The Foreign Empress

A Gilded Façade

"Your Highness may not know this, but this lowly one's life is in grave danger. His Highness, the Eighth Prince, seeks to take this loyal servant's head and mount it on a pike in front of the palace walls!" Zhang Rang pleads, wiping tears from his eyes from the injustice being done to him.

"Why should I care?" I scoff. "Surely if the Eighth Prince seeks your head, you must have committed some ill sin. Regardless, working with you has no tangible benefits for this Palace." If you want my help so badly, I'm going to wring you dry for everything I can get, information and support.

"This lowly servant sought only two things, Your Highness. Firstly, this lowly servant lobbied for a measure to tax the upper echelons of the empire in order to accumulate funds to conduct food relief for the people." Zhang Rang's voice changes. In an instant, he transforms from a timid mediocrity into a righteous defender of the people. It's hard not to be taken aback at this new side of Zhang Rang. "Secondly, this lowly servant wanted to try and expose the Heizhenzu's abuse of power."

It's not a hard story to believe. The personalities of the Eighth Prince and Quan Linwen, the two highest authorities in the Heizhenzu, are more than enough to convince me of the threat the agency poses to...well, everyone. Zhang Rang proceeds to layout the dozens of different abuses of the Heizhenzu. Raiding parties ruthlessly massacre entire villages to quench their bloodthirst; upright officials and scholars are purged for speaking out, their familial lines all but extinguished, select survivors forced into state-run brothels; commissars attached to military units execute any who step out of line, replacing them with their own family members to consolidate personal power; the list goes on and on.

Carefully, Zhang Rang reaches into his robe and pulls out a small scroll, covered in tiny letters, numbers. He looks around, eyes squinted, straining to detect any eavesdroppers. Leaning in, he whispers, "Your Highness, this is the data I've painstakingly collected on the Heizhenzu." He points to a column, "This column shows the income the Heizhenzu has collected from their brothels. This one..." Zhang Rang points to column after column. I attempt to do the math in my head but it's simply too much. From what Xiaoyue and Cilanru have told me, the Eighth Prince receives an official salary from his position as Grand Inspector of the Central Plains, income from the Marquessate of Dong, and an allowance from the court. This means he should draw a monthly salary of approximately 30,000 coins and around 300 hu of grain.

"So, in total, His Highness alone is receiving around six million in coins each year, over sixteen times his official salary. And this is just the Eighth Prince, your guard dog is probably making ten or twenty times what she should be. What Your Highness sees is a gilded façade, a bandage attempting to cover a gaping, already-fatal wound. The Han Empire is rotting away Your Highness. And the Eighth Prince is vulture peeling flesh from its cooling corpse."

There is an unspoken message at the core of our conversation. Zhang Rang's fate as a court eunuch and mine as a princess of Han, are both inexorably tied to this decaying empire. For our own safety, the empire must remain strong and the imperial system must continue to reign supreme. The people must be provided for, protected, not out of goodwill or duty, but to prevent them from rising in revolt. And if Zhang Rang is to be believed, time is already running out.

Money- Let's talk about money in ancient China. The EighthPrince makes 360,000 coins and 3,600 huof grain per year. To put that in modern numbers, that's 72,000 liters ofgrain, divided by 35.2, that's approximately 2,045 bushels of grain. At sixdollars a bushel, that's $12,276 US dollars (2021), not a huge sum. However,consider that, by some estimates, the average GDP per capita of the Han Dynastywas $895 USD (2021) meaning that from his grain income alone, the Eighth Princemakes the money of thirteen people, not bad. Unfortunately, we don't know howmuch USD (2021) one wuzhu (one coin) translates to. We do know, however,that the Han Dynasty produced approximately 227,000,000 coins per year from 118BCE to 5 CE, if we assume this trend continues into the Late Eastern Han, thenthe Eighth Prince is making the equivalent of 2.6% of the national annual productionof coins. This is a HUGE amount. To put this in context, the Han Dynasty was bysome measures the richest country in the world at the time. If we look at therichest country today, the US, it has a GDP of $20.45 trillion, two percent ofthis is a staggering sum of $435 billion. Suffice to say, the Eighth Prince isWAY richer than he's supposed to be (and these are only the funds Zhang Rangcan definitively trace).