This article continues the story begun in “[Posthumous Names],” and stands as one worked example of the series’ opening piece, “[History Is Written by the Victors].” In the manga Kingdom, Zhao Qian appears as the strange, unstable king of Zhao — the state’s very last ruler. The history books dismiss him in a word: benighted, a fool. But read the single poem he is said to have composed in his place of exile, and you find something else: a man who never stopped grieving over his own mistake.
The “Fool King,” a Courtesan’s Son
Zhao Qian’s life was crooked from the moment he was born.
His mother, later titled the Courtesan Queen (Queen Chang), had begun as an entertainer — a chang, a singing-girl. Her beauty won her the favor of King Daoxiang, and she entered the palace harem. The first to object was the great general Li Mu: to bring a woman of such low standing into the harem, he said, was a violation of ritual propriety. Remember this. It comes back later.
In time the Courtesan Queen joined forces with Guo Kai — the king’s old study-companion — to bring down the rightful heir, the principal wife’s eldest son Zhao Jia, and installed her own boy, Zhao Qian, as crown prince in his place. It was a flat, unprecedented breach of the ritual order. Young Zhao Qian grew up watching this bloody harem power-struggle every single day. And his mother, it is said, had a lover of her own — none other than Lord Chunping, the elder brother of his father, King Daoxiang. What must it have been like for a small boy to watch his own mother carrying on with his father’s brother?
✦ My reading. In his later years he was extravagantly suspicious, unable to trust grown men or women — and perhaps this childhood cast its shadow over that. The manga Kingdom portrays him as a king who opens his heart only to boys. There is no record of homosexuality in the historical sources, but psychologically I find it a rather persuasive touch.
A King in Name Only, Ringed by Qin’s Shadow
In 236 BC, Zhao Qian took the throne at nineteen. But it was a throne in name only. Real power was held by three people: his mother the Courtesan Queen, her confidant Guo Kai, and her lover Lord Chunping. And all three of them were on Qin’s payroll. Lord Chunping led the pro-Qin faction; the Queen and Guo Kai both moved to Qin’s tune. Every figure around the young king had Qin’s breath on him.
On top of that, the court was split from within. This was a king who had risen by pushing aside the legitimate heir, Zhao Jia — so resentment smouldered (“he unseated the rightful crown prince”), and a Zhao Jia faction lurked in the wings. The pro-Qin faction, the civil-official faction, the remnants of the crown-prince faction — their interests tangled together, and even with the country in danger the court could not become one body. Qin merely drove a wedge into a crack that was already there. What choices, really, did a young man enthroned into such a situation have?
Why He Killed Li Mu
In 229 BC, a great Qin army invaded Zhao. And still Zhao had hope. Li Mu — counted among the Four Great Generals of the Warring States, an undefeated commander. Because he had turned back the armies of Qin again and again, people believed: as long as Li Mu lives, Zhao cannot fall.
Knowing it could not beat Li Mu head-on, Qin reached for another tool: a bribe to Guo Kai. Having pocketed the money,Kaku kai Guo Kai whispered to Zhao Qian that Li Mu and Sima Shang were in secret contact with Qin.
✦ My reading — this was the textbook case of the “sowing-discord stratagem.” I have seen this trick again and again on this blog. Qin removes an enemy state’s able general not on the battlefield but through rumor and bribery — this is precisely the fanjian ji (反間計), the discord stratagem that Qin’s strategist [Wei Liao] refined into national policy. It is exactly how Wei was made to lose its own great general, and how [Lord Xinling] was cast aside (→ “[Lord Xinling]”). Even one of the Four Great Generals dies not by an enemy’s sword but by an ally’s whisper.
And in Zhao Qian’s case, an old memory may have been smouldering deep down. Li Mu was the man who had once called his mother “base.” Onto that faint seed of distrust, Guo Kai’s slander set a match. Seen that way, this was no simple lie: it was a calculated blow, aimed straight at a feeling years in the making.
There was more. To the court’s civil-official faction, Li Mu — adored by soldiers and commoners alike — was a threat to their own power if left standing. Qin’s bribe, the officials’ pressure, the persuasion of his mother and Lord Chunping: from every direction, he was swept toward the same conclusion. And Zhao Qian made his decision. He had Li Mu executed and stripped Sima Shang of command. The result was almost too painful to look at. Robbed of its great general, the Zhao army collapsed, and in 228 BC, Zhao fell.
✦ Let me say this plainly. Killing Li Mu was a genuine, irreparable mistake. I have no intention of dressing Zhao Qian up as a “poor victim” and canonizing him. But — settling the whole matter with the single phrase “and that is why he was a fool king” is wrong in a different way. To have made a mistake and to have been incompetent are not the same thing. What I want to know is the true grey that lies between them (this blog’s creed → “[History Is Written by the Victors]”).
