The Romance of the Three Kingdoms establishes a clear dividing line between its heroic protagonists and their opponents. Liu Bei, Zhuge Liang, and the other heroes of Shu-Han are seeking to restore the Han Dynasty, teetering on the brink of collapse, to its former glory. Their quest is to restore the “good old days” that supposedly existed during the Han’s height of power. Cao Cao, Sun Quan, and most of the other warlords seek to replace the Han with their own dynasties, replacing the social order of the Han era with a new one fashioned in their own image. While it is not as clear cut as often claimed—after all, the novel does accept that Han is destined to be replaced by Jin—on the whole, Romance of the Three Kingdoms places its sympathies with those who look to the past and the Han rather than those striving to create a post-Han future. This is especially true of the Qing-era Mao recension—long the standard edition of the novel—which eliminates many ambiguities in how the original novel portrayed the Han and makes Han-loyalty the ultimate moral standard from which to judge the various characters.
This also carries over into the novel’s portrayal of millennialist movements. As demonstrated last time, the Romance treats its two major millenarian sects quite harshly. The Yellow Turbans are depicted as little more than petty bandits and pillagers who can only stand up to the Han armies through the use of malicious sorcery. The Five Pecks of Rice (Celestial Master) sect, the incipient Taoist church, comes off slightly better. But their founder, Zhang Daoling, is portrayed as a con-man and his successor Zhang Lu as incompetent and undeserving of the power he wields. This can be explained by the fact that the Yellow Turbans began the process of overturning the Han and the Celestial Masters helped to legitimize Cao-Wei. But it also speaks to the general character of millennialist movements and the type of goals that they aspire to.
Millennialist movements are inherently future-focused. They place their expectations upon the future, when a new and perfected world order is supposed to come into being. Because no state in history has ever managed to create a perfect social order, millennialist movements often call for a sharp and total break from the past. The demise of the old world, with its political systems, social structures, and established institutions, is often expected to be total. It is also usually imagined in quite violent terms. Indeed, some Chinese millennialist traditions stand right up there with the Book of Revelation in their description of the horrors that accompany the end; the Zhengming jing depicts the whole world being burned to nothingness before the coming of the new age. It is hard to imagine the adherents of such a text having much love for the world that was about to be destroyed.
Thus, in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it could be said that the millennialists, specifically the Yellow Turbans, provide an even starker contrast to the heroes than do the likes of Cao Cao and Sun Quan. The warlords at least veil their ambitions behind lip-service to the Han and its court. On the other hand, the Yellow Turbans announce their intention to destroy the Han and ring in a completely different social order. Their battle cry, “The blue Heaven is ending, the Yellow Heaven will come!” speaks of cosmic transformation and the complete destruction of the old world. This puts them in sharp contrast to Liu Bei and his retainers, who are deeply committed to preserving that old world, or at least its primary institution, the Han Dynasty. Liu Bei’s answer to Cui Zhouping (covered a few entries back) casts him as a profoundly past-oriented individual; he is aware that history is leaving the Han Dynasty behind but is intent on fighting to maintain it regardless. Rather than indulging in hope for the future, he knowingly clings to the past and accepts the tragic fate that this inevitably entails, as does Zhuge Liang after him. They are the exact opposite of militant millennialists like Zhang Jue who imagine future utopias of universal peace. Such fantasies are not for the heroes of Shu-Han, who willingly fight for their dying cause to the bitter end.
At least, that is true for the novel. In history, the situation seems to have been much more complicated. Millennialism was widespread in the China of the second and third centuries. But it was not as clear cut as the novel makes it seem. Indeed, it seems that Liu Bei and his followers, far from seeing themselves as tragic heroes in the narrative of history, made active use of millennialist ideas in their own efforts to present themselves as the legitimate continuation of the Han. To understand how this is possible, however, we must first discuss the unique role of the Han Dynasty in Chinese apocalyptic thought.
We have already discussed the taiping ideal that took hold of Chinese thought so strongly in the Han Dynasty. Behind that ideal lay a prophecy. While it was the Taoists who really seized upon the notion of taiping, the prophecy itself came from one of the esteemed fathers of Confucianism, Mencius. Mencius foretold that a sage-ruler would arise in China every five-hundred years in order to ring in a golden age of universal prosperity. This prophecy was the basis of what Hubert Seiwert calls “Confucian messianism” (Seiwert 20), the expectation amongst Confucian scholars that such a messianic monarch would soon appear and transform Chinese society. This belief was sincerely held by Wang Mang, the utopian usurper we met last time, and it fueled both his quest for power and the social program he attempted to implement after taking the throne. In this sense, Wang Mang, rather than the Yellow Turbans, could be said to be the first great millennialist in Chinese history.
