiny fists balled, crying in fear and confusion.

As usual, the new emperor was gifted with a sceptre carved of jade, and the ancient

legendary sword known as “the sword that slew the snake”, which had belonged to the

first Emperor Han Kau Tsu.

Then the crowd would have burst out in rapturous cries, shouting “Ten thousand years! Ten

thousand years!” as the baby wailed and screamed in the centre of the great hall.

But the Emperor Shang would rule for only a matter of months before he also died.

His causes of death unknown, but they are not hard to guess.

The fifth Emperor of the Later Han never even reached his first birthday.

Two decades later in the year 125, it was the turn of the eunuchs.

They led a successful coup to replace another Empress Dowager and her son, and put the ten-year-old

Emperor Shun on the throne.

They were a little more successful, and the Emperor Shun reigned for nineteen years.

But when his son was crowned at two years old, he died mysteriously after only six months

on the throne.

These are just two of the countless examples of intrigue, murder, and plotting by these

two factions that turned the Imperial Court into a slaughterhouse throughout the second

century.

In the rare instances when an emperor reached adulthood, they were encouraged to stay away

from the business of actually ruling.

Instead, they were usually directed to a life of indolence and pleasure.

As the second century wore on, and weak young emperor followed weak young emperor, the power

of these two factions only increased.

But it would ultimately be the eunuchs who would truly seize the reins of power.

In the year 159, a group of eunuchs at court were even granted royal titles.

Seven years after that, university students in Luoyang took to the streets to protest

against the corrupt officials in the government.

At the advice of the eunuchs, the emperor had all of the students involved arrested.

One county magistrate named Li Yun even submitted a petition urging the emperor to curb the

eunuch’s power.

In this letter, he asked what many in the empire must have been thinking.

"Is the emperor turning blind?"

The emperor responded by having Li executed.

Soon, a group of twelve eunuchs controlled virtually everything that happened in the

Imperial Palace.

This inner faction was led by four individuals.

One popular song written around this time mocks the enormous power that these eunuchs

had gathered.

Zuo can reverse heaven's decision.

Ju sits by himself without match.

Shu is a lying wolf.

Tang's power is as prevalent as the falling rain.

Meanwhile, outside of the insular world that the Imperial Palace had become, the fabric

of the empire was truly beginning to come apart.

A number of problems plagued the Han Chinese throughout the second century.

One of these was the continued presence of northern nomads on the empire’s borders.

The empire had beated the Xiongnu a second time, but now to their dismay, a new group

known as the Xianbi had swooped in to occupy their lands.

This new group was every bit as powerful a challenge as the Xiongnu had been, as the

Book of Later Han recalls.

Since the Xiongnu have fled away, the Xianbi have become powerful and prosperous and have

occupied their former territory.

They can claim a hundred thousand soldiers, skilled and strong, and their ideas and understanding

are steadily increasing.

They also have renegades from Han to serve them as masters of strategy; in the sharpness

of weapons and the clash of horse, they are more dangerous than were the Xiongnu.

But it wasn’t until the reign of the Emperor Ling that the true disintegration of the Han

Empire began.

Ling was a model specimen of the kind of young, lazy ruler that had become the norm for Imperial

China.

He came to the throne at the age of 12, put in place by one powerful Empress Dowager.

The Emperor Ling was brought up by the eunuchs at court, now led by two named Zhao Zhong

and Zhang Rang.

They had so much influence over his upbringing that the Book of Han recalls the young emperor

making this statement.

"Regular Attendant Zhang is my father and Regular Attendant Zhao is my mother."

When he came of age, the Emperor Ling was more inclined to spend time with his palace

women than actually run the state.

He especially enjoyed creating roleplaying scenarios to engage in with his beautiful

consorts, as recorded in the Book of Later Han.

The emperor ordered a market set up in the harem apartments and had all his women trade

there.

They robbed and fought one another and the emperor dressed as a peddler, joined with

the crowd, and drank wine and feasted with them.