The Exile’s Poem, “Mountains and Rivers” (Shanshui 山水)
Having lost his country, Zhao Qian was banished far away to Fangling — deep in the mountains of what is now Hubei. No warm rooms, no beautiful music, no good food. Only the cold mountain wind and the fierce sound of the river. It was there that he is said to have composed the poem “Mountains and Rivers”:
These hills are my palace now; this river’s water, my wine. No zither, no lute reaches my ears — only the water, rushing on and on. Even this heartless water finds its own way, in the end, to the Han River; yet I, once lord of ten thousand chariots, can only dream of the home I cannot reach. Who brought me to this? Slander, run rampant. My good ministers were buried, and the altars of the state fell to ruin. My own ears were not keen enough — so how could I resent the King of Qin?
The bare sense of it:
These mountains are my palace now. The water of this river is my wine. I hear no zither, no lute — only the crash of the water. Even this heartless water reaches the Han River in the end, while I, who was once lord of ten thousand chariots, can do nothing but dream of home, unable to return. Who brought me to this? It was slander, run rampant. My finest ministers were buried; my country was destroyed. My own ears were not keen enough — so how could I resent the King of Qin?
✦ My reading: One Character — What Could the King Not Hear?
That last line:
My own ears were not keen enough — so how could I resent the King of Qin?
The word I have translated “keen” is a single Chinese character: 聡 (cōng) — sharpness of hearing, acuity, the power to perceive. My hearing was not keen enough, and so I cannot blame the King of Qin, Zhao Qian says. I found myself stopped for a long while at this one character. Because the king’s crown was built precisely in order to kill it.
The balls of cotton
The royal crown — the miǎnguān (冕冠) — has, hanging in front of the eyes, a curtain of jade beads, and hanging beside the ears, small balls of yellow cotton. The first are called liú (旒); the second, tǒukuàng (黈纊), or “ear-fillers” (chōng’ěr 充耳).
Dong Fangshuo explained it like this:
Water too clear has no fish; a man too sharp has no followers. The jade strings before the crown are there to veil his sight; the cotton at the ears is there to block his hearing. (Book of Han, “Biography of Dong Fangshuo”; same import in the Da Dai Liji.)
Water so clear that nothing lives in it. A man so perceptive that no one will follow him. The curtain before the eyes (liú) — so that he will not see too far into the fine details. The balls of cotton at the ears (tǒukuàng) — so that he will not catch even the whispers.
In other words, the ornaments of the crown were a device for deliberately dulling the king’s eyes and ears.
Do not perceive too much. Do not listen to the slander that is whispered to you. That is what he wears on his head as he walks.
And here is the strange collision. The crown’s device exists to block 聡. Zhao Qian’s confession is that his 聡 was insufficient. The two point in exactly opposite directions.
The two meanings of 聡
It happens because the single character carries two senses:
- The 聡 of “blocking 聡” — ears that are too good, sharp enough to pick up even whispers.
- The 聡 of “hearing not being 聡” — the power to tell apart, to distinguish true from false.
Ritual diagnosed the king’s disease as hearing too much. So it put in a plug.
But what Zhao Qian confessed was that he could not tell the true from the false.
The plug was useless. What he lacked was not the blocking of his ears, but the power to sort the voices that came in.
What Guo Kai whispered was: Li Mu and Sima Shang are plotting rebellion. What Zhao Qian was asked to distinguish were two images with identical outlines — the silhouette of Li Mu the honest, incorruptible minister, and the silhouette of a general planning treason, which from Handan looked like exactly the same shape. Guo Kai did not fabricate a lie; he simply described Li Mu as he was. Why that outline had become impossible to tell apart, I write from Li Mu’s own side (→ “[The Undefeated General — Why Was He Killed by His Own?]”). Not listening to the whisper was not enough. He had to listen, and then sort. The cotton has no such power.
His ear was already tilted
And one more thing. Zhao Qian’s ear had been tilted long before Guo Kai ever whispered.
Recall that remonstrance from the very beginning. When King Daoxiang sought to bring the Handan singing-girl — the woman who would later bear Zhao Qian — into his harem, the one who objected was Li Mu. The Lienü zhuan records it:
Li Mu remonstrated: “It must not be. A woman without virtue is the means by which a state is overturned and left in unrest. This woman has already thrown one house into disorder. Does Your Majesty not fear it?” The king answered: “Whether there is disorder or not lies in how I govern.” And he married her all the same.
Li Mu was right. And he said it out loud.
The Courtesan Queen did not forget. The Lienü zhuan states plainly that she later took large bribes from Qin and made the king put to death his own fine general, Lord Wu’an — Li Mu.
So by the time Guo Kai whispered, Zhao Qian’s head was already turned aside. The man who had called his mother “a woman without virtue” was Li Mu. Guo Kai did not pour a lie into a straight ear. He poured something plausible into an ear that had long been tilted.
