Liang Dynasty

Common cause and old loyalties

formationDrafted from Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881)

Xiao Yan, a cadet of the fallen Qi ruling family who had led the revolt against it, founded the Liang dynasty in 502 under the personal style Wuti. He overcame his rivals with little real difficulty, and Boulger credits his own moderation with disarming much of the hostility that might otherwise have gathered against a new ruler who had, after all, just helped destroy the family he himself belonged to. One early episode captures the mood exactly: a minister of the old regime chose to starve himself rather than eat the new emperor's bread, and Wuti, more philosophical than offended, remarked, "Is it not from Heaven, and not from court notables, that I have received the crown? What reason then induced this miserable personage to commit suicide?" Boulger reads the incident as evidence of how thoroughly loyalty to a fallen house could outlast the house itself, even among men the new ruler had done nothing personally to wrong.

National Palace Museum, Taipei · Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881) · Unknown · Public domain

An idealist's early stumble

Wuti's own instincts ran toward reform rather than conquest, and his very first substantial act as emperor - abolishing capital punishment outright - showed both the appeal and the danger of that instinct. The policy produced, in short order, a marked rise in crime, and Wuti was forced to suspend what Boulger calls a well-meant but very injudicious experiment. It was an inauspicious start for a reign that would go on to last forty-seven years, longer than any other ruler across the troubled span between the fall of the Han and the rise of the Tang - and it set the tone for a monarch who would spend his own long rule more concerned with governing well than with expanding what he governed.

The tiger of Hofei

peakDrafted from Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881)

For most of Wuti's long reign the Liang held their own against Northern Wei without ever quite defeating it. The wars that opened in 503 produced real heroism on both sides and, in most seasons, more credit to Wei than to the Liang. In one encounter alone more than fifty thousand imperial soldiers were reckoned slain; Wuti's generals lost heart afterward and would not come out of their entrenchments, even when the Wei army rode round their camp displaying a dead man's head dressed in a widow's cap and chanting a doggerel challenge naming them cowards by name. They escaped only under cover of a night's heavy rain.

Mengqi at Chouyang

The one clear exception came at Chouyang, a fortress entrusted to one of Wei's most capable lieutenants, Ginching. During his temporary absence with part of the garrison, Liang generals learned the town was undermanned and appeared before its walls in force, carrying the outer defences without a blow. At that point, with the place almost in their grasp, Ginching's wife Mengqi came out onto the ramparts and restored the garrison's sinking courage herself - arming the townspeople, strengthening the gates, and holding the defence together by the inspiration of her own presence until the besiegers gave up and withdrew. It was the single Liang success of an otherwise one-sided season; Ginching himself won a battle in the field at the same time, but had to abandon his own siege of the fortress of Chongli when the Hoaiho River flooded his camp.

Chongli, and the tiger of Hofei

In 507 Wuti put two hundred thousand men in the field under Weijoui, the one general who had reliably won him battles, and the war returned to Chongli. The Wei general Yuenyng laid siege to it with three hundred thousand men and, confident in the bridges he had thrown across the Hoaiho to keep his divided army in communication, held his ground even as Weijoui's relief force approached. It was a fatal confidence. Weijoui saw the weakness at a glance, filled vessels with combustibles, and sent them upriver by night against the bridges on which Yuenyng's whole position depended. By morning the Wei army was split in two with no way to reinforce itself, and the Liang assault that followed put the southern division to the sword or the river. Weijoui and his lieutenant then turned on the northern division and broke it in a second, harder battle. More than two hundred thousand Wei soldiers died, and their standards and baggage became the victors' spoil - a defeat severe enough that a captured challenge song had already named Weijoui, half in fear, "the tiger of Hofei."

It was the single most complete victory either side won in the whole war, and Wuti did nothing with it. Implored by Weijoui to press the advantage, he chose instead to rest on the triumph and return to his own religious devotions, calling his army home and letting Wei recover from a blow that could otherwise have broken it for good. Several years of peace followed Chongli, and Wuti spent them on the education and internal government of his own subjects rather than on the war his own best general had just as good as won for him.

National Museum of China, Beijing · Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881) · Xiao Yi (attributed) · Public domain

An aged prince's dream

contractionDrafted from Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881)

Age did not improve Wuti's own judgment. Northern Wei broke apart into two rival, warring halves not long after Chongli, and it was in the aftermath of that collapse that Wuti dreamt a dream promising him the long-contested province of Honan - and was weak enough to treat it as a genuine sign. He ordered his troops to seize what he believed had been supernaturally decreed his; the army was defeated in the field and driven back across the frontier in confusion, and with it went whatever was left of the scheme of conquest Wuti had once had Weijoui's own unused victory to build on. Boulger's verdict is blunt: "an aged prince, broken in power as in health, hastening to the fall which was inevitable."

Hou Jing

That fall came from within his own ranks. In 549 Hou Jing, one of Wuti's vassals, renounced his allegiance, published an indictment of the emperor, and marched on the capital. Wuti's palace guard offered only token resistance before the eighty-year-old emperor found himself a captive of the very soldiery he had once commanded.

Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881) · Scott Semans · CC BY 3.0

"It was I who raised my family and it is I who have destroyed it," Wuti is recorded as saying. "I have no reason to complain." He did not long survive the humiliation - Boulger records that the shock told on his shattered constitution and he found relief within days, though another account, Du Halde's, has him dying after his own attendants refused him a request for honey to ease a pain in his throat. Either way, a reign of forty-seven years, the longest and, in Boulger's own judgment, the most praiseworthy of the whole period between the Han and the Tang, ended in captivity in his own palace at the hands of a man he had once trusted.

Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881) · Remixia · CC0

All is over

endDrafted from Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881)

What followed Wuti's death unraveled fast. His third son Wenti, installed by Hou Jing as a puppet, was murdered by his own minister within three years; Wenti's brother Yuandi overthrew Hou Jing in turn and had his body publicly displayed, only to be besieged himself within three more years by the general Chen Baxian.

Yuandi's own surrender came with a gesture that outlasted the man who made it: he broke his sword and burned a library of a hundred and forty thousand volumes, declaring "all is over! All my skill in war and letters henceforth becomes useless to me" - and was killed shortly afterward, his capital handed over to plunder.

National Museum of China, Beijing · Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881) · Xiao Yi (attributed) · Public domain

The last Liang ruler, Jingdi, Yuandi's own ninth son, held the throne two more years before Chen Baxian murdered him in 557 and founded his own dynasty in the Liang's place - closing a fifty-five-year span in which one exceptional forty-seven-year reign was followed, within a single decade, by the same cycle of murder and usurpation that had ended every dynasty before it.