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Updated: June 29, 2025
Through these timely precautions Chuwen, who was only sixteen years of age, was proclaimed emperor without any opposition, and took the title of Kien Wenti. Hongwou had rightly divined that his sons might prove a thorn in the side of his successor, and his policy of employing them in posts at a distance from the capital was only half successful in attaining its object.
Addressing his soldiers he said: "I know how to advance, but not to retreat"; but his army decided to return to their homes in the north, when the extraordinary and unexpected retreat of the greater part of the army of Wenti revived their courage and induced them to follow their leader through one more encounter. Like Frederick the Great, the Prince of Yen was never greater than in defeat.
Wenti succeeded in recovering Honan, but after a protracted campaign, during which the Wei troops crossed the river on the ice, his armies were again expelled from it, and the exhausted combatants found themselves at the close of the struggle in almost the same position they had held at the commencement.
The good work of Wenti was continued during the peaceful reign of sixteen years of his son Kingti. The next emperor was Vouti, a younger son of Kingti, and one of his earliest conquests was to add the difficult and inaccessible province of Fuhkien to the empire.
It says much for the excellence of Kaotsou's work, and for the hold the Han family had obtained on the Chinese people, that when it became necessary to select an emperor after the death of Liuchi the choice should have fallen unanimously on the Prince of Tai, who was the illegitimate son of Kaotsou. On mounting the throne, he took the name of Wenti.
Ts'ao Ts'ao himself wrote songs: he was that bold bad adventurer and highly successful general who turned out the last Han and set his own son on the throne as Wei Wenti; who also was a poet, as was his brother Ts'ao Chih. Of Ts'ao Chih a contemporary said: "If all the talent in the world were divided into ten parts, Ts'ao Chih would have eight of them."
As the Hoangho divides this province into two parts, it was extremely difficult for the Wei ruler to defend the portion south of it, and when Wenti sent him his declaration of war, he replied, "Even if your master succeeds in seizing this province I shall know how to retake it as soon as the waters of the Hoangho are frozen."
But instead of profiting by his good fortune, Wenti, believing that all danger from the prince was at an end, resumed his old practices, and reinstated two of the most obnoxious of his ministers, whom he had disgraced in a fit of apprehension.
In Ssechuan a Han prince set up a small unstable throne; another went to Armenia, and became a great man there; but in Loyang the capital, Ts'ao Ts'ao, the man who engineered the fall of the Hans, set his son as Wei Wenti on the throne. He was a very typical figure, this Ts'ao Ts'ao: a man ominous of disintegration. You cannot go far in Chinese poetry without meeting references to him.
Afraid to trust himself to the mercy of his relative, he fled, disguised as a priest, to Yunnan, where he passed his life ignominiously for forty years, and his identity was only discovered after that lapse of time by his publishing, in his new character of a Buddhist priest, a poem reciting and lamenting the misfortunes of Wenti.
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