The First Empires 35
herPrecepts for My Daughters can be read as an effective manual of
survival for women in a dangerous and male-dominated environment.
Ban Zhao’s precepts refl ect elite ideals but not necessarily the social
realities of the Han era. We know that many imperial wives in the Han
period were very aggressive in asserting their power. The emphasis on
fi lial piety in Han Confucianism made it hard for most emperors to
ignore the desires of their mothers, even after the emperor reached
adulthood or middle age. Consequently, empress dowagers often found
ways to dominate the Han court, especially late in the dynasty’s history.
Many dynasties in China were eventually weakened and destroyed by
lethal power struggles among four competing groups: empress dowa-
gers and their families, Confucian offi cials in the imperial bureaucracy,
military commanders, and court eunuchs.
In the later Han, the two most powerful groups around the throne
were the imperial eunuchs and the families of empresses. Eunuchs were
a unique class of people in imperial China. As castrated males, they
were scorned, yet as the personal servants of the emperor, they could
at times become his closest personal friends and advisors, giving them
more power than any other group of people. Eunuchs often came from
very humble backgrounds. Why else would they agree to undergo cas-
tration (a serious risk to life itself in an age before modern surgery)?
Eunuchs were given the duty of managing palace life so as to ensure
that any children born in the palace would be legitimate descendants
of the emperor and not the product of illicit liaisons between imperial
women and lowly servants. Since eunuchs had no descendants of their
own, they had fewer temptations to build up their own personal wealth,
but the lure of wealth and power was still seductive; and the number of
eunuchs tended to grow over time in each dynasty.
In the later Han, there were thousands of eunuchs, and they
became so powerful that they were granted the right to adopt heirs
of their own. In 124 ce, court eunuchs managed to place an infant
on the throne so they could control state affairs in his name. In
159 ce, they helped an emperor execute the entire family of the pow-
erful mother of his predecessor. The eunuchs led a series of purges
in 166 and 169 in which they killed or exiled thousands of offi cials
from the civil bureaucracy.
All of this turmoil at the court only intensifi ed the weakness of the
Han central government, as military leaders in outlying regions paid
less and less attention to their “superiors” in the capital, and wealthy
families found more and more ways to avoid taxation. Two structural
changes in the Eastern Han proved fatal to the dynasty. The court