Big Talk about the Art of Imperial Power Struggles

Author: Jin Liangnian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-11-01
Features: Ancient Chinese people regarded the emperor as the "True Son of Heaven" and the "Dragon's Seed." Even in the early years of liberation, there was such an incident: A bandit leader in a certain region of Guangxi claimed to be an emperor and ordered a tailor to sew him a dragon robe. The tailor refused to do so, no matter how much pressure he was under. He simply couldn’t believe that the bandit was the "True Dragon Emperor" and feared that sewing the robe for him would bring divine retribution. As a result, the bandit skinned him alive. This incident shows how deeply rooted and firmly entrenched this traditional belief was in the hearts of the people. The idea of deifying emperors can be traced back to ancient times. The ancestors believed that an all-powerful God ruled the world from beyond the veil, and the male shamans and female witches were the messengers who communicated between the divine and the mortal realms. At that time, the tribal chiefs were often the leaders of the shamans. With the rise of class society, this divine tribal chief became the head of the state. From the oracle bone inscriptions, we can see that the Shang kings, apart from worshipping the God, also called their ancestors "Kings of the Gods." They shared the same functions as the God and jointly ruled over all things in the mortal world, while the Shang kings, as the real supreme ruler, became the enforcers of the divine will. The Zhou people, who succeeded the Shang, reformed the Shang people's religious beliefs, calling the "God" "Heaven" and the Zhou kings as the "Son of Heaven" who carried out the Mandate of Heaven. In their hymns to the gods, they sang, "Departing to inspect the states, the God treats me as his son, blessing the Zhou state with prosperity" ("Traversing the states, the vast Heaven treats me as his son, truly upholding the order of the Zhou," see Shijing·Shi Mai), which conveys this meaning. Whenever a feudal emperor sought or ascended the throne, the desire for power and the fear of losing it haunted him like a nightmare, and thus his close guards—statecraft—had to repeatedly come forward to "save the throne." Now, let us follow in his footsteps and lift the veil on these various "plots and schemes"!