Of course, Wang Mang failed to ring in a new world. The Han Dynasty was restored. Wang Mang’s usurpation and ultimate defeat had several interesting effects. For one, it discredited millenarianism in the Confucian tradition. As Seiwert puts it, “Confucian messianism, of course, was intimately related to the belief in prophecies and omens … Following the failure of Wang Mang’s rule, it lost much of its appeal and was eventually suspended” (20). The more esoteric, mystical, and prophetic side of Confucianism fell more out of favor, until the Jin Dynasty banned it outright and proscribed all Confucian texts with a supernatural flavor, pushing Confucianism in the far more rationalist direction that we recognize today—yet another example of how these turbulent centuries determined the scope and shape of Chinese religion ever afterward. The collapse of messianic Confucianism cleared the field for Taoism to become the repository of the nation’s millenarian hopes, with the results that we explored last time.
However, the idea of cyclical moments of imperial renewal survived. Even before the usurpation, Han monarchs had already been toying with the idea that the dynasty would need to be periodically renewed at the beginning of each new cosmic cycle in order to maintain its health and vigor forever. But Wang Mang’s failed attempt to create a new dynasty breathed life into this notion and gave it a currency it had never enjoyed before. Soon, it took on a messianic hue of its own, with the standard belief in both popular and elite circles being that a salvific sage-emperor would come to revitalize the Han at the start of a new age. What was more, Wang Mang’s efforts transformed the notion of the Han’s rebirth from abstract speculation into something more concrete: prophecy. In a bit of historical irony, the man who was arguably China’s first great millennialist found his rule threatened by the sort of millennialist prophecies he himself had utilized to make his own claim to the throne.
During Wang Mang’s reign, a prophecy appeared which stated, “One surnamed Liu is to rise again and one surnamed Li will be his assistant” (qtd. in Seiwert 87). Since the house of Liu was the Han imperial family, the return of a Liu to the throne would mean the restoration of the Han Dynasty itself. The prophecy reflected the general feeling that Wang Mang was illegitimate and that the Lius were still the rightful rulers of China. The prophecy quickly found many adherents; so widespread was it, in fact, that Wang Mang himself attempted to coopt it for his own purposes by appointing a member of the Li family as his field-commander. This failed to weaken the original Liu-and-Li conception. That form of the prophecy soon proved self-fulfilling when, upon hearing it, a general by the name of Li Tong dedicated himself to the Han cause. He proved instrumental in toppling Wang Mang and restoring the Han Dynasty, giving the Liu family two hundred more years as the undisputed rulers of China. Whether mystically inspired or not, prophecy had changed the course of history.
Despite already coming true, however, the prophecy itself did not disappear. Instead, it continued to circulate amongst the populace at large and actually managed to outlast the Han Dynasty whose return it predicted. What is more, as the years went on, the millennialist tone of the forecast grew ever stronger. As Seiwert notes, “From the early years of the first century on, messianic prophecies referring to the surnames Li and Liu were transmitted through the centuries” (Seiwert 87). The second part of the prophecy is more famous, because it laid the groundwork for the whole of Taoist eschatology. “Li” was popularly believed to be the surname of Laozi, and so Taoists took the prophecy to mean that either a returned Laozi himself or one of his descendants was destined to play the role of future world savior. Once the connection to the Han fell away, the Li of the prophecy was transformed into the Taoist messiah Li Hong, who would come at the end of time to save the elect and rule over the purified world to come. From the Han period itself up through the seventh century, various members of the Li family would use this prophecy of a future savior bearing their surname to launch their own bids for the throne. Finally, one of them succeeded, and thus the Tang Dynasty was born, and prophecy again changed the course of history.
But while the messianic beliefs surrounding Li Hong and their role in founding the Tang Dynasty gets most of the attention, it should not be forgotten that the first part of the prophecy, regarding the restoration of the Han Dynasty itself, also remained incredibly popular during the centuries of chaos that followed the Han’s second collapse. These too took on a millennial cast, with the future Han Emperor turning into a messiah by the name of Liu Ju who, like Li Hong, was destined to rule the new paradise that was soon to come. Just as the long period between Han and Tang saw countless Lis trying to claim the messianic mantle, so too were there several self-proclaimed Liu Jus, sometimes working in concert with the Lis. Even the apparent vindication of the Li prophecy with the founding of the Tang Dynasty did not put an end to the rival Liu prophecy for, as late as 710 C.E., Wang Huaigu proclaimed the imminent coming of the Buddhist messiah Maitreya with the words, “The house of Li is ending and the house of Liu is about to arise” (qtd. in Shek 94). The wording and the narrative behind it were slightly different, with Li now being the adversary of Liu instead of his servant, but the idea was the same. At this late date, then, the restoration of the Han Dynasty was still seen as a prerequisite for the world’s millennial transformation and the dawning of a new age.
