Background
Liubeichengdi — Liu Bei's proclamation of emperorship — rested on two immediate contexts: first, in the twenty-fifth year of Jian'an (220) Cao Pi received the abdication of Emperor Xian and replaced Han with Wei, nominally terminating the Han imperial succession once and for all; and second, intelligence circulating in Chengdu carried the mistaken report that "Emperor Xian had already been murdered," turning the "vacancy of the Han throne" from a legal gap into a factual one. Given these two overlapping contexts, Liu Bei — whose political legitimacy was rooted in his identity as "a descendant of King Jing of Zhongshan, a kinsman of the Han imperial house" — had to choose between proclaiming himself emperor promptly and maintaining the moral posture of "reluctance to usurp." Zhuge Liang chose the Confucian enthronement ritual of "court officials urging three times, Liu Bei declining three times" to satisfy both requirements simultaneously: the ritual refusals preserved the moral posture; the final acceptance met political necessity.
Key Figures
The composition of the group urging enthronement was carefully calibrated for political effect. Zhuge Liang orchestrated the entire process in his capacity as Chancellor; Xu Jing, as a distinguished scholar of the former Han, an Eastern Han veteran official, and a "cross-dynasty opinion leader," represented the endorsement of "Central Plains literati" — his participation gave Liu Bei's proclamation the coloring of "universal recognition by the Confucian establishment" rather than a local warlord's self-appointment; Qiao Zhou, as the great Confucian scholar of the Shu region and an expert in astronomical divination, added the "mandate of Heaven" dimension with observations of "auspicious winds and joyous clouds, columns of yellow vapour dozens of zhang high piercing the sky, and the imperial star appearing in the constellations Bi, Wei, and Mao". Court Academician Xu Ci and Remonstrance Adviser Meng Guang presided over the ritual — the standard configuration for enthronement rites since the Western Han, intended to render Shuhan's enthronement ceremony "unimpeachable" in Confucian ritual scholarship. Mi Zhu, Zhang Fei, Guan Xing, Zhang Bao, and other founding figures and their heirs represented the complete support of "Peach Garden brothers and original followers." It is worth noting that Huang Quan, as a representative of the Yizhou faction, also appeared among those urging enthronement — signaling that the enthronement ceremony simultaneously completed the political integration of the Jingzhou, Eastern-province, and Yizhou factions.
Core Issues
On the surface the issue was "whether or not to proclaim emperorship"; at a deeper level it was "on which legitimacy narrative to found the state." Cao Pi followed the path of "transfer of the Mandate of Heaven, the Han dynasty's fate having run its course" — acknowledging that Han's mandate was finished; had Liu Bei also followed this path, his difference from Cao Pi would have amounted to nothing more than a difference in strength, and Shuhan's existence would have had no independent moral standing. The path Zhuge Liang chose was "the Han house has not perished — a scion of the bloodline continues the succession" — the dynastic title was set as "Han" and the era name "Zhangwu" directly echoed Emperor Guangwu's "Jianwu," embedding Shuhan within the narrative chain of Han revival. This "succession" positioning had three fundamental implications: first, it gave all of Shuhan's military actions against Wei the moral identity of "suppressing rebellion rather than launching conquest" — "restore the Han house and return to the old capital" in the Shixiao Memorial is the concrete expression of this logic; second, it allowed Shuhan's regime to use "restoring the Han" as the greatest common denominator internally, integrating the Jingzhou, Yizhou, and Eastern-province factions; third, it linked Shuhan's political brand to the earlier narrative of "taking the people as the foundation" — the former addressed the source of legitimacy, the latter its expression, and together they constituted a complete and self-reinforcing political narrative. Yet in the very month after enthronement, Liu Bei resolved to campaign east against Wu to avenge Guan Yu, and Zhao Yun remonstrated forcefully: "the state's enemy is Cao Pi, not Sun Quan... the enmity of Han's enemy is a public cause; the enmity of brothers is a private one" — pointing precisely to the internal contradiction this narrative encountered in its very first year.
Political Consequences
The most immediate consequence was that the nominal structure of San Guo tripartition was completed at this moment: Cao Pi proclaimed himself emperor in 220, Liu Bei in 221, and Sunquanchengdi in 229. Shuhan became the only one of the three states to claim the identity of "continuation of the succession" — simultaneously its source of strength and its greatest burden: it had to carry out continuous northern campaigns to redeem the promise of "restoring the Han," or its legitimacy would self-erode. The medium-term consequence was the strategic disaster of the immediately following eastern campaign — the defeat at Yiling left Shuhan's field army nearly exhausted; Liu Bei died of illness at Baidi; the "restore the Han" narrative suffered a major fracture in only the second year of the state's existence. The long-term consequence was that Zhuge Liang took over this narrative and sustained it single-handedly — the Shixiao Memorial's "restore the Han house and return to the old capital," the five northern campaigns, Jiang Wei's nine campaigns into the Central Plains — all were continuous repayments against "the promissory note of succession issued at enthronement." By the time Shuhan was destroyed in 263, Qiao Zhou — the astronomer who had participated in urging enthronement — had become the leading advocate of "the faction counseling surrender," and this single character arc is itself a complete miniature of Shuhan's "succession narrative" from its rise to its dissolution.
Counterfactual Analysis
Had Liu Bei refused to proclaim himself emperor and continued in Shu under the title of King of Hanzhong, Shuhan's legitimacy would have declined year by year — Cao Pi was already emperor, Sun Quan might proclaim himself at any moment, and without following suit Shuhan would have been reduced to a "second-tier entity" in Three Kingdoms diplomacy, unable to integrate the three factions internally through the authority of an imperial succession. Had Liu Bei after enthronement heeded Zhao Yun's counsel to first campaign north against Caowei rather than east against Wu, Shuhan's "restore the Han" narrative would have received its first substantive fulfillment — even had the northern campaign not succeeded, it would at least have preserved the battle-hardened forces of the pre-Yiling period and the Sun-Liu alliance. Had Shuhan at the time of enthronement established its capital at Hanzhong rather than Chengdu, pushing the seat of power north onto the axis of advance originally envisioned in the Longzhong plan, northern campaigns would have become an extension of national policy binding "capital relocation" to "restoration," significantly improving Shuhan's strategic efficiency — but Chengdu's economic conditions and defensive depth made this choice impossible to implement at the time. Understanding this means understanding that "Liu Bei's proclamation of emperorship" was not merely a ceremonial event but a structural decision that locked Shuhan onto the track of a "succession-type regime" — with all the consequences encoded within it from that day forward: the necessity to campaign north, the inevitability of exhaustion, the predestination of dying for the cause.