The Fall of the Later Han

Everyone calls him a foolish ruler. He kept a ledger of his own. In the first year of Jianning, twelve-year-old Liu Hong, Marquis of Jieduting, entered Luoyang to become emperor. Known as Emperor Ling of Han, he would later be called a foolish ruler. He trusted neither the court historians nor the eunuchs, nor anything anyone said. He trusted only numbers. Numbers cannot be wrong. The people who record them are always the ones at fault. But the Imperial Seal of the Realm remembers more than anyone else: it remembers the future. From the Yellow Turban fires to bloodshed at the palace gates, from the sale of offices and titles to the struggle over who would take the throne, he audited the accounts for twenty-one years. Behind every set of rotten books stood someone who had written them; in the end, he discovered that later generations had made a ledger of him, too and titled it Emperor Ling of Han. Do you recognize me, you who write the annals?