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Overview
Niohuru-Nara Arjin was the Renxian Emperor of the Great Ri, the Yonggan conquest dynasty that ruled in Ba Sing Se. He was the seventeenth enumerated Earth Monarch.
As the eldest son of the dynastic founder Niohuru, Arjin was groomed to inherit the Badgermole Throne since the Yonggan Ascendancy began around 788, when he was a boy. Arjin succeeded his father 745 BG at the age of 53.
The Renxian era was a time of relative peace and great material prosperity for the Earth Kingdom. An active reformer, Arjin attempted to reshape the conquests of his father and grandfather into a unified, multiethnic imperial polity, with some success. He was also considered a humanitarian, reforming the criminal justice system of the Empire and elaborating on the dynastic regulations. Because of these accomplishments, Arjin is widely considered the greatest of the Ri Emperors.
Early Life
Arjin was born in 799 BG to Niohuru of the Nara clan. Niohuru was the eldest son of the Yonggan Khagan, Jaikan, and Arjin was Jaikan's first grandson. When Arjin was a small boy, the Hao dynasty had ruled in Ba Sing Se for over 275 years, but had grown weak and ineffectual. Arjin's great-grandfather had united the clans of the Yonggan people under the leadership of the Nara, but they remained vassals of the Earth King in Ba Sing Se.
When a peasant uprising began in the agricultural zone of Ba Sing Se during the reign of the 15th enumerated Earth King, and spread into the outer ring, the Earth King called on his vassal Nara Jaikan to bring the army of the khanate south to suppress the rebellion. Jaikan agreed, with the Yonggan armies being allowed into the capital in 790 BG. Their well-disciplined troops, experienced from conflict in the Northwest, quickly prevailed over the peasant rebellion. Arjin and his mother came to the city not long thereafter to join his father, who had been appointed as Inner-Ring General of the Right. Seeing the opportunity afforded by their occupation of the city and becoming aware of the extreme weakness of the Royal Earth Army under the incumbent Earth King, the Nara Khan refused to withdraw his forces despite increasingly direct insinuations by the Earth King that he should do so. In the end, the Earth King was assassinated under unclear circumstances and Nara Jaikan installed Arjin's father Niohuru as the sixteenth Earth King, beginning the Ri Dynasty in 788 BG.
The young Arjin was tutored by his father's advisors, and many upwardly mobile native intelligentsia of the capital, who sought to ingratiate themselves with their new Yonggan overlords, as well as to mould Arjin into a virtuous earth monarch according to the culture and customs of the Central Continent. His father generally approved of this education, though he saw to it that Arjin did not grow too far away from his roots on the Northern steppes and mountains, appointing Yonggan nobles to teach him the traditional martial arts, religion, language and bending forms. Like his father, he was a prodigious Earthbender, and became proficient in both the Northern Way and Orthodox School (as yet, there was no Court School distinct from the Orthodox form, as it was not until the Hao-Ting dynasty that a nonbending Earth Monarch was considered an acceptable possibility.)
When he was 21, Arjin married his paramount wife from among his distant kin, Nara Muke.
In 774 BG, at age 25, Arjin took his second wife, Ikulu Huwangse. The lady Ikulu was sent for a diplomatic marriage from the Eastern Yonggan, but Niohuru felt it unseemly to marry her himself (he was 48 and already had three wives) and so gave her to his crown prince with the assent of the parties involved. Again for diplomatic purposes, Niohuru also had his son betrothed to a then-thirteen-year-old girl who was the great-granddaughter of an important Abkha khan in the West. This girl, Sunud Tsas, only came to the capital as a young adult and finally married Arjin when she was twenty and he was thirty-two, after living an unusually adventuresome (and somewhat scandalous) life prior to this.
Arjin became father to many daughters, but it was not until 761 that he had his first son, Tuhai, by his paramount wife; he was her fourth child and Arjin's eighth. In these years, Arjin served as a general during his father's wars with the remnants of the Hao dynasty and breakaway tributary states. During his travels with the banner armies, he cultivated an interest in jurisprudence, collecting local legal texts and interviewing native officials. After the Nara-Hao campaigns, he wrote a summa on the topic, titled The Laws of Earth Nations.
Ascension to the Throne
When Niohuru died in 745, the Imperial Clan Council of the Succession ratified a posthumous edict appointing Arjin the Supernal Khan and Emperor of the Great Ri, and he shortly thereafter ascended the Badgermole Throne. He proclaimed an era name of Renxian (仁顯), indicating his desire and intention to be known as a benevolent and virtuous ruler. In the same year, he married Hao Molin, a native of Ba Sing Se whose poetry he admired. This was also seen as a conciliatory gesture to the former dynasty, as Molin was a noble from a cadet branch of the royal family.
Soon after his ascension, Arjin set about a comprehensive program of legal reform. He established basic rights for all imperial subjects, such as the right to a trial before any serious punishment or confiscation of goods, and attempted to eliminate hereditary slavery, but was strongly advised against it and shelved an edict that would have emancipated all slaves in the Empire. Later in life, he was able to eliminate hereditary slavery, though non-hereditary forms of unfree labor remained common throughout the dynasty, including the Imperial bondservants (who were de facto hereditary, non-chattel serfs originally, but who gradually developed into an unfree but high-status administrative class loyal to the Emperor.)
Under the Hao, and the early Ri, many crimes committed by men were punished by emasculation and slavery, and eunuch slaves were a common feature of the noble household. The law distinguished between the "volunteer" eunuch and the reformed criminal. Considering this practice barbaric (the Yonggan did not employ emasculation as a punishment), Arjin abolished emasculation as a punishment except for forcible rape. Within a short time, this caused the value of eunuch slaves to skyrocket, and many reports of dubious "volunteer" emasculations began to reach the court; the emperor enacted a sumptuary law to limit the number of eunuchs according to the rank of the householder, required licensure of eunuch-makers and witnessed assent of the prospective eunuch and permission from the candidate's parents.
Arjin eliminated punishments he considered barbaric, including all forms of capital punishment except beheading and strangulation. After witnessing the judicial strangulation of a palace cook who attempted to poison an official, he eliminated strangulation as well, and thereafter all capital punishment was accomplished by decapitation. He replaced punishments involving maiming, such as nose-cutting (劓) and foot-amputation (刖) with tattooing the forehead of offenders instead. Many crimes that were previously at least theoretically capital became punishable by caning, fines or penal servitude instead. Murder, poisoning, adultery by nobles, arson, and high treason remained capital offenses.
In 740, Arjin created an advisory council of local people to keep himself informed about the political conditions of the Empire. Although he only occasionally convened the body as a whole, he would often seek the advice from these councilors parallel to the scholar-official bureaucracy, which he felt was too dominated by ethnic Zhongzu. Three representatives were selected by sortition of the literati from each county in the Earth Kingdom, with each one spending a third of the year in the Inner Ring of Ba Sing Se.
As Emperor, Arjin made a deliberately conspicuous effort to reform the Great Ri as a multiethnic empire of all Earth Nations, desiring it not to be seen as a "Yonggan Ascendancy" forged by conquest. He appointed many non-Yonggan as ministers and high officials, though a majority of the court remained Yonggan as he needed to placate the conquest elite of the banner armies, on whom he depended to maintain the stability of the state.
Later Life and Death