The Everlasting Empire (12 page)

Exaltation of the emperor to the position of the Frue Monarch had immediate political consequences. First, it tremendously elevated the monarch above other human beings, including his closest aides. The new superhuman status of the emperor was duly buttressed by the newly designed imperial title, with its explicit sacral connotations (
huangdi
, “emperor,” meaning literally “the August Fhearch”); by the new imperial vocabulary; by the emperor’s propaganda; and, most notably, by his megalomaniac construction activities, traces of which can still be seen at the site of his staggering burial complex, where the famous Ferracotta Army was unearthed. Second, in his capacity as the Frue Monarch, the First Emperor was expected to rule and not just to reign, which he duly

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did—fervently traversing his new realm, ascending sacred mountains, reshaping the imperial pantheon, and managing the everyday affairs of the state, reportedly to the degree of self-denial.
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Third, and most consequentially, the emperor declared himself the Sage, boldly appropriating this most prestigious designation, which had theretofore been applied exclusively to legendary and semilegendary rulers of the remote past, but never to living monarchs. Having declared himself Sage, the First Emperor radically redefined his position vis-à-vis members of the intellectual elite. Gone was the age of passive and deferential sovereigns for whom intellectuals were respected teachers: now the emperor held not just political but intellectual authority. This was the beginning of a new era in the history of China’s rulership.

By his bold appropriation of the position of the sage True Monarch, the First Emperor had decisively empowered himself and future rulers vis-à-vis their entourages and society as a whole. This may explain why, despite persistent criticism of the First Emperor’s excesses, his model of the emperorship remained intact for more than twenty-one centuries. Nonetheless, rulers of subsequent dynasties did not miss another lesson from Qin’s short history: namely, the swift disintegration of the empire under an inept and intemperate Second Emperor (r. 209–207 BCE). This rapid collapse of the first imperial dynasty had taught future statesmen and rulers that excessive monarchism may be no less damaging to the social fabric than the absence of a powerful sovereign. The Qin model was alluring, but some of its details had to be modified.

The modification of the Qin model was subtle but nonetheless substantial: it can be summarized as renewed awareness of the difference between the institutional power of the throne and the power of an individual ruler. Nominally, every emperor from the Han dynasty on was conceived of on the model of the First Emperor as an embodiment of the True Monarch and the Sage; yet practically, most emperors learned not to take their sagacity at its face value. They duly adopted a more modest stance, disclaiming their abilities and endorsing a more cooperative and collégial attitude toward their aides than the First and Second Emperors had done.
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And yet, the persistence of fundamental aspects of the Qin model meant that any monarch who took his sagacity literally could impose his will on his subjects in the most resolute and ruthless way. This added yet another dimension to the ongoing tension between the monarch’s institutional omnipotence and the courtiers’ persistent desire to avoid Qin-like abuses of power.

The appropriation of the imperial title by the king of Qin in 221 BCE marks a watershed in Chinese history. Thereafter, despite tremendous variability in the personal qualities and actual power of individual monarchs, no major changes were made in the institution of emperorship, of

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which Qin—as both admirers and bitter critics of dynastic rule recognized—served as a fountainhead.
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At this point it may be useful, then, to shift from a chronological discussion to a more generalized one, in which I shall analyze interactions between the institutional and individual powers of China’s monarchs throughout the imperial millennia.

