Chapter 133: Eight Thousand Foster Sons

An Lushan wanted Zhen Qian’s method of brewing for two reasons: first, to amass wealth; second, because the liquor known as Burning Sabre truly could ward off the cold. Possessing it would also help him win the loyalty of his soldiers. Although he had failed to obtain the brewing method, the outcome was already quite satisfactory, and he naturally had no desire to come into conflict with Li Cui.

Li Cui immediately said displeasedly, “Master Zhen, I care nothing about how much wine you sell. Not a single drop of my share may be short!”

Zhen Qian secretly gave him a thumbs-up. Li Cui truly knew how to repay a favor, and was far better than that ungrateful wolf, An Lushan. Zhen Qian could hardly resist planting a kiss on him.

“Your Highness may rest assured. I am planning to open a Drunken Immortal Tower in the capital. From then on, your residence’s supply of wine can be handled by my establishment.”

“Excellent! I happen to own some properties in the capital as well. There is a restaurant in the East Market that has been poorly managed and is about to be put up for sale. Would you be interested, Master Zhen?”

Land in Chang’an was worth its weight in gold. The West Market was the most prosperous, filled with a dazzling array of goods, while the East Market gathered rare treasures from every corner of the realm, most of them high-end luxuries. Buying a restaurant in the East Market was impossible without at least ten thousand strings of cash.

Zhen Qian naturally had no intention of buying a Chang’an restaurant on the verge of collapse. Once war broke out, land prices in Chang’an would plummet. Buying one now would be like taking over a sinking ship. Renting a poorly managed restaurant was not an especially wise move either. Yet however high the rent, it could never equal the price of the property itself. Zhen Qian had always held firmly to this principle: occupy as little capital as possible while expanding as quickly as possible. Since Li Cui wished to join the venture, there was naturally no problem.

“Thank you, Your Highness. I could not ask for anything better!”

The Tang regarded merchants as a base and contemptible class, considering commerce and industry to be pursuits of little worth. Officials were strictly forbidden from entering the marketplace. Yet where there was a policy, there were always ways around it. If officials could not conduct business themselves, they had their relatives or clansmen do it for them; they invested in ventures or supported them in secret. The methods were endlessly inventive. No one ever thought money too hot to touch—least of all Li Cui, whose title was illustrious but whose authority was negligible. Conducting business would hardly invite impeachment from the censors.

The two men quickly reached an agreement. A partnership worth more than ten thousand strings of cash was settled on the spot, without the slightest regard for An Lushan, who was watching from the side with naked envy.

An Lushan rose to take his leave. “This commander is leaving Luquan County tomorrow. Will Your Highness travel with me?”

Li Cui shook his head and declined. “My daughter’s illness has improved greatly thanks to Master Zhen’s treatment, but her condition has not yet stabilized. It would be unwise to subject her to the jolting of a journey. We must remain here for a few more days to observe her, so I shall not be traveling with Marshal An.”

An Lushan’s folds of fat trembled several times. “Very well! Then this commander shall bid you farewell now and will not trouble Your Highness with another farewell tomorrow. We shall meet again in the capital on New Year’s Day!”

Zhen Qian and Li Cui saw An Lushan and his men out. With three thousand strings of flying cash tucked against his chest, Zhen Qian finally managed to send that plague god on his way.

After returning to the tent and sitting down again, Li Cui looked at Zhen Qian and sighed. “Master Zhen, you were reckless today.”

“Is this because of the brewing business?”

Since Li Cui had treated him with complete candor, Zhen Qian naturally could not pretend not to understand.

“Since you already knew that, why did you drag me into it? Do you know what sort of man An Lushan is?”

Zhen Qian truly did not yet understand An Lushan’s character. History, after all, had been embellished and altered countless times by later generations. Li Shimin had personally consulted the daily records of court life, while Zhu Di had simply erased the Jianwen era from the annals altogether. As for the matter of An Lushan taking alchemical pills, whether Emperor Xuanzong had intended it or whether An Lushan’s constitution had been unable to expel the poison, perhaps only Emperor Xuanzong himself had ever known the truth.

Seeing Zhen Qian shake his head, Li Cui gave a bitter smile. “You are far too bold. Everyone at court says that An Lushan harbors treasonous ambitions and possesses a tremendous appetite for power. He has more than eight thousand adopted sons under his command, and most of the generals around him are foreigners from beyond the frontier. Can you truly afford to provoke such a man?”

During the Tang, the practice of taking adopted sons was widespread. Such sons were called fictive sons, and of course they were not born of the adopter’s blood.

There were generally three kinds of adopted sons in the Tang.

The first were genuine adopted sons. Though unrelated by blood, they shared the affection of a true father and son, and their numbers were usually small. Some were taken in because a man had no sons of his own. The ancients were deeply superstitious and believed that adopting a genuine son first would bring them a biological son later. Such adopted sons not only took the family name, but were entrusted with important responsibilities and enjoyed the right of inheritance.

There were many such examples in history. Wang Chongrong’s adopted son Wang Ke served as military administrator. When Wang Chongrong died, the army appointed Wang Ke to oversee the affairs of the military command. Zhu Wen’s adopted son Zhu Youwen was greatly favored by him, receiving the title Prince of Bo and being appointed superintendent of Jianchang Palace; he was even privately designated as heir to the throne. More famously, three emperors of the Later Five Dynasties had begun life as adopted sons. Liu Jisi, the deposed emperor of Northern Han, and Liu Jiyuan, the Martial and Heroic Emperor, were both adopted sons of Liu Chengjun, Emperor Ruizong. Chai Rong, Emperor Shizong of Later Zhou, was the adopted son of Guo Wei.

