Li Shimin leaned back into his carved wooden chair, a broad grin spreading across his face.
"The Giant Tang. I absolutely love the sound of that."
The title rolled off the tongue with undeniable weight. Around him, his ministers puffed out their chests in a swell of collective pride. As for the grand Northern Expedition slogans the Vietnamese were shouting on the Light Screen, Li Shimin treated them with the contempt they deserved.
Setting aside the fact that the Light Screen itself used the word scheming to describe their ambitions, and completely ignoring the later historical records of the Ban Hong uprising that showed Vietnam and Myanmar standing as separate nations, the entire premise was absurd on its face. Even if this modern version of Vietnam somehow pulled off a successful Northern Expedition, did they honestly expect to dig up Li Shimin's descendants and crown them as their emperors from a thousand li away?
The idea was laughable. But it served one purpose. It offered a stunning glimpse into the sheer, terrifying reach of the Great Tang's reputation.
The assembled ministers exchanged knowing smiles. First, there was the mighty Han. And now, the glorious and gigantic Tang. The strength and prosperity of their dynasty truly outshone the Han by a wide margin.
"If we are to build a formidable navy, we should set our sights on Lingnan," Wei Zheng suggested, stepping forward with a calm and measured demeanor. "Lingnan is rich in excellent timber, the kind perfectly suited for building massive ocean-faring vessels. But to properly manage Lingnan, we must first bring it fully into the fold as part of our inner territory."
If Lingnan became an inner territory, where would the new border fall?
The ministers let their gazes drift further south across the map. The Strait of Malacca looked like an ideal place to draw the line. But something caught their eyes. A strange and glowing line cut straight through the middle of the strait, slicing the waters in two.
[Lightscreen]
[Another interesting detail worth mentioning is the evolution of posthumous titles.
When Liu Shan was alive, he surrendered after his state fell, and the emperor was demoted to the rank of Duke of Anle. After he died, the Jin Dynasty bestowed upon him the posthumous title of Si, which means Reflecting or Regretting.
Later, the remnants of Han retroactively elevated him as Emperor Xiaohuai.
The stories of Cao Pi and Cao Rui were relatively straightforward.
But the situation in Jiangdong? That gets quite entertaining.
The title of Great Emperor that everyone always jokes about actually belonged to the Hundred Thousand Club's founding member, Sun 'shinwan' Quan.
Just as Cao Pi was given the posthumous title of Emperor Wen, Sun Quan received the title of Great. And what exactly does that mean? According to the ancient rules of posthumous naming, it means emulating the wisdom of the sage-king Yao.
Because it is a rather obscure title, only two rulers in ancient history ever held the title of Great Emperor. One was the Sun Quan himself. The other was Li Zhi, Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty.
Li Zhi's initial posthumous title was the Heavenly Great Emperor. In the usual practice, among a long string of honorifics, one character serves as the primary marker. For example, Li Yuan was awarded the title of Emperor Taiwu, with the primary character being Wu, meaning Martial.
For Li Zhi, the primary character was Da, meaning Great. Exactly like Sun Quan. The New Book of Tang refers to Li Zhi as Great Emperor Gaozong, or simply the Great Emperor.
Sun Quan probably felt rather pleased with himself at first, thinking his title of Great Emperor would be carried forward with dignity by future generations. He never imagined Li Zhi would come along with a sly grin and decide to completely shatter the old rules of posthumous naming.
Consider the example. The Second Taizong was given the title of Emperor Wen. Li Zhi then piled on Wen, Wu, and Sheng for good measure. Emperor Xuanzong later added the character Great for the first time. And then he added even more characters for the second time.
As a result, a century after Taizong's death, his full posthumous title had swollen into an absolute mouthful: the Emperor of Great Civil, Martial, Sacred, and Vast Filial Piety, (Dawen Dawu Dasheng Daguangxiao Huangdi).