THE INSTITUTIONAL POWER OF THE MONARCHS

The paradoxical coexistence of the image of omnipotence and an abundance of passive and weak emperors explains modern observers’ highly contradictory assessments of Chinese emperorship. A scholar can choose to focus on despotic rulers, who mobilized millions of people for controversial military and civilian projects, who indulged in a life of luxury amid overall poverty and devastation, who terrorized their subjects and tortured or executed outspoken officials, and who defied any attempt to rein in their whims. Such a scholar may well concur with Montesquieu’s identification of the Chinese emperor as a paradigmatic despot: “a single man, unrestrained by laws and other rules, dominates everything by his will and caprices.”
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Another scholar might focus on those emperors who were completely overpowered by their officials, unable even to change the status of their concubines or leave the capital without having difficult bargain with restive courtiers; hapless sovereigns who knew nothing of the real situation in their realm and had to humbly rubber-stamp memorials and policy proposals, the content of which they rarely could fully understand. This scholar might well agree with Ray Huang that the emperor was a nullity on the throne, a “living ancestor,” who “remained the Son of Heaven only because everybody believed that he was.”
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Yet these ostensibly contradictory assessments are reconcilable. In what follows, I shall suggest that the paradoxes of emperorship can be resolved through the distinction between the institutional omnipotence of the monarchy and individual limitations on the emperor’s power. I shall analyze first the institutional aspects of imperial power and demonstrate that its omnipotence was not just a meaningless convention but a potentially powerful stabilizing force. Next, I shall focus, conversely, on the limited power of individual monarchs and show how invisible “checks and balances” prevented imperial China from sinking into the abyss of senseless autocracy.

My analysis of the emperors’ institutional authority will start with their ritual supremacy rather than with their administrative powers. This choice is not arbitrary; actually, it reflects the understandings of many Chinese thinkers from Xunzi on. Indeed, as we shall see below, while all of the emperor’s endless administrative tasks could be relegated to his underlings, his ritual supremacy normally remained inviolable; any infringement of it was viewed as a major step toward usurpation of the

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throne. Not incidentally, one of the most brilliant historians and political thinkers of the imperial age, Sima Guang (1019–1086), opted to start his magnum opus,
The Comprehensive Mirror to Aid the Government
(
Zizhi tongjian
), by explaining that the preservation of the emperor’s ritual power was the most essential precondition for proper monarchic rule:

In the office of the Son of Heaven, nothing is more important than
ritual… After, all, in the vastness of four seas, among multitudes of
people, [all] are ruled by a single person. Even among those whose
power suffices to sever the norms and whose knowledge exceeds that
of their age, none will not hurry to serve—is not it due to the basic
norms of ritual? … Unless [the ruler] is as evil as [the paradigmatic
tyrants] Jie and Zhou[xin], and [the subject] is as benevolent as [the
founders of the Shang and Zhou dynasties,] Tang and Wu, one to
whom the people flock and who is decreed by Heaven—one should
preserve the separation between the ruler and the minister even at the
expense of prostrating [oneself and accepting] death!
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Sima Guang’s message is clear: ritual distinctions between the ruler and his subjects allow the monarch to preserve his authority even vis-àvis the most powerful of his underlings; only under truly exceptional circumstances can these distinctions be ignored and the ruler overthrown. This statement is surely prescriptive rather than descriptive, but insofar as it comes from the single most important imperial historian, it deserves some scrutiny. What does Sima Guang mean by “ritual” here? In the context of ensuring the monarch’s authority, this term cannot be reduced to its surface referent, the manifold regulations that distinguished the emperor from his subjects, such as sumptuary rules, specific forms of address to the ruler, and the ceremonial display of reverence to the monarch, i.e., the performance of obeisance. Surely, all these regulations were essential in displaying the emperor’s majesty; but there were also deeper aspects of this majesty, what I would refer to as the sacredness of the throne. This sacredness, the elevation of the emperor to superhuman heights, was arguably the single most important dimension in ensuring the emperor’s authority.

My discussion of the sacredness of the throne will not focus on what is often conceived of as its immediate manifestations, such as the emperors’ position as the exclusive intermediaries with the supreme deity, Heaven, or their occasional acquisition of divine features borrowed from Buddhism, Daoism, or other creeds (e.g., presenting themselves as Buddhas, bodhisattvas, Daoist deities, or the Buddhist Wheel-Turning King, Chakravartin).
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While these divine features of the emperors, especially their role as Sons of Heaven, surely bolstered the monarchs’ authority, my interest lies in a deeper dimension of the emperors’ sacredness. I be

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lieve that the emperorship as an institution possessed a sort of sacral aura, the acceptance of which by all social strata can be interpreted as a Chinese variant of “civic religion,” which transcended the diverse creeds and faiths of emperors, courtiers, and the populace at large. This aura turned any emperor ex officio into a semidivine person, sharply differentiating him from other human beings.

