翟瑰 / Zhai Gui (late Han)

Overview

翟瑰 / Zhai Gui enters the wiki through Hanji 796 as the Guangling Shangshu who reinforces 杨震’s objection to 汉安帝’s palace favorites. His memorial turns the 王圣 and 伯荣 field into a broader warning about private households, fiscal depletion, and imperial security.

Current Profile

Hanji 796 gives Zhai Gui a single but important intervention. He memorializes that the earlier Dou and Deng families gained overwhelming honor, offices, wealth, and influence, but their collapse showed the danger of status and title not acquired through the proper public path.

Zhai’s warning is institutional rather than merely moral. He argues that offices, ranks, salary, and authority should not slip from the court into private hands, because such transfer endangers the throne itself. The episode also has him contrast Emperor Wen’s careful fiscal restraint with An’s post-personal-rule grants, empty treasury, and exhausted people.

Emperor An does not accept Zhai’s memorial. That nonresponse makes Zhai part of an early An-era feedback failure: the court can still articulate why favorite households threaten the state, but correction does not follow.

Key Characteristics

• Guangling Shangshu whose current wiki profile is defined by anti-favorite remonstrance.
• Official who uses Dou and Deng outer-relative precedent to warn against private-household overreach.
• Critic of office, title, salary, and power drifting away from public court control.
• Fiscal remonstrant who links favorite rewards to treasury depletion and popular exhaustion.
• Source-bounded actor whose importance is as a diagnostic voice in Emperor An’s court.

Evidence

• Memorial role: Hanji 796 says Shangshu Zhai Gui submits a memorial after Yang Zhen’s objection to the Wang Sheng, Bo Rong, and Liu Gui field.
• Precedent warning: Hanji 796 says Zhai invokes the Dou and Deng families’ rise and collapse as a warning about unrightfully gained status and title.
• Public-control claim: Hanji 796 says Zhai criticizes office, title, salary, and political power moving from the court into private hands.
• Fiscal contrast: Hanji 796 says Zhai contrasts Emperor Wen’s fiscal restraint with An-era rewards, treasury emptiness, and social exhaustion.

Qualifications

This page is bounded to Hanji 796 and does not reconstruct Zhai Gui’s full office history, factional ties, or later career. The source transcript uses 翟规, while this page normalizes to 翟瑰 for the received Tongjian context.

What Changed

• Created Zhai Gui as the early An-era Shangshu who expands Yang Zhen’s anti-favorite objection into fiscal and state-security critique.

Relationships

• 汉安帝 - ruler who receives but ignores Zhai Gui’s anti-favorite memorial.
• 杨震 - senior remonstrant whose objection Zhai Gui reinforces through historical and fiscal argument.
• 王圣 - palace actor in the favorite-household field that Zhai criticizes.
• 伯荣 - favored household member whose position helps trigger the warning field.
• 刘瑰 - title-succession beneficiary who makes the private-household warning concrete.
• 私恩任官侵蚀 - concept named by Zhai’s concern that office and title leave public control.
• 君臣反馈失灵 - governance failure visible when Zhai’s warning does not alter An’s conduct.