Emperor Wu of Han

Emperor Wu of Han the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty, who reigned from 141 to 87 BC and is widely regarded as one of the greatest rulers of Chinese history. Under his long reign the empire reached its greatest territorial extent, Confucianism was established as the state orthodoxy, and the foundations of the Chinese imperial system were consolidated for centuries to come.

Accession and Early Reign

Emperor Wu was born Liu Che in 156 BC, the tenth son of Emperor Jing. He was named heir apparent while still a young boy and ascended the throne in 141 BC at the age of fifteen. His grandmother, the Empress Dowager Dou, who favoured the Daoist doctrines of quiet governance that had guided the early Han, remained a powerful influence at court until her death in 135 BC, restraining for a time the more activist policies that the young emperor wished to pursue.

Once free of that restraint, the emperor embarked on an ambitious programme of reform at home and expansion abroad. He surrounded himself with able ministers and advisers, many of them recruited through a system of recommendation and examination, and he broke the power of the hereditary nobles and of the great families who had dominated the government. He reasserted the authority of the throne against the factional interests that had shaped policy under his predecessors.

He was fascinated by learning and by the rituals of the classical tradition, and he patronised scholars and poets. The grand academies of the capital were expanded, and the emperor's court became a centre of intellectual activity. His long reign, lasting fifty-four years, was one of the longest in Chinese history and left a deep imprint on the institutions, the religion and the borders of the empire.

Confucianism and Central Reform

The most enduring of the emperor's domestic policies was the elevation of Confucian learning to the status of state orthodoxy. Advised by the scholar Dong Zhongshu, he endorsed the doctrine that Confucian texts and ethics should guide government, and he established imperial academies where the classics were studied and officials were trained. In 136 BC he decreed that the five Confucian classics be made the basis of official learning, and later he promoted the practice of selecting officials by examination in the classics.

This shift did not mean that law and administrative technique were abandoned, for the emperor continued to rely on legalist methods of control, but it gave the state a shared moral vocabulary and created the class of scholar-officials who would govern China for two thousand years. The great synthesis associated with Dong Zhongshu, which joined Confucian ethics with cosmology and the theory of the mandate of heaven, provided the ideological foundation on which the imperial order rested.

At the same time the emperor centralised power and reformed the finances. He created new offices to supervise agriculture and the economy, introduced state monopolies on salt and iron, and controlled the coinage to fund his wars. He taxed the merchants and the wealthy more heavily, instituted price-control measures and encouraged the settlement of new lands. These measures filled the treasury but also provoked resistance from the nobility and the commercial classes.

Expansion and the Frontier

Emperor Wu transformed the Han from a defensive power paying tribute to the nomadic Xiongnu into an aggressive empire that pushed its borders far beyond the older frontiers. He ended the policy of appeasement through marriage alliances and sent armies north across the desert against the Xiongnu confederation, which for decades had raided Chinese territory. Under generals such as Wei Qing and Huo Qubing the Han won a series of victories that broke the Xiongnu's dominance of the northern steppe.

In the west the emperor's diplomacy opened the way to Central Asia. He sent the envoy Zhang Qian on two great missions to the lands beyond the Gobi, seeking allies against the Xiongnu and gathering intelligence. Although the sought alliance was never formed, Zhang Qian's reports revealed the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin, Ferghana and beyond, and the routes he travelled became the beginnings of the Silk Road, through which goods, plants, ideas and religions travelled between China and the West.

In the south and east the Han extended its control over the coastal regions, the Yangtze delta and parts of what are now Vietnam, Guangdong and Guangxi. Colonies and garrisons were established, roads and canals built, and local elites brought into the imperial system. The empire quadrupled the size of the territory it administered, and the wealth and diversity of the regions it incorporated changed the character of Chinese civilisation.

Religion, Culture and Court Life

The emperor was deeply interested in religion and in the quest for immortality. He performed the great imperial sacrifices at Mount Tai and other sacred sites, asserting the emperor's role as mediator between heaven and the human world. He patronised Daoist adepts and magicians who promised elixirs of long life, sent expeditions across the sea in search of the legendary islands of immortals and erected tall towers and bronze pillars in the hope of attracting celestial beings.

His court was a brilliant centre of literature and the arts. The historian Sima Qian completed his great history under his reign, and poets and rhetoricians such as Sima Xiangru wrote the elaborate fu poems that celebrated the grandeur of the empire. The emperor himself composed verse, and the musical and ceremonial life of the court was enriched by new offices and new forms of performance.

The splendour of the reign was accompanied by heavy spending and by the strains of constant warfare. Taxes, corvee labour and conscription pressed on the population, and the later part of the emperor's rule saw discontent, official corruption and disputes over the succession. The deaths of his favourite consorts and of members of his family, and the suspicions that surrounded them, cast a shadow over the closing years of his long reign.

Death and Legacy

Emperor Wu died in 87 BC after ruling for fifty-four years. He was succeeded by his young son, whose mother the emperor had ordered executed to prevent her family from dominating the throne, a decision that revealed both his concern for the stability of the succession and the ruthless logic of dynastic politics. A regency governed during the boy's minority, and the dynasty continued for another two centuries.

His legacy was immense. He extended the borders of China to Central Asia and Korea, established the Confucian examination tradition that produced the imperial bureaucracy, and created a centralised fiscal and military state that his successors inherited. The historian Sima Qian, whom he had punished with castration for defending a defeated general, nonetheless produced under his reign the first great universal history of China, a work that preserved the memory of the age for all later generations.

Emperor Wu is often compared with Qin Shi Huang as a ruler who centralised and expanded a unified empire. He is celebrated for the grandeur of his achievements and criticised for the cost of his wars and for the severity of his methods. The Chinese people take their name from the dynasty he led to its height, and his reign is remembered as the period in which the institutions, the ideology and the frontiers of imperial China were decisively established.

See also

• Han dynasty
• Silk Road
• Dong Zhongshu
• Zhang Qian