Cao Wei

The name of his master

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)formation

Emperor Xian had been a puppet for as long as he had been emperor. Placed on the throne in 191 after a palace massacre that killed ten thousand eunuchs and the general who had opposed them, he passed from the hands of one strongman to the next — first Dong Zhuo, who had installed him and issued edicts in his name until his own overreach made him too many enemies, then Cao Cao, who added military skill and personal courage to Dong Zhuo's appetite for power and gradually gathered every strand of real authority into his own hands. Boulger's verdict on the exchange is blunt: Emperor Xian found that in trading one master for another he had not become more independent, only changed the name of the man who ruled through him.

Twenty years of war for a third of the empire

Others refused to accept Cao Cao's ascendancy without a fight, and two decades of near-constant warfare followed. Yuan Shao proclaimed himself emperor outright and was broken by Cao Cao for the presumption; Sun Quan and Liu Bei carved out separate domains in the south and held them. Cao Cao won almost every battle he fought, and still ended his life in command of only a third of the old Han territory — the other two-thirds split between rivals he could defeat in the field but never dislodge entirely. When Cao Cao died, his position passed to his son Cao Pi in the ordinary course of inheritance, in the year 220.

An abdication with nothing forced about the ceremony

Emperor Xian, apprehensive of what refusal might cost him, abdicated in favour of Cao Pi. There was no battle to force the issue — thirty years of accumulated warlord control had already settled the substance of the question, and the ceremony that followed simply gave it a name. Xian retired to private life with the title Prince of Shanyang, and outlived the man who deposed him. It was, Boulger writes, the ending of "the brilliant dynasty of the Hans which had ruled China for more than four hundred years with splendour and wisdom" — armies that had marched across the breadth of Asia, provinces and vassal states won in every direction, cities and canals and roads that still stood to testify to what the dynasty had built.

What Cao Pi actually inherited

What Cao Pi took possession of was the name of that inheritance and the smallest workable fraction of its substance: the recognised capital at Luoyang, the central and northern provinces, and the diplomatic status that came from being the state every foreign embassy and every claim to legitimate succession had to reckon with first. Two rival princes, in the south and the southwest, held the rest between them, each convinced his own claim to the Han inheritance was the true one. China had not been reunified. It had simply acquired, in place of one fiction of unity, three competing claims to it — and Wei's advantage lay less in strength on any single battlefield than in being the one all the others had to answer to.

A cringing prince

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)peak

Liu Bei, ruler of the southwestern kingdom that styled itself the true continuation of the Han, had no sooner proclaimed himself an independent prince than he turned his mind to vengeance rather than strategy. His target was not Wei, the strongest of the three successor states, but Sun Quan's kingdom of Wu — a personal grudge that his own advisers warned him was the wrong war to fight, since Wei was by far the more dangerous neighbour and an alliance with Wu against it the more sensible course. Liu Bei ignored the advice and invaded anyway.

An alliance bought cheap

The danger forced Sun Quan's hand. Rather than fight Wei and Shu at once, he accepted Cao Pi as emperor and was confirmed in return as Prince of Wu — a cringing posture, and one Sun Quan had no intention of maintaining a moment longer than the immediate crisis required, but it cost Cao Pi nothing and bought Wei a secure eastern flank while its two rivals exhausted themselves against each other. Liu Bei's army pressed to the frontier of Wu regardless, and Sun Quan's general Lu Xun, distrusted by Cao Pi as much as either of his neighbours but proving the better ally than either, held the line through twelve months of neither side willing to strike first.

The night attack

Time favoured the defender. Liu Bei's army, fighting far from home and worn down by inaction, grew dispirited while Lu Xun's forces, fighting on their own ground with a friendly population behind them, stayed fresh. When Lu Xun judged the moment right, he struck at several points at once in a night assault that broke Liu Bei's army outright — his best generals killed or captured, thousands of soldiers dead, the entire baggage train taken. Liu Bei himself barely escaped the field, and died three years later never having recovered from the shock of the defeat, leaving his young son Liu Shan a claim far larger than the power left to sustain it.

