The whole Hengling era is a rotten era, after Emperor Guangwu strengthened the imperial power, there were many young and weak emperors in the Eastern Han Dynasty, among which Emperor Heng ascended the throne at the age of 15, and Emperor Ling was called the emperor at the age of 12. At this time, whoever controls the emperor is the actual controller of the empire. For this reason, the two groups of relatives and eunuchs launched an endless competition. Although eunuchs and relatives were also descendants of the imperial power, they could coexist with the imperial power because they were naturally close to the emperor. Therefore, there is often a phenomenon that the emperor was dictated by his relatives when he was a child, and when the emperor became an adult, he relied on eunuchs to beat his relatives, and the emperor trusted the eunuchs excessively, which made the eunuchs cause chaos in the government.

The Constant Spirit era is a typical example.

In the first thirteen years of Emperor Heng's reign, his relative Liang Ji was in power, and the Liang family oppressed Zhongliang and caused chaos in the dynasty, which made the heavens angry and resentful, and finally ended in the destruction of the Manchus; After the Liang family, there were five marquis for iniquity, fortunately Chen Fan, Dou Wu, and Li Ying were not afraid of treachery; After the five marquis, the eunuchs Wang Fu and Cao Jie coerced the emperor to respect himself and wantonly hunted and killed upright ministers and scholars; After Wang Fu and Cao Jie, there were even more ten permanent servants who caused trouble in the world and his relatives He who pushed the empire to extinction. It can be said that this is completely the devil in charge, and the disasters are one after another, of course, the credit of the two faint kings is indelible.

The two emperors of Heng and Ling are not only pro-villains and distant virtuous ministers, but also do a lot of evil themselves.

After Liang Ji stepped down, due to years of luxury and decay in the country, the country's finances were basically depleted. On the one hand, Emperor Huan took a heavier tax on the peasants, which directly further increased the cost of living of the people at that time, and on the other hand, he took some emergency measures such as reducing the borrowing of hundreds of officials, borrowing taxes from the king and the marquis, and selling official beards.

Among them, Emperor Huan's maladministration of selling officials and lords had a very bad impact on the time, not only corruption became a legal act, which directly undermined the rule of officials, but also further increased the burden of the people due to the looting of corrupt officials and corrupt officials, and set a precedent for Emperor Ling's larger-scale sale of officials. Before his death, Emperor Heng also launched the "Party Rebellion" to suppress the direct ministers who attacked the eunuchs, completely reversing black and white, and making the world even darker.

As a faint monarch, Emperor Huan's private life was also quite corrupt, and he changed three queens successively, and the number of concubines was once as high as five or six thousand, creating a Guinness record at that time! Due to Emperor Heng's indulgence, his health was soon overdrawn, and the thirty-six-year-old Emperor Huan finally fell ill in the first year of Yongkang (167).

Emperor Heng is so mediocre, but compared to Emperor Ling, he can only be regarded as a small thing.

During the period of Emperor Heng, although the emperor reused eunuchs, in order to maintain imperial power, the eunuchs would still be appropriately suppressed, and when it came to Emperor Ling, the emperor was almost completely trusted, and left it alone, Emperor Ling reigned for 20 years, which was the longest, most powerful, and most powerful reign period of eunuchs in the history of the Han Dynasty.

After the death of Taifu Chen Fan and the general Dou Wu, under the impetus of the eunuchs, Emperor Ling launched the second party rebellion, compared with the first time, this time the party faction was wider in scope and more harmful, involving countless scholars, and hundreds of people were persecuted to death. In the fifth year of Xiping (176), Yongchang Taishou Cao Luan wrote a letter to redress the grievances of the party, and Emperor Ling was furious, tortured Cao Luan to death in prison, and imprisoned the party members and their relatives and friends on a larger scale.

In the first year of Guanghe (178), Emperor Ling, instigated by his mother Empress Dowager Dong and the attendants, tried to sell officials again, and unlike the emergency measures of Emperor Heng, this time the sale of officials continued until the death of Emperor Ling, and the scale was far greater than the last time, and even the position of the third prince had to be paid in full first. The price of Emperor Ling's official position was at least 10,000 times that of an official's annual salary, and many officials were so frightened that they abandoned their official positions because they could not pay such a high "official fee".

The two emperors of Heng and Ling were so mediocre and immoral, which made all the people in the world feel cold, and even those members of the royal family had different hearts at this time. In the fifth year of Zhongping (188), Taichang Liu Yan proposed to the imperial court to use the clan and important ministers as the state pastors, overriding the history of the assassin and the Taishou in the local area, and monopolizing the power to stabilize the people. Emperor Ling accepted the suggestion of Taichang Liu Yan and appointed Liu Yan as the pastor of Yizhou, Huang Wan as the pastor of Yuzhou, and Zongzheng Liu Yu as the pastor of Youzhou, which resulted in the formation of warlords in various places, and the state pastors, including Liu Yan, were basically no longer under the control of the imperial court after taking office.

During the Hengling period, the Han Dynasty was extremely bad in all aspects.

In life, whether it is the two emperors Heng and Ling, or those authoritarian relatives, the eunuchs who are in chaos are corrupt and corrupt, poor and extravagant. When Emperor Ling, Lu Qiang, who was often served, was loyal and loyal to the public, and Shang Shu Chen said: "Those who have no merit in the Zhongguan clan have built a pavilion, where there are tens of thousands, the pavilions are connected, the danqing is chalky, and the ornament of the carving cannot be said alone." The funeral is overdue, extravagant and ceremonial, competing to be effective, and Moken is overbearing. ”

Politically, in order to maintain their own status, their relatives and eunuchs all hijacked the dictatorship, formed parties for personal gain, and ruled brutally. They reused their own relatives and cultivated party henchmen everywhere, and those who went along with it prospered and those who rebelled died, destroying the electoral system at that time, making "showing off talents, but not knowing books." Cha Xiaolian, his father does not live. One consequence of this was that the clans began to flourish, the forces of regionalism began to rise, and the central government's control over the localities became weaker.

Economically, the relatives and eunuchs were both powerful and money-wise, and after they gained power, they were often unscrupulous, plundering and annexing land everywhere. Among them, Liang Ji, a relative, was the worst, and after his death, more than 3 billion yuan was confiscated, and half of the country's tax revenue was only so. With the acquiescence of the emperor and the frenzied plundering of relatives and eunuchs, yeoman farmers went bankrupt one after another, and the country's economic income fell sharply, and there was a scene of "empty fields, empty courts, and empty warehouses".

Externally, the frontier wars continued one after another, successively with the Qiang people in Xiliang and the Xianbei in the north, and the foreign wars lasted for decades, with huge costs and heavy military service, which further consumed the weak national strength of the Eastern Han Dynasty.

The corruption of the imperial court, the constant fighting between eunuchs and relatives, the constant wars on the frontiers, the weakening of the country, and the fact that due to the great drought in the country, the taxes were not reduced, and finally the people could no longer bear it, and peasant uprisings broke out all over the country. Among them, the Yellow Turban Rebellion was the largest and most influential, and although the Han Dynasty eventually suppressed the uprising, it also consumed most of the national power. In the sixth year of Zhongping (189), Dong Zhuo entered Beijing, deposed Liu Wei, supported Liu Xie, and coerced the Son of Heaven to order the princes, cruel and unkind, perverse, resulting in the division of the warlords, the entire empire was fragmented, and the decaying Eastern Han Dynasty had existed in name only.

After all, in that era, only the bad guys were dead.