Ling was also financially irresponsible, and increased the burden of taxation on the people

to fund his lavish lifestyle.

The emperor was in the habit of laying by money and treasure for himself.

He arranged that all valuable goods from the empire and all tribute sent in from the commanderies

and kingdoms went first to the Inner Palace.

He took a share for himself and called it his commission.

Hatred of this corruption spawned peasant rebellions which quickly emptied the Imperial

Treasury.

Increasingly strapped for cash, the empire began offering minor titles and positions

to its wealthiest citizens in exchange for payment.

This was a short-term measure to fund the armies that were needed to put down the rebellions.

But since the rebellions were in protest against corruption in the first place, this policy

had the effect of pouring gasoline on a fire.

Matters were made considerably worse by the Emperor Ling who started selling high political

offices for money.

Even the position of Chief of Police in the Imperial capital was put up for sale.

This policy severely damaged both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of the Han civil service.

Corruption now trickled down to every level, from the Royal Court to the lowest officials,

as the Book of Later Han recalls.

During the reign of Emperor Ling, the inspectors of provinces and the heads of commanderies

and kingdoms were greedy as jackals and tigers, oppressing the people in most cruel and ruthless

fashion.

Most of these rebellions were easily put down, but as the decades wore on, along with the

simmering intrigue in the Imperial Court, the rebellions got worse.

Some of these became truly enormous.

Perhaps the worst of these was the rebellion of the Qiang people.

The Qiang were an ethic minority who lived in the mountainous regions of the Tibetan

Plateau in a province known as Liang, an arid and rocky place in the northwest of China.

Liang has its back to the Tibetan mountains in the west and south, and stares out into

the Gobi Desert to the north.

It was the gate to the Hexi Corridor and the staging ground for caravans setting out through

the deserts.

The Qiang were a hardy people who herded yak and lived in fortress villages in the stony

hills, cultivating narrow plains along creeks and mountain terraces.

They built strong houses from granite fieldstones and tall, narrow stone watchtowers to defend

from attacks.

The first Qiang rebellions were put down easily by the empire, but they were only the first

in a long line of revolts that would be a thorn in the side of Imperial China for the

rest of the Han Dynasty.

By the middle of the second century, the Qiang rebellions had reached such a pitch that the

empire was considering extreme measures, measures that we today would recognise as ethnic cleansing,

as this letter from one general to the emperor shows.

If I have 5,000 cavalry and 10,000 foot-soldiers, with 3,000 carts for baggage, in three winters

and two summers, I can break these people and settle them.

The emperor gave his permission for the campaign, and a year later, the general wrote back triumphantly.

After just one year, with less than half the money expended, the remnant enemy are reduced

to ashes and are on the point of total destruction.

These cruel reprisals against the empire's ethnic minorities only hardened the hearts

of the common people.

Before long, the state was locked in a number of rolling insurgencies in the west, which

combined with the peasant rebellions in the east to further sap its strength.

Combined with these were also a new kind of rebellion, one that the Chinese authorities

were completely unprepared to deal with.

These were the devout religious crusades of the Yellow Turbans.

Religion in China around this time is a complicated subject.

In the Royal Court, the most influential ideology was Confucianism.

Confucianism wasn’t exactly a religion - more a series of guidelines about how a society

should be ordered and run.

But in the countryside, religious beliefs were extremely diverse from region to region.

This extract from Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian gives you a sense of this

variety.

The shamans from the region of Liang worshipped such deities as Heaven and Earth, the Heavenly

Altar.

Those from Qin worshipped the Five Emperors, the Lord of the East, the Lord in the Clouds,

the Arbiter of Fate, the Bringer of Fire, and so on.

The shamans of Qin worshipped the gods below the hall, Ancestor of Shamans, and the Giver

of Gruel.

Since about 500 BC, a new religion had also risen up among the peasants in the countryside;

the religion of Daoism.

