Meng Chang

Biography

Accession and control of the court

Meng Chang was born while Meng Zhixiang was establishing his position in Sichuan. Meng Zhixiang died soon after proclaiming himself emperor, and his son succeeded him in 934 (first year of the Later Shu Mingde era). The new ruler faced powerful military leaders, including Li Renhan. Meng had Li executed shortly after his accession, preventing military authority from passing wholly to the generals, but Zhang Ye and other senior officials retained influence for years. Meng changed the era name to Guangzheng in 938 (first year of Guangzheng). With Zhang Ye's execution in 948 (eleventh year of Guangzheng), he began to manage affairs more directly. Each execution arose from a struggle for authority at court and should not be reduced to a story of a virtuous ruler removing a villain.

Administration and the northern frontier

Later Shu, centered on Chengdu, was less directly involved in the rapid changes of dynasty on the central plains. Meng maintained civil administration through official assessments, an admonition addressed to local officeholders, and the preparation of classical texts. The admonition issued in 941 (fourth year of the Later Shu Guangzheng era) was later inscribed on officials' warning stones and circulated in subsequent times. The extent to which it changed day-to-day administration cannot be established for every prefecture. Later Shu also competed for districts toward Hanzhong and Guanzhong. In 955 (eighteenth year of Guangzheng), Later Zhou took the four prefectures of Qin, Cheng, Jie, and Feng, pushing back Later Shu's northern defense line. This loss helped shape the strategic setting for Song's later invasion; it does not alone explain the kingdom's fall.

Surrender to Song

After its founding, Northern Song moved to bring the southern states under its rule. Its forces invaded Later Shu by separate routes in 965 (third year of the Northern Song Qiande era), and resistance collapsed rapidly. Meng surrendered in Chengdu and went to Bianjing with his household. Song made him Duke of Qin. He died soon afterward and was posthumously honored as Prince of Chu. Accounts place the surrender and death in 965; the “964” ending year given in another account conflicts with that account's own narrative. Accounts also disagree on his burial place, so the precise location is left undetermined.

His Family, His Accession, and the Decision to Publish the Death

Meng Chang, originally named Renzan (or Chengzan), styled Baoyuan, was a man of Longgang county in Xingzhou, born at Jinyang in the prefecture of Taiyuan. He was the third son of Meng Zhixiang, founder of Later Shu, though the epitaph of the princess of Fuqing records him as the fifth, the first two sons perhaps having died young and been left out of the count. His mother, Lady Li, had been a consort of Li Cunxu, Emperor Zhuangzong of Later Tang, who gave her to Meng Zhixiang; and on the fourteenth day of the eleventh month of 919 she gave birth to Meng Chang at Taiyuan. When Meng Zhixiang held Shu, Meng Chang and his mother lived with Meng Zhixiang's principal wife; and when Meng Zhixiang was commissioner of the two Chuan he made Meng Chang marshal of the marching army. In the first month of 934 Meng Zhixiang took the imperial title and gave Meng Chang a frontier command; and in the seventh month, being gravely ill, he set him up as heir apparent on the twenty-sixth to act in the government. That night he died and the death was kept secret, and as those about him wept together Zhao Jiliang said gravely that the military governors now held strong armies and were waiting to see how things turned, so that the heir must be set up at once to cut off their presumptuous hopes, and that weeping was of no use. Wang Chuhui and Zhao Jiliang therefore resolved to make Meng Chang emperor first and then announce the death. Meng Chang at first kept the era name Mingde, and only in 938, the fifth year of Mingde, changed it to Guangzheng.

The Killing of Li Renhan and Zhang Ye, and His Assumption of Government

Meng Chang was young and did not handle government himself, and the ministers and generals were all his father's old companions: Meng Zhixiang had been generous and had indulged them, so that they treated Meng Chang with still greater arrogance and indolence, breaking the laws and rules, building great houses, seizing men's good fields and digging up their graves, Li Renhan and Zhang Ye being the most overbearing. Within a few months of his accession Meng Chang arrested Li Renhan and put him to death with his kin to the third degree. A general who had come to court from a military province, entering with a staff and claiming illness so that he could not bow, on hearing of Li Renhan's death at once dropped the staff and bowed to the ground; and Meng Chang compelled him to retire and banished him. In 946 Zhao Jiliang died and Zhang Ye grew more arbitrary still. Zhang Ye was Li Renhan's nephew by a sister, and when Li Renhan was killed Zhang Ye was commanding the palace guards, so that Meng Chang, fearing he would rebel, made him chancellor; and Zhang Ye, holding concurrently the office of revenue, set up a private prison in his house and used cruel punishments to extort from the people of Shu, who hated him bitterly. In 948 Meng Chang with the palace commander An Siqian contrived to arrest and execute him. The arbitrary and greedy among the old ministers were dismissed one after another, and from that time none of the old generals and companions remained; and Meng Chang began to govern in person, setting up in the twelfth year of Guangzheng (949) the three selections of the board of personnel and the examinations of the board of rites, and in 950 taking the honorific title of "the emperor wise in letters, heroic in arms, benevolent, sage, clear and filial." Both killings had their background in the contest for power at court and should not be reduced to the tale of a worthy prince destroying the wicked; but that he thereby recovered the power of decision is beyond dispute.

