The Rise and Fall of the Tang Dynasty (618–907)_State, Society and Empire in Medieval China_By Dr. Rahul S. Kharat

 The Rise and Fall of the Tang Dynasty (618–907)_State, Society and Empire in Medieval China_By Dr. Rahul S. Kharat

Abstract

The Tang dynasty (618–907) was among the most durable, cosmopolitan and culturally creative regimes in the history of China and of Eurasia. This article offers an integrated account of its trajectory, from the collapse of the Sui and the founding of the dynasty by Li Yuan and Li Shimin, through the institutional consolidation of the seventh century, the unique reign of the Empress Wu Zetian, and the brilliant “High Tang” of Emperor Xuanzong, to the catastrophe of the An Lushan Rebellion and the long, uneven decline that ended with the abdication of Emperor Ai in 907. It argues that the dynasty’s greatest strengths, namely its fusion of northern and southern traditions, its openness to the steppe and to the Silk Road, and its flexible administrative machinery, also generated the pressures that eventually undid it: the militarisation of the frontiers, the fiscal burden of a professional army, and the rise of provincial power-holders and palace eunuchs. The article reviews the principal primary sources and the main historiographical interpretations, and concludes that the Tang’s “fall” is better understood as a prolonged transformation than as a sudden collapse.

Keywords: Tang dynasty; Li Shimin; Wu Zetian; Xuanzong; An Lushan Rebellion; jiedushi; Huang Chao; medieval China; Silk Road

1. Introduction

Few periods of Chinese history have exercised so strong a hold on the imagination, both inside China and beyond it, as the three centuries of Tang rule. To later generations of Chinese the Tang represented a golden age of confident empire, magnificent poetry and universal learning; the very word “Tang” became a name for Chinese people and Chinese civilisation in many parts of southern China and across the overseas Chinese world, so that the quarter of a city inhabited by Chinese has long been called, in Cantonese, a “Tang people’s street.” To the Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese, the Tang provided a template of law, bureaucracy, urban planning, Buddhist institutions and literary culture that they adapted, with varying degrees of fidelity, for their own states. To the peoples of the steppe and of Inner Asia, the Tang was at once a formidable adversary, a lucrative trading partner and, on occasion, a reluctant ally. Few other dynasties have left behind so rich a documentary and material record, from the dynastic histories and the great compilation of Sima Guang to the manuscripts of Dunhuang, the tomb figurines of Chang’an and Luoyang, and some forty-eight thousand surviving poems.

The traditional narrative of the dynasty is a moral and cyclical one. A vigorous founder and a wise second emperor establish a just order; the dynasty reaches its zenith under an emperor of brilliant gifts; the ruler grows complacent, falls under the sway of a beloved consort and a treacherous minister, and the empire is plunged into rebellion; thereafter a series of weak sovereigns, dominated by eunuchs and challenged by insubordinate generals, preside over a long decline until Heaven withdraws its mandate. This pattern, already visible in the two Tang histories compiled in the tenth and eleventh centuries, is neat, memorable and in some respects misleading. It underplays the structural and institutional causes of change, it exaggerates the rapidity of the decline, and it obscures the remarkable resilience that allowed the dynasty to survive for a century and a half after a rebellion that, by every ordinary calculation, ought to have destroyed it.

Modern scholarship has complicated the older picture in several important ways. Chen Yinke (1943) emphasised the continuing power of a northwestern aristocratic “Guanlong” group and its gradual displacement by a class of examination-selected officials. Pulleyblank (1955) placed the rebellion of An Lushan in the context of the cultural and ethnic politics of the northeastern frontier. Twitchett (1963; 1979) reconstructed the financial machinery of the state and showed how the post-rebellion fiscal system, far from being a mere symptom of decay, represented a creative adaptation to altered circumstances. More recent work by Lewis (2009), Wang Zhenping (2013), Skaff (2012) and Tackett (2014) has set the dynasty firmly within the wider history of Eurasia and has re-examined the fate of the old aristocracy. These interpretations do not all agree, but together they invite a more nuanced narrative than the older cycle of vigour and decay.

This article offers a chronological and analytical survey of the dynasty’s rise and fall. After a brief discussion of sources, it examines the legacy of the Sui and the circumstances of the founding (Section 2); the institutional achievements of the reign of Taizong (Section 3); the rise of Wu Zetian (Section 4); the High Tang under Xuanzong (Section 5); the cosmopolitan culture that flourished in the capital cities (Section 6); the An Lushan Rebellion (Section 7); the transformed state of the late eighth and early ninth centuries (Section 8); and the final collapse in the wake of the Huang Chao uprising (Section 9). Section 10 discusses the main explanations that historians have offered for the dynasty’s fall, and Section 11 assesses its legacy.

A Note on Sources

Our knowledge of the Tang rests on a distinctive body of sources. The two official histories, the Old Tang History (Jiu Tangshu), completed in 945 under the direction of Liu Xu, and the New Tang History (Xin Tangshu), compiled by Ouyang Xiu and Song Qi and presented in 1060, are complementary and in places contradictory. The former draws more directly on the Tang’s own veritable records and archives; the latter is more elegantly written and more didactic, reflecting the moralising concerns of eleventh-century Confucian scholars. The Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (Zizhi tongjian) of Sima Guang, finished in 1084, weaves these and many lost sources into a continuous annalistic narrative and remains indispensable, even though its judgements are strongly coloured by its author’s political and ethical views. Alongside these narrative histories stand encyclopaedic compendia of institutions, legal texts such as the Tang Code (Tang lü shuyi) of 653, collections of imperial edicts and memorials, and the sayings of the early emperors compiled by Wu Jing in the Essentials of Government of the Zhenguan Era (Zhenguan zhengyao).

Equally important is the non-literary record. The manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang and Turfan include household registers, contracts, military documents and Buddhist texts that allow us to see the operation of the equal-field and military systems at the local level. Thousands of epitaphs excavated from tombs in the Chang’an and Luoyang regions illuminate the careers and marriages of the elite. Archaeology has recovered the plan of the Tang capital, the palaces of Daming and Xingqing, the pagodas and the tombs of the imperial family, with their celebrated murals. Finally, foreign sources, such as Arabic and Persian travel accounts, Tibetan annals, Old Turkic inscriptions and the records of Japanese pilgrims, furnish perspectives from outside the Chinese court. Used together, these sources permit a far richer reconstruction than any single tradition would allow.

2. The Sui Legacy and the Founding of the Tang

2.1 North, South and the Reunification

The Tang did not emerge from a vacuum. After the fall of the Western Jin in the early fourth century, China had been divided for nearly three hundred years between successive dynasties in the north, many ruled by élites of steppe origin, and a sequence of Han Chinese regimes in the south. The northern states, above all the Northern Wei (386–534) and its successors the Western Wei and Northern Zhou, had experimented with institutions that would prove fundamental to the later empire: the equal-field system of land allocation, a household-based system of taxation in grain, cloth and labour, and a militia organisation tied to the ruling clans. In the northwest, around the old capital region of Guanzhong and the Longxi plateau, a tightly interwoven group of military families of mixed Han and Xianbei descent consolidated power under the Western Wei general Yuwen Tai. It was from this milieu, which Chen Yinke called the Guanlong group, that the founders of both the Sui and the Tang were to come.

