Emperor Wu of Han

• 1. Introduction

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  Emperor Wu of Han held the Chinese throne for 54 years, a record no ethnic Han emperor has ever broken. When he died on the 29th of March 87 BC, he left behind an empire that had roughly doubled in size, a state philosophy newly anchored in Confucianism, and a capital full of people who had reason to fear him. His personal name was Liu Che, and his posthumous name, Wudi, combined the characters for 'martial' and 'emperor.' That name was chosen for a reason. He repelled the nomadic Xiongnu who had raided as close as 100 miles from the capital, sent the envoy Zhang Qian thousands of miles west in search of allies, and annexed territories stretching from the Fergana Valley to northern Korea and northern Vietnam. Yet the same ruler who opened the Silk Road also had his own crown prince driven to suicide, castrated the historian who wrote his biography, and incarcerated nearly 200,000 people in special prisons. How the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty became one of its most celebrated and most feared figures is a story that begins, improbably, with a five-year-old boy promising to build a golden house.

• 2. A Boy and a Golden House

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  Liu Che was the 11th son of Emperor Jing of Han, born on the very day his father ascended the throne, in 156 BC. His mother, Wang Zhi, had been forcibly divorced from her first husband by her own mother, Zang Er, after a soothsayer predicted that both Wang Zhi and her sister would one day become greatly honoured. That prophecy shaped everything that followed. Liu Rong, the son of Emperor Jing's favoured concubine Lady Li, was already the crown prince. Lady Li's arrogance, her habit of throwing tantrums at the emperor over his other women, and her blunt refusal of a marriage proposal from the powerful Princess Guantao created the opening that Consort Wang needed. Princess Guantao, Emperor Jing's older sister, turned instead to Consort Wang and offered her daughter Chen Jiao to the five-year-old Liu Che. At a subsequent royal gathering, the princess held the boy in her arms and asked whether he wanted to marry his first cousin A'Jiao. The child reportedly boasted that he would 'build a golden house for her.' That answer, treated as a divine omen, helped persuade Emperor Jing to approve the match. The Chinese idiom 'putting Jiao in a golden house' traces directly to that moment. Princess Guantao then campaigned relentlessly against Lady Li before the emperor. Lady Li was eventually stripped of her titles, placed under house arrest, and died of depression. Liu Rong was deposed, exiled from the capital Chang'an in 150 BC, later arrested for illegal seizure of imperial shrine lands, and committed suicide in custody. The seven-year-old Liu Che, now legally the eldest son of the empress, was made crown prince in 149 BC.

• 3. Power Behind the Curtain

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  In 141 BC, Emperor Jing died and the fifteen-year-old Liu Che ascended as Emperor Wu. He moved quickly. Only one year into his reign, in late 141 BC, he launched what history records as the Jianyuan Reforms. The package was ambitious: officially endorsing Confucianism as the national philosophy, forcing noblemen out of the capital Chang'an and back to their own fiefdoms, removing unauthorized road checkpoints that local lords used to collect tolls, encouraging the reporting of criminal activities by nobles, and recruiting talented commoners into government positions. Every one of these reforms threatened the existing aristocracy. Grand Empress Dowager Dou, Emperor Wu's grandmother, held real political power in the Han court and backed the conservative factions. She crushed the reforms swiftly. Emperor Wu's two noble supporters lost their positions. His two mentors were impeached, arrested, and forced to commit suicide in prison. Emperor Wu, stripped of allies, adopted a different strategy. He pretended to abandon political ambition entirely, playing the role of a docile hedonist, sneaking out of Chang'an to go hunting and sightseeing while posing as an ordinary nobleman. Behind that performance, he quietly recruited a circle of young loyalists from ordinary backgrounds and placed them in middle-level government positions. These officials, known as the 'insider court,' reported directly to him and served as a counterweight to the established 'outsider court' made up of anti-reformists. He also dispatched a newly promoted official named Yan Zhu to mobilize a naval fleet during a border crisis in 138 BC, bypassing the tiger tally that authorized armed force, which happened to be in his grandmother's possession. That manoeuvre set a precedent: the emperor's decree could substitute for the tally, removing one of his grandmother's most powerful levers. In 135 BC, Grand Empress Dowager Dou died, and every obstacle to Emperor Wu's ambitions died with her.

