Early Life and Career
Huan Wen was born in 313. His father Huan Yi (桓彝) was a commandery governor. When he was young, his father once received a visit from Wen Jiao, who saw the boy and thought that the child was special. Huan Yi, because Wen had a high opinion of the child, thus named his son Wen, after Wen Jiao's family name.
In 328, during the rebellion of Su Jun, Huan Yi tried to resist Su's forces, but was defeated and killed by Su's general Han Huang (韓晃), who received help from Huan Yi's subordinate Jiang Bo (江播). In 330, after Jiang had already died, Huan Wen killed Jiang's sons to avenge his father, and this was an act that brought him great fame. As he was considered capable, and his father had died for the imperial cause, he was selected as the husband for Emperor Cheng's sister Sima Xingnan (司馬興男) the Princess Nankang. He inherited his father's title of the Baron of Wanning, and he gradually rose in rank, eventually becoming the governor of Xu Province (徐州, then modern central Jiangsu). Emperor Cheng's uncle Yu Yi (庾翼) was impressed with his talent, and often endorsed him for even greater responsibilities. During Emperor Kang's brief reign, Huan was one of the few officials who supported Yu's plan for a northern campaign against Later Zhao in 343, although Yu's plan was never actually carried out. After Yu's death in 345 (during the reign of Emperor Mu, then a toddler), the prime minister He Chong (何充) commissioned Huan to succeed Yu, as the commander of the military forces in the western provinces (roughly modern Hubei, Hunan, Guizhou, and Yunnan), even though some other imperial officials had misgivings about Huan's ambitions and independence.
Read more about this topic: Huan Wen
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.”
—Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)
““Is there life on Mars?” “No, not there either.””
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)