At The Suggestion Of
His Ministers, Who Were Alive To The Dangers Of A Disputed Succession, He
Proclaimed His Eldest Son Heir To The Throne.
He purified the
administration of justice by declaring that prince and peasant must be
equally subject to the law; he abolished the too common punishment of
mutilation, and had the satisfaction of seeing crime reduced to such low
proportions in the empire that the jails contained only four hundred
prisoners.
Wenti was a strong advocate of peace, which was, indeed,
necessary to China, as it had not recovered from the effects of the last
Hun invasion. He succeeded by diplomacy in inducing the Prince at Canton,
who had shown a disposition to assert his independence, to recognize his
authority, and thus averted a civil war. In his relations with the Huns,
among whom the authority of Meha had passed to his son, Lao Chang, he
strove to preserve the peace, giving that chief one of his daughters in
marriage, and showing moderation in face of much provocation. When war was
forced upon him by their raids he did everything he could to mitigate its
terrors, but the ill success of his troops in their encounters with the
Tartars broke his confidence, and he died prematurely after a reign of
twenty-three years, which was remarkable as witnessing the consolidation
of the Hans. The good work of Wenti was continued during the peaceful
reign of sixteen years of his son Kingti.
The next emperor was Vouti, a younger son of Kingti, and one of his
earliest conquests was to add the difficult and inaccessible province of
Fuhkien to the empire.
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