introduction:
Emperor Liu Che of the Han Dynasty was a legendary emperor who adopted a "spontaneous government" style of rule during his reign and established his own "Middle Dynasty", which is extremely rare among ancient Chinese emperors.
Spontaneous and emotional
Liu Che, who is spontaneous and human, acts mostly on feelings and does not take into account the various taboos of the world.
After he first came to power, he heard His close minister Han Yan say that Empress Wang had a daughter in the folk Jin family before entering the palace in her early years, which should be something that the imperial court did not want to publicize and that it was difficult for her son to have glory, but Liu Che complained to Han Yan after hearing it: "Why didn't you say it earlier?" Immediately prepare to get off the car and drive, personally go to an alley in Changling, welcome this eldest sister from the Jin family's home into Beijing, and reward her fiefdom with the title of Xiu Chengjun.
For example, Princess Pingyang knew that he was going to pass by his home, and specially prepared more than ten good family women for him, Liu Che took a fancy to a singer, and soon made her empress. Later, his favored concubines, such as Lady Li and Yin Jiehao, were all born dancers.
Sima Qian once mentioned that the hierarchy was strict at that time, but Liu Che did not care about all kinds of worldly taboos, and he resolutely did what he wanted to do, without considering the opinions of others. Of course, women can freely remarry, and song and dance women are not inferior, but this is the concept of modern people, and the secular world in the Western Han Dynasty must have some scruples about the people's women entering the palace and singing women.
Liu Che's disregard for these worldly things is by no means how advanced his concepts have been, but because of his spontaneous and self-righteous character, and his personal will embodies a resolute and indomitable character in his unscrupulous outreach.
Micro service private visits, to understand the people's feelings
For some reason, Liu Che suddenly became interested in micro-service private business in the fourth year of his presidency. His private Fan kingdom stretched north to Chiyang Palace, west to Huangshan Guan, south to Changyang Palace, and east to Yichun Guan. Liu Chang and the people around him who are good at riding and shooting at a certain temple gate date, come out at night, claim to be the family of the Princess of Pingyang, and the next morning arrive at the south of Zhongnan Mountain to shoot deer fox rabbits.
They often broke crops on horseback and abandoned their horses, and the local peasants did not know who had done it, shouting and cursing, and Du County Order once arranged for people to arrest and detain several hunters, and they showed the imperial officials to prove their identity, so that they could be liberated.
The high-ranking officials such as Yushi knew that Liu Che liked to travel privately, so he asked the capital of the capital to arrange for people to patrol east of Changyang, and let the Right Inner History, who was in charge of Gyeonggi, send people to wait in certain clubhouses. Liu Che felt that this was too much labor and brought trouble to the people, so he asked the Taizhong Grand Master Wuqiu Shouwang and the two people around him to set aside a large area of land to reset the Royal Shanglin Garden in the place where they often traveled privately, connecting it with Zhongnan Mountain, and letting people set aside the uncultivated wasteland around them to compensate the people of Edu.
Seeing the preparatory plan played by King Wuqiu Shou, Liu Che was very happy to praise. Dongfang Shuo wrote a letter of advice on this, in which he said that the construction of the garden would bring about the disadvantages of misguided farmers, bad tombs, and hurting people's hearts. Liu Che read the book of resignation and promoted Dongfang Shuo from the pending bus in charge of the palace's Sima Gate to the Taizhong Doctor, and gave him a hundred pounds of gold, but the plan to restore shanglin court also proceeded as usual.
The young Liu Che seems to be pursuing happiness and recklessly. He took pleasure in micro-walking, and did not care about the influence of the DPRK and the people. Shanglin Garden was the imperial court of the Qin Dynasty, and in the early Han Dynasty, Liu Bang allowed the people to enter the garden for reclamation, and Liu Che is now restored as a place for archery and hunting. He knew that Dongfang Shuo's advice was beneficial to both the country and the people, and he was given money for his promotion, but he was not willing to give up the reconstruction of the old garden. In his view, the pursuit of pleasure embodies the assertion of the king's will, and cannot be abandoned because of the consequences that are difficult to predict.
Liu Che once went privately in micro-service, arrived in Baigu at night, and asked the owner for pulp soup to drink after staying in the guest house, and the man said: "There is no pulp, only urine." Suspecting that the visitor was a thief who had committed a crime, he called some young men to prepare to retrieve him. The hostess saw that Liu Che was in an abnormal state, and dissuaded the man and said: "The visitor is not an ordinary person, he is also prepared, and he must not attack him." Seeing that the man did not listen, he poured it up, and the young people left, and the hostess killed the chicken to cook and entertained the guests.
