Tang dynasty

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 18th of June in the year 618, word reached Li Yuan that Emperor Yang of Sui had been murdered by a general named Yuwen Huaji. Li Yuan had already occupied Chang'an months earlier, reducing the Sui emperor to a retired figurehead and ruling through a puppet child. Now he declared himself emperor of a new dynasty he called the Tang. It would rule China from 618 to 907, and historians have come to regard it as a high point of Chinese civilisation and a golden age of cosmopolitan culture. The capital he seized would become the most populous city on earth. The empire he founded would stretch from northern Vietnam to a border with Persia, count its people in the tens of millions, and produce poets whose work still survives in the thousands. Yet the same dynasty would be torn apart by one of its own commanders, see a former consort crown herself the only female emperor in Chinese history, and end with a salt smuggler murdering the last boy on the throne. How did a frontier duke's rebellion turn into three centuries of brilliance? And what unmade it?

• 2. The House Of Li

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  The House of Li claimed an ancestry that read like a roll-call of legend. According to official Tang records, they descended paternally from Laozi, the traditional founder of Taoism, whose personal name was Li Dan or Li Er. They also traced their line to the Han general Li Guang and to Li Gao, founder of the Western Liang kingdom. This was the Longxi Li lineage, which also counted the poet Li Bai among its members. The reality was more tangled than the genealogy admitted. The Li belonged to the northwest military aristocracy of the Sui era, and Emperor Gaozu's mother, Duchess Dugu, was part-Xianbei. Some modern historians suspect the family modified its records to hide that Xianbei heritage. Li Yuan himself was a first cousin of Emperor Yang of Sui, their mothers both among the Dugu sisters, and he held the post of governor of Taiyuan. The rebellion of 617 was a family affair. Li Yuan rose alongside his son and his militant daughter, Princess Pingyang, who raised and commanded her own troops. The dynasty's deeper conflicts would also begin at home, inside the walls of the palace these founders had just won.

• 3. Blood At The Gate

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  Li Shimin had commanded troops since the age of 18, prized for his skill with bow, sword, and lance, and known for cavalry charges that broke larger armies. On the 28th of May 621, fighting a numerically superior force, he defeated Dou Jiande at Luoyang in the Battle of Hulao. Power inside the family proved deadlier than any battlefield. Fearing assassination, Li Shimin ambushed and killed two of his brothers, the crown prince Li Jiancheng and Li Yuanji, at the Xuanwu Gate on the 2nd of July 626. His father abdicated shortly after, and Li Shimin took the throne under the temple name Taizong. Killing brothers and deposing a father violated the Confucian value of filial piety, yet Taizong governed as a ruler who listened to the wisest members of his council. In 628 he held a Buddhist memorial service for the war dead, and in 629 he had monasteries built at major battle sites so monks could pray for the fallen on both sides. His generals carried Tang power outward. Li Jing destroyed the Eastern Turkic Khaganate and captured its ruler, Illig Qaghan, after which the Turks accepted Taizong as their khagan under the title Tian Kehan. He held that steppe title alongside the Chinese style of Son of Heaven, a double sovereignty no Han emperor had claimed.

• 4. The Only Empress

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  Wu Zetian entered Emperor Gaozong's court as a lowly consort, and ended as the only legitimate female emperor in Chinese history. When Gaozong suffered a stroke in 655, Wu began making his court decisions, discussing affairs of state with councillors who took her orders while she sat behind a screen. Her rise was paved with vanished rivals. When her eldest son, the crown prince, asserted policies she opposed, he suddenly died in 675, and many suspected poison. The next heir was accused of plotting rebellion in 680, banished, and obliged to commit suicide. After Gaozong died in 683, she deposed one son, Zhongzong, after only six weeks, then installed and dominated another, Ruizong. On the 16th of October 690 she proclaimed the Tianshou era of her own Wu Zhou dynasty, demoting Ruizong to crown prince and forcing him to surrender the surname Li. To justify her reign she circulated the Great Cloud Sutra, which predicted that a reincarnation of the Maitreya Buddha would be a female monarch who would dispel illness, worry, and disaster. She even introduced revised written characters, which reverted to their old forms after her death. A palace coup on the 20th of February 705 forced her out, and the Tang was formally restored on the 3rd of March. Her most lasting work was political. By diminishing the dominance of the Northwestern aristocracy, she let clans from other regions enter government, a loosening of pedigree's grip that would echo through the dynasty's politics.

