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“We were all alive when the chaos that you speak of was at its worst,
but we were not greying men as we are now,” Wang Lang said. “We were children,
and the ‘Ten’ ruled Huandi’s court.”
“I... I know,” Kong Rong conceded. “But-!”
“Cao Cao is exactly what we need right now,” Wang Lang insisted. “We
must fight the chaos head-on, and he does. He is a hero of an era of chaos, not
a hero to chaos. He sheltered the
partisans during the worst of the eunuchs’ rule, did he not...?”
Kong Rong nodded sheepishly.
The ‘Ten Attendants’ made an already terrible situation far worse: the
eunuch clique’s corruption added to the existing activities of unscrupulous
officials, and it affected everything. The military were underfunded, disaster
management was neglected, and only those that fawned on the ‘Ten’ or paid their
sizeable bribes could hold a high post for more than a few months without being
slandered and all but destroyed. A public protest by the intelligentsia was met
with sustained and disproportionate persecution that came to be known as the
‘Partisan Crisis’, and when the rot continued into the reign of the child
Emperor Ling, many guessed that total disaster was imminent.
A failed military campaign against the ‘barbarian’
Xianbei Confederacy ended in disaster when the painfully under-resourced and
demoralised imperial army - whose leaders were mostly inexperienced,
unqualified allies of the ‘Ten’ - was decimated; subsequent economic and
agricultural hardships coincided with the rise of a Taoist cult called the ‘Way
of Peace’, whose leader, Zhang Jue, preached that the calamities were a result
of the Han’s ‘Mandate of Heaven’ being exhausted - the same concept cited
decades before by Wang Mang - and that a ‘Yellow Sky’, a sign of change, was
coming, and the message reached peasant and disaffected noble alike.
Zhang Jue’s acolytes in the capital were exposed before they could stage a coup, but by then Zhang had close to two million followers, including disgruntled former soldiers; he called upon them to don yellow turbans - a blatant sign of defiance against imperial rule, for it was decreed that none but the sovereign could ‘wear yellow above the head’ - and rise up throughout the nation. The army was unable to cope with this ‘Yellow Turban Rebellion’, so Emperor Ling was forced to ask his nobles to fight the threat as private militias. Zhang Jue was killed and the rebellion crushed, but more rebellions followed, and by the time that Emperor Ling died, the entire country was in turmoil; the trade routes were repeatedly restricted or closed altogether in order to hide the fact that Han Dynasty China was on the verge of total implosion.
“...I still say that Cao has much to answer for,” Kong Rong declared.
“Yes, he sheltered partisans, but men change! That Cao Cao would not have
committed regicide as this one has! And I reiterate that he confessed to it!”
“Did he...?” Wang Lang replied. “Or did he ‘confess’ to eliminating
threats to the Empire in the forms of a treacherous vassal, his daughter - a
mere concubine - and an unborn child that may or may not have been a future
prince, and even more questionable as to whether it would have been a future
sovereign...?”