The second kind were adopted sons in name only. In reality, they served as their master’s personal guards and retainers. Their numbers could be astonishingly large, sometimes reaching several thousand. They were all brave warriors or men skilled at devising strategies, and were also known as “righteous sons.” An Lushan had adopted more than eight thousand men from the Tongluo, surrendered Xi, and Khitan tribes as fictive sons.

In truth, this was an imitation of the traditional system by which tribal leaders maintained personal retainers among certain minority peoples. Such men therefore possessed no right of inheritance and did not change their names.

The third kind occupied a position between the first two. Their numbers likewise fell between the two extremes, and the nature of the relationship was ambiguous, depending entirely on the adopter’s attitude.

The widespread adoption of this system from the Tang through the Five Dynasties had definite historical roots and social causes.

At first, the practice was closely associated with peoples from beyond the frontier and was most prevalent in the Heshuo region, where frontier peoples and Han Chinese lived side by side. At the time, the northern tribes lagged far behind the Central Plains in their social and historical development. They remained in the latter stages of primitive tribal society and still lived by a backward nomadic way of life.

Their customs included such practices as a dead father or elder brother leaving his wife to his son or younger brother, placing the mother before the father, and despising the old while honoring the strong. Their marital and family structures appear to have been in transition from pair-bonded families toward the monogamous household. The position of women was therefore relatively elevated, and rigid feudal concepts of father and son, senior and junior, or husband and wife had not yet taken shape.

At the same time, warfare between the tribes was frequent and brutal. Their members, especially the men, suffered high mortality, and their communities were highly mobile. These social conditions and cultural attitudes made them accustomed to taking outsiders or captives as adopted sons in order to strengthen their own clans and tribes. They were equally accustomed to becoming the adopted sons of others.

As the Tang launched campaign after campaign, large numbers of frontier peoples were incorporated into the empire and settled in the Central Plains. Through this process, the institution spread into the heartland.

Why, then, did the system of adopted sons gradually become so widespread during the Tang and Five Dynasties, growing more extreme with each passing year?

The fundamental reason was directly connected to the transformation of the Tang military system: from conscription, to recruitment, and finally to private armies, together with the prolonged division of the realm among regional military commands.

At the beginning of the Tang, the government operated a garrison-army system based on conscription. It rested upon the equal-field system. Peasants drafted into the garrisons provided their own weapons and provisions and took turns standing guard, ensuring that generals could not monopolize troops.

After the reigns of Emperor Gaozong and Empress Wu, the gradual collapse of the equal-field system, together with the internal contradictions of the garrison system itself, caused conscription to disintegrate. The recruitment system, which had existed on a small scale since the early Tang, therefore became increasingly common. By the Kaiyuan era of Emperor Xuanzong, recruited soldiers had become the established norm.

Once recruitment was implemented, soldiering became a specialized profession, and generals gained the power to command troops personally. The conditions for the flourishing of the adopted-son system were thus created.

During the reigns of Emperor Ruizong and Emperor Xuanzong, the increasingly complex relations between the frontier regions and the minority peoples led the government to establish military-governor posts in key border strongholds. During the Tianbao era of Emperor Xuanzong, frontier generals who were isolated, impoverished, and without powerful allies were often promoted to these positions.

Once men of foreign tribal origin gained control over military and political authority, they naturally exerted a powerful influence on local customs, encouraging the spread of frontier traditions. The custom of taking adopted sons and the tribal system of personal retainers therefore found favorable conditions and gradually became widespread.

When the An-Shi Rebellion erupted, every provincial governor in the Central Plains who also commanded troops was granted the title of military governor. After the rebellion was suppressed, the Tang central government gradually lost effective control over the armies of the provinces, and the realm descended into a condition of regional military separatism.

Relying on their political and economic strength, the military governors recruited soldiers, gathered followers, and established themselves as dominant powers in their respective territories. Their system of private armies provided the foundation upon which the custom of adopting sons spread throughout the military.

To cultivate trusted followers and nurture their own factions, the commanders of the regional armies imitated the frontier practice of adopting sons. They manufactured vast networks of kinship within their armies, to the point that in the latter years of the Tang, every powerful governor and fierce military commander kept adopted sons.

Meanwhile, after the An-Shi Rebellion, Hebei remained under the control of the remnants of An Lushan and Shi Siming. Their armies consisted largely of frontier peoples, and the influence of frontier customs in the Heshuo region only grew stronger. People at the time even said, “The world regards Heshuo as though it were inhabited by barbarians.”

Moreover, many generals who had served under An Lushan and Shi Siming, along with soldiers from the military commands of Hebei, entered the Central Plains and became commanders or leaders of various regional armies there.

After the founding of the Northern Song, its rulers, mindful of the separatist military commands and the arrogance of soldiers that had prevailed since the middle Tang and the Five Dynasties, adopted a series of measures to strengthen central authority. They reclaimed the military, financial, and judicial powers of the military governors for the central government.

Along with the Song emphasis on civil administration and Han-centered culture, these measures stripped the once-prevalent system of adopted sons of its political, military, and social foundations. It was therefore severely restricted, and large-scale adoption gradually vanished into the river of history.

Ironically, An Lushan had eight thousand adopted sons, while Zhen Qian secretly had several hundred of his own. Most of them were abandoned children—homeless, parentless wanderers whom Zhen Qian had quietly taken in.