Northern Wei

Prince of Tai

Drafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)formation

The Toba were one of three wandering Xianbei tribes that had settled, by historical times, in the country between Beijing and Datong and further west again — a minor branch of a people whose more famous relatives, the Murong and the Khitan among them, would go on to found dynasties of their own in the centuries that followed. The Toba's own rise began quietly, as a reward for loyalty rather than a conquest.

A patent, then an empire

In 315 the Jin court, still nominally ruling all of China though already losing its grip on the north, made Ilu — chief of the westernmost of the three Toba tribes — Prince of Tai, the region around modern Datong, in recognition of his services against the Xiongnu and a rival Xianbei people. The grant came with a proper staff of officials, the ordinary apparatus of a Chinese client state rather than a purely steppe arrangement. Three generations later, Ilu's grandnephew Zhaobugen became the first of the family to introduce a reign-period of his own — the formal mark of sovereign rather than merely delegated authority — commanding as many as five hundred thousand Tartars by that point. It was Zhaobugen's grandson, Tuoba Gui, who took the final step: proclaimed in 386 as the first actual emperor of what would be known as the Northern Wei.

What the family already had

By the time Tuoba Gui took the imperial title, his family had spent seven decades building exactly the kind of administration a Chinese patent implied rather than the looser structure of an ordinary steppe confederacy — officials, a fixed seat of government, a chain of inherited authority running cleanly from Ilu through three more generations without the succession disputes that broke so many of the era's other short-lived northern states before they properly began. What the new dynasty inherited, in other words, was not a conquest to defend but an institution already two generations tested, ready to be pointed at the rest of a fractured north.

Root and branch

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

Taiwu came to the throne in the way a dynasty's ablest rulers rarely do: at the end of a costly failure rather than a triumph. His father had invaded the southern Song territories the moment its own founder died, sending his best generals and finally coming in person to press the siege of a small fortress called Houlao, held by an officer named Mao Deci with a resolution that outlasted seven months of everything Wei's army could throw at it. When Houlao finally surrendered, the victors found nothing but a pile of ruins to show for the cost of taking it, and Taiwu's father died soon afterward, worn down by the hardship of the campaign as much as by its disappointment — his one lasting credit the magnanimity he showed Mao Deci once the ruined fortress finally changed hands.

Finishing what the north had left unfinished

Taiwu inherited a throne and an unfinished war, and turned his own reign toward completing what three generations of steppe rivals had left undecided. He absorbed the Liang principality in the west and the Murong state in the east, closing out the last of the rival claimants that had divided the north since the Jin collapse, and pushed Wei's own frontier walls further south than any of his predecessors had managed.

A ruler in two registers

He governed, in the meantime, like a man determined to be taken seriously in both the traditions he had inherited. He encouraged the study of Confucian texts among his officials and set a legal limit of six years on how long any magistrate could hold the same office, a measure meant to keep local government answerable rather than entrenched. At the same time he turned against the Buddhist monasteries spreading through his territory with a severity his Confucian sympathies did nothing to soften: their temples pulled down, their sacred books burned, and those monks who could not escape killed outright. The faith's excesses, his own edict declared, would not be tolerated in Wei — the same errors, in his reading of history, that had helped bring the Han dynasty itself to ruin.

The reckoning he did not finish either

In 450, encouraged by recent successes against the nomad tribes on his own northern border, Taiwu crossed into Song territory at the head of a hundred thousand men, confident the moment had come to settle the account his father had opened and left unpaid. He fared better than his father had, but not decisively: detained for months before a place of no great importance while the Song court gathered its own forces, he eventually withdrew, baffled in his larger object but without having suffered any serious defeat either. Two more engagements followed near the town of Chenching, both costly to each side and neither conclusive. The war that had killed his father settled nothing for his own generation either, and would still be unfinished when the next one inherited it in turn.

A molten image

Drafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)aside?What aside means

Wei's court kept a custom through much of the dynasty's history that Parker calls singular and, so far as the record shows, invariable: the mother of an heir-apparent was put to death as soon as her son was formally named successor. It reads, on its face, as simple cruelty, and Parker offers a more specific explanation without pretending it explains away the horror of the practice itself — a survival, he suggests, of the older Xianbei custom of tracing descent through the mother's line rather than the father's. Once a prince's claim to the throne ran cleanly through his father's house instead, a surviving empress dowager became a rival source of legitimacy the new arrangement had no place for, and the dynasty removed the rival rather than risk it.