Of course, millennialist proclamations that the Han Dynasty was soon to be restored to rule over a future spiritual utopia were only half of the story. In the centuries after the second fall of the Han Dynasty, there were numerous attempts to bring about the Han’s restoration in a more concrete and political fashion. Shu-Han was the first of these and remains the most famous. Those who are only familiar with this era from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which ends with Jin’s successful unification of China, would likely believe that it was also the only such movement and that the cause of Han restoration died with it. This, however, is far from the truth. Indeed, on this point, an earlier popular work on the Three Kingdoms, the Sanguozhi pinghua [now available in English as the Records of the Three Kingdoms in Plain Language], came nearer the mark than the later Romance did.
The pinghua gives a more positive and hopeful ending to the Shu-Han cause than the later Romance does. Here, Shu-Han still falls to the incipit Jin Dynasty, but Liu Bei’s great-grandson Liu Yuan escapes and flees to the north. Liu Yuan proclaims himself the heir of Liu Bei’s son and successor, Liu Shan, and goes to war with the Jin Dynasty. His forces capture the Jin Emperor, after which “they killed him and sacrificed him in the temple of Liu Shan” (Idema and West 169). Following this, as the pinghua states, “The King of Han subsequently annihilated the state of Jin and ascended the throne of the emperors of Han” (169), after which he offers sacrifices to the founders and restorers of the Han Dynasty, with Liu Bei and Liu Shan taking their place in the lineage of those who had successfully reestablished the dynasty. This not only directly ties Shu-Han into the cyclical model of Han restoration—with all its messianic associations—but also portrays the new united empire as a direct outgrowth of Shu-Han.
This ending is obviously included in order to save the Shu-Han heroes from the ignominy of failure and represents a fantasy of what would have happened had Liu Bei won. And yet, despite this, it is partially based on historical fact. Liu Yuan was a real person. He was not a descendant of Liu Bei. Rather, he was the rightful king of the Xiongnu, a nomadic people of the north brought under Chinese rule during the Han period. But he did claim Han descent and did present his rebellion against Jin as an effort to restore the Han Dynasty. He made several moves to cast his new state as the continuation of Shu-Han, including setting up a temple to Liu Bei and granting Liu Shan the posthumous temple name that was the prerogative of deceased emperors. And what was more, his new state (known to history as Han-Zhao) did actually defeat the Jin Dynasty, killing their emperor and driving them out of northern China.
That much is history, and fans of Shu-Han can certainly take some comfort in the fact that a later state exacted a measure of vengeance on Jin in its name. However, the pinghua’s implication that Liu Yuan would enjoy a long and peaceful reign over a united empire is as untrue as the Romance’s suggestion that the Jin Dynasty would. The historical Han-Zhao never managed to capitalize on its success against Jin. It remained a small state that proved unable to unite the north under its rule and it was soon swept away by other powers. But its existence does demonstrate that the political effort to restore the Han Dynasty did not end when Shu-Han fell. Instead, it was taken up by other political leaders who launched their own attempts at reestablishing Han rule. While it is probably too much to classify their disparate efforts as any sort of unified movement, they do prove that restoring the Han remained a potent political rally-cry for centuries after the dynasty’s fall.
The next state to claim the mantle of a restored Han after the fall of Han-Zhao was also, arguably, the most successful. In 420 C.E., Liu Yu usurped the throne from the last Jin Emperor south of the Yangtze, giving birth to the Liu-Song Dynasty. To an extent, this entity wanted to establish itself as a new dynasty, hence the choice of the name “Song” instead of “Han,” and the usage of temple-names that had already been assigned to Han monarchs in the past. But at the same time, Liu-Song also wanted to be seen as a continuation of the Han, and thus they stressed Liu Yu’s relation to the Han imperial family and adopted the Han imperial color, red, as their own. Regardless of the ambiguity and this shifting sense of identity, they came perhaps the closest to achieving the goal of restoring the Han’s rule throughout China. Not only did they accomplish fully what Han-Zhao had only been able to do partially by overthrowing Jin and claiming its mandate, but they also enjoyed unchallenged rule over all China below the Yangtze. On a handful of occasions, they even managed to extend that rule to the northern heartland around the old capitals of Chang’an and Luoyang, even if the resulting possession of those cities was inevitably brief and fleeting.
