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Soon after the "Crimson Eyebrows" were in the field again, not as supporters of an imperial refugee, but as open enemies of the public peace, each man fighting for his own hand. While the new ruler was making himself strong at Loyang, the new capital, Fanchong and his brigands seized Changnan, Wang Mang's old capital, and pillaged it mercilessly.
The story is profoundly characteristic: like Ah Sin's smile in the poem, "childlike and bland"; but hiding wonderful depths of philosophy beneath. Laotse showed his deep Occult wisdom when he said that the Man of Tao "does difficult things while they are still easy." Liehtse tells you the story of the Assitant to the Keeper of the Wild Beasts at Loyang.
With the growing influence of the Chinese gentry, however, Confucianism gained ground again, until with the transfer of the capital to Loyang it gained a complete victory, taking the place of Buddhism and becoming once more as in the past the official religion of the state. This process shows us once more how closely the social order of the gentry was associated with Confucianism.
This fighting ended with a victory for the Toba and with the final establishment of the Toba in the new capital of Loyang. South China was heavily defeated again and again, but never finally conquered. There were intervals of peace. In the years between 480 and 490 there was less disorder in the south, at all events in internal affairs.
Loyang was just in the middle of the new state, and for the purposes of Heaven-worship it was regarded as the centre of the universe, where it was essential that the emperor should reside. Loyang was another twin city: in one part were the rulers' administrative buildings, in the other the transferred population of the Shang capital, probably artisans for the most part.
Conditions had been much the same once before, at the court of the Han emperors, but with one great difference: at that time everything of importance took place in the capital; now, in addition to the actual capital, Ch'ang-an, there was the second capital, Loyang, in no way inferior to the other in importance; and the great towns in the south also played their part as commercial and cultural centres that had developed in the 360 years of division between north and south.
The massacres of the preceding years had so reduced the population that there was land enough for the peasants who remained alive. Moreover, their lords and the moneylenders of the towns were generally no longer alive, so that many peasants had become free of debt. The government was transferred from Sian to Loyang, in the present province of Honan.
He had; and yet the change came in 166; after that year Rome stood on the defensive until she fell. It was in that year, you will remember, that King An-tun Aurelius's envoys reached Loyang by way of Bumiah and the sea.
He succeeded in capturing Loyang, and carrying off Hwaiti as his prisoner. The capital was pillaged and the Prince Royal executed. Hwaiti is considered the first Chinese emperor to have fallen into the hands of a foreign conqueror. Two years after his capture, Hwaiti was compelled to wait on his conqueror at a public banquet, and when it was over he was led out to execution.
His son and successor was also murdered, when the Soui dynasty came to an end, and with it the magnificent and costly palace erected at Loyang, which was denounced as only calculated "to soften the heart of a prince and to foment his cupidity."
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