Other emperors suffered the same fate. Li Zhi's title became the Emperor of Heavenly Sacred and Vast Great Filial Piety, (Tiansheng Dasheng Dahongxiao Huangdi). Xuanzong's became the Emperor of Supreme Path, Sacred, and Vast Bright Filial Piety, (Zhidao Dasheng Damingxiao Huangdi).
After the Tang Dynasty, the convention for referring to ancient emperors shifted from posthumous titles to temple names. The reason was simple. The posthumous titles had grown far too long for anyone to remember.
There is one more note worth adding. During the Qing Dynasty, to avoid the taboo of using the character Xuan from the Kangxi Emperor's personal name, Xuanzong was renamed Yuanzong in the official records.
The common people, however, paid no attention to such formalities. They picked up his original title of Xuanzong and called him Emperor Tang Minghuang instead.]
"Li Zhi?"
The ministers' eyes flew wide with absolute shock. A loud crash rang through the hall as their Emperor, a touch too excited, kicked his own chair over.
Fortunately, Li Shimin was still in the prime of his life. No injuries. After a brief flurry of panic and scrambling hands, the ministers helped him back to his feet and everyone returned to their seats.
Li Shimin's expression lurched through a rollercoaster of emotions. He felt as though an invisible hand had closed around his heart and was squeezing hard. Stars swam before his eyes.
His mind raced through a dozen scenarios at once. The Gaoping Tombs incident. The Sima clan. Liu Yu, whose name they had just spoken. The blood-soaked stones of the Xuanwu Gate.
"Prince Zhi... how could he possibly..."
Li Shimin pushed the question out with great difficulty. No one in the room dared answer. The ministers lowered their eyes and fixed their gazes on the floor, not even risking a glance at one another.
The heavy silence pressed down until it was unbearable. At last, Du Ruhui, unable to stomach the confused and wounded look in the Emperor's eyes, spoke up with great caution.
"Your Majesty, Prince Zhi is only one year old at this moment. The glorious governance of your reign has only just begun."
Zhangsun Wuji, ever the master of leaping onto the winning side, quickly added his voice in support.
"Your Majesty, we still have twenty years of peace and prosperity stretching before us. Why lose sleep over what lies so far down the road?"
That was true. They had time. Plenty of it. The realization settled into Li Shimin's chest, and his spirits lifted, if only slightly.
Still, he could not stop the question burning behind his ribs from escaping. "Was it a disaster I brought down with my own hands?"
The room sank back into silence. The only sound was the scratch of Yan Liben's brush as he hurried to capture the heroic likeness of Sun Quan from the Light Screen. He wanted the image fixed on paper before it faded from memory.
He did wonder, though, why Sun Quan had been framed inside a box with a divine character glowing in the upper-left corner and the words Imperial Power and Sovereign Balance carved in at the bottom.
Du Ruhui let out another sigh. This imperial family, he thought, would fall apart entirely without him. He rose to his feet.
"Your Majesty, how can you say such a thing? Twenty years is more than enough to turn the world on its head. Anything can happen in that span. Why heap all the blame onto your own shoulders? At the very least, if the Light Screen warns of a threat, we can take precautions now and steer clear of disaster."
Li Shimin nodded, though the effort showed on his face. It was the only path open to them.
Before watching the Light Screen today, he had been fearless. The Xuanwu Gate incident had never weighed on his conscience. But now he understood. His own conscience might be clear, but what about his children? They would have to live through the long shadow of everything he had done.
"This addition to Prince Zhi's posthumous title..."
Li Shimin did not know how to judge it. If his son had truly done such a thing, it meant the boy loved his father. But the method itself seemed like a sure way to turn them into a laughingstock for future generations.
"Prince Zhi was simply showing filial piety to honor Your Majesty's memory," Zhangsun Wuji said, seizing the opening at once.
"And come to think of it, doesn't it strike you as strange that the Qing Dynasty emperors don't even have Han surnames?"