The Setback in Guanzhong and the Killing of An Siqian and Wang Zao

Under the Later Han, Zhao Sihuan and Wang Jingchong, who had risen at Fengxiang, both sent memorials submitting to Meng Chang, who sent generals to support them; his chancellor remonstrated earnestly that it should not be done, but Meng Chang was resolved to take Guanzhong and sent An Siqian east with reinforcements. Presently the Later Han killed Zhao Sihuan and Wang Jingchong and the Shu generals all withdrew. An Siqian, ashamed of having won no merit, killed many of his soldiers to overawe the rest; and Meng Chang with the Hanlin commissioner Wang Zao contrived to kill him. But when urgent memorials came from the frontier officers Wang Zao failed to report them and opened them without authority, at which Meng Chang was angry; and as Wang Zao was present when An Siqian was killed, he was seized and beheaded with him. Afterwards the Later Zhou sent troops from Qinzhou against Later Shu, and Meng Chang made Han Jixun commissioner of the Xiongwu army; hearing that the Zhou army was coming he sighed that Han Jixun could hardly hold them off. The usher Zhao Jizha asked to go and was made supervising commissioner of Qinzhou; but reaching Deyang and hearing that the Zhou troops had arrived he galloped back to report, and when Meng Chang questioned him he was so frightened that he could not utter a word, whereupon Meng Chang in anger had him killed and at once sent Gao Yanchou and Li Tinggui out to Tangcang against the Zhou. Gao Yanchou was heavily beaten and fell back on Qingni, and the four prefectures of Qin, Cheng, Jie and Feng were again taken by the Zhou, so that the northern defence of Later Shu fell back. In 957, when Emperor Shizong of Later Zhou sent back the captured Shu soldiers, Meng Chang sent the captured Zhou general Hu Li to the capital with a letter to Shizong, who held that Meng Chang had not used the language of a subject and in anger sent no reply; and in 958, when Later Zhou attacked Southern Tang and took the fourteen prefectures of the Huai and all the states were afraid, Jingnan wrote to urge Meng Chang to submit to Zhou, and he, having had no answer to his earlier letter, dropped the matter.