Unlike Confucianism, Daoism looked to nature rather than human beings as the source of

morality.

It was a vision of a human society that conformed to the Dao, or The Way, the essential unifying

element of all that exists.

Around the year 180 AD, about twelve years into the reign of the Emperor Ling, a Daoist

religious order was formed known as the Taiping Sect.

It was led by a man named Zhang Jiao, who claimed he had the power to heal the sick.

The historian Yu Huan regards these practices with particular contempt.

Such procedures did nothing to cure sickness; they were simply false and evil.

Petty fellows, however, stupid and confused, were only too eager to follow such teachers.

It wasn't long before several Imperial officials became concerned about the dedication that

Zhang Jiao inspired in his followers.

They suggested that the empire should act to crush this new cult.

But Emperor Ling, occupied with his harem women and hunting, did nothing.

But the religious zealot Zhang Jiao was in fact planning a rebellion.

He was preparing his followers to rise up and topple the entire Imperial Order.

This Daoist mystic had named 36 of his followers as military commanders.

He set up a shadow government ready to take over, and even plotted with two eunuchs in

the palace to overthrow the emperor.

When the plot was discovered, the emperor realised too late how much power this mystic

had gained, and ordered his arrest.

The followers of Zhang Jiao immediately took up arms.

They took local garrisons by surprise and swept through the country, capitalising on

the growing resentment people held for their rulers.

Each member of this rebellion wore a yellow piece of fabric wrapped around their head,

and so they became known as the Yellow Turban Rebellion.

The rebellion would ultimately prove a failure.

The empire’s armies swept into the countryside and put it down with enormous force.

Zhang Jiao was eventually killed in the year 184, but the rebellion had a number of lasting

effects.

The first of these was that the common people no longer trusted the empire to protect them.

Villages and towns that had been plundered by the Yellow Turbans now formed their own

militias in order to defend themselves.

Local governors took on greater powers, and the central power of the empire began to falter.

Another effect was the growing influence among the army of a company known as the Liang troops.

These were the soldiers that had spent their whole careers up in the tough mountain lands,

crushing the constant rebellions of the Qiang people.

They were battle-hardened, remorseless, and brutal in their methods.

Now they were being used not against ethinc minorities like the Qiang, but against the

empire’s own Chinese peasants in the depths of their heartlands.

The Liang company became feared not just among the peasants, but among the other soldiers

in the Imperial Army, too.

They began to feel the power that came from that fear.

One of the generals leading these Liang troops was a man named Dong Zhuo.

He is remembered to history as a fearsome tyrant, a butcher, and a sadist.

He would be the final nail in the coffin of the Empire of the Han.

When reading about the meteoric rise of Dong Zhuo, it’s hard not to draw comparisons

with the figure of Julius Caesar who died on the other side of the continent.

Like Caesar, Dong Zhuo believed in the ruthless application of power, and he was a man who

understood how power really operated.

Dong Zhuo was born in Lintao in Liang province, that same arid, rocky land where the Qiang

people refused to bow to the empire.

It was an unforgiving landscape that gave birth to this unforgiving man.

As Dong Zhuo grew up, he would have seen many rebellions put down with brutality.

As a youth, he was strong and showed an immediate talent for violence.

He excelled in horseback archery and in his early twenties joined an elite unit of cadets

known as the Guards of the Feathered Forest.

These were one of the units tasked with guarding the emperor.

He spent some months in the Imperial capital, and it’s here that Dong Zhuo must have got

his first taste of the power and prestige of the emperor, and perhaps it's here that

he first dreamed of one day getting a morsel of that power for himself.

Less than a year into his time in the capital, in 166 AD, another Qiang rebellion burst out.

He was sent back to his homeland along with the other Guards of the Feathered Forest to

crush those who defied the empire.

The campaign would have been bloody and brutal; burning down villages and doling out collective

punishments to civilian populations.

We don’t know the exact details of Dong Zhuo’s involvement, but we do know that

he sufficiently impressed his superiors that he was rewarded with 9,000 rolls of fine silk.