• 4. Wars at the Edges of the World

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  Zhang Qian departed for the west in 139 BC, commissioned to find the Kingdom of Yuezhi and offer a military alliance against the Xiongnu. He was captured almost immediately after crossing into Xiongnu territory and held for years. He escaped around 129 BC, finally reached Yuezhi in Samarkand, and found that the kingdom had no interest in returning to fight old enemies. He arrived back in Chang'an in 126 BC, having spent a second, shorter period in Xiongnu captivity. His report opened the Western Regions to regular Han embassies and helped Emperor Wu understand the geographic possibilities of a southern route through the tribal kingdoms toward India and Parthia. On the northern steppe, Emperor Wu formally ended the policy of appeasement with the Battle of Mayi in 133 BC. The plan was to lure 30,000 Xiongnu into an ambush set by 300,000 Han soldiers. It failed without casualties on either side, but the Xiongnu retaliated with intensified border attacks. Emperor Wu responded by shifting Han military doctrine from chariot-and-infantry defence to mobile cavalry offensives. Generals Wei Qing and his nephew Huo Qubing drove the Xiongnu from the Ordos Desert and the Qilian Mountains between 127 and 119 BC. The decisive Battle of Mobei in 119 BC sent Han forces deep into the Gobi Desert, pushing the Xiongnu north toward Siberia. The Han army lost almost 80 percent of its warhorses in that battle. Emperor Wu then settled the Hexi Corridor with 700,000 soldier-settlers, established five commanderies, and built a fortified wall, opening the Northern Silk Road to Central Asian trade. In the south, he annexed the entire territory of Nanyue, including modern Guangdong, Guangxi, and northern Vietnam, by 111 BC. Korean territory fell in 108 BC after a two-pronged attack by land and sea. Far to the west, in 102 BC, a Han army of 60,000 men under Li Guangli laid siege to the capital of Dayuan by cutting off its water supply, winning the surrender of 3,000 prized horses and frightening the Xiyu kingdoms into submission.

• 5. Gods, Poets, and Immortality

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  Emperor Wu worshipped the divinity Tai Yi, introduced to him by shaman advisers who reportedly summoned the god into his presence. In 118 BC he built a dedicated chapel for this purpose at his Ganquan palace complex in modern Xianyang. He also organized the Suburban Sacrifice, for which nineteen hymns were composed and published during his reign. His fascination with immortality drew him toward magicians who claimed to be able to produce divine pills from the right ingredients. One of these magicians, Luan Da, was elevated to the rank of marquess and even married Emperor Wu's eldest princess, Wei. He was later exposed as a fraud and executed. Emperor Wu himself punished others' use of magic severely. In 130 BC, when a witch named Chu Fu attempted to teach Empress Chen sorcery and love spells to curse a rival concubine, Emperor Wu dispatched the official Zhang Tang to execute her for witchcraft. The late-reign ceremony of the Feng and Shan sacrifices at Mount Tai in 110 BC, an ancient ritual of worship to heaven and earth, came at enormous expense. He decreed he would repeat it every five years but only did so once more, in 98 BC. Alongside these religious pursuits, Emperor Wu reorganized the Imperial Music Bureau, known as yuefu, around 120 BC, charging it with collecting folk songs from across the country, adapting Central Asian tunes to new Chinese lyrics, and commissioning original work. The bureau's output gave birth to a named poetic tradition, the yuefu style, still recognised today. The poet and official Sima Xiangru shaped the fu style of Han poetry at Emperor Wu's court. Emperor Wu also patronized the revival of Chu ci, the poetry rooted in the former Chu kingdom and its shamanistic traditions, in part through his connection with Liu An, the Prince of Huainan. Several poems are attributed to Emperor Wu himself, including a lament on the death of a concubine whose opening line reads: 'The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.'