The next day, Liu returned to Beijing and summoned the hostess to give jin Qianjin, and made her husband Yu Linlang the official Zhongwei. Here, the hostess who bestows the gold is known and reciprocated, but why should the male host who has spoken ill of the man who has spoken ill of him still appoint him? Because Liu Che saw a good, courageous and stubborn personality from him, saw his own shadow, and what was born in his heart was identity and pity.
Replace officials on the grounds that the funeral is not handled properly
In 135 BC, when Liu Che was in power for six years, Empress Dou died, and without the restraint and pressure of the empress dowager, Liu Che's era really began. The chancellor Xu Chang and the imperial master Yan Qingzhai were dismissed from their posts for not handling the funeral well, and Tian Yu and Han Anguo took over the above two positions respectively.
Xu and Yan were the people appointed after the sudden attack on Xingru four years ago, and were supposed to be political supporters of Empress Dowager Dou. Liu Che was suppressed by Empress Dou for several years, and as soon as he took power, he removed Empress Dou's party, showing a courage to act boldly. Due to the feelings of the two people who were dismissed, it is presumable that Empress Dou's affairs will not be slack, but the reason for their dismissal is precisely that Empress Dou's funeral is not done well.
Liu Che got rid of the empress dowager's remnants of the court, and let them bear the notoriety of not doing a good job of mourning, and the good name of the long burial of honored relatives naturally fell on himself, which also showed the young Liu Che's old way of doing things.
Exclude phase power and strengthen imperial power
Marquis Tian of Wu'an was Empress Wang's half-brother, Liu Che's maternal uncle, and a confucian scholar of Tongxing at that time, and after Xu Chang, he was appointed as a chancellor, and should be a political partner who could rely heavily on Liu Che.
However, this was not the case, and they soon became estranged from each other. There are two things that can indicate the cause of this estrangement: Tian Qiao often entered the palace to play, and most of the conversation was half a day, Liu Che basically obeyed, and later Tian recommended officials, and there were cases of promotion from commoners to Ershi. Once, Liu Che listened to Tian Fei's recommendation and said to him, "Is your recommendation finished?" I would also like to recommend some officials. Tian Qiao recommended too many officials, which was to transfer the power of employing people from the emperor to his own hands, and a feeling of extreme impatience and disgust in Liu Che's heart was difficult to suppress at this time.
Another thing, the arrogant and greedy Tian Zong wanted to show the dignity of the prime minister everywhere, and he once asked that a piece of land be allocated to the management department under the Shaofu Bureau for the manufacture of equipment to expand his residence, and Liu Che was angry when he heard this: "Why don't you just take the arsenal!" The arsenal is one of the main buildings of Weiyang Palace, which has always been used as a warehouse for storing weapons, and is also managed by the Shaofu Bureau, but it is a place for the use of weapons to defend the palace, and those who trespass are not guilty.
Liu Che's answer showed that Tian Tian's request had reached a point where he could not tolerate it. He was using his arsenal to warn Tian Yan that he could not go any further down the road of wantonness.
Of course, for Liu Che, Tian Jie was his own close relative, and his mother, Empress Wang, was still there, and his disrespect for the words of this minister in person was due to his straightforward and honest character, and there were no disciplinary measures because of this, but it had clearly exposed the exclusivity of the country's supreme ruling power, which was one of the fundamental characteristics of the autocratic system.
Without Liu Che's dislike and restriction of Tian Che, there would inevitably be Tian Che's control and replacement of Liu Che, and it was in this way that the monarchy and the power of the phase occurred in a substantive conflict in the superficial dependence of the authoritarian system.
Establish a "China-DPRK" and strengthen the centralization of power
Liu Che was undoubtedly a spontaneous, resolute, and daring monarch, although young, he would not survive in the control of the emperor, nor was he willing to do that kind of endless power struggle, he was unwilling to sit in the old system, so in the short political practice, while attracting a large number of talents, consciously or unconsciously constructed a set of political operation system with personal confidants as the main body and direct obedience to the emperor, that is, the so-called "China Dynasty", which was related to the administrative system headed by the minister, including the taiwei and the imperial master, as the skeleton. That is, the so-called "foreign dynasty" to compete.