In 581 Yang Jian, a Northern Zhou aristocrat and father-in-law of its last child-emperor, took the throne as Emperor Wen of the Sui. In 589 his armies conquered the southern Chen dynasty and reunified the whole of China for the first time since 316. The Sui regime was a state-building enterprise of extraordinary energy. It laid out a vast new capital, Daxing, on the southern bank of the Wei River, a city that the Tang would inherit and rename Chang’an; it reorganised local government; it rationalised the legal code; it began to recruit officials by examination; and under Emperor Yang (r. 604–618) it completed the Grand Canal, a network of artificial waterways linking the Yellow River and the Huai region with the Yangzi valley and eventually with the area of modern Beijing (Wright 1978; Xiong 2006). The Grand Canal was the single most consequential piece of infrastructure in medieval Chinese history, for it made possible the movement of southern grain and wealth to the northern political centre.

2.2 The Collapse of the Sui

Yet the Sui overreached. Emperor Yang, ambitious and cultivated, sought to build a second capital at Luoyang, to tour his realm in great state, to extend Chinese power into Central Asia, and to subdue the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo. The three great expeditions against Goguryeo between 612 and 614 mobilised, according to the sources, more than a million men and ended in humiliating failure. The cost of the campaigns and the building projects, coming on top of the conscription of labour for the canals, provoked widespread desertion and banditry, and in 613 a revolt led by Yang Xuangan, a son of one of the dynasty’s founding ministers, showed that even elements of the elite had turned against the throne. By 616 the emperor had retreated to the southern city of Jiangdu (Yangzhou), where he abandoned the north to a patchwork of rebel leaders. In 618 he was strangled by his own officers, led by Yuwen Huaji.

2.3 Li Yuan and Li Shimin

Li Yuan, the founder of the Tang, was a typical product of the Guanlong élite. His grandfather had been one of the “Eight Pillars of State” of the Western Wei; his mother belonged to the Dugu family, whose daughters had married into the Northern Zhou and Sui imperial houses, so that he was a first cousin of Emperor Yang. In 617, as commander at Taiyuan, the strategic military headquarters of the northern frontier, he faced growing disorder and a suspicious emperor. Urged on by his able second son, Li Shimin, and by a circle of allies, he rose in revolt, secured the forbearance of the Eastern Türk qaghan by a combination of tribute and nominal deference, and marched on Chang’an, which fell in the eleventh month of that year. Li Yuan first installed a puppet child emperor and then, on receiving news of Yang’s murder, proclaimed himself emperor in the summer of 618, taking the dynastic name Tang from his hereditary title of Duke of Tang. Historically he is known as Gaozu.

Establishing the dynasty required a decade of war. Rival regimes held Gansu and the Ordos (Xue Ju and Liu Wuzhou), the Central Plain (Wang Shichong at Luoyang and Dou Jiande in Hebei), the Yangzi valley and the south. The decisive campaigns were conducted by Li Shimin, who in 621 defeated Wang Shichong and Dou Jiande in the crucial battle at Hulao Pass, a victory that handed the Tang the eastern capital and the north China plain. The last rival of consequence, Liang Shidu in the Ordos, fell in 628. By then it was already clear that the real founder of the Tang’s military reputation was Li Shimin rather than his father, and this fact would soon bring the dynasty’s first crisis.

3. Taizong and the Foundations of Tang Government

3.1 The Xuanwu Gate Incident

Li Shimin’s success on the battlefield created a dangerous rivalry within the imperial family. The designated heir, his elder brother Li Jiancheng, had few military laurels and felt increasingly threatened; he found an ally in the third brother, Li Yuanji, and in the emperor’s favoured concubines, and together they sought to undermine Shimin’s retainers and send his best generals away. On the fourth day of the sixth month of 626, Li Shimin ambushed his two brothers at the Xuanwu Gate, the northern entrance to the palace in Chang’an, and killed them with his own retainers. Within weeks Gaozu had named him heir and abdicated. The new emperor, posthumously honoured as Taizong (r. 626–649), would later suppress or sanitise the record of these events, and historians have long debated how far the official narrative can be trusted. Whatever the truth, the incident left a stain that Taizong sought to expunge by the exemplary quality of his government.

3.2 The Zhenguan Ideal

The Zhenguan era (627–649) was remembered by later Confucian statesmen as the model of good rule. Taizong cultivated an image of receptive, self-critical kingship and surrounded himself with able, outspoken ministers, among them Fang Xuanling, Du Ruhui and above all Wei Zheng, whose frank remonstrances were afterwards enshrined in the Zhenguan zhengyao (Wechsler 1974). The emperor is reported to have likened the ruler to a boat and the people to the water that can both carry and overturn it, an image that expressed his keen awareness of what had happened to the Sui. Historians have noted that the tradition was deliberately cultivated: Taizong took an active interest in the compilation of the dynastic histories of the preceding states, and the picture of the Zhenguan reign that comes down to us was shaped by his own court. Even so, it would be wrong to dismiss the achievement as mere propaganda. The early Tang did produce a government that was relatively frugal, that reduced taxes, that expanded the bureaucracy on a regular basis, and that listened, at least some of the time, to criticism.

3.3 The Institutions of the Early Tang

The institutional architecture established in the first half of the seventh century endured, with modifications, for the rest of the dynasty and was to influence later Chinese regimes. At the apex of the central government stood the “Three Departments and Six Ministries.” The Secretariat (Zhongshu sheng) drafted imperial edicts; the Chancellery (Menxia sheng) reviewed them and could return them for reconsideration; and the Department of State Affairs (Shangshu sheng) carried them out through the Six Ministries of Personnel, Revenue, Rites, War, Justice and Works. The division of drafting, review and execution produced a system of checks within the bureaucracy, and the leaders of the three departments together constituted the chancellors who counselled the emperor. In practice the system evolved: from the reign of Gaozong onward, chancellors were increasingly appointed with special titles that gave them access to the emperor irrespective of their department, and the relationship between the three bodies became more fluid. Nevertheless, the Tang pattern of functionally specialised ministries remained the foundation of civil administration until 1911.