• 6. The Witchcraft Persecutions

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  In 96 BC, Emperor Wu reported a nightmare of being whipped by tiny stick-wielding puppets and a sighting of a traceless assassin in his palace. He ordered wide-ranging investigations. Large numbers of people, many of them senior officials, were accused of witchcraft and executed along with their entire families. The first prosecution targeted Gongsun He, who was the prime minister at the time, and his son Gongsun Jingsheng. Both were executed along with their whole clan. Two of Crown Prince Ju's elder sisters, Princess Yangshi and Princess Zhuyi, and his cousin Wei Kang, the eldest son of the deceased general Wei Qing, were all accused and executed in 91 BC. The persecutions became entangled in the question of succession. A favorite concubine, Lady Gouyi, had given birth to Emperor Wu's youngest son Liu Fuling in 94 BC, when the emperor was 62 years old. He was delighted, noting that Consort Zhao's pregnancy had supposedly lasted 14 months, the same as the mythical Emperor Yao. Rumors spread that he intended to replace Crown Prince Ju with the infant. The head of secret intelligence, Jiang Chong, used these tensions to move against Prince Ju directly. With Emperor Wu away at Ganquan Palace, Jiang's men ransacked Ju's palace and Empress Wei's palace while secretly planting witchcraft dolls and cloth inscribed with mysterious writings, then announced they had discovered these items. The prince, knowing he was framed, launched an armed resistance in Chang'an. The two sides fought in the streets for five days. When it became clear that Prince Ju lacked his father's authorization, the resistance collapsed. Prince Ju fled with two sons, was tracked to Hu County in modern Sanmenxia, and hanged himself. His sons and the peasant family sheltering him were killed by government soldiers. Empress Wei Zifu committed suicide when Emperor Wu sent officials to depose her. She and Prince Ju were buried in unmarked fields.

• 7. Reckoning and Legacy

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  Around 92 BC, Tian Qianqiu, the superintendent of Emperor Gao's temple, submitted a report claiming that Emperor Gao had appeared to him in a dream and said that Prince Ju should have received no more than a whipping. Emperor Wu accepted this as a revelation. He had Su Wen burned and had Jiang Chong's family executed. He appointed Tian Qianqiu prime minister. He built a palace and an altar for his dead son. He issued what history records as the Repenting Edict of Luntai, a public apology to the nation for his past policy mistakes. Wars and territorial expansion largely ceased. The prime minister he had chosen favoured retiring the troops, reducing hardship on the people, and promoting agriculture. These were the very policies that Crown Prince Ju had supported during his lifetime. By 88 BC, Emperor Wu was seriously ill. He chose his six-year-old youngest son Liu Fuling as heir and named Huo Guang as regent, judging him capable and faithful. He also ordered the execution of the boy's mother, Consort Zhao, fearing she would accumulate unchecked power the way Empress Lü once had. He died on the 29th of March 87 BC. He lies buried in the Maoling mound, the most prominent of what are sometimes called the Chinese pyramids. In 140 BC, early in his reign, Emperor Wu had convened an imperial examination of over 100 young scholars, most of them commoners, through which a Confucian named Dong Zhongshu distinguished himself by advocating that Confucianism become official doctrine. In 136 BC, Emperor Wu founded what became the Imperial University to train Confucian administrators. Scholar Michael Loewe called his reign the 'high point' of Modernist policies. Out of twelve prime ministers he appointed, three were executed and two committed suicide while in office. The post of Shangshu, court secretary, was elevated under his reign from a clerical role to that of the emperor's close adviser, a change that held until the end of imperial China.