The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (12 page)

THE THREE KINGDOMS OF CHINA

Death toll:
34 million missing

Rank:
25

Type:
failed state

Broad dividing line and Major state participants:
Wu vs. Wei vs. Shu

Time frame:
189–280 CE

Location:
China

Other state participants:
Han (before), Jin (after)

Who usually gets the most blame:
eunuchs, Cao Cao

Another damn:
Chinese dynasty collapsing

The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been . . .

—opening lines of
Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Story in One Hundred Words or Less

As the Han dynasty grew more corrupt, peasant revolts unleashed chaos. Warlords carved up the empire among themselves. From this turmoil, three kingdoms gradually emerged:

1.
The Kingdom of Wei, led by the devious Cao Cao (pronounced “tsow-tsow”)

2.
The Kingdom of Wu, led by the ambitious Sun Quan (pronounced “soon-chew-ann”)

3.
The Kingdom of Shu, led by the virtuous Liu Bei (pronounced “lyoo-bay”)

Over the next century, the Three Kingdoms fought each other in shifting alliances. Heroes rose and fell. Finally, China was reunified.

R3K

The era of the Three Kingdoms has a special place in Chinese culture as a kind of Trojan War, Wild West, and Camelot all rolled into one. It was a conveniently mysterious time into which any saga could be dropped without a lot of backstory. It was a violent, chaotic era when men made their own destiny, when a person’s moral strength was tested in the crucible of war, when adventure was just down the road or over the next hill. Eventually, in the fourteenth century during the Ming dynasty, Luo Guanzhong bundled all of the accumulated stories together into
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
, one of the three
*
most important novels in Chinese literature.

In Chinese culture, a name from the era of the Three Kingdoms will likely spark memories of a character from the novel rather than the real historical individual. Cao Cao is a scheming villain. The Zhang brothers who founded the Yellow Turbans are sorcerers and con men. Sun Quan’s sister Sun Shangxiang is the archetype of all tomboy princesses who are surprisingly skilled in the martial arts. Guan Yu, companion and blood brother of Liu Bei, was posthumously promoted to Chinese god of war, so you just
know
he displayed some awe-inspiring martial prowess in
Romance
.
¹

As with most historical novels, the characters from
Romance
interact much more directly than they probably did in real life, all having rich personal friendships, loves, and vendettas to drive the story forward. They can be divided into heroes and villains more neatly than real people usually can be. The story is consistently popular; the 2007 film
Red Cliff
directed by John Woo and based on events from the Three Kingdoms is the highest-grossing film in Chinese history.
²

Now let’s back up and see how this age of chaos unfolded.

The Beginning: Yellow Turban Rebellion (184–188 CE)

The first version of the Han dynasty had fallen to Wang Mang (see “Xin Dynasty”) because imperial in-laws held too much power, so when Liu Xiu (Emperor Guangwu) restored the Han dynasty, he tried something different. This time the emperor surrounded himself with eunuchs, who were (literally) cut off from all family connections and presumably would be loyal only to the emperor. Unfortunately, in practice, the eunuchs proved even more selfish than the imperial in-laws because they had to enjoy their power
right now
, rather than bank it away for their children. During the reign of Emperor Ling (156–189 CE), a clique of palace eunuchs, the Ten Regular Attendants, controlled the government and looted the empire for their own personal gain.

At the time, China was in the grips of a deadly epidemic, until a team of wandering Taoist healers, Zhang Jiao and his brothers, developed a cure. Considering the state of medicine in this era, if their cure actually worked, then the disease may have been imaginary or something that ordinarily went away on its own. Maybe their cure was a placebo or just a rumor. There’s even a slim chance it was some esoteric folk wisdom that is now lost. In any case, as the brothers traveled throughout the empire tending the sick, they accumulated a large, grateful following. They listened to complaints of suffering and injustice, and they offered hope. In time they became leaders of a large secret society of discontented commoners. Passwords and rituals bound them together, and every member recruited more members from trusted friends and neighbors.

Finally the Zhang brothers rose up against the tyrannical power of the palace eunuchs. For identification in battle, the rebels wore yellow headscarves (traditionally but misleadingly translated into English as “Yello
w Turbans”). They scored tremendous success in the beginning, defeating at least three major armies thrown against them.

