The Three Chaste Ones of Ba: Local Perspectives on the Yellow Turban Rebellion on the Chengdu Plain

It is something of a truism in discussions of early imperial Chinese history that the so called Yellow Turban rebellion of the late second century c.e. played an important role in the demise of the Han dynasty.l With the court weakened by factions of bureaucrat-officials, eunuchs, and in-laws fighting over control of a series of young and ineffective emperors, an uprising centered in eastern China and led by Zhang Jue ^H? and his brothers Bao ff and Liang H? in c.e. 184 served as not only a theologically based outlet for pent-up peasant out rage against the state, but also provided a window for another type of opportunist to take control of the dying state. The various military men who were ordered by the court to put down the Yellow Turban rebellion, after completing their assigned tasks in relatively short order,2 then established themselves as regional warlords, later seizing control of the Han emperor, and eventually establishing three independent states, thus ushering in a four hundred year period of political disunion in China. This much of the story is well known, though to much of the world it is recognizable primarily from the fictional account of these events in the fifteenth-century novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong ?Hf^? the San guo yanyi HHiffll [Extended Meanings of the Records of the Three States]. While the stan dard dynastic histories covering the period, Fan Ye's ?Si| (398-445) Hou Han shu ??/Jlilf [Later Han History] and Chen Shou's ?J?HI (233-297) San guo zhi Hi?7? [Records of the Three States], mention the uprising,3 they tend to outline the rebellion and its impact mainly on the Han court and the lives of its major players, especially military officials. In both cases, the standard historical accounts focus on the rebellion at the imperial level and virtually ignore how the event played out in smaller locales across the subcelestial realm. This focus is due largely to the particular set of concerns typically addressed by orthodox his toriography, and not because of the absence of local evidence. Similarly, the limited scholar ship on the uprising in Western languages appears focused on a few key issues, particularly the religious affiliation of the rebels and potential links between the Yellow Turbans in eastern