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43 4 The Beginning of the End The Fall of the Han and the Opening of Three Kingdoms ‫ﱠ‬ George A. Hayden Well before the formal beginning of the Three Kingdoms era upon the close of the Latter or Eastern Han in 220, the three kingdoms were already taking shape in the persons of Cao Cao, Sun Quan, and Liu Bei. The tripartite fragmentation of the Han itself was the formation of an uneasy balance of power, a settling of a more chaotic condition resulting from the loss of imperial authority and prestige at an earlier time. The search for an answer to the question of when and how the Han began to fall leads to two kinds of source material and two different approaches to historical fact and interpretation. One type of source is traditional Chinese historiography : Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi) by Chen Shou, Hou Han ji by Yuan Hong, Hou Han shu by Fan Ye and Sima Biao, and Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (Zizhi tongjian) by Sima Guang. The other type of source is historical fiction in the form of Luo Guanzhong’s Three Kingdoms. Traditional Chinese historians have tried to present as much important factual data as possible for a designated historical period and have tended to forego simple explanations; the guiding principle is complexity. Through a mass of events and individuals in annals and memoirs and with the aid of only sporadic commentary by the compiler/author, we are to form our own opinions on historical causes. Even such summarization as can be found tends toward some complexity. An example is Sima Guang’s summary of the decline of the Eastern Han. Six symptoms of moral decline have their start with Emperor He, who reigned from 89 to 105: 1. excessive power in the hands of imperial in-laws 2. indulgence of imperial favorites 3. a lack of standards in reward and punishment 4. open bribery 5. confusion in judging the worthy and the inept 6. a confounding of right and wrong The responsibility for these symptoms, in accordance with Confucian tradition, rests with the emperor; even bribery, if not actually committed by him, was tolerated by him and was in any case the reflection of widespread degeneration beginning at the top. The itemization is not specific, because it covers the reigns of several emperors. Sima Guang’s point is that the first three emperors of the Eastern Han—the emperors Guang Wu (r. 25–57), Ming (r. 58–75), and Zhang (r. 76–88), had such a beneficial effect on public morality that certain conscientious officials of later, more benighted regimes managed to shore up the dynasty in spite of the rot at the highest levels and, but for the absence of a good man on the throne, could have worked miracles. Only with the reigns of the emperors Huan (r. 147– 67) and Ling (r. 168–89) does he use labels of disgust—“stupidity and cruelty,” (hun nüe)—in reference to two rulers who in his opinion went out of their way to favor the wicked and destroy the good. Public anger during this time resulted in the misguided call by He Jin for outside armed help against the eunuchs, which in turn brought the disasters caused by Dong Zhuo, Yuan Shao, and other warlords and the irrecoverable loss of the “great mandate” of the Han.1 Although specific on He Jin’s mistake as the proximate cause of the downfall of the Han, Sima Guang is less specific on the ultimate causes, but he presents more than ample documentation in the body of his history. The concerns of the novelist lie elsewhere: in threading action and speech together into a single line of narrative on the fall of the Han and the rise and fall of the three kingdoms. The line must have a starting point and a conclusion, and this starting point should explain as succinctly as possible how it all began to go wrong. The version of the novel with the title Sanguo zhi tongsu yanyi, hereafter to be called the TS, opens the narrative with the accession of Emperor Ling in 168, the manipulation of power by the eunuchs Cao Jie and Wang Fu, the failed plot against them led by Dou Wu and Chen Fan, and the subsequent domination of the court by the eunuchs, all in a short paragraph of four sentences as punctuated in a modern edition.2 This introduction leaves out...

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