"Establish a son with a long term but not a virtuous one, and establish a son with a noble one rather than a long one."
This is the primogeniture system that many of us are very familiar with.
From the turn of the Shang and Zhou dynasties to the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the secret establishment of the prince, almost 2,700 years, the inheritance of the ancient throne in China has been pursued by the primogeniture system.
It can be said that a prince, as long as his mother is the queen, he is the eldest son, and he can surpass his father without being deposed as a death, then it is equivalent to winning at the starting line, and he can basically inherit the throne smoothly.
No matter how good the other princes are, it is difficult to shake the status of the eldest son.
Many people are about to ask: The eldest son is just the advantage of being born earlier and his mother is the wife, not necessarily the best among the brothers. The emperor has to shoulder the world, so why not choose the most capable prince as the heir?
The ancients insisted on the primogeniture inheritance system so much, and even the emperor wanted to abolish the eldest son who was not virtuous enough, and the ministers had to fight with the emperor for blood, isn't it not smart?
If you think so, you would underestimate the wisdom of the ancients. The reason why the ancients insisted on the primogeniture system is reasonable.
Before discussing the issue of the eldest son, let me ask you a question: Chen Yulian, Li Ruotong and Liu Yifei have all played the fairy sister Wang Yuyan. Which of them is more in line with the original book?
This question has been discussed many times on the Internet, and it is basically noisy, and there is no unified answer. In the minds of different people, there are different fairy sisters.
If I ask again: Of the three of them, who is older?
As long as you know a little bit about them, you can say it without thinking: Of course it's Chen Yulian.
Their year of birth is there, it is an objective fact, and it is not subject to anyone's will.
And the emperor chooses the ** person, which is the same.
If you ask the emperor who among his many sons is the most virtuous, the emperor may not be able to choose, and even at different stages, there are different candidates.
But if you ask the emperor who is the eldest son among his sons, then every emperor can say it without hesitation.
Let's take a look at real cases from history.
Emperor Wen of Sui Yang Jian, the crown prince who was established at the beginning, was Yang Yong, the eldest son of the emperor.
However, he picked his nose at Yang Yong, and always felt that Yang Yong was not a qualified heir. In the eyes of Emperor Wen of Sui, Yang Yong's decoration of the armor was an unforgivable mistake.
And Yang Yong's younger brother Yang Guang is different. He is talented, has a simple life, is not a woman, and is simply the perfect heir in the eyes of Emperor Wen of Sui.
After several considerations, Emperor Wen of Sui ignored the opposition of his ministers and deposed Yang Yong, who was not virtuous enough, and replaced Yang Guang, who was virtuous in his eyes, as the new prince.
We all know what happened next. Everything Yang Guang did in front of Emperor Wen of Sui was disguised to cater to Emperor Wen of Sui's preferences. After he ascended the throne, he showed his true colors, violent and overjoyed, resulting in the death of the second generation of the Sui Dynasty.
Just looking at Song Shenzong's sons, some people may think that Zhao Ji is the most talented and the most suitable to be the emperor. And he also behaved very humbly before he ascended the throne.
But Zhao Ji, who was later Huizong of the Song Dynasty, single-handedly led to the demise of the Northern Song Dynasty.
It can be seen that it is unreliable to look at the prince by whether he is virtuous or not. First, there are different people with different standards, and second, the prince who seems to be the most virtuous may just have the best acting skills.
Someone is about to say that although there are uncertain factors in the selection of talents, it is possible to elect an actor, but the eldest son, it is also possible that the eldest son is a mediocre person with insufficient ability, and the selection of talents cannot be directly vetoed.
What's more, even if different people will have different understandings of the standard of meritocracy, the final choice is in the hands of the emperor himself.
As long as the emperor identifies his most virtuous son, then what does it matter if other people's standards are different from him?
This brings us to another problem: the instability that meritocracy can cause.