• 5. An Lushan's War

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  An Lushan was a half-Sogdian, half-Turkic commander who had served the Tang since 744, fighting the Khitans of Manchuria with mixed success. Given great responsibility in Hebei, he rebelled with an army of more than 100,000 troops. The rebellion ran from 755 to 763 and destroyed the prosperity the dynasty had built. After An Lushan captured Luoyang and named himself emperor of a short-lived Yan state, the court fled Chang'an. The newly recruited capital troops were no match for his frontier veterans, despite early victories by the Tang general Guo Ziyi. The Tang survived only by borrowing strength from outside. In 756 they called on the Uyghur Khaganate, whose khan Moyanchur married his daughter to the Chinese envoy and received a Chinese princess in return. The Uyghurs helped recapture the capital, then refused to leave until paid an enormous tribute in silk. Even Abbasid Arabs assisted. The war devoured its own leaders. An Lushan was killed by one of his eunuchs in 757, and the troubles continued until the rebel Shi Siming was killed by his own son in 763. The strategic cost outlasted the fighting. The Tang withdrew its western garrisons, and the Tibetans seized the opportunity, even capturing Chang'an for fifteen days in 763. So significant was this loss that half a century later, jinshi examination candidates were required to write an essay on the causes of the Tang's decline.

• 6. The Warlords Rise

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  After 710, regional military governors called jiedushi gradually began to challenge the central government. Once the An Lushan rebellion ended, the power the jiedushi had accumulated in Hebei moved beyond the court's control. After a series of rebellions between 781 and 784 across present-day Hebei, Henan, Shandong, and Hubei, the government had to formally acknowledge the governors' hereditary rule. In exchange for protection and the suppression of local revolts, the court let them keep their armies, collect taxes, and pass their titles to their heirs. The balance never fully tipped back. The last ambitious ruler, Emperor Xianzong, kept a well-trained imperial army at the capital, the Army of Divine Strategy, recorded at 240,000 strength in 798. Between 806 and 819 he led seven campaigns against the breakaway provinces and subdued all but two, briefly ending the hereditary jiedushi by appointing his own officers. His successors squandered the gain. More interested in hunting, feasting, and outdoor sports, they let eunuchs amass power. When Emperor Wenzong plotted to overthrow them in the Ganlu Incident, his allies were instead publicly executed in Chang'an's West Market on the eunuchs' command. The rule of the military governors would outlast the dynasty itself, ending only in 960 with a new civil order under the Song.

• 7. Ink And Examinations

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  Over 48,900 poems from the Tang survive today, the work of more than 2,200 authors. Skill in composing poetry became required study for anyone hoping to pass the imperial examinations, and the art was fiercely competitive, with contests common among banquet guests and courtiers. Two of China's most famous poets belonged to this age. Li Bai, who lived from 701 to 762, was celebrated for the gushi style, while Wang Wei and Cui Hao were known for jintishi, the regulated verse of eight lines with fixed tone patterns. Reputations shifted across centuries. Du Fu, who lived from 712 to 770, was not esteemed in his own era and was branded by his peers as an anti-traditional rebel. Only in the Song did the critic Yan Yu reserve for him the highest esteem among all Tang poets. Prose changed too. The Classical Prose Movement, spurred by Liu Zongyuan and Han Yu, broke from the ornate parallel prose of the Han in favour of clarity and precision. The examinations these writers sat for reshaped who could rule. Two exams were given, the mingjing, which tested knowledge of the Confucian classics, and the jinshi, which tested essays on governance and the composition of poetry. The system was meant to draw the best talent and, just as importantly, to free the rulers from dependence on aristocratic families and warlords. Recent quantitative research shows that by the late seventh century the jinshi degree had already become the primary route to high office, while family pedigree had lost its power to predict appointment. From Tang times until 1912, scholar-officials would serve as intermediaries between the people and the government, their authority drawn from examination success rather than lineage.