The Song Invasion, Sixty-Six Days, and His Surrender

Meng Chang was fortunate to live in the time of the Jin and Han, when the central plain was in disorder, so that he could hold a region by its natural defences; but his court and ministers took luxury for their pleasure, even ornamenting chamber pots with jewels. When Northern Song arose and had taken Jing and Tan, Meng Chang was the more afraid and sent the great usher Sun Yu by a side road to Northern Han with a letter in a wax ball, proposing a joint move to obstruct Song's unification; and Sun Yu was caught by Song frontier officers. The Song founder, having the letter, instead had more than five hundred rooms built for Meng Chang with all furnishings complete, to await his surrender. In the winter of 964 the Song armies advanced by several roads, and Meng Chang's dispositions were absurd: at the farewell banquet Wang Zhaoyuan, directing the army with an iron ruyi in his hand and likening himself to Zhuge Liang, said in the warmth of the wine to Li Hao that he was not merely going to resist the enemy, but that with twenty or thirty thousand of these scarred and hardened lads he would take the central plain as easily as turning his palm. Meng Chang also sent his son Meng Xuanzhe with several tens of thousands of picked troops to hold Jiange, and Meng Xuanzhe went with his favourite concubines in carriages and with musical instruments and scores of actors in the train, so that the men of Shu secretly laughed. Wang Quanbin met Wang Zhaoyuan at Sanquan and beat him; Wang Zhaoyuan burned the pontoon bridge at Jibai river and fell back on Jiange. The company commander Xiang Tao learned from Shu prisoners that there was a small road, the Laishu, joining the main road at the Qingqiang inn south of Jiange, and Wang Quanbin sent the subordinate general Shi Yande by that road to strike Jiange from the north while he attacked from the other side, so that Wang Zhaoyuan and Zhao Yantao were defeated and taken, and Meng Xuanzhe, hearing of the defeat, fled back to Chengdu. A Shu commander, beaten, shut himself in the inner city and held out; the judge Luo Ji urged him to withdraw, and he said that having failed to hold Qinzhou he could not retreat again, and that though the emperor did not kill him he would have no face for the men of Shu, and refusing to surrender he burned himself to death. The Shu troops broke up and most of the generals were taken. Meng Chang asked his advisers for a plan, and the old general Shi Jun held that the Song troops had come from afar and could not stay long, so that they should gather their forces and hold out until the enemy was worn out; but Meng Chang sighed and said that he and the late emperor had kept soldiers in warm clothes and good food for forty years, and that now, facing the enemy, not one would shoot an arrow eastward for him, so that though he wished to hold out, who would hold for him? He then had Li Hao write the memorial of surrender, and in the first month of 965, sixty-six days after the Song invasion began, Later Shu came to an end. It is worth noting that Li Hao had written the surrender of the former Shu emperor Wang Yan as well, and now wrote Meng Chang's, so that the men of Shu wrote by night on his gate that "the Li house writes surrenders from generation to generation," which was long a joke. After the surrender Meng Chang was taken from Chengdu toward the capital, and several tens of thousands of the people of Chengdu came out at the risk of their lives to see him off, weeping and escorting him along the river, men and women, old and young, several hundred of them fainting with grief, and Meng Chang hid his face and wept as the people followed him from Chengdu as far as Qianwei county, several hundred li. Reaching the capital he was enfeoffed duke of Qin, and seven days later, on the eleventh day of the sixth month of 965, he died at the age of forty-seven.

The Admonition to Officials, the City of Hibiscus, Medicine, and Later Legend

Meng Chang's rule left several marks in the way of civil government. In 941 he dismissed a number of generals who held military commands in absentia and cared only to gather wealth and not for administration; and in the same year he wrote the Admonition to Officials and issued it to the commanderies and counties, in twenty-four lines of ninety-six characters, among them the words that "I think on my people, and eat and sleep untimely; I entrust them to the magistrates, to nourish and bring them peace... do not let them be encroached upon, do not let them be wounded; the lowly people are easily oppressed, but heaven above is hard to deceive... your salary and your stipend are the fat and marrow of the people; as a father and mother to them, be you never without kindness; this I make your warning, and take to heart my deep intent," the purpose being that the officials should have it "before their eyes" and "so be inwardly warned in their hearts." Later the four lines "your salary and your stipend are the fat and marrow of the people; the lowly are easily oppressed, but heaven above is hard to deceive" were taken out as the Admonition of the Warning Stone and ordered to be cut in stone in every commandery and county and set before the hall of government; and from Song to Qing the offices of the prefectures and counties mostly carved those four lines to warn their officials. He organized the people to develop farming, sericulture and weaving, had the stone classics cut, and founded schools, so that the economy and culture of Shu stood in the forefront of the Ten States. In the ninth month of 950 he had hibiscus planted on the walls of Chengdu and screened with curtains, so that in full flower it looked like brocade, and Meng Chang told those about him that while men had always called Shu the City of Brocade, seeing it today it was truly a city of brocade. He was fond of medicine: when his mother was ill and physician after physician failed, he made up a prescription himself and gave it to her, and she recovered; and when any of his ministers fell ill he would summon them and examine them himself, so that his physicians acknowledged his skill with admiration. He was also fond of ball games and riding, took pleasure in the arts of the adepts and of the bedchamber, and filled his palace with women of good family. In later legend the Jintai Record holds that the Daoist immortal Zhang Xian was Meng Chang, and that the image of Zhang Xian handed down is a picture of the prince of Shu bending his bow, the word for his pellet being homophonous with the word for birth, so that he became the god who grants sons.

Major Activities

Admonition and official assessment

Meng issued an admonition reminding local officials that their salaries came from the people and that power should be exercised carefully. The words were subsequently adopted in the Song period and became a lasting part of the history of official instruction. The introduction of assessments in 949 (twelfth year of the Later Shu Guangzheng era) was a specific attempt to supervise officeholders. Sources also mention agriculture, water works, and schools, but broad claims about the success of every policy go beyond the evidence.