Although the final decision is in the hands of the emperor alone, the emperor's standards are not necessarily unchanged.
I think everyone has had this experience: when I was a child, I watched some TV series, I watched them with relish, I thought they were good-looking, and I didn't want to miss a minute. But when I look back when I grow up, I will feel that the plot is old-fashioned, the plot is bloody, and the actors' acting skills are not good, and I don't know why I liked it so much when I was a child.
Emperors are also human beings, and their aesthetics and preferences will also change. He may have felt that when he was young, children who read well were the most virtuous, so he made the prince early. When he got older, he felt that another filial son was more virtuous, and the prince who was good at reading was too wooden.
What to do at this time? Do you want to abolish the crown prince who has been established for ten or twenty years? This will cause turmoil in the court.
If the emperor does not appoint a crown prince for a long time, or if he takes a fancy to other candidates after appointing a crown prince, it will also cause turmoil in the court.
In order to show the emperor that they were the most virtuous of their brothers and the best heir to the throne, the princes would form factions and attack their brothers.
The famous Nine Dragons in the Kangxi period is a typical case. The 9 sons of Emperor Kangxi, in order to compete for the throne, caused a lot of trouble, and the ministers also fought one after another, which had a great impact on the stability of the court.
And the final result of the Nine Dragons seizure is that historians have not been able to confirm that Yongzheng is not the heir chosen by Kangxi, and whether he ascended the throne normally.
The princes who participated in the succession rarely ended well. The supporters behind them, not to mention.
And if the emperor insists on the primogeniture inheritance system, even if he can't stop some careerists from wanting to pull the eldest son off the horse, it is much more difficult to do so, and the probability is much smaller.
For the emperor, instead of spending so much thought and price to choose an heir who looks virtuous but is not necessarily virtuous, it is better to choose the eldest son as early as possible, cultivate it wholeheartedly, and maintain the stability of the court.
One asks again: why should the eldest son be appointed instead of the eldest son, if it is only to determine the heir as soon as possible and with clear criteria to avoid confusion?
The eldest son is not necessarily the eldest son, but the eldest son is the eldest brother of all brothers.
This brings us to the question of the supporters behind the eldest son.
First of all, the emperor's first woman, not necessarily the empress. It is very likely that he had already pampered the palace maids around him and gave birth to a son before the official wedding.
In this case, the status of the birthmother of the eldest son is very low.
And the emperor has requirements for the queen's family background. The early queens were either born in a family or the daughter of **, even in the Ming Dynasty, the queen was generally from a mediocre background, at least she was a lady.
In this case, it goes without saying whether the son of the palace maid has more supporters, or whether the son of the queen has more supporters.
In the early days of the primogeniture, most of the queens were the daughters of the princes, and the supporters behind them were extremely powerful.
In the year of the Western Weekend, there was an incident that annoyed the queen's mother's family because the Son of Heaven deposed the eldest son.
King Zhou You favored the concubine Bao Xi, so much so that he abolished the queen and the prince born to the queen, and made Bao Xi the queen and Bao Xi's son the crown prince.
However, this queen of King Zhou You is the daughter of Shen Hou, the monarch of Shen State. After these in the Western Zhou Dynasty, he held great power and had strong troops.
When Shenhou saw that King Zhou You had abolished his daughter and grandson, he was furious and united with the State of Xuan and the Dog Rong to attack King Zhou You, so that the Western Zhou Dynasty perished.
From this case, we can also see how strong the support forces behind the primogeniture system were at the beginning of the birth of the primogeniture.
In the Song and Ming dynasties, the queen's family background was far less powerful than the rise and fall of a dynasty, why did these dynasties still pursue the primogeniture system?
The queen of the Ming Dynasty was the lowest born, basically selected from the people, but the Ming Dynasty can be regarded as the dynasty that most strictly adheres to the primogeniture inheritance system.