Never one to miss an opportunity to increase his men’s loyalty, Dong Zhuo insisted that

the silks should be shared with every one of his soldiers.

In the early 180s, when the Yellow Turban Rebellion sprang up, Dong Zhuo was put in

charge of a large and battle-hardened army of those most feared Liang troops.

For his services during that campaign, Dong Zhuo was given the title “the general who

smashes the cowards”.

He was offered a position as the governor of a large province, but he refused.

His power had now grown to such an extent that he dreamed of even larger things.

He returned to the rocky hills of Liang province along with his army, and continued to exercise

their brutality on the Qiang people.

The power that Dong Zhuo held over the Liang troops seems to have worried some people at

the Imperial Court.

At one point, they summoned him to the capital in order to take up office as the minister

steward.

This was a promotion, but it was also clearly designed to remove him from military command.

Astonishingly, Dong Zhuo refused, writing back to the emperor that his men would not

allow him to leave.

My Huang-jong auxiliaries, they hold onto my carriage and refuse to let me leave.

These Qiang and other non-Chinese have evil hearts and the nature of dogs.

I cannot bring them under proper discipline, but I shall stay to keep them quiet.

Later, and getting a little desperate, the government tried again.

But once again, Dong Zhuo refused.

I have received your heavenly favour and held military command for ten years.

My officers and men of every rank have long been close to me.

They appreciate my generous care and are always ready to obey my orders.

I beg to take them with me to the north, to assist in the defence of the frontier.

Although wrapped up in the usual polite language, this was a clear affront to the Imperial authority.

It shows that even at this point, Dong Zhuo knew that his army’s loyalty belonged to

him, and it’s easy to see why.

Dong Zhuo had led his soldiers for years now, out in the remotest parts of the empire.

They had committed atrocious acts of violence on his behalf, and he was also the one in

charge of paying them and feeding them.

After a while, these men must have begun to look on him as a kind of father figure.

Just like Julius Caesar with his Gallic legions, these Liang troops now owed their loyalty

not to the empire and its weak succession of child kings, but to the man who rode at

the front of their army.

Whatever he ordered them to do, they would carry out without question.

In the years to come, this combination would spell doom for the fragile order of the Han

Dynasty.

During the final years of the reign of Emperor Ling, the Book of Later Han records a number

of dark omens beginning to appear.

In the second month on the 7th day, there was an eclipse of the sun.

In the summer, on the 11th day, there was an earthquake.

In the sixth month, a black emanation resembling a dragon came down in the Eastern Court when

the emperor was present.

In the autumn, a dark rainbow appeared in the courtyard of the Jade Hall.

The emperor immediately summoned his wise men and councillors, but their advice was

not encouraging.

They were asked how these omens and strange occurrences might be halted.

One replied, “When Heaven sends a rainbow, all the world is angry and all within the

seas is in confusion.

A period of four hundred years of government is reaching its end.

Now, a gang of concubines and eunuchs have combined to dominate the court, and they cheat

and deceive your celestial intelligence.

I wish your majesty might be hard-hearted enough to get rid of these evil associates."

When the emperor heard this, he is said to have simply turned his back and sighed.

These wise men were put in prison.

They were later exiled and the palace eunuchs arranged for them to be assassinated on the

road.

By this time, the eunuchs were despised by just about all the people of the empire.

The wealth they had amassed was staggering, and it was now widely known how easily they

could manipulate the emperor, as the Book of Later Han remembers.

The eunuchs built great houses for themselves, rivalling the Imperial Palace.

On one occasion, the emperor wanted to climb the Observation Terrace of the Palace of Perpetual

Peace, but the eunuchs were frightened he would see their mansions.

They sent harem official Shang Dan to say, "The Son of Heaven must never climb high,

for if he does so, his people will be impoverished and scattered."

From this time on, the emperor never climbed a tower again.

In the year 189, the Emperor Ling became critically ill.