To understand the sacredness of the emperor, we should distinguish him from Chinese gods, although at times among the lower social strata this distinction may have been blurred.
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Unlike most Chinese gods the emperor was not understood to possess individual superhuman qualities nor posthumously to join the popular pantheon. Rather, his godlike position approximated certain features of the God Almighty of the Abrahamic religions, with its aura of singularity and omnipotence. In what resembles a conceptual inversion of medieval Europe—where multiple loci of secular authority were tolerated, but there could be only one God, one Church, and one legitimate pope—in China, conversely, multiple gods and creeds were legitimate, but only one legitimate monarch could exist. The first biblical commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” is perfectly applicable to the emperor of China, whose subjects were free to worship any deity but could not possibly contemplate simultaneous recognition of two competing emperors. Among segments of the elite, the imperial institution could at times generate truly religious zeal, as is exemplified in mass loyalist suicides—China’s equivalent of religious martyrdom in Western Eurasia.
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Further resembling the Jewish God, the Chinese emperor remained aloof, mysterious, inscrutable, and invisible for the vast majority of his subjects. He was generally enclosed behind the walls of the Forbidden City; and even when he left it for ritual or other purposes, he was usually not supposed to intermingle freely with his subjects (although some rulers did so—often incognito). Normally, no statues or paintings of the emperor decorated temples or individual dwellings;
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his name was tabooed; his image was not reproduced on coins; and individual communication with him was difficult even for the majority of officials, not to speak of the public in general. This position might not have ignited strong religious feelings in the populace, but it evidently strengthened the emperor’s mysterious majesty.

The concept of the emperor’s sacredness permeates multiple aspects of Chinese culture: from rituals to laws, from court life to popular legends and tales. The emperor’s body, his seals, his edicts, his ritual paraphernalia—everything was sacrosanct. Among the “ten abominations”—the gravest and most unpardonable crimes under imperial law—we find “great irreverence” (
da bu jing
), a term that refers, among other acts, to stealing the emperor’s sacrificial utensils, mislabeling his medicine, or

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mishandling his chariot. Whenever an imperial edict, written in vermillion ink on yellow silk, was read by an imperial envoy, the recipient—be he a fearsome general, a proud tribal chief, or a meritorious official—could not but prostrate himself before the emperor’s supreme power, even if he knew that the edict had been drafted by a hated regent or, worse, by a eunuch secretary acting on behalf of a child ruler.
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Any display of irreverence signified open rebellion and could have the gravest consequences.

The emperor’s sacredness pervaded his entourage and officials; occasionally, it could empower the inner court or the emperor’s in-laws. It subverted other sociopolitical norms, including gender and age hierarchies. The immortal eighteenth-century novel
A Dream of Red Mansions
tells of an imperial concubine who is permitted to visit her natal home. During the visit, her father, a stern high official who would never talk to his progeny as equals, let alone as his superiors, turns to the daughter from behind the door curtain:

Your subject, poor and obscure, little dreamed that our flock of com-
mon pigeons and crows would ever be blessed with a phoenix. Thanks
to the imperial favor and the virtue of our ancestors, your Noble High-
ness embodies the finest essence of nature and the accumulated merit
of our forebears… His Majesty, who manifests the great virtue of all
creation, has shown us such extraordinary and hitherto unknown fa-
vor [by allowing his concubine to visit her parents] that even if we
dashed our brains we could not repay one-thousandth part of our debt
of gratitude. All I can do is to exert myself day and night, loyally carry
out my official duties, and pray that our sovereign may live ten thou-
sand years as desired by All-under-Heaven.
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