A Concise History of China-Pangu to Puyi - Part 4

Laszlo Montgomery (0:01)

Welcome back, everyone. Thanks for stopping by. Laszlo Montgomery here. This is The China History Podcast, part four today in this concise overview of Chinese history from mythical to modern times. We left off last time with the death of one of China's most celebrated historical figures, Liu Bang, remembered as Han Gaozhu. Like his predecessor, Qin Shi Huang, the first Han emperor also didn't get a chance to reign for too long. Both of those dynasty founders spent most of their adult life conquering the land. And in 221 BC, when he declared the founding of the Qin dynasty, Ying Zheng only ruled for 11 years.

As for Liu Bang, once he became emperor in 202 BC, his reign was even more brief, lasting only seven years.

Now when Emperor Gaozhu was alive, he had a favorite concubine. She was the beautiful consort Qi, also known as Lady Qi. Qi Ji. She had a son with Emperor Gaozhu named Rú Yi. Gaozhu had wanted this son, Rú Yi, as his heir, but backed out after vociferous opposition at court. They were insisting that Liu Ying, his son by Empress Lü, should be the rightful heir. Well, Empress Lü, she never forgot this, nor the fact that the emperor had, throughout their marriage, showed obvious favoritism to his Lady Qi rather than to his empress.

So later, in 195 BC., after Gaozhu was cold in his tomb, Empress Lü moved on concubine Qi and the potential heir Rú Yi.

She had the prince poisoned to death in a rather gruesome and nefarious way, and then she turned her sights on consul Qi.

After all these years, quite a bit of spite and hatred had been percolating in her mind. She had Lady Qi arrested, and then as Sīmǎ Qian gruesomely described, had her taken from the opulent life of the Imperial Palace to the hell on earth that were the Imperial dungeons. There the deceased emperor's favorite concubine sat in chains, her head shaved, wearing prison garb, and spending her days husking rice.

But this wasn't enough. As the Grand Historian wrote, and he should know, since he came only seven or eight decades ex post facto, Empress Liú had her former rival blinded and had her tongue cut out. All four limbs were amputated, and she was made to live in an underground pig pen.

Empress Liú bragged about this at the palace and referred to Concubine Qi as the rénjì, or human pig. When she proudly showed her handiwork to her son, the new Emperor Huì, Sīmǎ Qiān said that he could no longer rule, so affected was he at the sight of what his mother had done to his father's favorite concubine. He lived out the rest of his years on the throne, traumatized at what he had beheld, and went through the rest of his days in a stupor of booze and carnal pleasures and died in 188 BC. The Book of Han, the Han Shu, and the 23 other official histories that followed are filled with these kinds of stories where the worst of humanity is immortalized for all to remember and reflect on.

Emperor Hui died leaving two young sons who became the third and fourth Han emperors, Qiánshào and Hòu Shào. But the real power lay with the regent, their grandmother, the empress dowager Lü. Now despite all the scorn he'd done empress Lü, well she learned a thing or two from her husband, and though she's primarily remembered for her ruthlessness and bloodthirstiness, empress Lü was also a rather capable administrator and ruler.

You remember when Liu Bang was scrambling to stabilize his brand new empire? He had installed these people from his family as princes in various lands. Well as I said, they opposed empress Lü, but she managed to eliminate them one by one and replace them with members of her own Lü family clan. And with the government stuffed with her relatives who watched her back, she continued to rule until 180 BC and died.

She was gone but the Lü's remained. They controlled the central government, the emperor, the imperial finances and the military. But Lü Ché, empress dowager Lü, she was the spider at the center of that web. And with her gone, things began to unravel for the Lü clan.

And with her death, we had the great Lü clan purge, the Lü shirjirju, every authoritarian government's worst nightmare. Everyone from the Lü clan who had enjoyed the good life under their benefactress, the emperor's dowager, Liú, were rounded up and executed. Her grandson, the puppet emperor, Hòushào, was also deposed.

This story of how the Lü's usurped power away from the royal Lü family and the aftermath that followed, served as a warning to later generations who meddled on a grand scale with the royal family. Needless to say, despite the outcome of the Lü clan disturbance of 180 BC and all the blood that flowed in its wake, plenty of relatives of China's future emperors made power grabs whenever, wherever, all the way up until the end.