What the victory changed, and what it didn't

Cao Pi's response to the news was to raise his demands on Sun Quan at once, and the two former enemies found in Wei's renewed pretensions a stronger reason to set their quarrel aside than either had found in years of open war — the same logic of self-preservation that had produced Sun Quan's cringing submission in the first place, now working to end it. Cao Pi died not long after, succeeded by his son Cao Rui, and it fell to the new emperor to press Wei's advantage on every front still open to him.

Liaodong

Cao Rui's clearest triumph came not against either southern rival but on his own northern frontier, where Gongsun Yuan, King of Liaodong, had grown confident enough in his isolation to defy the court at Luoyang outright. Cao Rui sent a large army under the general Sima Yi to settle the matter. Gongsun Yuan defended himself with real resolution and won an early success, but reinforcement after reinforcement tipped the balance against him; shut up in his own capital, he was killed attempting to cut his way out, and his city was handed over to the victorious soldiers to plunder. The whole of Liaodong became a Wei province, and Cao Rui's reputation stood higher among his neighbours than at any point before or after — though he did not live long to enjoy it. Within days of Sima Yi's triumphant return from the campaign, Cao Rui was dead, leaving an eight-year-old heir to a general his own deathbed instructions had just finished making indispensable.

A dying man's instructions

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

Cao Rui died a few days after Sima Yi's victorious return from Liaodong, leaving the throne to his nephew Cao Fang, a child of eight. His last instructions to Sima Yi asked the general to be as faithful to the boy as he had always been to Cao Rui himself — a request that assumed the loyalty Sima Yi had shown a living emperor who could reward or punish him would transfer intact to an eight-year-old who could do neither.

An emperor who could not yet rule

The years that followed tested that assumption without quite breaking it. Sun Quan, watching the succession of a child as the opportunity he had waited for, attempted to press an advantage while Wei's government was distracted; Sima Yi's arrangements foiled the attempt, and Sun Quan withdrew baffled from the contest. A separate war with the southern kingdom of Shu ended the same way, Wei's frontiers held rather than pushed forward, but held all the same — competent defence rather than conquest, which was as much as a regency government generally manages, and more than most.

A minister who mistook the moment

The one real internal crisis of these years came from inside Wei's own court rather than from either rival kingdom. A minister — Boulger names him Cao Shuang — judged the child emperor's minority the moment to seize the governing power for himself, and moved to displace the arrangement Cao Rui had left in place. Sima Yi curbed him. The sources give the episode little space, which is itself telling: whatever resistance Cao Shuang mounted, it was not enough to threaten Sima Yi's position, only enough to demonstrate that unseating him from the outside had already stopped being a realistic possibility.

What "restoring order" actually meant

Sima Yi died in 252, the same year as his old rival Sun Quan, and his position passed to his son Sima Shi as naturally as Cao Rui's throne had passed to Cao Fang thirteen years earlier — the difference being that no one now needed to ask whether the son would inherit his father's actual power along with his title. Every crisis of the boy emperor's reign had been answered by the same family reasserting the same indispensability, and each time the answer had cost the throne a little more of what it still controlled directly. Cao Fang himself would not survive contact with that arithmetic much longer.

Preparing my tomb

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

Sima Shi did what his father never had: he deposed an emperor outright. Internal disturbances gave him the pretext, and Cao Fang — twenty-one years old by then, no longer the child his regency had begun with, but no more able to govern in fact than he had been at eight — was set aside in favour of another of Cao Rui's nephews, Cao Mao. Sima Shi did not long survive the act; his death passed the family's accumulated authority to his brother Sima Zhao, and the real governing power in Wei remained exactly where it had been, only under a different name.

