Jiaozhou (2)
Having sent Shi Xin off with instructions to rest, I turned the matter over in my mind: just what kind of land was Jiaozhou?
Truth be told, it is an awfully obscure corner of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. And understandably so—the region lay impossibly far from the heartland. With Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Quan all too busy scuffling away up north, who had any attention to spare for a strip of territory at the empire's southernmost tip?
No joke: Rinan Commandery in Jiaozhou, notorious as the single worst place of exile in all of Han, lay a full 7,500 li—roughly 3,000 kilometers—from Luoyang. Put that way, it really is terrifying. They say those banished to Rinan held their own funerals at home before setting out, and there was good reason for it.
In fact, old Luo Guanzhong, the gentleman who penned Romance of the Three Kingdoms, never breathed so much as a word about Jiaozhou—let alone about Shi Xie, the man who ruled the region. As I recall, it appeared only obliquely, as one of Later Han's thirteen provinces.
The heart of Shi Xie's present domain was Jiaozhi Commandery, and Longbian County, where the Administrator of Jiaozhi kept his residence, corresponds to modern-day Hanoi, capital of Vietnam. From this you can gather that northern Vietnam in the Three Kingdoms era was part of the Han Empire.
To be precise, the territory was annexed after Qin Shi Huang founded the Qin dynasty, broke away again amid the Chu–Han contention, then settled into peace with the Former Han of Han Gaozu as a tributary state—until it surrendered and came under direct rule in the reign of Emperor Wu, that killer of foreign peoples who spent decades brawling with the Xiongnu.
After that came Emperor Guangwu, the munchkin emperor who founded the Later Han, and he set about handling northern Vietnam directly in an effort to blend the peoples together. And the man who, on Guangwu's orders, drove straight through the Vietnamese rebels and cemented Han control was Ma Yuan. A general with a distinctly familiar surname—and yes, you're reading that right. He was the ancestor of Ma Teng and Ma Chao.
In any case, having been absorbed into Han through all this drama and upheaval, Jiaozhou carried plenty of problems even afterward. It was the back of beyond squared, too remote for the court's influence to reach, so corrupt officials ran rampant, and the natives rose in revolt at the drop of a hat—whether because they disliked whichever official was governing Jiaozhou, or simply because they wanted independence.
For all these thorny problems, the reason Qin and Han never gave the place up was simple.
"Whoa! These things look insanely expensive! And you're telling me this is just a gift?!"
...Because in capable hands, it was a region that photocopied money. It was the source of southern specialties so rarely seen in Han that they commanded staggering prices, and the hub of countless trade routes fanning out to nation after nation.
I can't recall the exact date, but in the original history, even the Roman envoys who met with Sun Quan had entered the Kingdom of Wu by way of Jiaozhou. In other words, this was the sea lane of those VIP customers who, at the mere mention of Chinese silk, rolled their eyes back and paid its weight in gold.
The trouble, of course, was that the distance between the two nations made meeting face to face anything but easy. At this point in time, I'd have to start by calculating the route from scratch—working out how one might most easily make for Rome. And then there was Anxi, squatting in the middle to suck the honey out of the trade as the middleman, which was a considerable headache in its own right. Not that it mattered much, since the profits flowed in ample reward for the effort...
...Come to think of it, calling it by that name makes it sound terribly unfamiliar. To a modern person, "Parthia" is the more familiar word.
Anyway, the moment Roman and Chinese merchants tried to skip the middlemen and trade directly, those Parthian bastards would plant themselves squarely across the road and refuse to budge. Put yourself in Rome's shoes—getting fleeced exactly as I was—and it stings badly. But what could I do about it? It's not as if I could march into that far-off land demanding they spit back every coin they'd skimmed. Knowing Parthia, our dear Rome would be busily beating a retreat.
...Probably long after I'd grown old and died.
Pawooooo—!!
"Never thought I'd be seeing one of these beasts here."
Gazing at the elephant Shi Xin, Shi Xie's eldest son, had brought as a gift, I shook my head slowly. I did wonder how the elephant Her Majesty the Emperor had named "Pawoo" was faring back at the palace. Elephants live remarkably long, so it was probably alive and well. ...Still. How is "Pawoo" a name. Her Majesty's devastating sense of naming was the one thing I could never cover for.
I was not the only one to marvel at the appearance of such a familiar beast.
"Haha! If Mokrok saw this, she'd have been absolutely delighted!"
Meng Huo was referring to the Druid who had left so deep an impression on me during the Nanman campaign.
"Now that she's come up, I'm curious! What's Big Sis Mokrok doing right now?"
"Tossing meat to tigers in the forest, probably."
Meng You and Zhurong traded lines, each in her own unmistakable voice. ...But seriously—tossing meat to tigers in the middle of a forest. Why did that remind me of some old man sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons? Just as that odd picture took shape and a strange feeling began to steal over me, Zhuge Liang, standing nearby, asked:
"My lord, might I ask how you intend to handle Shi Xie's forces in concrete terms?"
"Hard to say." I shrugged at her question. That Shi Xie had bowed his head to me without so much as a skirmish was certainly news worth celebrating. And yet I couldn't exactly accept this offer of submission with a beaming smile and then simply leave the region to its own devices.
