Biography
Family Background and Early Life
Cao Rui's mother was Empress Zhen, posthumously known as Empress Wenzhao. Lady Zhen had originally been the wife of Yuan Xi, Inspector of You Province. After Cao Cao captured Ye in 204, the ninth year of Jian'an, Cao Pi took her as a consort. She was greatly favored and gave birth to Cao Rui and the Princess of Dongxiang. Cao Rui was handsome, refined in appearance, highly intelligent from an early age, widely read, and reputed to have an exceptional memory. The Wei section of the *Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance* records that “even the character and conduct of minor attendants, their official records and careers, and the names and affairs of their fathers, elder brothers, sons, and younger brothers, once seen or heard, were never forgotten.” His grandfather Cao Cao was greatly impressed and especially fond of him, often keeping him at his side and having him stand with attendants and close ministers at court gatherings and banquets. Cao Cao is said to have remarked, “With you, the foundations of my house may be carried on for three generations.” Cao Rui was studious and knowledgeable and paid particular attention to the study of law.
In 216, the twenty-first year of Jian'an, Cao Cao was made King of Wei. In the same year he campaigned east against Sun Quan. Cao Rui and his younger sister, the Princess of Dongxiang, left their mother Lady Zhen and accompanied their grandmother Lady Bian and their father Cao Pi on the campaign toward Jiangdong. This was an important episode in which Cao Rui was separated from his mother during his youth.
In 220, the first year of Yankang, Cao Cao died and Cao Pi succeeded as King of Wei. In the fifth month of that year, the fifteen-year-old Cao Rui was enfeoffed as Marquis of Wude. Cao Pi issued the “Order Appointing the Attendant Zheng Cheng as Tutor to the Marquis of Wude,” personally appointing the learned scholar Zheng Cheng, then serving as an Attendant, as Cao Rui's tutor in the Confucian classics.
Years in the Eastern Palace and the Pain of His Family Background
In 221, the second year of Huangchu, Cao Rui was enfeoffed as Duke of Qi. On the dingmao day of the sixth month (August 4) of the same year, his mother Lady Zhen was ordered by Cao Pi to die because of resentful remarks and was buried at Ye. Because of his mother's offense, Cao Rui was reduced to Marquis of Pingyuan. The event became one of the deepest emotional wounds of his life.
At first, Emperor Wen of Cao Wei believed that Cao Rui had harbored resentment over the matter and considered making Cao Li, Prince of Jingzhao and son of Lady Xu, his heir. He therefore delayed naming a crown prince. During this period, the household officials, tutors, and companions serving Cao Rui were selected only from men of upright conduct, who were expected to admonish and correct one another. Cao Rui handled affairs with great caution in order to avoid blame. While in the Eastern Palace, he was personally close to the senior minister Wei Zhen and often discussed court affairs and books with him. Cao Pi once indirectly asked Wei Zhen about Cao Rui. Wei Zhen merely praised Cao Rui as reasonable and virtuous and said nothing further.
According to the *Wei Mo Zhuan*, Cao Rui once accompanied Cao Pi on a hunt and saw a doe with its fawn. Emperor Wen shot the mother and ordered Cao Rui to shoot the young deer. Cao Rui refused, saying, “Your Majesty has already killed its mother. I truly cannot bear to kill its young as well.” He then wept. Emperor Wen lowered his bow, was deeply struck by the response, and thereafter resolved to make Cao Rui crown prince.
In the third month of 222, the third year of Huangchu, Cao Rui was promoted from Duke of Qi to Prince of Pingyuan. Cao Pi later ordered Empress Guo to raise him, further confirming his status as the principal heir. Because his own mother had been ordered to die, however, Cao Rui remained resentful for a time. Only later did he begin to serve Empress Guo respectfully, sending senior palace women to her residence morning and evening to inquire after her. Empress Guo, who had no children of her own, treated Cao Rui with affection. In addition to Zheng Cheng, whom Cao Pi had appointed as his tutor, the household of the Prince of Pingyuan included Gao Tanglong as princely tutor and Guan Qiujian, He Zeng, Ji Mao, and others as literary retainers. In 223, the fourth year of Huangchu, Cao Pi arranged a marriage for Cao Rui with a woman of the prominent Yu family of Henei, who became Princess of Pingyuan, and also selected Lady Mao of Henei for the Eastern Palace. Cao Rui greatly favored Lady Mao and frequently rode with her in the same imperial carriage.
