The Five Dynasties

A body in the lake

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

Zhu Wen served first under Huang Chao, the rebel leader whose uprising had already broken the Tang court's authority beyond real repair, before defecting to the imperial side once he judged Huang Chao's cause was not going to outlast him. From there his rise followed the pattern the whole next half-century would repeat: military command, growing personal following, and the steady conviction that the throne he was defending might as well become his own.

The eunuchs, the rival, and the emperor

Zhu Wen filled every post he could reach with his own men and marked himself as indispensable by exterminating the court eunuchs who had run the palace for a generation - "only thirty old men and children" spared, by his own reckoning. His one serious rival, the general Li Keyong, held the field against him for years without either man managing to finish the other. In 904 Zhu Wen forced Emperor Zhaozong to move from Chang'an to Luoyang, where he could be more easily watched, and kept him there under close guard. When the emperor tried to poison Zhu Wen rather than continue as his prisoner, Zhu Wen survived the attempt and, within months, had him murdered outright.

A banquet by the water

The official story blamed mutinous soldiers for the murder, a cover Zhu Wen undermined by executing his own son as the supposed culprit - a punishment that convinced nobody who was paying attention. He was not finished. Every surviving prince of the Tang imperial family still at Luoyang was invited to a grand banquet on the shore of a lake; once they had been fed, soldiers appeared and threw every one of the guests into the water. The senior officials who might still have opposed him were rounded up next, marched in chains to the Yellow River, and drowned there in turn.

The throne, taken by ceremony rather than battle

Zhu Wen installed one of the dead emperor's youngest sons as a placeholder, who abdicated after two powerless years rather than wait to become the next victim. In 907 Zhu Wen accepted the abdication, took the name Taizu, and founded his own dynasty under the name Liang. The ceremony that made him emperor changed nothing about the substance of what he already controlled - only its name, and the fact that no Tang prince remained who could plausibly claim it back from him.

A dynasty in someone else's name

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

Li Cunxu inherited his father Li Keyong's rivalry with Zhu Wen along with his father's army, and spent more than a decade grinding down what Zhu Wen's own dynasty had built. In 917, with the Yellow River frozen hard enough to bear the weight of his infantry and cavalry, he crossed it without loss and stormed the small forts the Later Liang had built to hold the line. By 923 he had collected the largest army of his career, proclaimed his intention of taking the throne outright, and given his own dynasty a name before he had finished conquering it: Tang, in deliberate tribute to the house Zhu Wen had destroyed, which Li Cunxu declared his ambition to renew rather than merely replace.

A splendid barbarian

The final siege went as badly for the Liang as the preceding sixteen years had gone well for their enemies. Zhu Wen's own successor, cornered in his capital with his ruin plainly inevitable, ordered his own execution rather than wait for the city to fall - "thus terminating also the brief reign of the Later Liangs," which had lasted sixteen years from Zhu Wen's original abdication ceremony. Li Cunxu, having desecrated the Liang ancestral tombs to seal the victory, then did to his own reign roughly what Zhu Wen had done to his - governed well enough at first, then let the palace's luxury undo the discipline that had won him the throne. His own soldiers, disaffected by a leader more interested in spectacle than in the camp discipline that had made his name, eventually forced the gates of his palace at Luoyang; a poisoned cup of sour milk, reportedly sent by his own empress, finished what the assault had started. He was thirty-five.

The reign that actually worked

His adopted brother and best general, Li Siyuan, took the throne after suppressing the disorder Li Cunxu's death set off - not by seizing it outright, but by first governing simply as "Governor of the realm" until order was restored, and only then accepting the title he had already been offered and had twice refused. As Emperor Mingzong, from 926 to 933, he governed the most stable of the five dynasties' many short reigns: successful campaigns against the Khitan, the encouragement of scholarship, and - during his reign specifically - the first practical use of woodblock printing for the mass reproduction of books, more than five centuries before Caxton brought the same technology to England. He even released captured Khitan officers as a gesture of goodwill, against the advice of ministers who warned that everything they had learned in China would be turned against him one day. Mingzong judged the risk worth taking. It was, by the standard the other four dynasties set, as close to enlightened government as the whole interregnum ever managed.

Father Emperor

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

Mingzong's death in 933 unwound in barely two years everything his own reign had held together. His son reigned one troubled year before a rival general, Li Congke, drove him from the throne with the backing of the palace itself. Li Congke did not enjoy his own victory long: within a year a rival ambition caught up with him too, and rather than face capture he retired with his family to a tower in his own palace and set it on fire, burning with them inside rather than surrender. "So expired," in Boulger's own words, "the brief dynasty of the Later Tangs."

