Wang Mang was a man of very literal thinking. He thought his surname “Wang” (lit: king) meant he must be a descendant of a king. Logic. He literally named his new dynasty the New dynasty. The Xin dynasty. He also loved renaming things. He renamed the titles of officials, but the new titles didn’t make sense. He renamed places, but couldn’t come up with new names, so he just swapped them around. He also tried to run the empire with rules from the Zhou dynasty 1000 years prior. The problem was, he didn’t know what the rules were, so he just winged it with vague ideas in his head.
Wang Mang’s approach to governance made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. So people rebelled, and he got killed by some nobody. Ding dong, Wang Mang is dead. Who should be the next emperor? The rebels looked around, found someone surnamed Liu, and made him emperor. This guy wasn’t important. The important one was another man under him, also surnamed Liu.
Liu Xiu was a descendant of Liu Bang. He once led 10,000 men to fight Xin’s army of 420,000. How do you defeat that many people with 10,000? With area-of-effect spells, of course. On the first night, a meteor shower struck the Xin camp, then the next day, a storm struck the Xin camp. Liu Xiu then led 3,000 men and charged into the enemy camp, and the 420,000 men simply collapsed. Unlike his ancestor, he didn’t kill off his founding team after becoming emperor. All 28 of them held high-ranking positions and died peacefully in old age. He also ended up marrying his childhood sweetheart, which is extremely rare for an emperor.
Did you know they made a second Lion King movie? It’s decent, but it would probably be rated higher if the original didn’t exist. And that’s basically what happened to Liu Xiu’s son. He spent his whole life imitating his father, bordering on paranoia. He once dreamed about Iron Man, and decided to bring Buddhism into China. Where’s the connection? Then Liu Xiu’s grandson re-established the Silk Road and brought back exotic goods like horses, wine, pepper, and… the blood of Xiongnu people. What happened next was a pattern you’ll see over and over again throughout the history of imperial China.
The next emperor was a child. His father was dead, he was too young to rule, so his mother handed power to her in-laws. The powerful in-laws caused a lot of problems, like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. The child emperor grew up and decided to take the power back. The only people he could trust were the eunuchs who had raised him. The powerful eunuchs caused even more problems. Then the emperor died. Rinse and repeat.
This happened seven times in a row like some kind of twisted jackpot. There were teenager emperors. Little boy emperors. Baby emperors. One of them managed to get rid of his powerful in-laws by plotting with the eunuchs while pooping. Over these years, no one was really running the empire, and the people decided they had had enough.
A man named Zhang Jiao started his spiritual healing business. It was a fascinating process where he pretended to heal you, and you pretended to be healed. Combine that with multi-level marketing, he managed to amass hundreds of thousands of followers. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. They called themselves the Yellow Turbans, and they rebelled against the government.
How could a kid and his eunuchs fight against a rebellion? They couldn’t. So they released military power to the local warlords and allowed them to recruit their own troops. The rebellion was quickly suppressed. But here’s a thought experiment. You release spiders to deal with your moth problem. Later, you deal with the spiders with scorpions. Then you take care of the scorpions with snakes. Then what?
Then the emperor died. A warlord named Dong Zhuo heard the news and marched into the capital. Why him? Because he just happened to be nearby. It could’ve been any of the other warlords. So thirteen other warlords decided to form a coalition and fight against him. This coalition of warlords was a lot like a software development team. You have the enterprise architects, the project managers, the scrum masters, and two developers. Only Cao Cao and Sun Jian actually fought, but they both failed.
Dong Zhuo had an adopted son named Lü Bu. Lü Bu was sleeping with one of Dong Zhuo’s servant girls, and when someone called him out on it, he let his little head do the thinking and assassinated Dong Zhuo. And the emperor finally found a chance to escape the capital. The news of the emperor’s escape reached Cao Cao, and Cao Cao fetched the emperor back to his base.