Emperador Ling de Han

The last Han emperor to rule a more or less intact empire. Ling was twelve when the empress dowager's family picked him, and the reign that followed is remembered for the second purge of the scholar-officials, for the open sale of government appointments, and for the Yellow Turban rising of 184 that put armies in the hands of men who never gave them back.

The coup that opened his reign set its terms: the regent Dou Wu tried to break the eunuchs and was killed by them instead, and the Second Partisan Prohibitions of 169 shut the reforming officials out of office for the next seventeen years. Ling, who grew up inside that arrangement, treated the state as an estate — offices were priced, the price list was public, and the money went to his private treasury.

In 184 the Yellow Turban rebellion broke out across eight provinces at once. Putting it down required giving provincial governors their own troops and their own tax revenue, and they kept both. Ling died in 189; within months the eunuchs had been massacred, Dong Zhuo held the capital, and the dynasty had thirty years left as a name.

Xiang Li paints the two empresses of his reign together: Empress Song, deposed on a sorcery accusation in 178 and dead in prison, and Empress He, whose brother led the failed strike against the eunuchs and whose son was the second-to-last Han emperor.