A throne built on a foreign army

Shi Jingtang, the man who had first urged Li Congke toward the throne and then turned against him once that throne became inconvenient, took power in the vacuum - but not on his own strength. He owed his position to Khitan military backing, and he paid for it on Khitan terms: addressing the Khitan ruler as "Father Emperor," ceding border territory in the north, and enduring the protests of ministers who found the arrangement a disgrace to Chinese dignity. Shi Jingtang's own answer to the objection was practical rather than proud - the Khitan, one of his own ministers pointed out, were no longer the unlettered barbarians of an earlier age; they had absorbed enough Chinese territory and Chinese civilisation to retain the hardy military edge of their steppe origins while matching the sophistication of the court they now dominated. A war between that combination and Shi Jingtang's own exhausted state could end only one way.

The vassalage a successor could not stomach

Shi Jingtang's tact held the arrangement together for the seven years of his own reign, at the cost of border cities surrendered and an annual subsidy paid without complaint. His successor and nephew had none of the same patience. Encouraged by ministers who found the whole relationship shameful regardless of the strategic argument for it, the new ruler defaulted on the deference his uncle had maintained - and discovered, when the Khitan ruler retaliated in force, that the shame of the arrangement had been the price of a peace his own army could not actually enforce without it. Besieged, cut off from supplies and finally starved into surrender, he abdicated and retired into private life. The dynasty that had bought its throne with a foreign patron's army lost it the moment it tried to stop paying for the patronage.

Baffling the Khitan

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

The Khitan king who had just finished starving the Later Jin into surrender held the northern capital in person for a short time afterward, weighing whether to rule China directly or install a puppet of his own choosing. He died before he could settle on either course. Guo Wei, left by the dynasty's founder as chief adviser to his son, had already spent the intervening years winning several victories over renewed Khitan incursions from Liaodong - proof that Wei's earlier vassalage had not been the only available answer to Khitan pressure, only the one its own founder had chosen.

A throne offered rather than seized

In the vacuum the Khitan king's death left behind, Liu Zhiyuan - Guo Wei's own patron and a trusted companion of the dynasty that had just fallen - was placed on the throne by what Boulger calls the public voice rather than by any formal act of conquest. It was the closest any of the five transitions came to a genuine consensus choice rather than a naked seizure, though the underlying mechanism was identical to every transition before it: an army, and the men who commanded its loyalty, deciding who would rule next.

Four years, then the same story again

Liu Zhiyuan died within two years of founding the dynasty, and his son Yin Di turned the security Guo Wei's victories had bought him toward "reckless" indulgence rather than governance, in Boulger's judgment - a court squandering exactly the kind of borrowed time none of its four predecessors had ever been given twice. When Guo Wei returned from his own further victories against the Khitan to acclamations that made his own ambitions impossible to keep hidden any longer, Yin Di read the danger correctly and fled his own capital rather than wait for it. He was recognised and killed by some of Guo Wei's own soldiers in a village outside the city before the new reign had even been formally declared. The dynasty Liu Zhiyuan had been carried to by popular acclaim ended, within four years, exactly the way every other dynasty in the interregnum had: an army preferred someone else.

The fifth time

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

Guo Wei ruled only three years before his own death, leaving the throne to an adopted son, Chai Rong (Emperor Shizong), whose brief six-year reign Boulger treats with more sympathy than almost any other figure in the whole interregnum. Chai Rong drew up an ambitious plan to finally expel the Khitan from the territory Shi Jingtang had ceded them two decades earlier, extended Later Zhou's own authority along the Yangtze in a series of real successes, and died before any of it could be carried through to completion. His son, a child, inherited a throne with nothing behind it but a dead man's unfinished ambitions.

A general acclaimed on the march

Zhao Kuangyin had risen through Later Zhou's own service and commanded its army when a threatened invasion - real or manufactured, the sources never entirely settle which - required troops to be sent north from the capital. On campaign, his soldiers surrounded him and made the same declaration that had elevated at least one general before him in this interregnum: the empire needed a master, and no one present was more worthy of the position than their own commander. Zhao Kuangyin returned to the capital and took the throne from Chai Rong's child heir without a battle to settle the question - the fifth time in fifty-three years that an army's acclamation, rather than any rule of succession, had decided who would rule next.

What made the fifth time the last one

Nothing about the mechanism was new. What changed was what the new emperor did with the throne once he held it. Zhao Kuangyin named his own dynasty Song, and spent his reign building precisely the kind of standing, examined, centrally answerable military establishment none of his four predecessors had ever managed to hold in place long enough to matter - converting the same institutional weakness that had elevated five separate houses in five decades into the one problem his own new dynasty was explicitly designed to solve. The interregnum that had begun with Zhu Wen drowning Tang princes in a lake ended with a general who understood, better than any of the men who had taken the same throne before him, exactly why his own throne would not be safe until the trick that had put him on it could never be repeated by anyone else.