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but Shi Xie was a man who had practiced benevolent governance in Jiaozhou for many long years and enjoyed the undivided support of its Vietnamese people. They harbored a basic aversion to being ruled by Han, to be sure, but as the long years flowed by, a current of "credit where credit is due" had taken hold. How should I put it—the two peoples were slowly assimilating into one. In other words, the ethnic-assimilation policies Guangwu had rolled out at the founding of Later Han were only now, centuries later, beginning to bear fruit.
And the man at whom these same Vietnamese nodded and said, "If anyone's earned our recognition, it's him," was Shi Xie.
Thanks to old Luo Guanzhong, the Three Kingdoms era enjoys towering popular fame, but within the broad sweep of Chinese history it hardly looms large. At most, Sun Quan—the first to begin developing the Jiangdong—gets the occasional mention. Shi Xie, however, is a figure you simply cannot leave out of any account of Vietnamese history. He introduced the Chinese script to Vietnam, laid down its basic infrastructure, and governed the local people without cruelty. The locals revered him so deeply they took his very surname and called him King Shi.
...Right. Which meant that if Shi Xie set his mind to it, he could raise a Shi dynasty across the whole of Jiaozhou. No—considering the influence he already wielded there, his domain was effectively an independent state even now. Given how meekly he lived and died in the original history, he probably wouldn't attempt independence—but if I simply left him be, there was a very high probability feudalism would revive all on its own.
You know the thing I mean. Handing official posts down to your own family and ruling a territory as a hereditary possession, generation after generation. And this, in a Han court that reacted to the word "king" with hair-trigger sensitivity—imagine anyone not born a Liu being addressed as one. For an empire pursuing absolute centralization through the commandery-and-county system, that was beyond all toleration.
In truth, Sun Quan—who blindsided the Shi clan and then seized Jiaozhou by force—most likely acted precisely because the region amounted to an independent state. The trouble was that the aftershocks were anything but mild...
"In that case, how about I write it up something like this and send it?"
……
Having spent a while putting my thoughts in order, I looked to Zhuge Liang and asked what she thought; hearing me out, she nodded with the same expression she always wore.
"Indeed, my lord. If this man Shi Weiyan—Shi Xie, by surname and courtesy name—truly holds his clan's welfare at heart, he will without fail lend his ears to the words you have spoken."
"Oh?" That was far more positive than I'd expected. If our divinely-calculating, fiendishly-cunning strategist Zhuge Liang approved, there was no reason not to press ahead. I gave my orders to the adjutant standing nearby, waiting for instructions.
"An envoy... no, a courier. Summon a courier. I mean to send a reply to the Inspector of Jiaozhi."
"Yes, my lord! Leave it to me!!"
Watching Sun Quan's retreating back—today as ever, it seemed one more exclamation mark attached itself with every shout—I turned a quiet thought over in my mind. Shi Xie was a capable man; he would surely catch what I was getting at. All that remained was to hope he proved it with action.
Longbian County, Jiaozhi Commandery.
Ever since the previous Inspector of Jiaozhi, Zhu Fu, had lost his life on the open sea after a career steeped in corruption, the man newly installed as Inspector had been waiting for something with poorly concealed unease.
"Mmm... just when on earth is that reply going to arrive..."
Scarcely had Shi Xie finished muttering to himself when one of the officers under his command came sprinting up, shouting.
"My lord! A courier from the General-in-Chief has just arrived outside!"
"Ohh? Is that truly so?"
"It is, my lord!"
Having answered, the officer glanced about furtively before continuing.
"...But your eldest son is nowhere to be seen among the General-in-Chief's party. What are we to do?"
"...I see." Shi Xie replied in an even voice. "My son made his peace with this long ago. Pay it no mind."
"...Yes, my lord!" Though the voice was placid, the officer sensed something indescribable beneath it, and could only bow his head.
Shi Xie murmured under his breath. "...Still, I imagine they are treating him generously."
Sending one's own flesh and blood away as a hostage—proof that one harbored no treacherous designs—took courage from parent and child alike. The General-in-Chief would surely have read his intentions from such a gesture. All that remained was to receive the reply and judge.
Rising from his seat, Shi Xie moved at once to greet the General-in-Chief's envoy in person, and the envoy, after offering a simple bow, recited a single sentence.
"A letter from our lord."
……
Shi Xie took the letter the envoy held out and read its contents. The General-in-Chief's letter did not carry all that much.
Recall the White Horse Oath that Han Gaozu of old once swore with his ministers—and recall Empress Gao.
Nothing more than that single, curt line. Yet Shi Xie's brilliant mind needed only that one sentence to grasp exactly what the General-in-Chief was trying to say.
The White Horse Oath. The one vow kept more scrupulously than any other across four hundred years of Han history.
—Do you intend to make yourself a king?
The General-in-Chief was holding that very fact up before his eyes now—and offering him a chance to choose.
"I have words of great import to speak. Summon all of my children to me."
"We obey your command!"
After the General-in-Chief's envoy had departed, Shi Xie sat for a long while lost in thought. Then he tidied the letter away and spoke in a calm, level voice.