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The Fall of Former Shu in 925: an Eyewitness Account

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The Fall of Former Shu in 925: an Eyewitness Account 925 59 THE FALL OF FORMER SHU IN 925: AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT Glen Dudbridge e narrative presented here is a document so rare of its kind and for its time as to be unique. It describes a great event, the fall of a kingdom, as seen by one directly involved in it. In his urgent desire to set the whole aair on record he both logs the sequence of events and transcribes written texts and poetic dialogues in which the main confrontations are played out. At a distance of more than a thousand years it is a luxury to possess rst-hand testimony of this quality, not least when our basic knowledge of the whole period is pieced together from the work of ocial historians who had their own ways with source material. is document has no balanced structure or well-craed narrative shape. Instead it spontaneously re ects an indignant need to expose who was to blame for the fall of Shu 蜀, and why. Its evidence comes mostly in textual form, but also includes snatches of spoken dialogue between the main players. All this presents the disaster of 925 as the result of both political and strategic errors. e author makes no attempt at detached appraisal: his own voice speaks out in the verse debates at the climax of the drama. Here is a passionately committed statement by a participant who wants the truth to be told. “Most people do not know this,” are his closing words. e memoirist was Wang Renyu 王仁裕 (880–956),1 and the present paper is part of a larger project to translate and interpret the remains of his two collections of narratives from the Five Dynasties period.2 1 My study of his career and translation of his tombstone epitaph are in course of publication by the Institute of Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong: see “e rhetoric of loyalty and disloyalty in Five Dynasties China,” Journal of Chinese Studies Special Issue: Institute of Chinese Studies Visiting Professor Lecture Series (II) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2009). 2 ey are Yutang xianhua 玉堂閒話 (Anecdotes from the Jade Hall) and Wang shi jianwen lu 王氏見聞錄 (ings Seen and Heard by Wang), both lost to transmis- sion but copiously anthologized in Taiping guangji 太平廣記 (Extensive Records for the Time of Supreme Peace, 978), abbreviated below to TPGJ. e present piece was 60 His youth coincided with the dying years of the Tang dynasty, his sudden maturity with the fracturing of China into kingdoms and aspi- rant dynasties. Native to what is now Lixian 禮縣, near Tianshui 天 水 in Gansu, he began an administrative career modestly as an aide to the military commissioner of Qinzhou 秦州, one of the prefectures in the small territory Qi 岐, covering parts of southeastern Gansu and southwestern Shaanxi. In 915 Qinzhou was surrendered to the newly arisen kingdom of Shu in the south, and Wang joined the Shu court at that point. He was successful and rose rapidly to high positions. When the Younger Ruler Wang Yan 王衍 succeeded the founder Wang Jian 王建 in 918, Wang Renyu was among his close entourage and in a position to see and hear events at court. at is how we come to read of the Younger Ruler’s sexual abandon and misplaced trust in the eunuch Wang Chengxiu 王承休. e decisions to make this man military commissioner of Qinzhou, to send him there with the best troops in the Shu armed forces, then to follow up with a royal visit in person to that place—all contrived by manipulating the Younger Ruler’s sexual cravings—raised a huge scandal at court, but took eect nonetheless. Wang Yan’s trip to the north went disastrously wrong. As his extended regiments struggled through dicult mountain country in incipient winter conditions, troops from the expanding Later Tang dynasty marched towards them from the northeast. Morale collapsed. e royal train turned tail as its own troops ed south. Wang Chengxiu, heavily armed in a strategically critical stronghold to the north, failed to li a nger, and instead vanished into the heights of the Tibetan plateau, making his own way south at the head of a force that would be pulverized by Tibetan raiders and the brutal climate. He arrived with a handful of people in Chengdu 成都 at the point when the Later Tang commanders had taken control, and duly suered execution. Wang Renyu attends rather minimally to this narrative sequence (with the exception of an unforgettable vignette from the hills west of Jianzhou 劍州). Instead, he gives up a large portion of his memoir to compositions by himself and other men, particularly to a memorial of remonstration by Pu Yuqing 蒲禹卿 which occupies more than half of the entire text. Reading through that lengthy piece makes it clear why Wang wanted to transcribe and preserve it. Pu, a man little known sourced from the latter title and appears in TPGJ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 241.1858–1864..
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