The Light Screen had not said much on the subject, but the ministers recalled the succession clearly enough. The Zhao Song Dynasty. The Zhu Ming Dynasty. And now, the Aisin Gioro Qing Dynasty.
Line them up side by side, and the wrongness of it jumped out at once.
But the ministers could only look on, helpless. The Song, the Yuan, and the Ming lay between them and that distant age.
Even if each dynasty endured for two or three hundred years, that placed the Qing nearly a thousand years away. Nothing that far off had any bearing on their present lives.
Much like the Hexi region. Later generations described it as a barren desert, but in the Tang Dynasty, it was still lush and green.
Over in the Shu camp, Liu Bei and Kongming were staring at the Light Screen with their eyes stretched wide.
"You can do that too?" Zhang Fei shook his head in disbelief.
"Strategist, you always say the people of the future have endless land and boundless resources. Turns out they have an endless supply of posthumous titles as well. The titles of just two or three of those emperors strung together would stretch longer than the entire history of our Han Dynasty."
Kongming shook his head. Something else had caught his eye.
"The Qing Dynasty was rarely mentioned before, and the emperor's surname clearly belongs to an outside tribe. Could the Yuan Dynasty be the same?"
Pang Tong nodded as though the answer were obvious.
"The Song Dynasty was conquered. Most likely, the Mongols swept down and unified the Central Plains."
Kongming found this highly plausible. He could only nod and let out a quiet sigh.
"It is a relief that the Han lineage was not completely severed."
His expression then shifted into something more somber.
"I only wonder whether other civilizations, Great Rome or Parthia, were able to preserve their own cultural heritage in the same way."
[Lightscreen]
[Moreover, Emperor Wu of Liu Song, Liu Yu, was so overwhelmingly powerful that some people mock the Northern and Southern Song dynasties for their weakness, claiming that all the martial virtue of the era was stolen by the Liu Song emperors.
But in reality, thirteen emperors of the Zhao Song Dynasty held martial posthumous titles.
Take Wan-yan-Gou, for example. His temple name was Gaozong, and his posthumous title was the Emperor of Great Success, Complete Merits, Supreme Virtue, Sacred and Divine Martial, Civil, Illustrious Humanity, and Filial Piety.
After the Tang Dynasty, the entire system of posthumous titles was completely wrecked. It became nearly impossible to pick out a single primary character from the bloated string of honorifics.
Another example is Zhu Qizhen, whose title was the Emperor of Following Heaven and Establishing the Path, Benevolent, Bright, Sincere, Respectful, Illustrious Civil, Martial Virtue, Vast Filial Piety, and Sagacious.
From these two examples alone, it is painfully clear that posthumous titles became utterly meaningless. If even one character in those lengthy titles were true, neither of them would have ended up in such a shameful position.
Why did the titles keep growing longer? The answer becomes obvious once you look back at their original purpose.
Posthumous titles began during the Zhou Dynasty. By the Spring and Autumn period, they had evolved into a way to evaluate an emperor's entire life. That is why, when you look at emperors from the Han Dynasty, names like Emperor Wen, Emperor Wu, or Emperor Ling, the title alone gives away the whole story of their reign.
You could tell how well an emperor had governed simply by reading the title. And who decided that title? The officials did.
But adding characters later had nothing to do with the officials. It was usually done by the emperor's descendants.
In the feudal era, fighting for a dead man's reputation was, in essence, fighting for the living man's power.
The steady lengthening of posthumous titles is a direct mirror of imperial power consolidating further and further, with fewer and fewer restraints left to check the emperor's will.
The Qing Dynasty marked the absolute peak of this trend. Posthumous titles stretched to at least twenty-one characters. The longest of them all, belonging to Nurhaci, reached twenty-seven.
Once the posthumous titles were ruined, temple names did not escape the same fate. In truth, they were ruined even earlier.