Accession and Government
On the sixteenth day of the fifth month in 226, the seventh year of Huangchu, Cao Pi became gravely ill and named Cao Rui crown prince. In his final edict, he appointed Cao Zhen, Sima Yi, Chen Qun, and Cao Xiu to assist the government. After arranging the regents in the southern hall of Chonghua Palace, Cao Pi issued an instruction to Crown Prince Cao Rui: “If anyone tries to sow discord between you and these high ministers, you must not distrust them.” On the seventeenth day, Emperor Wen died. The young Cao Rui then ascended the throne in Luoyang as Emperor Ming of Cao Wei.
After his accession, Cao Rui elevated the empress dowager to grand empress dowager and the empress to empress dowager, posthumously honored his mother Lady Zhen as Empress Wenzhao, and enfeoffed his younger brother Cao Rui (Cao Rui of Yangping) as Prince of Yangping. In the eighth month of the same year, Sun Quan attacked Jiangxia, where Administrator Wen Ping held the defenses. Court officials proposed sending reinforcements, but Cao Rui judged that Sun Quan's forces excelled in naval warfare and had attempted a sudden land assault only because they expected Wen Ping to be unprepared. Now that Wen Ping was able to hold them and they had no clear advantage, Cao Rui believed they would not persist for long. Before this, he had sent the Investigating Censor Xun Yu to comfort the frontier troops. Upon hearing of the Wu incursion, Xun Yu recruited county troops along his route to Jiangxia and, together with his mounted attendants, assembled more than a thousand infantry and cavalry. Outside Jiangxia, he used the terrain to light fires and launch an attack on the Wu forces, which then withdrew as Cao Rui had predicted.
In the first month of 227, the first year of Taihe, Qu Ying rebelled in Xiping Commandery and killed the Magistrate of Linqiang, the Chief of Xidu, and other local officials. Emperor Ming sent the generals Hao Shao and Lu Pan to suppress the uprising, and Qu Ying was killed. In the second month, the emperor personally plowed a field to demonstrate the importance of agriculture. In the eleventh month he made Lady Mao empress. In the twelfth month, Meng Da, Administrator of Xincheng, rebelled, and the emperor ordered Sima Yi, General of Agile Cavalry, to campaign against him.
In 228, the second year of Taihe, Sima Yi captured Xincheng. Meng Da was executed and his head was sent to the capital, Luoyang. When the Shu chancellor Zhuge Liang launched his first Northern Expedition, the officials and people of Tianshui, Nan'an, and Anding commanderies rebelled against Wei and joined Shu. Court officials had no ready response. Cao Rui said, “Zhuge Liang could have relied on the mountains and held firm, but instead he has chosen to advance. Greedy for the three commanderies, he knows only how to attack and not how to withdraw and defend. He is certain to be defeated.” Cao Rui therefore sent Cao Zhen, Zhang He, and others with fifty thousand troops to resist him and personally went to Chang'an to supervise the campaign. Before long, Zhang He decisively defeated Ma Su at the Battle of Jieting. The Shu army withdrew to Hanzhong and the three commanderies were pacified.
In 229, the third year of Taihe, Cao Rui renamed Pingwang Observatory as Tingsong Observatory. Emperor Ming often said, “The adjudication of legal cases concerns the lives of all under Heaven and must therefore be examined clearly and judged impartially.” Whenever major cases were decided, he frequently went in person to Tingsong Observatory to hear them.
