<<Card: execution failed [local variable 'page' referenced before assignment] (see also the log)>> Some aspects of this are pending Rachel's approval
Overview
Niohuru-Nara Kuazha was the Huowang Emperor of the Great Ri, the Yonggan conquest dynasty that ruled in Ba Sing Se. He was the twenty-first Earth Monarch. Coming to power as a teenager after his father was disabled in a hunting accident, his early years on the throne were successful, but after the death of the Empress Dowager, he allowed the bureaucracy to run amok, neglecting the affairs of state in pursuit of a lavish and hedonistic lifestyle. Having made many enemies with his lechery and cruelty, Kuazha was assassinated by some of his vassals for desecrating the sacred imperial hunt, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Turusi, the last of his dynasty to rule in Ba Sing Se.
Early Life
Kuazha was the son of an Air Nomad woman named Lolha and NIOHURU-NARA Isangga, then an imperial prince of the Great Ri, the Yonggan conquest dynasty that ruled in Ba Sing Se. Kuazha was born during the rule of the great Shenxing Emperor and nineteenth Earth Monarch, NIOHURU-Nara Gagai, his grandfather. Gagai had pursued a policy of close relations with the Air Nomads, especially those affiliated with the Northern Air Temple, and the Imperial Crown Prince Isangga was married to a talented airbending woman named Lolha, among others.
Kuazha's father Isangga was forty years old at the time of Kuazha's birth, and he was eighth of Isangga's sons, seemingly with little chance of ascending the throne. However, Lolha was Isangga's favorite wife, and Gagai openly favored his half-air-nomad grandchildren, to the displeasure of conservative Yonggan courtiers. When Kuazha was nine years old, the Shenxing emperor (Gagai) died at the age of 68, of what were possibly natural causes (though there was a rumor that he was poisoned by a disaffected Yonggan shaman.) Isangga, the crown prince and Gagai's oldest son, ascended the Badgermole throne without substantial controversy as the Jianshun Emperor of the Great Ri and twentieth Earth Monarch.
In purported obedience to a letter written by Gagai, Isangga began to groom the young Kuazha as crown prince, deposing three of his older, adult sons and sending them away to their princely fiefs beyond Ba Sing Se to put them out of the center of political power. Rumors circulated that the posthumous decree was actually forged by Lolha, but these rumors were probably started by the court factions supporting the older princes.
Kuazha was an indifferent student and gave his teachers every sign of not really wanting the throne, except perhaps for the lifestyle advantages it might afford him. However, his father, otherwise an able sovereign, seemed blind to Kuazha's obvious shortcomings as a crown prince. In 686 BG, when Kuazha was 15, the Grand Tutor noted that he could only name six of the Earth Kingdom's constituent territories. But whenever Isangga's advisors would remonstrate with him about the need to name a different crown prince, Issanga would reply that the matter was out of his hands. In matters of martial skill and athleticism, at least, Kuazha was quite talented; though only a fair earthbender, he was an exceptional archer and rider, and player of the badgermole horn.
During the annual ritualized hunt of the year 685, Issanga, in his capacity as Supernal Kahn of the Yonggan, Abka and Nogai (the three major nomad ethnicities of the steppes West of Ba Sing Se), sustained a devastating head injury while earthbending an animal trap. Contrary to the expectations of most onlookers, Issanga survived, cared for by the controversial Ganjinese physician Naiku (奈刳) who overcame Issanga's inability to swallow by piercing his abdomen with a silver tube, into which a slurry of liquid food was poured to sustain him for the next 24 years.
Ascension to the Throne and Marriage
The Imperial Ri Council of the Dynastic Succession - a body dominated entirely by the Yonggan conquest elite - deemed Issanga incapable of functioning as ruler, as he was nonverbal after his head injury and hence incapable of performing the state rites. The council attempted to issue an edict in his name bypassing the crown prince Kuazha and naming the fourth-oldest brother as Emperor. However, the Earth Sages refused to seal the edict with the Heirloom Seal of the Realm because it was against the stated wishes of the still-living emperor. The matter was brought before the disabled Issanga, with Kuazha's mother Lolha interpreting his subtle gestures to indicate rejection of the Council's proposal and affirming that Kuazha should be Emperor. Interpretations of the gestures varied largely along factional lines, but Lolha was a popular figure with the non-Yonggan court factions and had enough political capital that, with the support of the Earth Sages, she was able to secure a decree for Issanga's retirement and Kuazha's succession.
The 16-year-old Kuazha chose the name Huowang (活王) for his era, and ascended the badgermole throne with the customary rites. He was guided heavily in his early years by Lolha, now the empress dowager, and the indigenous officials who had supported his ascension (likely with the ulterior motive of having a malleable young Earth Monarch instead of one of his older and willful brothers.) Kuazha usually just deferred to his mother or his advisors on matters of state. Empress Dowager Lolha, worried for the viability of Kuazha as emperor in his own right, sought to marry him well. When the air Avatar Sangye brought his teenage daughter Asa to the New Year's festivities in Ba Sing Se, Kuazha seemed smitten with Asa and Lolha saw an opportunity. Being rather impressed with Asa herself, she persuaded Sangye to allow them to get to know each other; Sangye felt that Asa would be a stabilizing influence on Kuazha and a relationship would help to cement the good relations between the Air Nomads and the Earth Kingdom for another generation.