A war fought for its own sake

The rivalry between Wei and its southern neighbours dragged on through these years without producing a decisive result on either side, until 257, when Sima Zhao's general Wang Ji won a string of victories and took the town of Zhuquan with its garrison of a hundred and fifty thousand men — a heavy blow struck in Wei's favour, and one Sima Zhao made sure was credited entirely to himself. Over Cao Mao's protests, he had himself proclaimed governor of the empire with the title Prince of Jin.

A boy who would not stay a cipher

Cao Mao was not without courage, whatever else the office had cost him. He gathered a handful of companions he trusted enough to confide in, and set out for Sima Zhao's own palace with the plain intention of ridding the empire of an over-mighty subject by his own hand. It was a bold plan, and it failed completely. There was, in the event, a killing that day — but Cao Mao himself was the one killed, not Sima Zhao.

A different commander's answer

Years earlier, in a different theatre entirely, a Wei commander named Zhangde had faced his own version of the same arithmetic and answered it with more room to manoeuvre than Cao Mao ever had. Besieged at the small fort of Xincheng for ninety days by a southern army under Zhuge Ke, his walls breached in numerous places and no relief in sight, Zhangde tricked his besiegers into a hundred-day truce by inventing a law that supposedly pardoned a garrison which surrendered without hope of relief after holding that long — then used the borrowed time to rebuild his ramparts from the ruins rather than to prepare his surrender. Asked what he thought he was doing, he answered plainly: "I am preparing my tomb, and to bury myself under the ruins of Xincheng." Zhangde's ruse worked; the relief he had never really expected arrived in the form of his own besiegers' exhaustion and withdrawal. Cao Mao, cornered in his own palace with no walls left to rebuild and no truce worth inventing, had made the same choice of dying rather than submitting - without anything like Zhangde's luck to survive having made it.

An army which has the reputation of victory

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)end

Sima Zhao lost nothing by Cao Mao's failed attack — if anything it removed the one obstacle still willing to contest his authority directly — and he installed a third of Cao Rui's nephews, Cao Huan, on the throne in his place. The southern kingdom of Shu, still ruled in the name of the Han it claimed to continue, had by then outlived every advantage its founder's early campaigns had won it, and Sima Zhao turned the whole of Wei's military weight against it.

The end of the Han that called itself the Han

The general Deng Ai carried the invasion through with a speed the southern court had no answer for. A council of despair debated the options at Chengdu — some counselling flight, some resistance to the last man — and the southern ruler, Liu Shan, accepted his minister's advice to throw himself on Sima Zhao's mercy rather than fight on. His own son argued for a different ending, that a dynasty on the point of extinction should at least finish with its lives rather than its dignity, but was overruled; Liu Shan surrendered in person while his son ended his own life and his family's in the ancestral temple rather than watch the surrender completed. It is in the son's act rather than the father's submission, Boulger writes, that the last scion of the great house of Han actually vanishes from history. Shu was absorbed into Wei's territory, and Deng Ai wrote to Sima Zhao urging him to press on at once against Wu as well — "an army which has the reputation of victory flies from one success to another" — advice Sima Zhao chose not to take. The conquest of Wu was left for nearly twenty more years.

The sword changes hands one last time

Sima Zhao died in 265, and his son Sima Yan inherited both his father's accumulated authority and his father's patience run out. He deposed the nominal emperor — Boulger names him Yuandi — without ceremony beyond what was needed to make the transfer official, and proclaimed a new dynasty, the Jin, taking the name Emperor Wu in his own right.

What Cao Pi's family had built, and lost, in forty-five years

The rivalry that had once divided the Han inheritance three ways ended in favour of the dynasty Cao Pi had founded — but only for as long as it took one loyal general's descendants to do to the Cao family exactly what the Cao family had done to the Han. Cao Wei had held the recognised capital, the largest population, and the strongest claim to being the empire's actual government for forty-five years. None of that had been enough to keep the throne in the hands that had first taken it, because the same accumulation of trusted, indispensable, generation-spanning service that had made Cao Cao's rise possible in the first place was, in the end, exactly what Sima Yi and his sons had been allowed to build for themselves.