Final Years and the Regency Arrangement
From the winter of 238, the second year of Jingchu, Emperor Ming's health began to deteriorate. Early in 239, the third year of Jingchu, he became gravely ill. Cao Rui initially intended to appoint Cao Yu, Prince of Yan, as General-in-Chief, with Xiahou Xian, Cao Shuang, Cao Zhao, and Qin Lang serving together as regents, but Cao Yu repeatedly refused the appointment. Cao Rui then summoned Liu Fang and Sun Zi alone to his bedside for consultation. Liu Fang and Sun Zi recommended Cao Shuang as General-in-Chief and urged that Defender-in-chief Sima Yi be summoned quickly to share the regency. Cao Rui agreed and ordered Liu Fang to draft the edict. He briefly changed his mind, but in the end issued another edict ordering Cao Shuang, Liu Fang, and Sun Zi to receive the imperial command, while dismissing Cao Yu, Xiahou Xian, Cao Zhao, Qin Lang, and others from office.
On January 22, 239, the first day of the first month in the third year of Jingchu, Sima Yi returned from Liaodong and was encamped in Henei Commandery. Emperor Ming urgently summoned him to the imperial bedchamber, grasped his hand, and said, “At last you have come. I now entrust the affairs after my death to you. Together with General-in-Chief Cao Shuang, assist Cao Fang. Having seen you before I die, I have no further regret.” He then summoned Cao Fang, Prince of Qi, and Cao Xun, Prince of Qin, and entrusted them to Sima Yi's care. That same day, Emperor Ming died in Jiafu Hall of the Luoyang palace at the age of thirty-five. On the guichou day, the twenty-seventh day of the first month (February 17), he was buried at Gaoping Mausoleum.
Cao Rui, styled Yuanzhong, was a native of Qiao county in Pei and the son of the Wei emperor Wen and the empress Wen Zhao of the Zhen clan. He was a favourite of his grandfather Cao Cao, who kept him often at his side and had him stand with the palace attendants at banquets and audiences, saying that in him his house had an heir for three generations. He loved learning and above all the law, and was enfeoffed Marquis of Wude at fifteen. On Cao Pi's usurpation in 220 he was made Duke of Qi and then Prince of Pingyuan, but not named heir because of his mother's execution. The Jin history records that, degraded for his mother's fault, he was given upright tutors and companions, was cautious in punishment, served his father with filial piety and his mother with care, and was famed for it. It is told that hunting with the emperor he saw a doe and fawn: the emperor shot the doe and bade him shoot the fawn, and he refused, saying that his father had killed the mother and he could not bear to kill the child, and wept, so that the emperor laid down his bow and, marvelling, fixed his resolve to make him heir. The Weilue adds that as the empress Guo had no son she was ordered to raise him, that he was resentful because his mother had not died a natural death and only later served her with respect, sending daily greetings through the chief of attendants, and that she, having no son, loved him the more; and that the emperor, displeased at his resentment, thought of making the son of another concubine his heir and long delayed naming him. In the fifth month of 226, when the emperor lay dying, he summoned Cao Zhen, Chen Qun, Cao Xiu and Sima Yi to receive the testament for the heir; the emperor died in the Jiafu hall, and Cao Rui, made crown prince, took the throne, proclaimed an amnesty, honoured the empress dowagers, gave his mother the posthumous name Wen Zhao and enfeoffed his brother Cao Rui as Prince of Yangping. In the eighth month Sun Quan attacked Jiangxia, where the governor Wen Pin held firm; the court would have sent relief, but Cao Rui observed that Sun Quan, a master of naval war, had come ashore only to take them unawares, and that, matched against Wen Pin, he could not long keep the field; and Xun Yu, sent to reward the frontier troops, gathered the soldiers of the counties on his way and a thousand horse and foot of his escort, and at Jiangxia lit fires on the hills and attacked, so that Sun Quan withdrew. In the twelfth month Zhong Yao was made grand tutor, Cao Xiu grand marshal, Cao Zhen great general, Hua Xin grand commandant and Sima Yi general of the swift cavalry. In 228, when Zhuge Liang invaded and the three commanderies of Tianshui, Nanan and Anding revolted to Shu and the ministers knew not what to do, Cao Rui said that Zhuge Liang, who might have held the mountains, had come out to attack, which was the very art of drawing the enemy; that, greedy of three commanderies, he knew how to advance