Despite this, Liu-Song never managed to establish the kind of lasting control of all China that was supposed to come with the return of the Han Dynasty. The new Northern Wei Dynasty was too much in the ascendant for Liu-Song to make much headway on the North China Plain for long. And the dynasty’s own internal problems meant that it did not outlast the century it was founded in. But it did enjoy a limited amount of prosperity and success. This was not enough to satisfy the hunger for a new, more utopian Han Dynasty—would-be new Han states continued to pop up from time to time until the coming of the much better-known but unrelated Song Dynasty in latter half of the tenth century—but it was not nothing. For one thing, it allowed for an output of literary productions that tell us something about this dynasty’s ideological underpinnings.
For one, we can see that the Liu-Song Dynasty was certainly interested in its own pre-history, as represented by the first period of division and Shu-Han’s previous attempted Han restoration. It was the Liu-Song imperial court that commissioned Pei Songzhi to undertake his revisions and expansions to the Sangouzhi [Records of the Three Kingdoms], which did much to turn Chen Shou’s factual and unadorned account into the legendary cycle that resulted in the pinghua and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But Liu-Song was also quite interested in the now-widespread prophecy of Liu and Li that foretold the Han’s millenarian return. Not only are texts of the time the first to clearly identify Li Hong as the Taoist messiah—though the idea is clearly older, given the number of millennialist rebels who already made use of the name—but the first text to name him, the Taishang dongyuan shenzhou jing, also includes this prophecy: “the Liu family returned to China, set up their reign in Chang’an … the doctrine of the Dao prospers and Li Hong must arise again” (qtd. in Seidel 238). The message is that the Liu family must rule again from their old capital of Chang’an before Li Hong can establish his millennial kingdom on earth,
The reference to the Lius reigning against from Chang’an refers to Liu Yu’s recapture of that city in 417 en route to declaring himself Emperor. But it is also the old Liu-and-Li prophecy of Han restoration, updated to reflect the larger role now accorded to Li Hong and the millenarian nature of his coming in popular eschatology. Its inclusion here, as both a legitimation of Liu-Song and a promise of future utopia, demonstrates that not only was the dynasty aware of popular prophecies but that they actively made use of them to buttress their own rule. Here, the two different kinds of Han restoration movements, the mystical-prophetic and the political-military forms, overlap. A dynasty claiming Han descent not only showed an awareness of these different strands but interpreted both of them as leading up to its own rule. This demonstrates that the prophetic and political sides of Han restoration were not separate domains but could and sometimes did work together as one.
If this was the case for Liu-Song, might it not also have been the case for Shu-Han two centuries earlier? After all, the Liu-and-Li prophecy and other mystical notions were very much in the air when Liu Bei was positioning himself as the figurehead of Han restoration. And since Liu Bei claimed not only to be Han Emperor but the initiator of a new, third cycle in the Han’s existence—a fact that the pinghua picks up on and which will be discussed in greater depth later on—he was certainly dipping his toes in the millennialist pond, knowingly or unknowingly. Whether he was aware of it or not, Liu Bei was situating himself in the salvific role expected of the future Han messiah in popular prophecy. But because the prophecy was so popular, it is difficult to believe that Liu Bei was unaware of it. It is much more likely that he was actively attempting to tap into these popular beliefs about future Han restoration to bolster his own efforts and eventual claim to the throne. He would certainly not be the first imperial clamant to do so, and he would be far from the last.
What is more, there is another factor to consider that makes Shu-Han’s use of millennialist prophecy all the more likely, and that is the location of the state. For Shu-Han was based in what is today Sichuan, a place that was, at the time of the Three Kingdoms, was the epicenter of millenarian thought in China. We will take a closer look at this remarkable fact next time.
Sources
Seidel, Anna. “The Image of the Perfect Ruler in Early Taoist Messianism: Lao-tzu and Li Hung.” History of Religions 9.2/3 (1969-1970): 216-247.
Seiwert, Herbert. Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
Shek, Richard. “Sectarian Eschatology and Violence.” Violence in China. Eds. Jonathan N. Lipman and Steven Harrell. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. 87-114.
Records of the Three Kingdoms in Plain Language. Trans. Wilt L. Idema and Stephen H. West. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2016.
Zücher, Ernst. “‘Prince Moonlight’: Messianism and Eschatology in Early Medieval Chinese Buddhism.” T’oung Pao 68.1/3 (1982): 1-75.
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