延笃 / Yan Du (late Han)

Overview

延笃 / Yan Du enters the wiki as the Jingzhao administrator who turns Liang Ji’s private medicine-market request into a public enforcement case. His bounded role in Hanji 834 is narrow but pointed: a protected outer-relative’s retainer can be killed when an official frames the act as profiteering during a prince’s illness.

Current Profile

In Hanji 834, an imperial prince is ill and the court orders commanderies and counties to buy rare medicines. 梁冀 sends a retainer with a personal letter to Jingzhao and also seeks cow bezoar. Yan Du opens the letter, arrests the retainer, and argues that as an empress-family outer relative, Liang should be offering medical help rather than sending a guest across a thousand li for profit.

Yan Du then kills the retainer. Liang Ji is angry and ashamed but does not retaliate immediately in the episode’s account. The later removal of Yan Du, after hostile officials claim he is ill and unable to serve, makes the case bounded rather than triumphant: public enforcement can strike a protected proxy, but the official remains vulnerable in a captured court field.

Key Characteristics

• Jingzhao administrator whose current profile is anchored in one cow-bezoar enforcement incident.
• Official who treats Liang Ji’s retainer as a public-order offender rather than as a private messenger protected by Liang’s status.
• Uses the prince’s illness to frame Liang’s act as a failure of outer-relative duty and public responsibility.
• Creates a high-status enforcement signal by punishing the proxy of an overmighty powerholder.
• Suffers later office vulnerability when hostile officials recode him as unfit to serve.

Evidence

• Medicine-crisis setting: Hanji 834 says a prince’s illness leads the court to order local authorities to buy rare medicines.
• Liang Ji proxy request: Hanji 834 says Liang sends a retainer with a personal letter to Jingzhao and seeks cow bezoar for himself.
• Public-duty framing: Hanji 834 says Yan Du criticizes Liang as an empress-family outer relative who should contribute medicine rather than exploit the emergency for private gain.
• Enforcement and aftermath: Hanji 834 says Yan Du kills the retainer, Liang endures the humiliation, and Yan Du is later removed after hostile officials call him unfit.

Qualifications

The page is based on one podcast source note and does not reconstruct Yan Du’s full biography, offices, or later career. The causal link between Liang Ji and Yan Du’s removal remains source-scoped: the episode presents the removal in a retaliatory political atmosphere but does not prove that Liang directly ordered it. The transcript form “严赌” is normalized to 延笃 because the Jingzhao, cow-bezoar, and Liang Ji retainer details match the received late-Han passage.

What Changed

• Created Yan Du as the Jingzhao administrator who kills Liang Ji’s retainer during the prince-medicine emergency.
• Added the office-vulnerability qualification: the enforcement signal is visible, but it does not protect Yan Du from later removal.

Relationships

• 梁冀 - overmighty outer-relative whose retainer Yan Du arrests and kills.
• 高位执法信号 - concept made concrete by Yan Du’s punishment of a protected proxy.
• 外戚专权与清算 - power context that makes the case politically dangerous.
• 陈蕃 - parallel official in Hanji 834 who also refuses Liang’s request and punishes Liang’s envoy.
• 忠告不转化 - adjacent lesson because failed advice to Liang precedes visible enforcement against his agents.