Kids in Ancient China (Part 5)

 Here's another story in our "Kids in Ancient China" series: 

The Red Eyebrows

Last month my dad joined something called the Red Eyebrows. What are they? I didn’t know either so I had to ask him. At first, I thought he was joking: the Red Eyebrows? What kind of a name was that? Do they all have red eyebrows?  He said the Red Eyebrows are a group of people that live along the Yellow River that fight together. I wanted to ask him more about it. He didn’t want to tell me at first.

My family live in a small village along the Yellow River, but I hate it.  Actually, when I was a toddler, my family had to move villages because the river had changed its course. I miss my old home and all of my friends. Although many of them moved to another village, my family decided to move to this one. We’ve been here two years now and I don’t have many friends. Every time I complain about this, my mom is quick to remind me that I still have my older brothers and sister, and that they are lifetime friends. 

When the River flooded, many people, like my family, moved because our homes were ruined. Then the locusts came. I remember the locusts. They didn’t come through our village, but I heard about them coming through the village  next to ours and some of the fields outside of our village. Have you ever seen a locust? Well, seeing just one of them is bad, but can you imagine the sky being filled with them? They eat and eat and eat. They ate so much that there were hardly any leaves left on the trees or plants in the fields. This was horrible because not only had we lost our home and had to move to a new place, but now it was hard to find food! Our village has a market where people can buy and sell vegetables, fruit, meat, and a few other things. It used to be full but since the locusts came, it’s more than half empty. 

Then last month my dad said he was joining some kind of army. He told me that it wasn’t a real army, but a group of people that were fighting together to get food for their families. They were also helping keep us safe because a lot of other bad guys were out there. Although my dad said that the Red Eyebrows were a good thing, I wasn’t entirely sure.

When I talked with my grandmother, she told me how things were when she was a girl and how different everything is now. She told me that a few years ago the Han family were ruling the country. However, now someone from a different family is in charge, a man named Wang Mang. Before he was the Emperor he was called the Marquess of Xin. 

When he took over the country, everyone liked him at first because he seemed to be very humble. He loved Confucius and often dressed up as a  teacher of Confucius instead of an Emperor. My grandmother remembers something he did: he took land that the rich people had and gave it to the poor. My grandmother told me a story of how one of her friend’s families didn’t have a lot of money. They worked on someone else’s farm but always wanted a farm of their own. When the Xin Emperor took over the country, my grandmother’s friend was one of the families who got new land to have a farm on. Ever since then, my grandmother has really liked this new emperor. Sadly, she doesn’t think it’ll last that long.

There were also big floods on the Yellow River (which I talked about earlier), and then locusts. Many people didn’t have food and didn’t like how things were going in our country. Soon groups of bad guys went from village to village, taking food and other things from people’s homes. That’s when my dad joined the Red Eyebrows because he didn’t want our home to be one of the homes that this happened to. 

Epilogue: Wang Mang was the emperor of one of the shortest dynasties in China (AD 9-23). When the Western Han (the earlier Han Dynasty) started to lose control of the country, Wang Mang stepped in and took over. The Wang family worked in the government and had a lot of influence, but he wanted to do something even more. When he took over the country, he made a few changes: he took everyone’s gold money and changed  it for copper. This was supposed to help the country’s economy. He also took land from the rich and gave it to the poor. Later in the Xin Dynasty the Yellow River changed it’s course and flooded many villages (like the one in this story) and locusts came and ate a lot of the food that was left. People were hungry and unhappy, so many of them started going throughout their villages and other villages taking food and other things. The Red Eyebrows were one of the main groups of people like this who worked along the Yellow River. At the same time, the Xiongnu, one of China’s neighboring countries, were trying to take over China. In the end, many people weren’t happy with the Xin Dynasty, which made it easy for the Han Dynasty to come back and rule the country (and start the Eastern Han Dynasty, or the “later” Han Dynasty).