He died later that year, and there was the typical power struggle between eunuchs and

Empress Dowagers, which finally resulted in the crowning of a 13-year-old child as emperor.

But he wouldn’t make it through his first year.

Later that year, a group of military commanders saw their chance to rid the empire of the

curse of the eunuch advisers.

Among these commanders was the ruthless tyrant of Liang, the fearsome General Dong Zhuo.

When he received the message asking him to become part of the plot, Dong Zhuo responded

with glee.

The Regular Attendant Zhang Rang and his eunuch fellows have corrupted and disrupted all within

the seas.

Though it is painful to burst an abscess, it is better than a malignant tumour.

I now sound the bells and drums of punishment and march to Luoyang.

I ask permission to clear away all evil and wrongdoing.

Dong Zhuo arrived outside the capital of Luoyang in time to see flames rising over the city’s

Southern Palace.

His co-conspirators had already struck, storming the city.

The eunuchs were slaughtered in their mansions, along with many young attendants, killed simply

because they hadn’t yet grown beards and were therefore mistaken for eunuchs.

Stories are even recorded of palace officials stripping off their clothes so that the soldiers

could see that they were not castrated.

Other members of the government fled the palace and went into exile.

One group of eunuchs tried to kidnap the boy emperor Shao and his brother, and tried to

flee into the hills, but Dong Zhuo’s soldiers caught up with them.

The eunuchs killed themselves by jumping into a river, and the two princes were brought

back to the capital.

This was a military coup and Dong Zhuo was now the true power in the empire.

Three days after capturing Luoyang, Dong Zhuo deposed the young Emperor Shao.

He was thirteen years old, only a few years from becoming a man in his own right, and

at that point, he may have become difficult to control.

Instead, Dong Zhuo set his younger 8-year old half-brother on the throne, crowning him

as the Emperor Xian.

He would be the last emperor of the Han age.

After the coronation of the new 8-year-old emperor, Dong Zhuo forced his older brother

to drink poison.

Then, he issued this chilling command to the Royal Court.

Any person who seeks to impede the grand design will be dealt with by military law.

The corrupt rein of the eunuchs had been replaced with a military tyranny.

The golden age of the Han Empire was finally coming to a close.

The actions of the warlord Dong Zhuo caused outrage among the lords and nobles of the

empire.

As he sat in the city of Luoyang, with the boy emperor in his clutches, dozens of China’s

formerly independent kingdoms declared their independence once more.

Slowly, a resistance began to form against the usurper.

This resistance was started by a man named Yuan Shao, who camped with his army on a crossing

of the Yellow River, north of Luoyang.

He sent out word that he intended to fight the tyranny of Dong Zhuo.

He was soon joined by his brother and other nobles from the previous regime, and by the

Chinese New Year of the year 190, their forces were swelling.

Their tents would have spread out, bright and colourful across the plains, and soon

they began to pose a real threat to the usurper holed up in the capital.

Dong Zhuo knew that he could not hold Luoyang against an all-out assault.

As the rebel forces grew ever more powerful, he decided to take a drastic action.

He would flee west, back to the ancient capital of Chang’an.

He would take all of his hardened Liang soldiers and most of Luoyang’s civilian population

with him.

As he left, he would burn the Imperial capital to the ground.

Dong Zhuo’s men burst into the city’s palaces and temples, into the government offices

and the houses of its people.

They looted and burned, and stole everything they could lay their hands on.

They sent men out into the countryside to loot and burn in the towns and villages, too.

Dong Zhuo even sent one of his subordinates, a man named Lu Bu, to tear open the tombs

of the Han emperors on the hills of Beimang, and to despoil them of their treasures.

The vast Imperial libraries of Luoyang also went up in flames.

Some books were written on fine silk, and the illiterate soldiers took them to use as

screens, scarfs, and umbrellas.

Dong Zhuo ordered Luoyang’s library in the eastern pavilion to be set ablaze.