and not how to retire; and that the moment was theirs to break him. He disposed fifty thousand horse and foot against him, sent Cao Zhen to command west of the pass and Zhang He, who broke him utterly at Jieting, so that he fled and the commanderies were recovered. In the third month he visited Changan, returned in the fourth, pardoned all prisoners not capitally condemned, and in the sixth decreed that honouring the Confucian learning was the root of civil government, that unworthy holders of teaching offices could not expound the sacred way, and that doctors of learning fit for palace attendance should be chosen with care and the commanderies charged to recommend graduates first for their knowledge of the classics; in the tenth month he ordered the ministers to recommend a good general each, and in the twelfth month sent Fei Yao against Zhuge Liang, who had invested Chencang. In the seventh month of 229 he decreed on the duty of an adopted heir, that one who succeeded the great line must uphold the public right and not look back to private kin, citing the errors of the Han emperors in honouring their own fathers; and he ordered that a warning be written on metal and kept in the ancestral temple, that any future son of a prince who came to the throne should understand that he was the heir of his predecessor, and that any minister who induced a ruler to build improper titles against the orthodox line should be put to death without pardon. In the tenth month he renamed the Pingwang hall the hall of hearing suits, saying that justice was the life of the realm, and thereafter he often attended in person the trials of great cases. In the sixth month of 236 he decreed that the law officers, since capital cases were still in the hundreds each year, should discuss and stay executions and proceed with leniency, and that sentences should be reported with any petition for mercy so that he might consider how to preserve life. In the second month of 230 he decreed that since the wars the study of the classics had fallen away and men advanced without the ancient models; officials who knew one classic and were fit to govern should be tested by the doctors and the best at once employed, while the flashy and rootless should be dismissed; and he ordered the carving of the emperor Wen's Discourse on stone outside the temple gate. In the seventh month he sent Cao Zhen and Sima Yi against Shu, but the great rains of the ninth month brought the army back; and in the twelfth he reburied his mother at Zhaoyang ling. In 231 he ploughed in person at the ceremonial field; in the third month Cao Zhen died and, Zhuge Liang invading Tianshui, Sima Yi was sent against him; the Xianbei prince Kebineng and the Dingling chief Erchan came to Youzhou with fine horses, and the office of protector of the Xiongnu was restored. In the eighth month he permitted the princes and imperial clansmen to bring one son each to court, saying that though his father had forbidden the princes the capital lest a young ruler with a regent be endangered, he himself had not seen them for twelve years and could not but long for them. In 232 he decreed that the princes' territories should be whole commanderies, went east on progress rewarding the aged and the orphaned, mourned the death of the infant prince Cao Yin, and in the tenth month had Zhou He, the Wu general, killed at Chengshan. In 233 a green dragon was reported from a well at Mopi, and he went to view it, changed the era and the name of the place, gave the men of the realm two degrees of rank and remitted the taxes of the widowed, orphaned and solitary; he ordered sacrifices to the dead generals Xiahou Dun, Cao Ren and Cheng Yu in the temple of the founder. In 235 he made Sima Yi grand commandant and ordered the great building at Luoyang, with the Zhaoyang and Taiji halls and the Zongzhang tower, so that the people lost their farming seasons and the ministers remonstrated; and in the second month of 236 he established the Chongwen gallery and summoned all who were skilled in composition to fill it. In war he employed Cao Zhen, Zhang He and Sima Yi against Zhuge Liang; after Zhuge Liang's death in 235 the frontier grew quieter, and in the same year Kebineng was stabbed by an assassin sent by Cao Rui, so that the Xianbei broke up among themselves and the north was quiet. He sent Guanqiu Jian with the armies and the Xianbei and Wuhuan to the south-east frontier and summoned Gongsun Yuan by edict, who revolted and called himself King of Yan with the era Shaohan, until in 238 Sima Yi was sent and destroyed him; and it was at Chencang in 