The three emperor Han Dynasty, emperors Yuan, Cheng, and Ping were given the temple names Gaozong, Tongzong, and Yuanzong by Wang Mang. A usurper handing out grand titles to the very emperors he supplanted. That marked the beginning of the abuse of the character Zong
The Cao clan claimed three ancestors: Taizu Cao Cao, Gaozu Cao Pi, and Liezu Cao Rui. The title of ancestor became cheap goods.
The peak of this trend, once again, was the Qing Dynasty. They recognized three ancestral figures: Nurhaci as Taizu, Huang Taiji as Taizong, and Shunzhi as Shizu. Three ancestors. Everyone else who followed was simply named Zong.]
Zhang Fei did not care much for the finer details, but he let out a long whistle of amazement.
"Good grief. The posthumous title of a single Qing emperor stretches longer than the whole Han Dynasty put together. No wonder Second Brother's title keeps getting longer and longer. Turns out everything really is bigger in the future."
While Zhang Fei enjoyed the spectacle, the expressions on Liu Bei, Kongming, and Pang Tong grew steadily darker.
Pang Tong turned the matter over in his mind and offered a summary. "According to the Light Screen, during the Han Dynasty, the only civilization that could truly rival us was Great Rome. The Tang Dynasty reached the very summit of prosperity. Few enemies anywhere in the world could stand against them. Then the Song Dynasty fell to the Mongols. The Ming Dynasty fell to the Dragon-Tiger General of the Northeast, Nurhaci."
Kongming nodded in agreement. "The Qing Dynasty was humiliated by nation after nation and collapsed under the twin weight of internal rot and external invasion. The rebellion of the four barbarian nations tells us only one thing. The rest of the world was growing stronger while the Qing Dynasty grew uniquely weak."
Liu Bei was still struggling to follow the logic. "Why would that be? If the emperor's authority was absolute, the powerful clans should have been crushed long ago. And the later dynasties used the imperial examinations to select talent from every corner of the realm. By all reason, they should have been stronger, not weaker."
Pang Tong tried to offer an explanation. "Perhaps the political system is only one part of the answer. The Light Screen did mention other forces at work. Climate change, for one."
Kongming stared at the portraits of emperors flickering across the Light Screen. He spoke in a low voice.
"Could it be that once the monarch destroys the powerful elites who once enslaved the common people, the monarch himself becomes the largest elite of them all?"
The room fell so silent one could hear a pin strike the floor.
Then Kongming burst into laughter. "I am only guessing, My Lord. You should not take it too seriously."
Liu Bei looked at Kongming with profound respect. His strategist truly deserved the name Sleeping Dragon.
But Liu Bei knew he would not live long enough to see such a dilemma unfold. Judging by the centuries stacked between each dynasty, the suppression of the powerful elites was destined to be a long and grueling labor.
My only hoped that when the moment came, Kongming would still be there with a brilliant strategy to see it through.
"What are your thoughts on this, Minister?" Li Shimin asked, turning to Zhangsun Wuji.
Zhangsun Wuji bowed respectfully before he answered. "The insight regarding the lengthening of posthumous titles is certainly sharp, Your Majesty. But our Great Tang system is quite different from that of the Han Dynasty. The Song and Ming must be different from the Tang as well. One cannot simply lay them side by side and compare them."
Sensing that Zhangsun Wuji was weaving rather than answering, Li Shimin shook his head and shifted his gaze to Du Ruhui.
Du Ruhui lowered his eyes. He sat in silence for a moment before he spoke.
"Balance is the foundation of all things under Heaven. When officials grow too powerful, they deceive the ruler. When the ruler is too weak, the nation sinks into darkness. The harmony between a ruler and his ministers requires balance. Push too far in either direction, and harm follows."
Li Shimin was more than satisfied with the answer. Keming had always kept his integrity and held the middle ground steady.
Before Li Shimin could press further, Wei Zheng spoke up directly.
"Does Your Majesty view your officials as thieves?"
Li Shimin burst into laughter.
"Xuancheng, how could you say such a thing?"