It had once taken 2,000 carts just to transport the empire’s store of books from Chang’an

to the new capital.

But after the destruction of Dong Zhuo, the books that survived could barely fill seventy.

More than 96% of the empire’s entire collection of books were destroyed in a matter of hours.

Dong Zhuo had the great bronze statues at Luoyang melted down and turned into coins.

Since these were of a poor quality and not properly marked with the official stamps,

it resulted in all of China’s copper currency becoming devalued, and the economy went into

freefall.

According to the Book of Later Han, Dong Zhuo destroyed everything within a distance of

a hundred kilometres outside of Luoyang.

When the Emperor Guangwu had restored the Han Empire at the start of the first century,

he had announced that he would rule under the sign of fire.

But now it was fire that tore through the Imperial capital’s palaces, through the

ornate pleasure gardens and libraries, through the homes and workshops of its people.

The fires of Luoyang would have lit up the sky for days.

The rebel lords camped on the river crossing realized what was happening too late.

They now marched on the Imperial capital, but when they reached it, they found only

a desolate ruin.

No large buildings were left standing in the city, and the whole land was covered in a

layer of ash like a dusting of snow.

There was barely anywhere to shelter.

Dong Zhuo had escaped with the Emperor Xian, and he had burned the empire's capital to

the ground.

When Dong Zhuo reached the old capital of Chang’an, he set up an Imperial Court and

attempted to govern what was left of the empire.

Moving back to the old capital had solved some of his immediate problems, but it was

still not a strong position.

For one thing, Chang’an was more isolated than Luoyang had been.

Dong Zhuo had hoped that being closer to his home of Liang province would help him, but

there, the Qiang rebellions had burst out again, and made those lands all but ungovernable.

There was barely any economy left to speak of, and Dong Zhuo's rule depended on the vast

stores of treasure he had looted from the ruins of Luoyang.

He sent a constant stream of raiding parties out into the neighbouring provinces to bring

back whatever they could steal.

He was essentially a pirate emperor.

Meanwhile, half the country was up in arms against him.

Quickly, those around him began to realise how untenable their situation was.

Some accounts of this time paint a lurid picture of Dong Zhuo.

They describe him holding macabre banquets where the main entertainment was the sight

of prisoners of war being tortured to death, even boiled alive.

It’s said that while all the other guests were put off their food at the horrific spectacle,

Dong Zhuo alone ate hungrily while his prisoners screamed.

Some of these stories are likely later fabrications, but it is difficult to know for sure.

Dong Zhuo's love of feasting meant that he put on a great deal of weight, and he soon

became famously large.

Dong Zhuo soon became paranoid, and he built a vast personal fortress for himself on the

Wei River, 90 km from Chang’an.

He stocked his fortress with 30 years worth of supplies, and spoke in confident tones

about this insurance policy.

If things go well, I shall be master of the empire.

But even if I fail, I can hold out here in comfort and die of old age.

This would not turn out to be the case.

It's here that the final comparison with Julius Caesar should become apparent.

On the 22nd of May, in the year 192, one of his bodyguards, a man named Lu Bu, decided

that enough was enough.

He plotted with a number of other generals under Dong Zhuo and decided on a course of

action.

When Dong Zhuo was on his way to inspect his troops one morning in his chariot, Lu Bu and

the co-conspirators struck.

They drew daggers and stabbed Dong Zhuo, and he later died of his wounds.

Lu Bu and the other plotters followed up this act by killing all of Dong Zhuo’s family

and supporters, both in Chang’an and in his fortress on the River Wei.

Dong Zhuo’s body was left in the street, and it’s said that his killers mocked him

by putting a candle wick in his belly button and lighting it.

He is said to have been so large at the time of his death that the candle burned for days

on the fat of his stomach.

The villain of this chapter of Chinese history had been defeated, but the destruction he

had caused could not be undone.

The boy Emperor Xian, by that point only 11 years old, passed between the hands of the

various warlords who fought for control of Chang’an after Dong Zhuo had died.