As Lolha and Sangye had hoped, Asa and Kuazha developed a mutual romantic interest, and they were married in 684 BG, with Asa becoming Kuazha's paramount wife and Empress of the Great Ri. Lolha got along very well with her daughter-in-law Asa, who had the wisdom and spiritual nature that her son did not. Avatar Sangye, now the imperial father-in-law, also came to frequent the court; ostensibly this was simply to visit his daughter, but it was to the consternation of the other nations who felt that he was openly favoring the Earth Kingdom with his regular presence in Ba Sing Se. The Empress Dowager even renovated apartments in the Ba Sing Se Angjiao shrine, built by Gagai, for Sangye to stay in during his visits.
Over the next several years, under the supervision of the Empress Dowager and the Avatar, the Earth Kingdom remained mostly at peace. Asa gave birth to a total of six daughters over the next several years; the oldest, Yi, was born in 683. Kuazha took a few secondary wives as well during this time - mostly political marriages with the Yonggan elite. He initially treated Asa well, though his crueler nature sometimes emerged towards underlings, servants and animals.
In 679, Kuazha's eventual successor, Turusi, was born to one of his Yonggan secondary wives.
In 675, during one of his visits, Avatar Sangye and the Empress Dowager Lolha encountered an angry earth spirit, who was causing earthquakes. Attempting to appease the spirit, both were killed, leaving Kuazha without their guidance.
After the deaths of the Empress Dowager and his father-in-law, Kuazha became increasingly cruel and hedonistic. He was abusive toward Asa and his secondary wives, and took several more young Air Nomad women into his harem under dubious circumstances; reportedly some were actually kidnapped from the Soaring-Snow State. A state officer who called out his drunken and lecherous behavior during his latest wedding feast was drowned in wine at the imperial command, despite this capricious execution being a violation of the dynastic ordinances of the Great Ri. A delegation of Air Nomad lamas who came to call the Emperor to repentance (and attempt to ascertain if there were any kidnapped air nomads in the harem who wished to leave) were tricked into drinking wine at Kuazha's command, then violently expelled from Ba Sing Se while too drunk to defend themselves. In time, Kuazha's caprice and villainy made him many enemies, though his throne was protected by the bureaucrats of the capital, who did not wish a more engaged and less malleable ruler to come to power.
In 670, a preternatural black fog struck Ba Sing Se, which Yonggan Shamans attributed to Kuazha's distinct lack of spiritual merit. In the darkness, Asa, her daughters, and several of Kuazha's other airbending wives and concubines escaped. Although Kuazha attempted to recover them, sending the Earth Army after them, they were never captured, and what became of them remained unknown.
Later Life and Death
Eventually despairing of finding the women, Kuazha used his power to replenish his harem from other sources. His father Isangga finally passed away in 661. Age did not moderate Kuazha's cruelty, however, and if anything his behavior became increasingly erratic. He also began to suffer from chronic illness. In 640, after 45 years on the throne, he was slain during the annual hunt in the Yonggan Country by nomadic vassal rulers who were enraged by Kuazha's brazen advances on a female shaman accompanying the sacred hunt. Whether or not the crown prince, Turusi, had prior knowledge of a conspiracy or not is lost to history; obviously he denied it, but his punishment of the vassals was light: claiming that since there were no disinterested witnesses to identify which vassals had actually committed the regicide and which had merely been bystanders, he confiscated their fiefs but did not have them jailed or executed. (Indeed, most of the lords and ladies involved were rehabilitated within a few years or given other livelihoods by Turusi's court faction.)
Historical Appraisal and Legacy
Historians of the Earth Kingdom have rather consistently rated the Huowang Emperor as the worst of the Ri Empire, and among the worst Earth Monarchs of all time (though it must be admitted that most Earth Kingdom historians are writing in the Earth Kingdom and hence need to be circumspect with regard to recent and current monarchs of the incumbent Hao-Ting dynasty.)
After the death of the Empress Dowager, Kuazha largely left the business of governance to his scholar-officials and advisers. As a result, the power of the indigenous bureaucracy waxed strong and corruption was rampant in the later years of the Huowang era, creating conditions of dissatisfaction among the people of the Earth Kingdom.
Some Yonggan Historiography (for example The Register of the Imperial Nara Kinfolk) blames Kuazha's lack of virtue for the loss of the dynasty's favor with the great spirits of Earth and Heaven and its subsequent replacement by the Hao-Ting. Indeed, his successor's attempt to reform structures of power that had become distorted under Kuazha's mismanagement was the proximate cause of the coup that overthrew the dynasty, though this occurred well after Kuazha's death.
Worldbuilding Note
Some important aspects of Kuazha's life, especially in relation to Asa and Avatar Sangye and Kuazha's conduct towards them, were devised by Rachel.
The use of a silver tube for a gastrostomy is a reference to the actual use of such tubes by Qing-era Chinese eunuch-makers in the real world - they were used to stent open the urethra after the prospective eunuch was emasculated. Since eunuch-making at this time involved complete removal of the male genitals rather than just castration, the urethra could otherwise close up, with fatal consequences.
The importance of the annual imperial hunt mirrors that of the Qing dynasty in the real world, on which the Yonggan are very loosely based.