The expansion of imperial power and the strengthening of centralized power in Liu Che's court were accompanied by the growth of the "Middle Dynasty".
Liu Che had previously recruited a number of talents from all over the world, some of whom had given official positions, such as Dong Zhongshu, but more importantly, he had given titles such as Waiting, Chang Shi, and Scattered Horse. Such as Yan Zhu, Zhu Maichen, Sima Xiang, such as Dongfang Shuo and so on.
Shizhong was a close subordinate of the emperor, who followed the emperor as an advisor, they were the emperor's confidants, and they often acted as the emperor's emissaries, acting in place of the emperor. The guests who were recruited all started as virtuous and literary men, and they were very angry. Liu Che once organized them to discuss the state's grand plan, and zhuang zhu and others debated with the ministers of the imperial court, and the two sides criticized each other with righteous words, and the courtiers were embarrassed many times.
Many of these courtiers were later reused by the imperial court, and some even held the position of chancellor. In addition to the land of virtuous literature, Liu Che also made some foreign relatives and other close confidants become servants, giving them the titles of general, grand sima (大司馬), Taizhong Dafu (太中大夫), and giving them the titles of lieutenant, making them officials of the central institutions.
For example, Wei Qinghou, a foreign relative who started in the middle, was appointed as a great general and was above the chancellor. Adhering to the emperor's wishes, these figures participated in the major affairs of the military state and gradually became the central force controlling the state power, and the administrative system headed by the chancellor became a general administrative executive body.
In the Han Dynasty, there was a Shaofu in the Jiuqing Dynasty, which was in charge of the taxation of the mountains and rivers and the manufacture of royal clothing utensils, and was the private residence of the emperor, and there was a Shangshu under the palace, which was in charge of the receipt and dispatch of documents and chapters.
Shang, that is, the meaning of supervisor. Shangshu was originally a small official of six hundred stones, and the Shangshu Ling who was in charge of the secret documents and chapters was not high, but they could do things around the emperor, and Liu Che regarded him as a close subject, gradually promoting their status, and even using eunuchs to serve, called Zhongshu and Zhongshuling. Their duties were light and heavy, their powers were constantly expanding, and later Shang Shutai became the main organ of the prime minister's state affairs.
In order to strengthen local control, Liu Che divided the country into thirteen prefectures in the later years of his reign, and each prefecture sent a minister to supervise the officials of the counties and counties within the prefecture. The thorns were ranked six hundred stones, but they were the representatives of the emperor and had the right to supervise the two thousand stones of the sheriff and the kingdom minister, and even the princes. The inspection and supervision of the history of the thorn began in August every year, and there were six clear provisions on the content of the supervision, and at the end of the year, it was reported to the Beijing Master and directly responsible to the emperor.
Through these measures, Liu Che completely controlled the power of the central and local governments in his own hands, and the emperor's arbitrary centralization of power was further strengthened. The emperor, who had just made himself useful, no longer had to argue with the likes of tian clams for the handling of daily government affairs, because all decisions and employment were under his control.
The power system created and strengthened by Liu Che was summarized by later generations of scholars as "Zhongchao", and Liu Che's era as emperor may not have such a concept title, because he did not want to cause the gap and friction between the two power systems, and naturally he deliberately avoided explicitly viewing the original administrative system as a "foreign dynasty", but when Ban Gu described the events of Liu Che for about seventy years, he directly mentioned someone as a "left general of the Middle Dynasty", which shows that soon after Liu Che's death, "Zhongchao" became a title that people knew.
"Zhong dynasty" generally included generals, close ministers, and shangshu. As the Chinese Dynasty dominated the outer dynasties, the power of the chancellor was increasingly transferred to the Chinese dynasty, and the imperial power was greatly strengthened.
On the other hand, the eunuchs and foreign ministers who were closest to the emperor could easily become the masters of the Chinese Dynasty without the power of the chancellor. Liu Che did not appear in this phenomenon, but he prepared the objective conditions for the emergence of this phenomenon.
epilogue:
This spontaneous emperor only wanted to satisfy his desire for power and collected many of the powers belonging to the chancellor with the "Zhongchao" system, but his descendants were unable to control the huge power, or were unwilling to endure the torment of power manipulation, but slipped the power in their hands into the hands of eunuchs and foreign relatives. Many of the bad events that occurred in the late Western Han Dynasty were caused by Liu Che, and he himself never expected it.
bibliography:
Historia
General History of China