People with a little historical knowledge know that Liu Xiu was the Guangwu Emperor, and the history he created was called Guangwu Zhongxing, in short, to regain the Jiangshan that their old Liu family had lost, and took a series of measures to restore and develop social production and alleviate the social crisis since the end of the Western Han Dynasty.
However, not everyone knows that the founding emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Emperor Guangwu, made him a sinner of the Han people in his later years.
The Guangwu Emperor Liu Xiu had outstanding military skills and talents to attract talented people to share his great cause. And he was very strict with himself. He was a wise monarch who was good at discerning people, and a shrewd politician who was generous and ruthless as the situation required. Perhaps because of the limitations of the times and the influence of his rights on him, he is again a stubborn and superstitious man; he often reacts excessively to criticism, he does not have a long-term strategic vision, and it is difficult to foresee the consequences of his actions. His greatest weakness was in foreign policy and the policy of the nobility.
After the establishment of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the Xiongnu were still a threat to the Eastern Han Dynasty. However, as an emerging regime, although the Eastern Han Dynasty was capable of launching an attack on the Xiongnu, as Wei Qinghuo did when Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty went ill. The military posture of emperor Guangwu was completely defensive, although with the end of the civil war in 36 AD, he was strong enough to take the offensive. That year he built new fortifications to seal off the traditional invasion route into Shanxi. Emperor Guangwu was keen to build the Great Wall to protect himself from the Huns, but the best defense was always offense.
However, history still gave the Eastern Han Dynasty an opportunity, around 60 BC, the Xiongnu false lu quan qu single death, causing internal divisions, there were five singles in the struggle for the establishment, chaos continued, and finally developed into the Southern Xiongnu of Hu Han and the Northern Xiongnu of Zhi Zhidanyu attacking each other.
Discord within the enemy is precisely an opportunity to gain diplomatic and military initiative on its own.
At this time, the Southern Xiongnu were more pro-Han and expressed their willingness to submit to the Han Dynasty and jointly attack the Northern Xiongnu. However, emperor Guangwu may have been old, lacked ambition, and was more conservative. He made the biggest mistake of his reign, and this mistake is also one of the worst in Chinese history. He was supposed to unite with the Southern Huns and attack the Northern Huns. In 51 AD, Chinese generals strongly advocated this conquest, and the conquest would certainly be victorious. Nan Shan Yu could return to the land north of the Gobi as the sole ruler of the Xiongnu, while the Eastern Han Dynasty could recover several counties on the northwestern frontier. Or it can also adopt a balanced policy, so that the Xiongnu and the Xiongnu can contain each other, and the Eastern Han Dynasty can support the weak and suppress the strong as an arbiter, and whoever rises in the grassland will unite with other weak and small to suppress him, so that he can become the dominant and rich boss in this game of chess, and enjoy strategic advantages for a long time.
But how did the Guangwu Emperor do it?
Faced with the kindness of submitting to himself, he actually let the Southern Xiongnu migrate to the territory of the Han Dynasty. After that, I did not expect to assimilate them as much as possible, did not disperse them, but still let these Huns live in concentration, did not disarm them, and they still maintained the cultural customs of the Huns.
The measure taken by the Guangwu Emperor Liu Xiu was to have a considerable number of aides and a certain number of officials known as Xiongnu Zhonglang generals stationed at the imperial court on behalf of the Eastern Han Dynasty. At the same time, one of Nan Danyu's sons was held hostage at the Eastern Han court, but these measures were useless.
With the passage of time, the strength of the Southern Xiongnu gradually became stronger, while the strength of the Eastern Han Dynasty gradually weakened.
From 93 onwards, relations within the Southern Xiongnu and the Eastern Han Dynasty became increasingly tense. Over the next 100 years, the situation became increasingly complex and elusive, with them sometimes openly clashing and sometimes cooperating with limited efforts. At the end of the 2nd century AD, NanDan Yu lived in southern Shanxi, which was greatly close to the central part of the Eastern Han Empire. It was here that their descendants rose up against the Western Jin Dynasty in 308 AD. The fall of the Western Jin Dynasty, the loss of northern China, and the period of division that lasted until 589 AD were a direct consequence of emperor Guangwu's short-sighted policies. His later emperors should also be blamed for not correcting his mistakes and weakening the Southern Xiongnu as much as possible by means of dispersion and assimilation, but as the source of the error, the Guangwu Emperor Liu Xiu was still mainly responsible.
Once the wolf is lured into the house, the plague will not stop at once. In the winter of 304 AD, the Xiongnu nobleman Liu Yuan raised an army at Lishi, known in history as Han Zhao, which opened the prelude to the Wuhu Chaohua.
Wuhu Chaohua refers to the period when many nomadic people outside the Western Jin Dynasty took advantage of the rebellion of the Eight Kings of the Western Jin Dynasty and the weakening of their national strength to establish a non-Han regime and form a period of confrontation with the Han regime. During this period, a large number of Han Chinese were killed or migrated to the south.