Life is like a fleeting horse, and the world is like a dog in the clouds. In the 37th year of the reign of King Yingzheng of Qin (210 BC), Liu Bang was 47 years old. He had been in charge of the pavilion in Surabaya for more than ten years. He married a wife and had children. He was addicted to wine and lust. He had no promotion for ten years and did not want to make progress. If I hadn’t gone to Xianyang to serve as a corvee two years ago, when I saw the first emperor of Qin, I wouldn’t have been so careful to say “Oh, my husband!” It is even hard to avoid people’s suspicion that the fiery “knight errant dream” had already fallen into the dust.
Perhaps, that “knight errant dream” was indeed hopelessly bleak in the long Surabaya Pavilion career – after all, it was a long and boring time of more than ten years; After all, Liu Bang has gone from a vigorous youth to an awkward middle age. It is really unrealistic to ask a middle-aged man who has embarked on the road of running five to continue the passionate “Ranger dream” of his youth. However, the trip to Xianyang two years ago obviously stimulated Liu Bang’s dusty “knight errant dream”.
The dream is activated again. At the age of 47, Liu Bang abandoned his status as a small official in the Qin Empire and returned to the Ranger. In the coming vicissitudes of the late Qin Dynasty, the Ranger Liu Bang was finally able to achieve the foundation of the Han Dynasty for hundreds of years by virtue of “being chivalrous and courageous”.
Understanding the knight errant background on the road to the founding of the Han Dynasty is the first and most important key to unlock the unpredictable political situation within the Han Empire. Because everything that happened after that, the starting points of political propositions such as enfeoffment of princes with different surnames, the alliance of white horses, empress Lu’s system, and inaction were all based on this point: the Han Empire was originally established on the basis of Rangers.
In his article about the nature of the Han Gaozu group, the Japanese scholar Shouwu meiduxiong once inspected in detail the customer, Zhongjuan, Sheren, and pawn groups of Liu Bang Group, and concluded that their choice to combine with Liu Bang in the troubled times at the end of Qin Dynasty was based on a sense of mutual trust. In other words, the source of such an equal sense of trust is Liu Bang’s “Chivalry”. The most obvious manifestation of this “chivalrous and heroic spirit” is that when Liu Bang entered Shu, the state of Chu and other princes admired tens of thousands of followers of Liu Bang – during this period, there were already 3000 diners under the Xinling emperor’s sect.
If you pay a little attention, it is not difficult to find that Liu Bang was not the only one who succeeded in the turmoil in the late Qin Dynasty. The imperial mausoleum, once a “brother like figure” on Liu Bang’s journey as a knight errant, also gathered thousands of people as a knight errant and became an anti Qin force that can not be ignored. Others, such as yingbu and Pengyue, also started as Rangers and were recommended by many heroes; Liu Bang was a famous knight errant leader in the anti Qin movement. It can be said that when the chaotic times came at the end of the Qin Dynasty, because of the strict legalist network of the Qin Empire, the wind of the Warring States knight errant, which was hidden from the people, took advantage of the situation to revive again, and finally controlled the process of history.
As we all know, Zhang Liang and Han Xin were both Rangers transformed from the declining nobles at the end of the Warring States period. A close study of the relationship between them and Liu Bang shows that the two sides did not form the so-called “monarch subject relationship” at the beginning. The link between them lies in the word “Ranger”. The great promise between the Rangers and the neglect of life and death is fully reflected in the two men – Zhang Liang, as the messenger of the princes, went to Liu Bang as an envoy, which coincided with the defeat of the Han Army and was in danger. Others advised Zhang Liang to leave quickly to avoid suffering from the fish in the pond. As a result, Zhang Liang met me as a knight as king of the Han Dynasty. At this time, he refused to “die unjustly”. Similarly, when the battle between Chu and Han entered a critical moment and Han Xin, a third-party key force, was persuaded to take the opportunity to reach a tripartite confrontation, Han Xin, the then knight errant and now King of Qi, rejected the proposal on the same grounds that “the king of Han treated me very kindly” and could not bear to betray his righteousness.
Because of Liu Bang, the chivalry was very popular in the social life in the early Han Dynasty. Liu Bang worships xinlingjun’s style of raising guests, so Chen Xi, who is good at raising guests, has won Liu Bang’s almost unconditional trust – during Chen Chen Chen’s acting as prime minister, he once “took a thousand rides from the car”, and there were so many chivalrous guests under his door. The Ranger Zhu family dares to take in Ji Bu, a fugitive Ranger, and tries to intercede with Liu Bang for him. There is also a reason for seeing Liu Bang’s Ranger nature. The so-called “jibuyinuo is better than getting a hundred jin of gold”, which reflects the general recognition of the spirit of Rangers in the early Han society. This recognition came with the Ranger Liu Bang, who established the Han Empire in a Ranger way – the roving bandit group in Mangdangshan mountain, the rich old people group composed of Xiao He and fan Kuai, are the most basic military and organizational force on Liu Bang’s path to the founding of the country. The initial combination of the two has a strong Ranger color.