This is because the queen is the master of the harem, and she will be the queen mother in the future, and she is the most noble woman in the world.
If the queen has a son, but her son is not the crown prince, and she will be the queen in the future, but her son is not the emperor, then whether it is her son, the crown prince, or the emperor, they will be terrified.
This can be equally confusing.
Therefore, the emperor chooses the heir, and in the case of the eldest son, even if the eldest son is not the eldest son, he will choose the eldest son as the heir.
Moreover, in order to avoid the situation that the eldest son is not the eldest son, some emperors will give birth to the eldest son with the queen first, and then pamper other women. Several emperors in the early Ming Dynasty had relatively late weddings in ancient times, but their eldest sons were all sons-in-law, which should not be accidental.
Some people may ask again: The emperors pursued the primogeniture inheritance system so much, didn't they worry that the qualifications of the eldest son were really not good, the ability was too poor, and they couldn't sit on the throne?
In fact, sons of the same father, in most cases, are not too far apart in qualifications.
Extreme situations like Sima Zhen, the eldest son of Emperor Sima Yan of the Jin Dynasty, are more stupid, and Li Shimin, the second son of Li Yuan, the ancestor of Tang Gaozu, is a top genius, is rare.
In most cases, the emperor's sons may have one or two who are more talented and do not happen to be the eldest sons, but this is a gap that can be bridged through education.
The eldest son, who has been established as the heir since he was a child, enjoys the best prince education, has his own team of supervising the country, and even many princes have experience in helping the emperor supervise the country or manage the country.
And his brothers were basically cultivated as rich and noble kings, and they usually did not have the opportunity to contact the government and ministers.
This educational disparity is, in most cases, more than enough to compensate for the difference in aptitude between brothers.
Therefore, we can often see that the emperors in history, after losing their carefully cultivated eldest son, the next son who ascended to the throne was really mediocre in ability because he did not receive the education of the prince.
Although most of the time in ancient times, the emperor pursued the primogeniture inheritance system, it does not mean that the eldest son of the prince stepped on the throne with half a foot, and it was foolproof.
After all, rules are made by people and can be broken by people.
For example, Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty did not have a son-in-law, and at the beginning he was the eldest son of Lishu, Liu Rong, as the crown prince. Later, Liu Rong's mother annoyed him, and he liked Liu Che, the 10th son of the concubine, so Liu Rong was deposed without fault, and Liu Che became the new prince.
In order to show that he still abides by the primogeniture inheritance system, Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty also abolished the original queen, made Liu Che's mother the new queen, and let the 10th son Liu Che become the eldest son in one fell swoop.
And Liu Che, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, ignored the rules even more than his father, Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty. After his eldest son, Liu Ju, committed suicide, according to the rule that the eldest son "has a grandson and no grandson", the eldest son of the living son, Liu Dan, should be the crown prince.
But Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty ignored all the rules, directly skipped his first three living sons, and set up his youngest son Liu Fuling as the heir, and did not even go through the process of making Liu Fuling's mother the queen.
In the Tang Dynasty, the famous "Xuanwumen Inheritance Law" appeared.
When Tang Suzong first ascended the throne, he appointed his eldest son Li Chengqi as the crown prince. But when he ascended the throne for the second time, even the throne was won for him by his third son, Li Longji, and the crown prince was naturally Li Longji.
Tang Xuanzong Li Longji was disfigured by his eldest son, which affected Junyi, and first set up the second son and then the third son as the crown prince, and never considered the eldest son as the theoretical first heir.
Tang Suzong was the crown prince in the Anshi Rebellion, and for the sake of the overall situation, he gave up his young eldest son and set up the eldest son, who had already reached adulthood, as the heir.
Not to mention, there are not a few eldest sons who have been deposed in history.
Therefore, the identity of the eldest son is not foolproof. The primogeniture system is just a rule that most emperors in ancient times were willing to abide by under normal circumstances, but it is not the only truth.
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