Other revolts erupted in the wake of the Yellow Turban success. The Five Pecks of Rice Rebellion (so called because that was the initiation fee for membership to the secret society) established a theocratic kingdom in Sichuan in 184. Although this kingdom was destroyed rather quickly, the movement eventually turned into the Way of the Celestial Masters, a Taoist cult that has fluctuated in and out of respectability across Chinese history.

Within a year, however, the main Yellow Turban uprising had been beaten down and a half-million Chinese were dead, including the Zhang brothers.
³
Independent bands lingered, and every time it looked like the last of them
was crushed, another insurgency would erupt somewhere else. This finally ended when the last 300,000 armed rebels (along with civilian dependents, reportedly a million people in total) surrendered to the Han general Cao Cao, who kept this force under arms as a special unit under his own command.

The End of the World

In 189 Emperor Ling died without a direct heir, but Ling’s widow, the empress regent, and her brother He Jin, the army commander, elevated one of Ling’s relatives as Emperor Shao. The Ten Regular Attendants opposed the new emperor, so Shao summoned He Jin and the army to the capital at Luoyang on the Yellow River plain to scare them into obedience. As the army camped outside Luoyang, the Ten Regulars forged an imperial order instructing General He Jin to meet with his sister in the palace. Once he was away from his army, the eunuchs had him ambushed and killed. They displayed his head from the city walls to frighten the army, but this only made the soldiers angry. The army stormed the city and massacred all of the eunuchs, depantsing every man they found who wanted to be spared so they could look for genitalia.
⁴

With leaderless soldiers and pantless bureaucrats running amok in the capital city, chaos spread throughout China. General Dong Zhuo pulled his army off the northern frontier and moved to Luoyang, defeating everyone who stood in his way. He replaced Emperor Shao with Shao’s younger brother, ruling as Emperor Xian. More armies converged on the capital to drive away Dong Zhuo, who burned Luoyang to the ground and retreated to the secondary capital at Chang’an. Within a year, Dong Zhou was assassinated by an ambitious subordinate, who kept Emperor Xian as a hostage and a pawn in the civil war that was sweeping across China.

By now, all of the large armies that had been raised to put down the Yellow Turbans had turned on each other. At first, two types of contenders fought for control of China. Landowning nobility raised peasant armies to quell local rebellions and ward off other ambitious aristocrats. Soon, however, these amateur armies were bumping up against the professional armies led by career officers who had recently been stationed on the frontier. Most of these conflicts ended in favor of the professionals, and soon the civil war was entirely in the hands of rootless armies instead of the nobility.

There are five possible operations for any army. If you can fight, fight; if you cannot fight, defend; if you cannot defend, flee; if you cannot flee, surrender; if you cannot surrender, die. These five courses are open to you, and a hostage would be useless. Now return and tell your master.

—Sima Yi to Gongsun Yuan’s emissary,
Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Red Cliffs

After a few years, Emperor Xian escaped his captors and took refuge with Cao Cao, which conferred legitimacy on his war band. By 207, Cao Cao had beaten a string of rivals and united the Yellow River plain under his puppet emperor. In an earlier time, this would have been enough to count as a reunification of China, but the Chinese people had been expanding southward over the past few centuries, and these new frontier territories remained outside his control. These southern states combined their armies to repel any expansion southward by Cao Cao.

When Cao Cao invaded in 208, he met the allied armies of the south at Red Cliffs, a rugged gorge of the Yangtze River. For a couple of days, the two forces watched each other across the river. Finally Cao Cao piled his army into boats and tried an amphibious assault against the opposite bank, but halfway there, the wind shifted, blowing his boats back to his side of the river. The enemy now launched fire ships on the new wind; these collided with Cao Cao’s boats and spread fire and chaos throughout the invasion force. With his fleet destroyed, Cao Cao abandoned the Yangtze and returned north.

China’s split now solidified into the Three Kingdoms:

1.
Cao Cao’s Wei Kingdom on the Yellow River plain inherited most of the Han imperial apparatus.

2.
Sun Quan’s Wu Kingdom occupied most of southern China along the lower Yangtze River valley and toward Indochina.

3.
Liu Bei’s Shu Kingdom was tucked into the broad Sichuan basin around the upper Yangtze River.

Each of these kingdoms claimed to be loyal to the emperor and the legitimate continuation of the Han dynasty, unlike the other two territories run by rebellious usurpers. Liu Bei of Shu was the only warlord with actual roots in the imperial family, although it was a distant connection at best.