Printing and court culture

Meng's court printed Confucian classics, including the Mencius among the “eleven classics.” This was a material investment in scholarship during a period of regional wars. Later accounts, including the Shu Taowu, associate the couplet beginning “May the new year receive lingering blessings” with Meng and call it an early spring festival couplet. Neither the circumstances of its composition nor the claim that it was the very first such couplet is firmly established. Later literary traditions also enlarged stories about Meng and Lady Huarui; individual works attributed to the court require separate verification.

The Text of the Admonition and Its Later Use in Government

The value of Meng Chang's Admonition to Officials lay not only in its words but in its absorption into later institutions. The text warns local governors in the emperor's own voice, insisting that stipends come from the people's fat and marrow, that the governed must not be encroached upon or wounded, that "by gentleness and severity duly applied the customs may be changed," and promising that "my ranks and rewards are not late in coming," that is, that reward and punishment will not be delayed; its purpose was that officials should have the words "before their eyes" and so be "inwardly warned in their hearts." From it later ages took the four lines "your salary and your stipend are the fat and marrow of the people; the lowly are easily oppressed but heaven above is hard to deceive," issued them to every commandery and county to be cut in stone and called the "warning stone," set before the hall of the government office to warn officials to be clean and honest and to restrain themselves and love the people; and the practice was handed down as a fine story, so that the warning stone became a standing fixture of prefectural and county offices after the Song. To this end also, in 949, Meng Chang set up the three selections of the board of personnel and the examinations of the board of rites, beginning to put appointments in order through examination; and in the earlier part of his rule he attended to farming, water conservancy and schools, so that Shu kept a comparatively stable economic and cultural base amid the disorders of the Ten States — one reason why the men of Shu still remembered him after the state's fall.

The Eleven Classics, the Spring Couplet, and the Later Magnifying of His Court Culture

In the collation of texts, Meng Chang's court cut the Confucian classics, and the "eleven classics" so produced added the Classic of Filial Piety and the Erya to the Tang Kaicheng stone classics, kept the Analects, and took in the Mencius — the first time the Mencius was ranked among the classics; later Southern Song scholars placed the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean from the Record of Rites beside the Analects and the Mencius to form the Four Books, which were recognized officially and the Mencius became a classic in form, so that the canonical standing of the thirteen Confucian texts was established, and Meng Chang's eleven classics were one link in that chain. As to custom, the spring couplet is usually thought to begin in the Five Dynasties, and the Shu Taowu records that "on the last day of the year before Shu returned to Song, Chang had a scholar write on the peach boards at his chamber door, and finding the words poorly done, took up the brush himself and wrote: the new year receives the surplus blessings; the fine festival is called Long Spring." This is held to be the earliest recorded spring couplet: it was written at the New Year of 964, and in 965 the Song founder took Later Shu and carried Meng Chang away, at the same time appointing Lü Yuqing to govern Chengdu (giving the words "surplus blessing"), while the Song founder had already in 960 fixed his own birthday, the sixteenth day of the second month, as the "Long Spring festival," the words of the couplet's second line. Whether this was coincidence or foreknowledge cannot now be determined. Besides this, the court culture of Meng Chang and the consort Lady Huarui has been magnified by later literary narrative, and the attribution of the poems connected with it must be examined piece by piece and not decided on hearsay.

Personal Relations

• Meng Zhixiang and Lady Li: His parents. Meng succeeded his father as ruler of Later Shu.
• Meng Xuanzhe: His son, made crown prince in 962 (twenty-fifth year of the Later Shu Guangzheng era), and later taken to Song territory.
• Li Renhan and Zhang Ye: Senior officials who held power and were executed at different points as Meng asserted control.
• Zhao Kuangyin: The founder of Northern Song, who ordered the invasion of Later Shu and accepted Meng's surrender.
• Chai Rong, Emperor Shizong of Later Zhou: Ruled Later Zhou during its contest with Later Shu for Qin, Cheng, Jie, and Feng.

Historical Assessment

Later Shu lasted more than three decades under Meng Chang. The admonition to officials, administrative assessments, and classical printing reveal choices in government and scholarship. The loss of northern prefectures in 955 (eighteenth year of the Later Shu Guangzheng era) and rapid surrender in 965 (third year of the Northern Song Qiande era) also show the limits of its military position. Later writers frequently associated Meng with Lady Huarui and courtly pleasure, but those stories cannot substitute for examining frontier defenses, the political structure of Later Shu, and the balance of forces against Song. The poisoning story should likewise be distinguished from the established dates of his surrender and death.