Background
The Shuhan of 223 was a machine running on borrowed time. The catastrophic defeat at Yiling the previous year had wiped out the entire capital invested in Liu Bei's personally led eastern campaign over three decades; the defection of Huang Quan to Wei, the death of Ma Liang in battle, and the assassination of General Zhenbei Zhang Fei had left severe gaps among the military and political veterans. After Jingzhou fell in 219, Shuhan's pool of talent and tax revenues became increasingly concentrated between Yizhou proper and the frontier borderlands of Nanzhong. Liu Bei's own health had deteriorated rapidly during his year in Yongan, and nearly every political resource he could deploy was consumed in preparatory work for negotiating peace with Wu. In this context of "opening a game from wreckage," the accession of Crown Prince Liu Chan was less a fresh beginning than a crisis transition.
Key Figures
The nominal center was the seventeen-year-old Liu Chan. He had no military record, and none of Liu Bei's "founding charisma," but the late emperor had deliberately shaped him into an institutional partner with the Chancellor — the four characters "serve the Chancellor as a father" were the single most institutionally meaningful line in the regency edict. Zhuge Liang, as the Chancellor entrusted with the dying emperor's commission, concurrently holding the post of Governor of Yizhou with the authority to open his own administrative bureau, effectively took over all day-to-day decision-making power. The second regent, Li Yan, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Central and External Military Affairs and assigned to hold Yongan, tasked both with guarding the upper Yangtze against any renewed moves by Sunwu and serving as an implicit counterweight to Chengdu. Empress Dowager Wu Shi (sister of Wu Yi) and the posthumously honored Empress Zhao of the late Emperor Gan provided the maternal legitimacy of the new emperor's identity; although Lady Mi had died earlier, she was included in the ritual sacrifices as a symbol of Jingzhou's founding veterans, signaling reassurance to the old guard.
Core Issues
The central question of this succession was not "who ascends the throne" but "how to distribute power so that Shuhan can survive." Liu Bei's solution was a dual-track arrangement: governance and diplomacy were entrusted to Zhuge Liang; military affairs and border defense were entrusted to Li Yan; above both stood only the child emperor as the symbol of the state. On the surface this looked like a "dual-chancellor system," but in substance it left the decision-making center on the Chengdu side with Zhuge Liang — the authority to open his own bureau meant that the Chancellor's Secretariat was itself an independent administrative apparatus, while Li Yan, though nominally holding command of the external forces under the title "Commander-in-Chief," was fixed immovably at Yongan. The new emperor promptly issued edicts placing diplomacy, internal governance, and personnel appointments all in Zhuge Liang's hands, formally confirming this tilt.
Political Consequences
In the year of accession and the year following, Zhuge Liang dispatched Deng Zhi as envoy to Jiangdong to renew the Wu–Shu alliance, extricating Shuhan from the worst-case scenario of being threatened on two flanks. In the spring of 225 he personally led a great army on the southern campaign, dispatching forces in the third month and pacifying Nanzhong by autumn, expanding Shuhan's fiscal base from Yizhou alone to include Nanzhong's gold, silver, cinnabar, lacquer, draft oxen, and warhorses. In 227 the "Memorial on Sending Out the Army" was submitted and the northern army was stationed at Hanzhong; the five northern expeditions launched between 227 and 234 were all built on the framework of "military and political authority concentrated in the Chancellor's secretariat" that was established at the time of this accession. Simultaneously, the Li Yan bloc was steadily weakened: he was first reassigned as Commander of Jiangzhou, then compelled to move westward, and finally stripped of his rank and reduced to commoner status in 231 for failure in transport supervision. One could say that this succession of the fifth month of 223 was not merely the beginning of a new reign-title — it wrote out in one act the operating rules by which Shuhan would function for the next eleven years.
Counterfactual Analysis
Had Liu Bei not adopted the extreme form of regency captured in "serve the Chancellor as a father" — had he instead allowed the young emperor to exercise genuine personal rule through collective deliberation among several regents — Shuhan would very likely have become mired in repeated wrangling over the two tasks of the 224 Wu–Shu re-alliance and the pacification of Nanzhong. A delay in either would have been enough to drag Shuhan into deeper internal exhaustion. Conversely, had Li Yan been granted not "residence at Yongan" but "participation in recording affairs of the Imperial Secretariat, co-signing with the Chancellor," the Shuhan "dual-chancellor system" might truly have been realized and Zhuge Liang's sole-chancellor dominance would not have taken shape; but this would also mean that the long-term strategy of the northern expeditions — which required a high degree of centralized authority — would have been very difficult to launch, and Shuhan's external posture would have leaned toward defense. In retrospect, Liu Chan as a "constitutionally institutionalized emperor" was precisely the key to this entire power arrangement running stably for forty years — he neither disrupted Zhuge Liang's system during Zhuge Liang's lifetime nor was immediately toppled by an imperial relative or strongman after Zhuge Liang's death. This "low-profile stability" is the most underestimated political achievement of the accession of the fifth month of 223.