Dong Zhuo

Dong Zhuo was invited into the capital to settle a palace quarrel, deposed the emperor, burned the city when he left it, and is the reason the Han dynasty never governed again. He came from the frontier in Liang province, grew up among the Qiang tribes and was admired by them for open-handedness, and made his career in the wars on the northwestern border, where he commanded troops loyal to him personally rather than to the court. In 189 the general He Jin, planning to destroy the palace eunuchs, summoned provincial armies to Luoyang to force the empress dowager's hand; the eunuchs killed He Jin first, the guards massacred the eunuchs, and Dong Zhuo arrived to find the boy emperor wandering outside the walls with no protector. He took charge of him, then deposed him in favour of his younger half-brother, Emperor Xian, and had the dowager killed. He made himself chancellor, then Grand Preceptor, and his troops plundered Luoyang and its imperial tombs. A coalition of provincial warlords formed against him in 190; only Sun Jian and Cao Cao pressed the attack, and after Sun Jian beat his generals he abandoned the capital, burned it, and forced the population west to Chang'an, where much of the imperial library was lost. He debased the coinage so thoroughly that money stopped working. In 192 his adopted son and bodyguard Lu Bu, turned by the minister Wang Yun, killed him in the palace gateway; the body was exposed in the street and a lamp is said to have been set in the navel. His officers took Chang'an back within months and the wars ran on for ninety years. He built himself a fortified estate at Mei, west of Chang'an, stocked with grain for thirty years and with his family inside it, and the garrison was massacred after he died. Contemporary and later Chinese historiography treats him as the type of the usurping frontier general, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms opens on him. His name is still used in Chinese as a byword for a tyrant.

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