The legal system provides another example of lasting achievement. The first code was issued under Gaozu in 624, revised under Taizong in 637, and promulgated again with an authoritative commentary in 653. This Tang Code in its commentarial form, the oldest Chinese legal code to survive in its entirety, is a model of systematic and humane legislation, with its twelve sections, five degrees of punishment, and graded penalties for kinship and status relationships (Johnson 1979). It served as the foundation of Chinese law for the next thousand years and shaped the legal codes of Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

At the base of the fiscal and military system lay the equal-field (juntian) arrangement, inherited from the northern dynasties. In theory the state allocated to each adult male a standard allotment of land, part of which was returnable at death and part of which was heritable, and in exchange levied on each registered household a fixed tax in grain (zu), a levy in cloth or silk (diao), and a labour service (yong) that could be commuted for additional cloth. Registered households were also the pool for the militia system known as the fubing, or “garrison militia,” in which soldiers lived on allotted land, were exempt from regular taxes, drilled in rotation, and could be summoned to serve in the capital guard or on campaign. The combination of small-holding peasants, tax in kind and a part-time citizen army was relatively cheap and, for much of the seventh century, effective. But it presumed an abundance of land, an accurate census and a state capable of preventing the concentration of holdings, conditions that would not last (Twitchett 1963).

Taizong also confronted the question of the old aristocracy. The great clans of the northeast, such as the Cui of Boling and the Lu of Fanyang, and those of the northwest, kept a prestige derived from centuries of office-holding that the Li family, with its mixed ancestry, could not match. In 638 Taizong ordered the compilation of a new Catalogue of Clans (Shizu zhi). When the first draft placed the Cui of Boling in the first rank, he is said to have reacted with anger and demanded that the imperial house and its in-laws occupy the highest positions. The episode shows both the strength of aristocratic status and the early Tang rulers’ determination to subordinate it to dynastic power. At the same time Taizong expanded the examinations that recruited officials on the basis of learning rather than birth, though in the seventh century the number of examination graduates remained small and most senior posts continued to be held by men from the established families.

3.4 Taizong and the Steppe

Taizong’s foreign policy reflected the Tang’s dual identity as heir to both a Chinese and a steppe tradition. The Eastern Türk qaghanate, which had menaced the north for decades and which had received tribute even from Gaozu, was weakened by internal strife and severe winters. In 630 a Tang army under Li Jing captured the qaghan Illig and brought the khanate to an end. The following year, leaders of the steppe peoples proclaimed Taizong the “Heavenly Qaghan” (Tian Kehan), a title he accepted, so that he was both emperor of the Chinese and supreme ruler of the nomads (Skaff 2012; Wang Zhenping 2013). Thereafter Tang armies extended their reach over the Tarim basin oases, taking Gaochang (Turfan) in 640, and Tibet, newly united under Songtsen Gampo, sent envoys and, in 641, received Princess Wencheng as a royal bride. Taizong’s one major setback was his campaign against Goguryeo in 645, which failed to capture the fortress of Ansi and ended in a costly retreat. He died in 649, leaving a reputation for greatness that none of his successors could quite equal.

4. Gaozong, Wu Zetian and the Zhou Interregnum

4.1 The Expansion of Empire

Taizong’s ninth son and successor, Gaozong (r. 649–683), inherited a prosperous and well-organised empire and presided over its greatest territorial extent. In 657 the Tang general Su Dingfang destroyed the Western Türk qaghanate and extended Tang suzerainty across Central Asia as far as the borders of the Sasanian lands, where the Persian court of Peroz had sought Tang help against the Arab armies. In alliance with the Korean state of Silla, Tang forces overthrew the kingdom of Baekje in 660 and finally destroyed Goguryeo in 668, though Silla soon turned on its erstwhile ally and succeeded in expelling Tang troops from the peninsula by the 670s. In the west, however, the Tibetan empire emerged as a powerful rival. In 670 a Tang army was crushed at the Dafei River, and for the next century the contest between the Tang and Tibet for control of the Tarim basin and the Gansu corridor became the dominant strategic fact of the western frontier (Beckwith 1987).

4.2 The Ascent of Wu Zhao

Gaozong’s reign was remembered less for these conquests than for the rise of a woman of extraordinary will. Wu Zhao, born about 624 into a family of recent provincial officials, entered Taizong’s palace as a junior concubine at the age of fourteen. After his death she was sent, as was customary, to a Buddhist convent, but the new emperor, who had met her before his accession, brought her back to the palace, and by 655 she had displaced the empress Wang and the favoured concubine Xiao and had herself been installed as empress. The removal of Empress Wang provoked the opposition of senior statesmen such as Zhangsun Wuji and Chu Suiliang, who represented the Guanlong old guard; they were demoted and exiled, and the affair marked the first great victory of the new empress over the aristocratic establishment.

From about 660, when Gaozong began to suffer from debilitating illness, Wu took an increasing part in government. By 674 the court referred to the pair as the “Two Sages” (Er Sheng), and after the emperor’s death in 683 she governed as empress dowager, in the name first of the compliant Zhongzong, whom she deposed within weeks for showing too much independence, and then of the retiring Ruizong. In 684 an armed revolt led by Xu Jingye, a grandson of one of Taizong’s great generals, failed to dislodge her. Over the following years she used a mixture of conciliation and terror, backed by informers and by notorious interrogators such as Lai Junchen, to eliminate potential rivals within the imperial family, and in 690 she took the unprecedented step of declaring a new dynasty, the Zhou, with herself as emperor (Guisso 1978; Twitchett and Wechsler 1979).

4.3 Legitimation and Government

Wu’s usurpation required an ideology that justified a female ruler in a Confucian world. She found it in Buddhism. Monks presented to her a commentary on the Great Cloud Sutra, which prophesied that a female incarnation of the Buddha Maitreya would rule on earth, and she patronised the construction of monasteries and colossal images, notably the giant Vairocana Buddha at Longmen near Luoyang, whose features are reputed to resemble hers. She also built a ritual hall, the Mingtang, in Luoyang, which she designated the “divine capital” of her new dynasty, and she devised new characters for the writing of certain words. In her use of symbolism, ritual and a self-conscious reinvention of the monarchy, she displayed a political imagination fully equal to that of her male predecessors (Barrett 2008).

Her government was not merely a reign of terror, whatever the later histories suggest. Wu recognised the need for talented officials of non-aristocratic background to replace the Guanlong families whose loyalty she had lost, and she greatly expanded recruitment through examination, introduced a palace examination in which she personally tested candidates, and was willing to accept recommendations of men of low status. She also employed some of the best administrators of the age, among them the famed judge Di Renjie. The registered population grew significantly during her years in power, from perhaps 3.8 million households in 652 to over six million by 705, though some of the increase reflects improved registration. In the north, a Khitan rebellion in 696 and Türk resurgence under a restored Second Eastern Türk Qaghanate presented serious military challenges.

In 705 the aged empress, by then ill and politically isolated, was forced to abdicate in a palace coup led by the chancellor Zhang Jianzhi, and the Tang was restored under Zhongzong. She died later that year. Her legacy has been judged variously. To traditional historians, who could not accept a woman as legitimate ruler, she was a usurper and tyrant. Modern scholars have been more generous. Chen Yinke saw her as a conscious architect of a new elite based on talent and examination success, and recent writers have stressed her competence, her political skill and the long-term effects of her patronage of Buddhism and learning. What is undeniable is that the political instability that followed her fall, under Zhongzong’s consort Empress Wei and Princess Anle, was in some ways more damaging to the government than her own rule had been, and that it was only in 710, when Li Longji, a grandson of Wu and Gaozong, led a successful coup, that stability returned.