Early in the year 195, two of these rival chieftains burned down the Imperial Palace

at Chang'an while fighting over who would control the capital.

Now, both of China's Imperial cities lay in ruins.

Later that year, at the age of 14, the Emperor Xian managed to escape Chang'an, sneaking

through the gates in disguise with a select few attendants.

They fled back across the country, travelling by ox cart, evading the roaming bands of bandits

and the raiding parties of the warlords that were even now beginning to tear China apart.

The historian Wei Shu recalls that on this journey, the child emperor no longer held

any respect among the men who guarded him.

When the Son of Heaven met with his ministers, common soldiers hid in the bushes to watch,

pushing and jostling one another to make a laugh.

When he finally reached his once beautiful home of Luoyang, the Emperor Xian must have

experienced something similar to the feeling described by the poet Ts'ao Chih, which opened

this episode, when he crested the hills of Beimang and saw the blackened ruin of the

Imperial capital stretch out beneath him.

By this point, Luoyang had been a ruin for five years.

Brambles and ivy would already be growing over the blackened stones of the city’s

palaces.

The young Emperor Xian and his attendants tried to move back into the ruins of the palace.

They made some repairs to a small part of the Imperial residence, rendering them just

about habitable, kicking among the broken stones and heaps of ash, the human remains

still scattering the palace halls, and the blackened skeletons of the buildings.

Thick mats of thorns grew among the wreckage of the buildings.

The emperor’s attendants spent their days foraging for wild grains among the ruined

buildings.

Some of them starved and others were killed by hungry, lawless people who were still trying

to eke out a living among the ruins.

This tragic situation continued for a year until eventually a warlord named Cao Cao arrived

and rescued the child emperor.

By this time, the ruler of all the Chinese, the holder of the Mandate of Heaven, must

have looked like any other soot-blackened orphan wandering around the ruined streets

of Luoyang.

This General Cao Cao made one last attempt to reunify China under the restored name of

Han, and he came close.

But he was defeated at the Battle of Red Cliff in the winter of the year 208.

The Battle of Red Cliff involved around 300,000 soldiers on the waters and the banks of the

Yangtze River, and it has been called the largest naval battle in history.

Cao Cao’s failure confirmed the end of the Han Dynasty.

China was now divided into three kingdoms and a new age of history began.

The Emperor Xian was treated fairly by the victors.

He was made a duke, and lived out his life in peace and comfort.

The young boy emperor, the last of the Han, died peacefully at the age of 53.

The medieval writer Luo Guanzhong, in his medieval historical epic known as the Romance

of the Three Kingdoms, summarises this period of Chinese history in the following way.

The empire, long divided, must unite; long it united, must divide.

Thus it has ever been.

The Han Dynasty had been a remarkably successful ancient empire.

But it was brought down by the corruption of its politicians and the power struggles

in its Royal Court.

Today, it gives its name to the largest ethnic group in the world, the Han Chinese who, at

1.3 billion people, make up nearly a fifth of the world's entire population.

The divided realm of China would one day reunite under a new emperor, but that is a story for

another day.

The ruins of Luoyang would stand in the fields below the Beimang Hills, overgrown with thorns,

for decades before anyone returned to repopulate it.

The poet Yang Xuanzhi paints a beautiful picture of what the ruins of Luoyang must have looked

like after the fall of the Han Dynasty.

The inner and outer walls had collapsed.

The palaces and chambers had fallen down.

The monasteries and temples were reduced to ashes.

The pagodas and stupas were in ruins.

The walls were covered with mugwort.

Lanes were lined with thorns.

Wild beasts burrowed in overgrown stairways.

Mountain birds nested in courtyard trees.

Vagrants and herd boys lingered in the avenues.

Farmers and old tillers hunted broomcorn millet by the twin gateways.

More than half a century after the burning of Luoyang, the poet Zhang Zai visited Mount

Beimang where the tombs of the great Han kings had stood for centuries.

