Liu Bang in My Eyes

The traces of ancient history left by the pavilion in Sishui are just like the bronze tripods on the banks of the Wei River. The rust marks deposited in them are important turning points of Chinese civilization. While the nobles of the Six Kingdoms were still obsessed with the old system of ritual, music and conquest, this commoner from Peixian County had used the survival wisdom of the street people to reconstruct the underlying logic of power change. The four words "good wine and sex" deliberately retained by Tai Shigong in "The Benji of Gaozu" are the key to deconstructing the myth of the emperor. It is this lack of taboo about the true nature of human nature that has created a new political ethics that is different from the three generations of holy kings. The hardship of living on credit has sharpened his keen eye for insight into people's hearts; the dangers of his life as a bandit have tempered his ability to take advantage of the situation. The three chapters of the Covenant are not an ideal of benevolent government, but are actually the optimal solution to the game of troubled times; killing heroes without being violent is actually an inevitable price of a centralized system. This kind of pragmatism that abandons moral whitewash allowed the Han system to break free from the shackles of Zhou rites and create a governance paradigm of "hegemony and Taoism". Looking back two thousand years later, the rich folk memory of the hometown and the writings of historians are still competing. Those deified legends of different phenomena are actually the secret struggle of the common people for the right to interpret history. The essence of Liu Bang's phenomenon lies in revealing an undercurrent that is often overlooked in the evolution of Chinese civilization: when the theory of aristocratic lineage encounters the survival skills of the market, the river course of history is destined to change to the richer loess belt. This may be the most important revelation left by the commoner emperor to future generations - the so-called destiny is nothing but a banner tainted by the fireworks of the world.