Casting the succession in bronze

A second custom governed who might be proposed as empress or heir-apparent in the first place: a molten image of the candidate was cast, and the success or failure of the casting read as an omen of whether the choice was sound. Parker records the practice without elaborating on how often a poor casting actually changed a succession already decided by more ordinary politics — omens of this kind, in most courts that kept them, had a way of confirming what powerful people had already resolved to do.

What the customs said about the family that kept them

Neither practice survived the dynasty's later sinicisation intact, and neither needed to: by the time Wei's rulers had traded their own language, dress and clan name for Chinese equivalents, the older Xianbei logic that had once made a mother's execution seem a political necessity had already stopped applying to a court that no longer reckoned descent the way its own founders once had.

The name Yuan

Drafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)contraction

By the middle of the fifth century, Parker observes, the Toba were "rapidly becoming Chinese in sentiment" — a shift that had been building for generations in small ways and that the dynasty's later rulers began, from the 470s onward, to enact deliberately and in law rather than leave to custom.

Marriage, measurement, and a new calendar

In 483 the court followed Chinese practice and formally forbade marriage between people sharing the same clan name, a rule with no particular basis in older Xianbei custom but a familiar one to any Chinese household. A new calendar had already been introduced a couple of decades earlier with the help of scholars from the old Liang principality Wei had absorbed - proof that the conquered territory's learning was by then being drawn on rather than merely governed. In 476 the ruling house set aside its own clan name, Tuoba, for the Chinese surname Yuan - the same word, by no coincidence Parker is happy to point out, that Kublai Khan would choose for his own dynasty eight centuries later.

The ban that finished it

The clearest single act of the whole sinicisation programme came in 495: an imperial order prohibiting Tartar costume, the Tartar language, and the weights, measures and standards the dynasty's founders had brought with them from the steppe. The emperor by this point drafted his own decrees in Chinese and ordered a search of the realm for ancient books. Clan names were formally regularised for the whole Toba people - what English usage would call a surname - and six of them were singled out as especially aristocratic, in conscious imitation of the old Xiongnu clan hierarchies the dynasty's own ancestors had once lived under.

A court that patronised, and then needed, the faith it had once burned

Even religion, which Taiwu had persecuted root and branch a half-century earlier, found its way back into official favour by degrees rather than by any single reversal - some later Wei emperors patronising one faith, some another, until in 518 an embassy was sent all the way to Gandhara specifically to obtain Buddhist texts. A dynasty that had once burned sacred books to prove its Confucian seriousness was, within two generations, sending ambassadors to Central Asia to replace them.

Two puppets

Drafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)end

A century and a half of unbroken succession — fifteen emperors, Parker counts, from Tuoba Gui's proclamation in 386 down through Taiwu's conquests and the later court's wholesale adoption of Chinese law, language and dress — ended not at the hands of a steppe rival or a southern rival dynasty, but inside the family itself. What no external enemy had managed in a hundred and fifty years, two of Wei's own generals accomplished within a single year.

A dynasty split rather than deposed

In 534 and 535 the Wei court divided into two rival camps, each backing a different claimant and each controlled, in practice, by the general who had raised him rather than by the prince himself. One faction held Chang'an in the west, in the modern province of Chihli's neighbourhood, under a Wei prince whose actual authority belonged to one of the Jumen commanders serving him. The other held Luoyang and Yecheng in the east, in Henan, under a different Wei prince controlled just as completely by the general Gao Huan. Neither side deposed the Wei house outright. Both sides simply kept a member of it on hand to rule through.

What outlasted the family that founded it

The fiction did not last long in either half. Within a generation the sons of each controlling general set themselves up as emperors in their own right rather than continue governing through a Wei figurehead — one line founding the Northern Qi in the east, the other the Northern Zhou in the west — and the Wei name, having governed the north of China for a century and a half and rebuilt itself twice over in the process, from steppe confederacy to sinicised empire, disappeared from the throne it had held since 386 without a single dramatic battle marking the moment it happened. The dynasty that had persecuted Buddhism and then courted it, that had banned its own founders' language in law, ended the same way it had spent its last sixty years reshaping itself: by legal fiction rather than by conquest, until the fiction itself stopped being worth maintaining.