5. Xuanzong and the High Tang

5.1 The Kaiyuan Era

The reign of Li Longji, posthumously Xuanzong (r. 712–756), was the longest of the dynasty and the most dramatic. After eliminating his domineering aunt Princess Taiping in 713, he assumed full control and, during the first period of his rule, the Kaiyuan era (713–741), he gave the empire a period of balanced and energetic administration. Guided by a succession of outstanding chancellors, including Yao Chong, Song Jing, Zhang Yue and Zhang Jiuling, he reduced the influence of aristocratic factions and palace women, trimmed the overgrown bureaucracy, and cut the Buddhist clergy by returning many thousands of monks and nuns to lay life. Yuwen Rong’s registration drive in the early 720s uncovered several hundred thousand unregistered households. Pei Yaoqing’s reforms of the transport system lowered the cost of shipping grain from the south to the capital, easing the food shortage that had forced earlier emperors to move the court to Luoyang. The state’s granaries and its currency were stabilised. The Hanlin Academy and the Academy of Assembled Worthies drew leading writers into the emperor’s service, and the court became a centre of music and the arts, with the emperor himself a skilled musician and patron of the “Pear Garden” troupe.

The figures produced by the censuses show the extent of the dynasty’s recovery. By 742 the registered population was about 8.9 million households and some 50 million individuals, and by 754 roughly 9 million households and nearly 53 million people. These were the largest numbers recorded in Chinese history to that date, and the real population was probably higher still. The capital Chang’an, with perhaps a million inhabitants within and around its walls, was the largest city on earth.

5.2 The Militarisation of the Frontiers

Behind the prosperity, however, a fundamental transformation of the military system was under way. The fubing militia depended on a supply of registered, land-holding peasants who could be mobilised in rotation. By the late seventh century this system was breaking down: the equal-field allotments could no longer be maintained in the face of population growth and the purchase and concentration of land, and the militiamen, burdened by lengthy tours of duty on distant frontiers, fled or sold their allotments. The Tang had to find an alternative. In the early eighth century the government began to establish standing frontier armies manned by long-service professional soldiers, recruited from volunteers and often from non-Chinese populations. In 737 the government formally abolished the system of rotation and began to enrol soldiers on long-term contracts.

These frontier armies were commanded by military governors, the jiedushi, who gradually accumulated civil and financial powers in addition to their military authority. The first of the commissionerships was established in 710 on the northwestern frontier, and by 742 there were ten of them, stationed on the Tibetan, Türkic, Khitan and southwestern borders, commanding in total nearly half a million soldiers by the official count. Their powers made sense in a world where rapid response to steppe cavalry and Tibetan raiders was essential. They also meant that great concentrations of troops and revenue were placed under single individuals who were physically distant from the court and, increasingly, from the civil bureaucracy that was supposed to supervise them (Graff 2002).

The later years of Xuanzong saw this arrangement turn dangerous. The emperor, who had come to rely on the chief minister Li Linfu from 734 to 752, allowed the government to be dominated by a single manipulator who, among other things, persuaded him to staff the frontier commands with non-Han generals rather than with civil officials of the type who might otherwise aspire to the chancellorship. The reasoning was that men of Sogdian, Turkic, Khitan or Korean origin, lacking literary education, could never seek the highest civil posts and were therefore safe. The result was that the greater part of the imperial armies came under the control of professional soldiers whose loyalty was personal, not institutional. The most powerful of them was An Lushan.

Foreign affairs, moreover, did not always go well. In 751 an army under Gao Xianzhi, a general of Korean descent, was defeated at the Talas River in a clash with Arab-Abbasid forces allied with the Karluks, and in the same year Tang forces suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the kingdom of Nanzhao in Yunnan. Neither defeat was in itself decisive, but both revealed the growing strain on the empire’s resources. At the same time the aging emperor’s attention turned more and more to his consort Yang Guifei, whose relatives, led by her distant cousin Yang Guozhong, began to monopolise the highest offices after Li Linfu’s death in 752. The rivalry between Yang Guozhong and An Lushan, who had become the governor of three frontier commands in the northeast, was to be the immediate trigger of the disaster that followed.

6. A Cosmopolitan Empire: Chang’an, Religion and Letters

6.1 The Capital and the Silk Road

The prosperity of the Tang was inseparable from its openness. Chang’an was laid out on a rectilinear grid of approximately eighty-four square kilometres, divided into about one hundred and eight walled wards, with two great state-supervised markets in the east and west. The palace city lay in the north, and a central avenue, one hundred and fifty metres wide, ran southward from the main gate. The city’s regular plan, its symmetry and its monumental scale were consciously intended to embody the cosmic order, and they served as the model for the Japanese capitals of Heijō (Nara) and Heian (Kyoto) (Xiong 2000). Within its walls lived officials and soldiers, artisans and merchants, monks and nuns, students from the Korean kingdoms and Japan, and traders from Central Asia and Persia.

Among these foreign communities the Sogdians, an Iranian-speaking people from the region around Samarkand and Bukhara, were the most influential. As merchants, interpreters, musicians and sometimes soldiers, they dominated the overland commerce of the Silk Road, and settlements of Sogdians along the route from Dunhuang to Chang’an and in the northern frontier regions provided the Tang with intermediaries between China and the steppe (de la Vaissière 2005). Persian exiles, among them the heir of the last Sasanian king, found refuge at the Tang court. Foreign religions took root: Zoroastrian fire-temples, Manichaean chapels and, from 635, the Church of the East, whose “Nestorian” monument, erected in Chang’an in 781 with texts in Chinese and Syriac, remains one of the most remarkable relics of the period. By sea, Arab and Persian merchants gathered in Guangzhou and Yangzhou, bringing aromatics, pearls and glassware in exchange for silk and ceramics. Edward Schafer’s classic study of Tang exotica showed how thoroughly the material culture of the age was permeated with imports from Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia and the Persian world (Schafer 1963).

6.2 Buddhism and the Tang State

Buddhism was the most important intellectual and religious force of the age. The monk Xuanzang, who left China in 629 against official prohibition, travelled to India and returned sixteen years later with hundreds of scriptures, was received by Taizong with honour, and spent the rest of his life translating them in Chang’an. His journey inspired later novels, among them the Ming-dynasty Journey to the West. Yijing, who travelled by sea in the 670s, brought back both texts and detailed information on the Buddhist communities of Southeast Asia. The great indigenous schools of Chinese Buddhism, notably Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land and Chan, reached maturity under the Tang, and monasteries became centres of learning, charity, finance and pilgrimage. Wu Zetian’s patronage and that of several other rulers endowed temples with extensive lands and tax exemptions, and by the early ninth century the Buddhist church was one of the wealthiest corporate bodies in the empire (Weinstein 1987).