• 8. A City Of A Million

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  Chang'an was laid out like a checkerboard, its roughly square form bounded by 10 kilometres of outer walls running east to west and more than 8 kilometres running north to south. Fourteen main streets crossed it east to west and eleven ran north to south, forming 108 rectangular wards, each walled with four gates. The pattern was so striking it appeared in one of Du Fu's poems, and cities like Heian-kyo, present-day Kyoto, were arranged on the same model. Within those walls stood a remarkable inventory of devotion and leisure. The city held 111 Buddhist monasteries, 41 Taoist abbeys, 38 family shrines, 7 churches of foreign religions, and 6 graveyards, while some wards held open fields for horse polo and cuju, a Chinese ball game. In 662 Emperor Gaozong moved the court to the Daming Palace, which served as the royal residence for more than 220 years. The city drew the world to itself. Its population, counting the wards and suburban countryside, reached two million, and about 25,000 foreigners lived within. People of Persia, Central Asia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, and India settled there, practising Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. Tocharian women with green eyes and blond hair served wine in agate and amber cups at the taverns. The mingling had limits. A law of 628 protected women from temporary marriages with foreign envoys, requiring a foreigner who married a Chinese woman to remain in China. In 779 an edict forced Uyghurs in the capital to wear their ethnic dress and barred them from passing as Chinese. For all its splendour, Chang'an was not the dynasty's economic heart. That title belonged to Yangzhou on the Grand Canal, the headquarters of the Tang salt monopoly and the greatest industrial centre in China.

  In 748 the Buddhist monk Jian Zhen described Guangzhou as a bustling mercantile centre where large foreign ships came to dock. He wrote that many large ships came from Borneo, Persia, and Java with spices, pearls, and jade piled up mountain high. The sea carried Chinese goods astonishingly far. During the Tang, a strong Chinese maritime presence reached the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, into Mesopotamia up the Euphrates, and to Arabia, Egypt, Aksum in Ethiopia, and Somalia in the Horn of Africa. Beginning in 785, Chinese ships called regularly at Sufala on the East African coast to cut out Arab middlemen. The scale of this export trade lay buried at sea for centuries. The Belitung shipwreck, an Arabian dhow found in the Gaspar Strait, held 63,000 pieces of Tang ceramics, silver, and gold, including a Changsha bowl inscribed with a date corresponding to 826. The land route mattered just as much. The Silk Road, first formulated under Emperor Wu of the Han, was reopened by the Tang in 639 when Hou Junji conquered the West. It closed when the Tibetans took it in 678, reopened in 699, and was finally cut off after the An Lushan rebellion when the Tang withdrew its western troops. Trade carried far more than goods. The state ran roughly 32,100 kilometres of postal routes by horse and boat, and after the Battle of Talas in 751, captured Chinese soldiers shared papermaking with the Arabs, a technique that reached Europe by the 12th century through Arab-controlled Spain.

  A rebellion led by Huang Chao between 874 and 884 devastated northern and southern China, took a decade to suppress, and saw both Chang'an and Luoyang sacked. In 878 and 879 his army massacred foreign Arab, Persian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian merchants in Guangzhou, and one medieval Chinese source claimed Huang Chao killed eight million people. The Tang never recovered. Out of the chaos rose two rivals who would decide the dynasty's fate. Li Keyong, leader of the Turkic Shatuo people of what is now Shanxi, helped defeat Huang and was made a jiedushi, later Prince of Jin, and granted the imperial surname Li. His enemy was Zhu Wen, originally a salt smuggler who had served as a lieutenant under Huang Chao before surrendering to the Tang. For helping crush the rebellion he was renamed Zhu Quanzhong, Zhu of Perfect Loyalty, and promoted rapidly to military governor of Xuanwu Circuit. His loyalty proved a fiction. In 901 Zhu seized Chang'an and the imperial family from his base at Kaifeng. By 903 he forced Emperor Zhaozong to move the capital to Luoyang, and in 904 he had Zhaozong assassinated and replaced with the emperor's young son, Emperor Ai. In 905 he executed Emperor Ai's brothers, many officials, and the empress dowager. In 907 Zhu deposed Ai, took the throne as Emperor Taizu of Later Liang, and inaugurated the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. A year later he had the deposed boy poisoned. Li Keyong died in 908 without ever claiming the title of emperor, out of loyalty to the Tang, but his son Li Cunxu carried on the rivalry. In 923 Li Cunxu declared a restored Tang, the Later Tang, and toppled the Later Liang the same year. China would not be reunified until the Song dynasty rose in 960.