Chinese dynasty founded by scholar?

Imperial China was interesting in that royal blood only matter within dynasties- in disastrous times, peasant rebels, rogue generals and foreign barbarians could uproot the center of power and declare their own new dynasty. Another interesting thing was the importance of the secular scholar-gentry administrator class, as opposed to feudal societies like medieval Europe and Japan where warrior classes were the ones with the power.

So could we have a dynasty were a former Confucian (or other) scholar managed to lead the rebel forces to victory, and to found a dynasty? I'm not saying that such a figure would substantially change the nature of the imperial system- especially as a Confucian, he'd preserve the old order. But maybe as someone with a background in both the direct administration, and with a strong background, such a rule would be more philosophical in nature. Could a sage-king result?
 

Dorozhand

Banned
To unite China requires brutality and ruthlessness, not qualities associated with the scholar-gentry. The first emperors of dynasties were the warriors, while the second emperors were the builders, and the third emperors were scholars.
 
Zhao Kuangyin, though a military man by profession, was quite the scholar OTL. There's an anecdote from the 'wild histories' that says that the only thing Zhao Kuangyin sacked when conquering a city was its books. And the Song Dynasty that he founded was certainly very lenient to scholars - Zhao forbade their execution, for example (and generally exiled them), and the Song represented the height of Chinese bureaucratic government.

The Qing Emperor Kangxi, really the founder of the 'Qing' as we know it, was also quite the scholar who immersed himself in both Chinese and 'barbarian' culture. Yet the regime he established was autocratic, emperor-driven and he certainly wasn't above imprisoning/executing scholars for wordplay or insinuation.

Hong Xiuquan of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was also a (failed) scholar, and he was also a bit of a bloodthirsty maniac who regularly massacred cities who opposed him, and the 'dynasty' he founded was no less autocratic or harsh (perhaps even more) than the Qing he sought to replace.

So basically yes, Chinese scholars could found dynasties but no, you can't determine what the dynasty would turn out like just because the founder was a scholar. Western scholars produced politicians like Woodrow Wilson and they also produced people like Lenin. Ultimately Chinese state structure depended quite heavily on the caprices of its founder, rather than any sort of systemic evolution, so that played a part in the cyclical nature of its history.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
Hong Xiuquan of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was also a (failed) scholar, and he was also a bit of a bloodthirsty maniac who regularly massacred cities who opposed him, and the 'dynasty' he founded was no less autocratic or harsh (perhaps even more) than the Qing he sought to replace.

Hong Xiuquan also seems to have been a champion of the common man and even women's rights.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
There was also Wang Mang, founder of the abortive Xin Dynasty. He attempted land and economic reforms but botched foreign policy.
 
Did the peasant roots of the Ming emperor lead to any sort of egalitarianism for the former class he came from? I guess it did, at least to some limited extent!

It did... but, like the other famous peasant Emperor (Liu Bang of the Han), this also manifested itself in a sheer disdain for the scholarly class - as it should, since I wouldn't be surprised if the refined governors and scholars secretly held the former monk in contempt.

Of course, Zhu Yuanzhang was much harsher than Liu Bang - while Liu Bang was content to humiliate scholars by urinating on their hats, Zhu instituted numerous punishments for scholars, including the famous 'word-prisons' for insinuation in literature, created a system of secret services to spy on the bureaucracy (there is an anecdote that he physically scared an official to death by suggesting a few word changes in a poem that said official was working on in private), and, ultimately, stripped executive power from the bureaucracy by executing the Prime Minister and centralizing it into the person of the Emperor.
 
Hong Xiuquan also seems to have been a champion of the common man and even women's rights.

He certainly was for women's rights... as for the common man, I suppose so if you assume said common man didn't care one iota for Confucianism or traditional folk religions (big assumption). He did grow increasingly crazy as time went on, granted.

As for Wang Mang, I suppose he was a scholar of sorts but the way he claimed power was almost certainly through the position of 'royal relative'. Too ahead of his age, unfortunately.
 
Several Chinese dynasties got their start when provincial governors launched rebellions against the reigning emperor and, especially in later dynasties, to be appointed to those positions you had to pass the Confucian exams. Presumably any sufficiently motivated, skilled, and lucky governor could overthrow the emperor and establish their own dynasty.
 
Zuo Zongtang started out as a scholar then had a midlife career change, rebellions have a way of changing men's destinies. Under the right circumstances he could pull a Yuan Shikai and declare himself emperor. Today we'd have a dish called Emperor Tso's chicken.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
Kind of like Mao Zedong, and we all know where that went.

He is also similar to Mao in that he kinda went nuts, slowly coming unhinged as he aged. The CCP that approved the Great Leap Forward was not listening to the practical leader that led the Long March, or the intriguing and even stirring theorist of the 30s and 40s. They were listening to the ravings of a paranoid, drunken dementiac.
 

scholar

Banned
Did the peasant roots of the Ming emperor lead to any sort of egalitarianism for the former class he came from? I guess it did, at least to some limited extent!
Dynastic formation in China is one of the single most extraordinary cases of social mobility in most of the history of the world. It only lasts until the new classes are firmly entrenched in power and status, at which point great houses fade from memory and new ones rise up to replace them.

The Han's birth and collapse provide excellent examples for this, the same with the Tang and the Song.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
Dynastic formation in China is one of the single most extraordinary cases of social mobility in most of the history of the world. It only lasts until the new classes are firmly entrenched in power and status, at which point great houses fade from memory and new ones rise up to replace them.

The Han's birth and collapse provide excellent examples for this, the same with the Tang and the Song.

Indeed. The least of the least become the greatest of the great. This is especially true of Ming. IIRC, Zhu Yuanzhang started out as a vagrant.

Shoot, Li Zicheng was some random guy who showed compassion to a prisoner and got a bunch of angry farmers to beat off the imperial magistrates with wooden sticks.
 
Zuo Zongtang started out as a scholar then had a midlife career change, rebellions have a way of changing men's destinies. Under the right circumstances he could pull a Yuan Shikai and declare himself emperor. Today we'd have a dish called Emperor Tso's chicken.

Now, that's what I call a sage king!
 
Indeed. The least of the least become the greatest of the great. This is especially true of Ming. IIRC, Zhu Yuanzhang started out as a vagrant.

Shoot, Li Zicheng was some random guy who showed compassion to a prisoner and got a bunch of angry farmers to beat off the imperial magistrates with wooden sticks.
This was also true of Byzantium. A lot of emperors came from humble beginnings.
 
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