After the founding emperors of ancient China had settled down, most of them advocated the legend of their birth. The history of the Song Dynasty and the history of the Ming Dynasty respectively recorded the strange phenomenon of “red lights all over the house” when Zhao Kuangyin and Zhu Yuanzhang were born. Their purpose in doing so is nothing more than to prove the rationality and authority of being an emperor, and to declare to the world that they are not “ordinary people” and are well deserved “the right ones”. However, compared with Sima Qian’s way of portraying Liu Bang, the emperor of the Han Dynasty, as a God and a dragon, this kind of trick of painting his birth with a legendary color and claiming that “imperial power is granted by heaven” is really “a small Witch sees a big witch”.
Liu bangben is a common man. He has worked as a governor in Surabaya. He is a gluttonous, lecherous, lazy and rogue, and doesn’t like reading. However, such an almost rogue man was able to stand out in the peasant uprising at the end of Qin Dynasty. In just a few years, he not only defeated the imperishable Western Chu overlord Xiangyu, but also captured the country and became the emperor. Liu Bang’s achievements not only puzzled those who knew him, but also surprised Sima Qian.
Perhaps it was inspired by the authorities in the Western Han Dynasty, or perhaps it was out of his heartfelt worship for Liu Bang. Sima Qian naturally deified Liu Bang when he wrote the historical records? The chronicles of Gaozu. To mold Liu Bang, the founder of the Han Dynasty, into a God and the son of God was not only the political need of the rulers to further strengthen their rule at that time, but also the common people’s desire for a heroic and legendary life at that time.
To deify Liu Bang, the first step is to start at birth, even if it is to put a green hat on his father. Sima Qian did just that. “Before him, Liu Yi tasted the lake of daze and met God in a dream. At that time, the thunder and lightning were dark. When Tai Gong looked at it, he saw that the dragon was on it. He was already alive and gave birth to Gaozu.” Sima Qian deserves to be a big hand. He can make up such a wonderful story. Unlike ordinary people, Liu Bang is not the “crystallization of love” of his parents, but the product of his mother’s intercourse with Jiaolong in her sleep. In other words, Liu Bang’s mother was pregnant with “pure dragon”. After birth, Liu Bang was not an ordinary person, but the son of God (Jiaolong). To rule a country in the name of God is certainly popular.
Since Liu Bang is a dragon, his appearance must be extraordinary. “Long and straight, with a long face, a beautiful beard and beard, and 72 sunspots on the left thigh.” In ancient Chinese: Zhun, Bi ye; Face, forehead also. This shows that Liu Bang has a high bridge of the nose, a pair of the dragon’s forehead, and is also a free and easy “handsome bearded man”. Just being handsome doesn’t mean that Liu Bang is magical. The most peculiar thing about Liu Bang is his “seventy-two sunspots”, which coincides with the number of seventy-two days of the Red Emperor. The Red Emperor is the Chinese ancestor known as the Yellow Emperor and the son of the sun god, namely the God of fire. It is said that when the mother of the Red Emperor visited Huashan Mountain, she saw a dragon. Her body immediately reacted and gave birth to Yan Emperor when she came back. After beheading the White Snake, Liu Bang was described by the old woman as the son of the Red Emperor. In this way, it seems to have become a “fact” that Liu Bang is a descendant of the DPCA.
To mold Liu Bang into the offspring of the divine dragon, we must have some dragon weather and dragon shadow to set off and verify, which is more convincing. Therefore, Sima Qian wrote: “there is always cloud on his house” and “there is always dragon on it”. Liu Bang was already extraordinary before he was successful. The clouds symbolizing wealth and the dragon often appear above his residence, and the shadow of the dragon often appears on his body, which emphasizes that Liu Bang won the world not by chance, but by God. Liu Bang was commissioned by heaven to win the world and become an emperor, and was entrusted and favored by the gods. Such a writing makes Liu Bang’s image of “the right one” jump onto the paper.
After all, Liu Bang is not a real God, just an ordinary body of flesh and blood, so he can not get rid of the objective law of birth, old age, illness and death. But the image of Liu Bang’s God has been deeply rooted in people’s hearts. Even if you want to die, there will always be a unique way to die. When Sima Qian wrote about Liu Bang’s illness and death, he could not forget to add some legendary ingredients again, so as to have a beginning and an end. “I take the world with my cloth clothes and three foot sword. Is this not the destiny? The destiny is in the sky. Although the magpie is flat, it is useless!” So he did not cure the disease. I have not had enough of the land I fought in my narrow life, so I have to say goodbye. I don’t believe that Liu Bang can have that detachment and freedom when facing death. Who has no desire to survive? I believe that Liu Bang, who has become an emperor, is even worse. How can he refuse to be cured? Describing Liu Bang’s death as the act of “destiny” is another masterstroke of Sima Qian in shaping Liu Bang from man to God.
Sima Qian’s theory on Liu Bang’s “son of God” can be said to be a “God making movement” in that historical period. Therefore, Liu Bang became the first emperor to be promoted to the “altar” in Chinese history.
Following Sima Qian, the Confucians of the Han Dynasty finally found a man named Liu Lei in Zuozhuan in the early years of the Eastern Han Dynasty after more than 200 years of rummaging to further explore the source of Liu Bang’s noble ancestry. It is said that Liu Lei was a descendant of Yao and was a minister of the Xia Dynasty. Emperor Ming of the Han Dynasty, who was almost crazy about “respecting divination”, finally caught a straw to fully prove the rationality and inevitability of Liu’s rule over the country. Therefore, he did not hesitate to designate the Gaozu Liu Bang as the offspring of Liu Lei. In this way, Liu Bang can be traced back to the Yellow Emperor through Yao, and is considered to be a man with divine lineage.
Liu Bang established the Great Han Empire, achieved the foundation of the Liu family in the two Han Dynasties for 400 years, and created the Han nationality into the main nation of China, with far-reaching influence, worthy of a generation of heroes. In fact, even if real heroes die, history will record their great achievements. Why do you need these “gimmicks” out of nothing?!