228, when Hao Zhao shot fire-arrows at the scaling ladders, that the word "fire arrow" first appears in the histories. By shifting Cao Xiu, Cao Zhen and Sima Yi to the frontiers on campaign after campaign, he limited their time at court and so their influence, and two of them died in 228 and 231, leaving Chen Qun alone in the capital without military power. In rites and letters he established the Chongwen gallery and summoned the writers of the realm; when Jiang Ji in the Taihe years petitioned for the ancient sacrifice on Mount Tai, Cao Rui answered that the words made the sweat run to his feet and refused on the ground of his own insufficiency, and though the matter was later revived and Gaotang Long ordered to draft the rites, Gaotang Long died before it was done and Cao Rui lamented that Heaven did not mean him to accomplish it. In 237, on the report of a dragon, the calendar and era were changed, yellow adopted as the colour, the Taihe calendar renamed Jingchu, and the three ancestors of Wei given their temples never to be destroyed. He also built a mansion for his grandmother in the Zhen family and, asking what it should be called, was told by Miao Xi that his thought was as thorough as a sage king's and his gratitude greater than Zeng Shen and Min Ziqian, and that since the house was built for his mother's kin it should be named after the Wei river, as in the ode of Duke Kang. Towards the imperial clan he kept to the harsher policy of his father, though in 231 Cao Zhi memorialised against the excessive restrictions and he answered that there had never been an edict forbidding the princes to communicate, and that the fault lay in over-correction by timid officials, whom he had ordered to do as the prince asked; and Yang Fu likewise memorialised on the kinship of the nine degrees and was approved. In 232 he decreed that the princes' fiefs should be whole commanderies, showing a wish for a settled and systematic policy. Of his mother's death the histories relate that in the sixth month of 221 the empress Zhen was slandered by the consort Guo and put to death, her hair over her face and chaff in her mouth; that in the ninth month of 222 the consort Guo was made empress with orders to raise Cao Rui as her own son; and that when he came to the throne and learned the truth he wept and pressed her for the manner of his mother's death, and that she answered that his father had killed her and asked whether he would revenge a dead father by killing a stepmother; at which he was enraged and forced her to die, burying her in the same manner as his mother. In the twelfth month of 238, when Sima Yi returned from Liaodong and lay at Henei, Cao Rui meant to make Cao Yu general-in-chief with Xiahou Xian, Cao Shuang, Cao Zhao and Qin Lang to assist the young heir; but Cao Yu modestly declined, and Cao Rui called Liu Fang and Sun Zi into his chamber. Asked whether the Prince of Yan was of such a temper, they answered that he knew himself unequal to the charge; asked whether Cao Shuang could replace him, they approved and urged the immediate recall of Sima Yi to guard the imperial house. Cao Rui accepted it and had Liu Fang write the edict on yellow paper; then changed his mind and forbade Sima Yi to come; then, calling them again, said that he himself wished to recall the grand commandant and that Cao Zhao and the rest had almost ruined his design, and had the edict written again, summoning Cao Shuang and the two together, and dismissed Cao Yu, Xiahou Xian, Cao Zhao and Qin Lang from their posts. On the dinghai day of the first month of 239, when Sima Yi reached Henei, Cao Rui had him brought by post-horse, took his hand in his chamber and told him that his illness was grave and the future in his hands, that he and Cao Shuang should assist his young son Cao Fang, and that seeing him he had no regret; and Sima Yi bowed weeping. That day Cao Rui died in the Jiafu hall at thirty-six and was buried in the third month at the Gaoping ling. In the third year of Qinglong a peasant's wife of Shouchun had claimed to be sent by the gods to guard the imperial house and turn away evil, curing many by her water, and Cao Rui built her a palace in the rear of the court, praised her publicly and favoured her greatly; but when he fell ill and her water failed he had her killed. His tomb faces west, an earthen truncated pyramid on a square plan, with a ditch to the north and another to the south, said by tradition to have been dug by the Sima to cut the dragon vein of the Cao house; tile and brick fragments of the Wei period have been gathered on the terraces about it.