And the cotton ball only works on a head held straight. It merely dangles beside the ear — so when the head tilts, the cotton drifts away from the ear. Zhao Qian’s ball of cotton had slipped out of place before he was old enough to remember, because he was raised inside his mother’s hatred of Li Mu.
So “my ears were not keen enough” is both true and cruel. He blamed his own power to discern. But what he was asked to discern were two things of identical outline — and his ear had been tilted one way since before he was born.
That he could not do it, I cannot bring myself to blame so easily.
【Source note】 Whether Zhao Qian actually wore a miǎnguān hung with cotton, we do not know. The crown settles into the form we now know only in the Han dynasty (Book of the Later Han, “Treatise on Carriages and Robes”), and the explanation that “the cotton is for not hearing slander” is itself the phrasing of Dong Fangshuo (2nd century BC).
【Source note】 Li Mu’s remonstrance is not in the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji); it is a passage in the Lienü zhuan (Liu Xiang, Former Han), in the chapter on “pernicious favorites” — women blamed for leading rulers astray, a volume framed around the idea that states fall because of women. The storyline in which the Courtesan Queen has Li Mu killed with Qin’s bribes sits inside that same frame. “A worthy man remonstrated, the king would not listen, and sure enough the state fell” is a stock narrative pattern, and it may well have been composed after the fact. Please read it not as certain history, but as a tradition that such a thing was told.
Two Posthumous Names: “Youmiu” and “Min”
After Zhao Qian’s death, he was given two utterly different posthumous names (for how posthumous names work → “[The Posthumous-Name System]”).
What Zhao’s former officials conferred, in secret, was King Min (愍王) — the king to be lamented. Those retainers who had read his poem wept, and mourning their ill-fated lord, they gave him this name. (By a curious echo, this is the same character 愍 that the state of Shu-Han later gave to [Liu Xie], the last emperor of the Later Han. The heart that mourns a loser reaches, across the centuries, for the very same word.)
The name that survived in the history books, and remains his name to this day, is King Youmiu (幽繆王). Both 幽 (“benighted, dark”) and 繆 (“erring, muddled”) are among the most negative of all posthumous characters, signifying folly and confusion.
✦ My reading — the man who could not be graded, grading his enemies. There is a sharp irony here. As I wrote in the “[Posthumous Names]” article, Qin’s First Emperor refused a posthumous name for himself. He could not stand to be graded after death by ministers and descendants, so he waved the whole evaluation away: I am the First Emperor; after me, the Second, the Third. And yet — under that very Qin realm, the kings of the six conquered states had names like “Youmiu” and “erring” made to stick to them. He is graded by no one, and grades only the defeated.
“The kings of the conquered states were all fools. Therefore Qin’s unification was just.” — this is what it means to say the victors write history.
Whether Zhao Qian was truly a King Youmiu, we can no longer know. The only certain thing is that the ones who chose those characters were the ones who destroyed him.
In Closing — Which Name Will You Use?
Zhao Qian did, without question, make his mistake. The execution of Li Mu is beyond excuse. But the court he was raised in was one where his mother lay with his father’s brother, and where every retainer he should have trusted had been bought by the enemy. Rather than incompetent, he was a structural loser — seated from the outset before a board he could not win. That, to me, seems the more accurate way to put it. And to the very end, he never stopped grieving over his own mistake.
Call him “King Youmiu,” and you trace over the brand the First Emperor pressed onto him. Call him “King Min,” and you stand beside the old retainers who wept at his poem. Which name you use is up to you. For my part, I do not want to forget that last line — My own ears were not keen enough; so how could I resent the King of Qin? Because behind the history the victors write, there is always this: the small, buried voice of the defeated.
▼ The Fall of Zhao series
- The whole picture (why Zhao fell): Why Did Zhao Fall? [Overview]
- The sequence of events: King Youmiu and the Fall of Zhao — A Complete Timeline
- The people: Zhao Qian (King Youmiu) ｜ King Daoxiang (father) ｜ the Courtesan Queen (mother) ｜ Guo Kai (the treacherous minister) ｜ Lord Chunping
◀ Posthumous names and the victor’s verdict: [The Posthumous-Name System (Youmiu and Min)] ｜ [History Is Written by the Victors] ｜ [Liu Xie, Emperor Xian of Han (the same “Min”)] ◀ Slander that kills great generals: [Wei Liao (Qin’s discord stratagem)] ｜ [Lord Xinling (a hero cut down by slander)] ◀ The state of Zhao: [The He Shi Bi (returning the jade intact to Zhao)] ｜ [The Paulownia-Leaf Enfeoffment (Jin, the root of Zhao)] ｜ [The Heirloom Seal of the Realm (where Zhao’s jade went)] ◀ Series index: To the Complete Guide — Late Qing / Warring States Series