The imperial house, however, officially preferred Daoism. Because the family’s surname was Li, the Tang claimed descent from Li Er, the legendary Laozi, and Daoism was accorded precedence over Buddhism in court ritual in several reigns, with Xuanzong in particular elevating the Daoist canon and founding Daoist schools. The tension between the two religions, and the suspicion of Confucian officials toward both, were part of the intellectual fabric of the dynasty. The competition among faiths also fed into political conflict, as we shall see in the persecution of Buddhism in 845.

6.3 Poetry, Prose and Art

The Tang is above all remembered as the age of poetry. The Complete Tang Poems, compiled in the early eighteenth century, contains some forty-eight thousand poems by over two thousand poets. The flowering of the verse form was connected with the examinations, in which the composition of poetry became a standard test from the late seventh century, and with the courtly and urban culture of Chang’an and Luoyang. Li Bai (701–762), a free-spirited wanderer whose verse celebrates wine, the moon and the immortals; Du Fu (712–770), whose historical and moral poems record the sufferings of the An Lushan years; Wang Wei (c. 699–759), poet, painter and devout Buddhist; and Bai Juyi (772–846), whose clear and accessible style made him popular across East Asia, are only the most celebrated of a very large company. In prose, Han Yu (768–824) and Liu Zongyuan (773–819) led the “ancient prose” movement, a call for a return to the simpler styles and moral purpose of the classics, which would be taken up by Song-dynasty writers (Chen Jo-shui 1992). In history, Liu Zhiji’s Generalities on History (Shitong), completed in 710, laid out the first systematic critique of historical method in China.

In the visual arts, the painter Wu Daozi, the calligrapher Yan Zhenqing and the sculptors of the Longmen and Dunhuang caves reached heights of achievement that were rarely surpassed. Tang ceramics, particularly the polychrome lead-glazed sancai wares, and the gold and silver work influenced by Sogdian and Persian models, attest to the integration of foreign motifs into Chinese taste. Women of the elite, especially in the seventh and early eighth centuries, enjoyed a measure of visibility that was unusual in later periods, riding horses, playing polo and adopting foreign fashions. Tea became a national drink, and by 868 the world’s earliest dated printed book, a copy of the Diamond Sutra now preserved in the British Library, was produced, a harbinger of the printing revolution that would reshape East Asian culture in the following centuries.

7. The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763)

7.1 The Rebel and his World

An Lushan, born around 703 on the northern frontier, was the son of a Sogdian father and a Turkic mother, and spoke several languages. He rose through the ranks of the Tang frontier army in the northeast by his cunning, his skill in interpreting between Chinese and the Khitan and Xi peoples, and his talent for flattery. By 751 he commanded three of the empire’s ten military governorships, Pinglu, Fanyang and Hedong, controlling an army of some 160,000 men and an area that included much of the north China plain. He cultivated Xuanzong and Yang Guifei with outrageous displays of devotion, reportedly asking to be adopted by the consort despite being older than she, and the emperor, charmed, gave him ever-greater powers.

Pulleyblank (1955) argued that An Lushan’s rebellion should be understood against the background of the distinctive society of the northeastern frontier, where a mixture of Chinese, Sogdian, Turkic and other peoples constituted a military society that was only loosely bound to the Chang’an court. The rebellion was therefore less a case of a single ambitious individual than the expression of regional and ethnic tensions that had accumulated for decades. The political context mattered, too. With Li Linfu dead in 752, Yang Guozhong, a politician of narrow abilities and personal ambition, sought to destroy An Lushan as a rival, repeatedly accusing him of disloyalty. An Lushan decided that he could survive only by rebellion.

7.2 The Course of the War

On 16 December 755, An Lushan launched his rebellion at Fanyang, near modern Beijing, claiming to be marching against the “traitor” Yang Guozhong. His army of over 150,000 men advanced with astonishing speed across the unprotected north China plain, crossing the frozen Yellow River, and took the eastern capital Luoyang in the first month of 756, whereupon An Lushan proclaimed himself emperor of a new Yan dynasty. A Tang force led by the veteran generals Geshu Han and Gao Xianzhi held the strategic Tong Pass, which guarded the approach to Chang’an, but the court, distrusting Geshu Han and goaded by Yang Guozhong, ordered him to attack. In June 756 the army was destroyed outside the pass, and the road to the capital lay open.

Xuanzong fled from Chang’an before dawn on 14 July 756 with Yang Guifei, Yang Guozhong and a small guard. At the post-station of Mawei, the exhausted and mutinous guards killed Yang Guozhong and demanded the death of his cousin, the consort; the emperor reluctantly yielded and had her strangled. The tragedy of the emperor and his beloved was to become one of the most famous love stories in Chinese literature, most notably in Bai Juyi’s “Song of Everlasting Regret.” Xuanzong continued to Sichuan; his son, the crown prince, remained behind and, at Lingwu in the northwest, proclaimed himself emperor as Suzong, relegating his father to the status of retired emperor.

The next seven years were a time of war and confusion. Loyalist forces, led by the capable generals Guo Ziyi and Li Guangbi, defeated rebel armies in Hebei and Shanxi, and local resistance, such as Zhang Xun’s heroic defence of Suiyang in 757 and that of Yan Zhenqing in Hebei, tied down rebel forces and protected the grain-producing south. In early 757 An Lushan, by then blind and ill, was murdered by his own son, An Qingxu, and the leadership of the rebel cause passed to the general Shi Siming and, after Shi’s murder by his own son in 761, to Shi Chaoyi. To recapture Chang’an and Luoyang the Tang relied heavily on Uighur cavalry, whose qaghan demanded a high price: a licence to plunder Luoyang, marriage alliances and annual payments of silk. The capitals were regained in late 757, but the war dragged on until 763, when Shi Chaoyi committed suicide and his remaining generals submitted.

7.3 The Settlement and its Consequences

The rebellion was ended not through the total defeat of the rebels but by a compromise. The imperial government, exhausted and desperate to bring the war to a close, accepted the submission of the rebel generals and confirmed them in command of their territories as military governors. As a result, the northeastern provinces, above all the three Hebei circuits of Lulong, Chengde and Weibo, remained in practice independent of the central government, retaining their own armies, appointing their own officials and passing on their offices to their sons or chosen successors, though they continued to acknowledge Tang suzerainty in form. These Hebei circuits remained a thorn in the side of the dynasty for the next century and a half.

The human and economic costs were enormous, although their exact scale is hard to measure. The registered population in the first census after the rebellion was dramatically lower than in 754, some seventeen million as against nearly fifty-three million, but much of this reflects the loss of administrative control rather than literal death; still, historians agree that the number of deaths and the displacement of population were very great, especially in the north. Luoyang and its neighbourhood were laid waste, and the loss of fiscal records made the old census-based tax system unworkable. The grand ambitions of the Tang were permanently reduced. In the west, the Tibetans took advantage of the withdrawal of garrisons to take over Longyou and the Gansu corridor over the following years, and in 763, for fifteen days, a Tibetan army actually occupied Chang’an and installed a puppet emperor before withdrawing. The Tang lost control of the Tarim basin, and the Silk Road passed into foreign hands (Beckwith 1987).

Historians have long regarded the rebellion as the turning point in the dynasty’s history, and so it was, though the nature of the turn is debated. Older accounts treat it as the beginning of an irreversible decline. A more recent view, associated above all with Twitchett, holds that what followed was less a collapse than a reorganisation of the polity on a new basis, in which regional governors played an essential role in holding the empire together. The court of the later eighth century had lost the power to impose its will on the Hebei circuits, but it retained its control of the south, its revenues and the loyalty of most of its officials. The dynasty’s survival for another century and a half is evidence of its adaptability.

8. The Transformed State: Fiscal Reform, Provincial Power and the Eunuchs

8.1 The New Fiscal Order

The collapse of the registers rendered the old tax system unusable, and the government had to find new means of raising revenue. The most important of the expedients was the salt monopoly, first introduced in 758 and substantially reorganised after 763 by the brilliant financial administrator Liu Yan, who by 780 had made salt revenues the largest single source of state income, reportedly more than half of the total. In place of the equal-field and tax-in-kind system, in 780 the chancellor Yang Yan introduced the Two-Tax Law, which abandoned the pretence of equal allotments and levied taxes twice a year, in summer and autumn, on the basis of landholding and wealth as assessed in the place where the taxpayer actually resided, rather than on the number of registered adult males. This measure, which also moved much of the tax into money, acknowledged the change in the rural economy and in many ways foreshadowed the fiscal practices of later dynasties (Twitchett 1963).

A major consequence of these changes was the shift of the economic centre of gravity to the south. The lower Yangzi and Huai regions, relatively unscathed by the rebellion, supplied the greater part of the government’s revenue, and the Grand Canal became the lifeline of the capital. As the contemporary writer Han Yu observed, most of the empire’s taxes now came from the south-east. The empire’s long-term development thus depended on the security of the transport artery and the stability of the southern provinces. The dynasty’s fate in the ninth century would be closely tied to these conditions.

8.2 Provincial Governors and Imperial Recovery

In the interior, the new order was marked by the extension of the military governor system. The emperors established jiedushi, and civil governors with military powers, in most provinces, partly in order to meet the threat of Tibetan invasion and partly to counter the Hebei circuits. A succession of rebellions in the later eighth and early ninth centuries tested the loyalty of these commanders. In 783–784 the mutiny of Zhu Ci, who had served as a respected military governor, forced Emperor Dezong (r. 779–805) to flee from Chang’an, as Xuanzong and Daizong had done before him. The experience left Dezong disillusioned with the military aristocracy and led him to rely on eunuchs, in particular for the command of the Shence Army, a force built from frontier troops that came to be the principal body of palace and capital troops.

The reign of Xianzong (r. 805–820) marked the highpoint of the dynasty’s post-rebellion recovery. Backed by a competent financial and military bureaucracy and by the new Shence Army, he defeated a series of rebellious governors in Sichuan (806–807), in Huaixi (817), and in Shandong (819), and brought even the Hebei circuits to a nominal submission. The expression “Yuanhe restoration,” after his reign title, captured the contemporary sense that the dynasty had been revived. But the restoration was incomplete. The Hebei governors remained largely independent and resumed their defiance soon after Xianzong’s death. And Xianzong himself, who had been increasingly dependent on palace eunuchs and had become obsessed with immortality elixirs, died suddenly in 820, in circumstances that the Old Tang History suggests were the result of a palace conspiracy.

8.3 The Eunuchs and the Bureaucracy

The most distinctive and destructive political phenomenon of the later Tang was the rise of the palace eunuchs. Eunuchs had served as imperial attendants throughout Chinese history, but their power had hitherto been limited. After the rebellion, however, emperors who distrusted the military and the civil bureaucracy turned to the eunuchs, who lived in the palace, served the emperors personally, and had no families to promote. They became the heads of the Shence Army, the Palace Secretaries who transmitted documents between the emperor and the chancellors, and the supervisors of armies in the field. After Xianzong’s death, the eunuch leaders chose or influenced the choice of almost every emperor, sometimes by murder, and most of the emperors who followed Xianzong are said to have been enthroned through their agency (Dalby 1979).

The bureaucracy, for its part, was preoccupied with factional struggles. The so-called Niu-Li conflict, which pitted the followers of Niu Sengru and Li Zongmin against those of Li Deyu over a period of nearly forty years, split the civil service on issues that included policy towards the Hebei governors, the role of examination graduates versus aristocratic officials and the best response to Tibetan and Uighur threats. The most important attempt to break the eunuchs’ power came in 835, in the Sweet Dew Incident, when Emperor Wenzong and his ministers Li Xun and Zheng Zhu devised a plot to massacre the eunuch leaders by luring them to view a miraculous fall of sweet dew in the palace. The plot was discovered, and the eunuchs and their Shence troops struck back with merciless violence, killing the two ministers and several hundred, perhaps over a thousand, officials. From then on the bureaucracy was effectively cowed, and the eunuchs’ dominance was unchallenged for a generation.

8.4 The Persecution of Buddhism and the Last Efforts at Recovery

The accession of Wuzong (r. 840–846), a zealous Daoist who was advised by the minister Li Deyu, brought a short period of vigorous and in some ways successful government: the Uighur empire, which had collapsed under the pressure of the Kyrgyz in 840, was dealt with firmly, and a rebellion in Zhaoyi was crushed. But the best-known event of the reign was the great persecution of Buddhism of 845. Motivated in part by Daoist and Confucian hostility to the foreign religion and in part by the government’s need for revenue and for the return of taxpayers, the court ordered the closure of thousands of monasteries and shrines, the confiscation of their lands and bronze and the return to lay life of hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns. The official figures speak of some 4,600 monasteries destroyed and over 260,000 clergy secularised. The Japanese pilgrim Ennin, who was then in China, left a vivid eyewitness account (Reischauer 1955). The persecution was ended by Wuzong’s early death in 846, probably a result of ingesting immortality elixirs, but the Chinese Buddhist church, especially the scholastic schools that had depended on aristocratic patronage and the great monastic estates, never fully recovered its earlier eminence.

Under a second Emperor Xuanzong (Li Chen, r. 846–859), a diligent ruler later called “Little Taizong,” the government enjoyed a respite. The Tibetan empire had collapsed in civil war in 842, a Tang army recovered much of the Gansu corridor in the 850s, and the court pursued a reasonably competent policy. Yet the underlying problems were intractable. The tax burden fell heavily on the peasantry of the Yangzi and Huai region, the court’s expenditure on the army and palace remained high, and the government’s dependence on the salt monopoly provided an incentive for smugglers and unrest. The reign of Yizong (r. 859–873) was marked by extravagance, enthusiastic patronage of Buddhism and, in 868, a mutiny of soldiers from the Guilin garrison under Pang Xun, who had been kept in the south far beyond their term of duty, and who marched north across the empire, sacking cities on the way, before being defeated in 869. It was a warning of things to come.

9. The Great Rebellions and the End of the Dynasty

9.1 Wang Xianzhi and Huang Chao

The final catastrophe began in the early 870s. Floods and droughts devastated the North China plain in 873 and 874, harvests failed and famine followed, but the government continued to demand taxes and did little to provide relief. In the winter of 874, Wang Xianzhi, a salt smuggler, raised a revolt in Henan, drawing on the discontent of peasants and those engaged in the illicit salt trade. In 875 he was joined by Huang Chao, also a salt dealer and a man of some education, who had failed the examinations and brought to the movement a talent for leadership that Wang lacked. After Wang’s death in 878, Huang Chao became the unquestioned leader of the rebellion.

The rebel armies did not hold territory, but moved across the empire in great sweeps, avoiding strong defences and living off the land. They crossed the Yangzi, plundered the southeast, and in 879 sacked Guangzhou, the great seaport, where, according to the Arab writer Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, huge numbers of foreign merchants and local inhabitants were massacred (the exact figure is impossible to verify). The rebels were decimated by disease in the southern heat, but, returning north along the river valleys, they were able to cross the Huai and seize Luoyang in the winter of 880. They took the Tong Pass soon afterwards, and in early January 881 Huang Chao entered Chang’an in triumph. The Emperor Xizong (r. 873–888) fled to Chengdu in Sichuan, under the protection of the eunuch Tian Lingzi, while Huang Chao proclaimed himself emperor of a new dynasty, the Qi.

9.2 The Warlords

Huang Chao’s regime proved unable to consolidate its position. His forces were often undisciplined, and he failed to gain the support of the educated elite, many of whom were killed or driven out. Isolated in the devastated capital, short of supplies, and facing a growing coalition of provincial armies, he was undermined by defections. The most consequential was that of Zhu Wen, one of his senior generals, who surrendered to the Tang in 882 and was rewarded with the name Zhu Quanzhong (“Loyal and Complete”) and the command of an army. The court called in as its chief ally the Shatuo Turks of Shanxi, led by Li Keyong, who had been a rebel himself. In 883 Li Keyong and his cavalry drove Huang Chao from Chang’an, and in 884 the rebel leader, pursued by Zhu Wen’s forces, committed suicide or was killed in Shandong. By then, however, the capital had been stripped, burned and abandoned.

The victory over Huang Chao was the end of Tang power. The generals who had defeated him were the true rulers of the empire. Zhu Wen, from his base in Kaifeng and the rich plain around it, Li Keyong in the north, Wang Jian in Sichuan, Qian Liu in Zhejiang, Yang Xingmi in the Huai valley and many others governed their territories as independent states, collecting their own taxes, commanding their own armies and sending to the court little beyond formal homage. Taxes from the southeast were cut off from the capital and the court could survive only by relying on the military strength of one or the other of the warlords. The emperors who followed, Xizong’s brother Zhaozong (r. 888–904) and the boy Ai (r. 904–907), were captives of their protectors.

9.3 The Final Years

Zhaozong was an educated and ambitious ruler who tried to rebuild the central army and to restore imperial authority, but his efforts brought him into conflict with the warlords of the Guanzhong region, who in turn were crushed by the more powerful Zhu Wen. The eunuchs, still dominant at court, were by now rivals of the chancellor Cui Yin, who allied himself with Zhu Wen. In 901 the eunuchs seized the emperor and carried him to Fengxiang. Zhu Wen besieged the city and in 903 obtained the surrender of the emperor, and, with Cui Yin’s approval, massacred the eunuchs of the palace, ending the institution that had dominated the court for a century and a half. In 904 Zhu Wen forced the court to move to Luoyang, ordering the remaining population of Chang’an to go with it and dismantling the buildings of the former capital, whose timber was floated down the Wei and Yellow rivers. In the autumn of 904 Zhaozong was assassinated at Zhu Wen’s order, and a boy of twelve, Emperor Ai, was put on the throne.

Zhu Wen’s next step was to eliminate the old aristocracy that still served the court. In 905, at Baima Station on the Yellow River, a group of some thirty senior officials, accused of belonging to a faction opposed to him, were put to death and their bodies thrown into the river, on the suggestion, it is said, of a disappointed examination candidate who proposed that these “pure” men be consigned to the “muddy” stream. In the fourth month of 907 Emperor Ai was made to abdicate in favour of Zhu Wen, who founded the Later Liang dynasty at Kaifeng. The last Tang emperor was murdered in the following year. Thus ended a dynasty that had ruled for two hundred and ninety years, and China entered the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (Somers 1979; Wang Gungwu 1963).

10. Explaining the Fall

10.1 Structural Explanations

Why did the Tang fall? Historians have offered a variety of explanations, which are best understood as complementary rather than competing. The first set of explanations is structural and concerns the changing relationship between the state and its military and fiscal base. The Tang’s early success was based on a system that combined land allotments, militia service and taxes in kind, a system that suited a society emerging from centuries of warfare and depopulation. But the demographic and economic recovery of the seventh and eighth centuries eroded its foundations. As population grew, the land available for allotment shrank, private estates expanded, and peasants fled their registered homes. The shift to a professional army, driven by the demands of frontier defence, created standing forces whose loyalties lay more with their commanders than the distant court. The fiscal reforms after 763 saved the state from bankruptcy but also made it dependent on the commercialised economy of the southeast and on monopolies that were open to evasion and corruption.

10.2 The Political Explanation

The second set of explanations relates to the political culture of the court. The Tang political system relied on the emperor to arbitrate among competing factions. When the ruler was strong, as under Taizong and Xuanzong in his early years, this system was flexible and effective; when he was weak, a minor, or dependent on a small circle of advisors, the system lacked internal mechanisms to prevent the dominance of a single faction. The eunuchs’ ascendancy was in large part a product of rulers’ fear of the military and civil elites; in turn it created a pattern of palace coups, shortened reigns and weak governance. The bureaucracy’s factionalism, as in the Niu-Li conflict, diverted energy from administrative reform. These weaknesses did not cause the rebellions that destroyed the Tang, but they impaired the state’s ability to respond.

10.3 Geography, Environment and the Southeast

A third explanation, associated in its classical form with Chen Yinke, stresses the geographical dependence of the dynasty. Chen argued that after the An Lushan Rebellion the dynasty survived thanks to two things: the control of the southeast, from which tax revenue came by the Grand Canal, and the continued submission of the provincial armies. When Huang Chao’s rebels devastated the lower Yangzi and Huai valleys, the lifeline to the capital was cut, and the end of the dynasty followed. Though some historians have qualified this thesis, pointing out that the southeast continued to send revenue until the 880s and beyond, it highlights the vulnerability created by the concentration of the empire’s wealth in one region far from the capital. Environmental factors, too, have received increasing attention. The disasters of the early 870s coincided with a long phase of climatic instability and caused hardship among the very populations on which the fiscal system depended. It would be unwise to assign environmental changes a dominant role, but they undoubtedly aggravated the social tensions out of which the great rebellions grew.

10.4 The Transformation of the Elite

Finally, the work of Tackett (2014) has shown that the collapse of the Tang was inseparable from the destruction of the medieval aristocracy. The great clans of Chang’an and Luoyang, which had provided much of the dynasty’s leadership, were concentrated in the two capitals; when Huang Chao, and later Zhu Wen, devastated those cities and killed or scattered their inhabitants, the aristocracy lost its social base and, with it, its capacity to reproduce itself. The new elites of the tenth and eleventh centuries were of a different kind, recruited mainly through examinations and rooted in the provinces. Seen in this light, the end of the Tang opened the way to what the Japanese historian Naitō Konan (1922) first called a transition from medieval to early modern China, an interpretation that has been much discussed and qualified, but which remains a stimulating framework for relating the Tang’s collapse to the larger story of the Tang–Song transformation (Bol 1992).

11. Legacy and Conclusion

The Tang’s influence outlived its political collapse. In law, its codes became the basis of the systems of Japan’s Ritsuryō state, of the Korean kingdoms and of Vietnam, and of later Chinese dynasties up to the Qing. In government, its division of functional ministries and its examination system endured, with modifications, until the early twentieth century. In religion, the great Buddhist schools of East Asia took their classical form under the Tang, and Chan, the “meditation” tradition, became the Zen of Japan and the Seon of Korea. In literature, the verse of Li Bai, Du Fu and Bai Juyi, and the prose of Han Yu, set standards for subsequent generations. In urban design and material culture, the Tang capitals were the models for Nara and Kyoto. And in historical memory, the dynasty remained a symbol of what a powerful, cosmopolitan and confident China might be.

This survey has argued that the Tang’s rise and its fall had a single underlying logic. The dynasty rose by combining the best of the northern and southern traditions, by fusing the institutions of the steppe and the Chinese state, and by constructing a flexible bureaucratic machinery that could draw on the energies of a wide range of peoples. Its fall was the result of the strains that this very openness and expansion imposed on a polity whose institutions had been designed for a simpler agrarian society. The professional army that defended the vast frontiers created the possibility of the military governor; the financial costs of the army required a new fiscal order which depended on the southeast; the weakening of the court encouraged the dominance of eunuchs; and the long accumulation of social and environmental strains found violent expression in the rebellions of the 870s. No single cause was decisive, and none was inevitable.

It is also worth observing that the dynasty’s fall was neither as sudden nor as total as the traditional narrative suggests. For a century and a half after An Lushan the Tang state continued to collect taxes, to defend the frontiers, to produce great poetry and to maintain the institutions of civil government. The cause of its final demise was less the failure of the system as a whole than the combination of a massive popular rebellion with the emergence of a class of warlords who had no interest in preserving the old order. In this sense, the “fall” of the Tang is best understood as a long and uneven transformation, from the aristocratic empire of the seventh century to the more decentralised, commercial and bureaucratic society of the tenth and eleventh. The lessons of the dynasty, which later rulers and scholars studied with such care, remain relevant to any consideration of the relationship between a state, its armies and the society it governs.

References

1. Barrett, T. H. 2008. The Woman Who Discovered Printing. New Haven: Yale University Press.

2. Beckwith, Christopher I. 1987. The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

3. Benn, Charles. 2002. China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty. New York: Oxford University Press.

4. Bol, Peter K. 1992. “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

5. Chen Jo-shui. 1992. Liu Tsung-yuan and Intellectual Change in T’ang China, 773–819. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6. Chen Yinke 陳寅恪. 1943. Tangdai zhengzhishi shulun gao 唐代政治史述論稿 [A Draft Discussion of the Political History of the Tang]. Chongqing: Shangwu yinshuguan.

7. Dalby, Michael T. 1979. “Court Politics in Late T’ang Times.” In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3, Sui and T’ang China, 589–906, Part 1, edited by Denis Twitchett, 561–681. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8. de la Vaissière, Étienne. 2005. Sogdian Traders: A History. Translated by James Ward. Leiden: Brill.

9. Graff, David A. 2002. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300–900. London: Routledge.

10. Guisso, R. W. L. 1978. Wu Tse-t’ien and the Politics of Legitimation in T’ang China. Bellingham: Western Washington University.

11. Johnson, Wallace, trans. 1979–1997. The T’ang Code. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

12. Lewis, Mark Edward. 2009. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

13. Liu Xu 劉昫 et al. 945. Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書 [Old Tang History]. Reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975.

14. Mackerras, Colin. 1972. The Uighur Empire According to the T’ang Dynastic Histories. Canberra: Australian National University Press.

15. Naitō Konan 内藤湖南. 1922. “Gaikatsuteki Tō-Sō jidai kan” 概括的唐宋時代觀 [A General View of the Tang-Song Period]. Rekishi to chiri 9 (5).

16. Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 and Song Qi 宋祁. 1060. Xin Tangshu 新唐書 [New Tang History]. Reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975.

17. Pulleyblank, Edwin G. 1955. The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan. London: Oxford University Press.

18. Reischauer, Edwin O., trans. 1955. Ennin’s Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law. New York: Ronald Press.

19. Schafer, Edward H. 1963. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

20. Sima Guang 司馬光. 1084. Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑 [Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government]. Reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1956.

21. Skaff, Jonathan Karam. 2012. Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580–800. New York: Oxford University Press.

22. Somers, Robert M. 1979. “The End of the T’ang.” In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3, Sui and T’ang China, 589–906, Part 1, edited by Denis Twitchett, 682–789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

23. Tackett, Nicolas. 2014. The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

24. Twitchett, Denis. 1963. Financial Administration under the T’ang Dynasty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

25. Twitchett, Denis, ed. 1979. The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3, Sui and T’ang China, 589–906, Part 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

26. Twitchett, Denis, and Howard J. Wechsler. 1979. “Kao-tsung (reign 649–83) and the Empress Wu: The Inheritor and the Usurper.” In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3, Part 1, edited by Denis Twitchett, 242–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

27. Wang Gungwu. 1963. The Structure of Power in North China during the Five Dynasties. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press.

28. Wang Zhenping. 2013. Tang China in Multi-Polar Asia: A History of Diplomacy and War. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

29. Wechsler, Howard J. 1974. Mirror to the Son of Heaven: Wei Cheng at the Court of T’ang T’ai-tsung. New Haven: Yale University Press.

30. Weinstein, Stanley. 1987. Buddhism under the T’ang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

31. Wright, Arthur F. 1978. The Sui Dynasty: The Unification of China, A.D. 581–617. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

32. Xiong, Victor Cunrui. 2000. Sui-Tang Chang’an: A Study in the Urban History of Medieval China. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.

33. Xiong, Victor Cunrui. 2006. