Emperor Wu of Han

Emperor Wu of Han, born Liu Che, ruled China from 141 to 87 BCE, the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty. In a reign of 54 years he fought a long war against the Xiongnu nomads, pushed Chinese power into Central Asia, Korea and what is now northern Vietnam, opened the routes later called the Silk Road, and made Confucian learning the basis of government service. His wars and monopolies also exhausted the treasury, and his last years were darkened by paranoia and a bloody succession crisis.

Liu Che was born in 156 BCE, a younger son of the man who became Emperor Jing that year. He was not the first heir. His mother, Consort Wang, allied herself with the emperor's powerful sister, Princess Guantao, whose daughter Chen Jiao was betrothed to the young prince. Together they undermined the crown prince and his mother, and in 150 BCE the heir was deposed. Wang became empress, and her son was named crown prince at the age of seven.

He came to the throne in 141 BCE, aged about fifteen, and soon tried to promote Confucian scholars and curb the privileges of the nobility. His grandmother, the Grand Empress Dowager Dou, a patron of the Daoist-inspired policy of minimal government that had guided the early Han, blocked the reforms and had leading reformers removed. Only after her death in 135 BCE did Wu rule in his own right.

Wu's reign is traditionally remembered as the moment when Confucianism became the official doctrine of the Chinese state. On the advice of scholars such as Dong Zhongshu, he gave official posts to experts in the Five Classics associated with Confucius, and in 124 BCE founded an imperial academy in Chang'an to train future officials in these texts. Officials were increasingly recruited by recommendation and examination on the classics rather than by birth alone, a principle that shaped Chinese government for two thousand years.

In practice his government was a blend. Many of his most trusted ministers favoured the strict, centralising methods associated with Legalist thinkers such as Han Fei, the doctrine of the Qin dynasty, with harsh laws and close control of the economy. Wu further weakened the semi-independent kingdoms held by members of the imperial family, forcing them to divide their lands among all their sons, and introduced the practice of naming eras within a reign. In 104 BCE he adopted a new calendar, which fixed the start of the Chinese year in the form still used.

The early Han had bought peace with the Xiongnu, the nomadic confederation of the northern steppe, through marriage alliances and gifts, but raids continued. In 133 BCE Wu abandoned this policy with a failed ambush at Mayi, beginning decades of war. His generals Wei Qing, the brother of his second empress, Wei Zifu, and Wei Qing's nephew Huo Qubing led huge cavalry expeditions deep into the steppe. In 121 BCE Huo Qubing drove the Xiongnu from the Hexi Corridor in present-day Gansu, and in 119 BCE the two generals won a great victory north of the Gobi Desert. The Xiongnu were pushed back, though not destroyed, and the cost in men and horses was enormous.

To hold the Hexi Corridor, Wu founded new commanderies there, settled soldiers and farmers, and extended the walls and watchtowers along the frontier, opening a secure road westward.

In 139 BCE Wu sent the envoy Zhang Qian west to seek an alliance against the Xiongnu with the Yuezhi, who had been driven out of the Gansu region. Zhang was captured by the Xiongnu and held for about ten years before escaping and reaching the Yuezhi in Bactria, who declined an alliance. He returned around 126 BCE with the first detailed Chinese knowledge of Central Asia, including the Fergana Valley, famous for its horses, and distant lands such as Parthia. Further missions followed. Between 104 and 101 BCE Wu sent the general Li Guangli on two costly campaigns against Dayuan, in the Fergana Valley, to obtain its prized horses; the second succeeded. These contacts laid the foundations of the trade networks later known as the Silk Road.

Wu also expanded south and east. His armies conquered the kingdom of Nanyue in 111 BCE, bringing what is now Guangdong and northern Vietnam under Han rule, and absorbed Minyue on the south-east coast. In 108 BCE they destroyed the state of Gojoseon in northern Korea and set up four commanderies there, including Lelang, near modern Pyongyang. At its greatest extent, Han authority reached from Central Asia to Korea and the Red River delta.

The wars drained the reserves built up by Wu's predecessors. To pay for them, his ministers, notably the merchant's son Sang Hongyang, created state monopolies on salt and iron around 119 BCE and later on alcohol, introduced new taxes on merchants, sold ranks and pardons, and set up a system for the state to buy and sell grain to stabilise prices and earn profits. Coinage was reformed and centralised. These policies kept the armies supplied but bore heavily on the population, and the debate over them, recorded in the later Discourses on Salt and Iron of 81 BCE, became a classic argument about the role of the state.

Wu was also deeply interested in religion and immortality. He performed the great feng and shan sacrifices at Mount Tai in 110 BCE, and spent lavishly on magicians who promised elixirs and contact with immortals. He patronised poetry and music, expanding the Music Bureau that collected songs from across the empire. His court historian was Sima Qian, author of the Records of the Grand Historian, who was castrated in 99 BCE after defending a general who had surrendered to the Xiongnu.

Wu's later reign was marked by suspicion and terror. Many senior ministers were executed or driven to suicide. In 91 BCE accusations of witchcraft aimed at the emperor spread through the court, encouraged by the official Jiang Chong, who was hostile to the crown prince, Liu Ju. Fearing he would be framed, Liu Ju raised troops in Chang'an and killed Jiang Chong. Several days of fighting followed in the capital, with thousands killed; the crown prince fled and took his own life, and his mother, Empress Wei, also killed herself. Wu later accepted that his son had been innocent.

In 89 BCE, in an edict issued from Luntai, he rejected proposals for further expansion in the west and called for the people to be given rest, an act later read as a confession of overreach. Shortly before his death on 29 March 87 BCE he named his youngest son, the eight-year-old Liu Fuling, as heir, under the regency of Huo Guang, Huo Qubing's half-brother.

Wu's reign was the longest of any Chinese emperor until the Kangxi Emperor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Later historians often paired him with Qin Shi Huang as a model of an ambitious, martial and costly ruler. He gave the Han state much of its lasting shape: a Confucian-educated official class, a strong central government, and a frontier that reached deep into Central Asia. The name of his dynasty later became the name of the Han Chinese people themselves, and the history of China in the following centuries built on the empire he enlarged.