But what he found there was only a series of ruins.

Dong Zhuo’s men had destroyed many of the tombs and stolen their treasures, while grave

robbers during the years of chaos had seen to the rest.

The walls of the mausoleums had crumbled, animals had made burrows between the fallen

stones, and children now played among the ornate carvings.

On Beimang, how the graves join one to another.

I would ask whose graves these are.

All say they are of lords of the Han House.

At the end of the dynasty, destruction and chaos arose.

Robbers and thieves were like wild dogs and tigers.

The earth was despoiled by more than a handful.

In the inner corridor, the secluded doors have been opened.

Precious gems have been pilfered and stolen.

The funerary park and resting chamber have become wastes.

There are no segments left of the surrounding walls.

On the tomb pathways climb boys and youngsters.

Foxes and hares burrow within them.

Overgrown with weeds, they have not been swept.

The abandoned mounds are all ploughed and tilled.

On them, commonfolk tend their gardens.

Sad and sorrowful, I lament the distant past.

The ruins of the Han Dynasty stood empty and broken in the fields, a testament to the greatness

of former ages, and to the passing transience of all things.

I want to end this episode with some extracts from some of my favourite ancient Chinese

poems, known as the Nineteen Pieces of Old Poetry.

They likely have a number of different authors, but tradition typically attributes them to

the first-century Han Dynasty poet named Sheng.

These poems are melancholy meditations on the transience of things.

As you listen, try to imagine what it must have felt like to watch the peace and prosperity

of your lands torn apart by corruption and greed.

Imagine seeing the life you’d known, destroyed by the hunger of warlords who profited from

death and destruction.

Imagine watching the vast stores of the Imperial libraries, centuries of accumulated knowledge,

going up in flames before your eyes, and watching the leafy city of Luoyang burning, its flames

licking at the night sky.

Imagine seeing the once-great capital of a mighty empire now reduced to nothing but ashes

and smoke, as an age of 400 years comes crashingly, devastatingly, to a close.

The autumn winds shake the hundred grasses.

On every side, how desolate and bare!

Prosperity and decay each have their season.

The Eastern Castle stands tall and high.

Far and wide stretch the towers that guard it.

The whirling wind uprises and shakes the earth.

The four seasons alternate without pause.

The year’s end hurries swiftly on.

I drive my chariot up to the Eastern Gate.

From afar I see the graveyard north of the wall.

Beneath lie men who died long ago.

Black is the long night that holds them.

Thousands of years they lie without waking.

In infinite succession light and darkness shift, and years vanish like the morning dew.

Man’s life is just a visit.

Mourners in their turn were mourned.

The dead are gone and with them we cannot converse.

The living are here and ought to have our love.

Leaving the city-gate I look ahead and see before me only mounds and tombs.

The old graves are ploughed up into fields.

The years of a lifetime do not reach a hundred.

Yet they contain a thousand years’ sorrow.

Cold, cold the year draws to its end.

I go and lean at the gate and think of my grief, and my falling tears wet the double

gates.

I want to go home, to ride to my village gate.

I want to go back, but there’s no road back.

There’s no road back.

Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

I’d like to thank my voice actors for this episode, Claire Hynes, Shem Jacobs, Alex Peaty,

and Jake Barrett Mills.

Special thanks also go to Meng Wang of the Norwich Mandarin Learning Center, for allowing

us to hear the sounds of ancient Han era poetry.

I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what

you thought.

You can follow me at PaulMMCooper, and if you’d like updates about the podcast, announcements

about new episodes as well as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the

podcast at Fall_of_Civ_Pod, with underscores separating the words.

This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon.

You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you help keep this podcast ad-free.

You also let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording, and editing to get the

episodes out to you faster, to make them longer, and to bring as much life and detail to them

as possible.

I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading on to patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast

or just Google Fall of Civilizations Patreon.

That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

For now, goodbye, and thanks for listening.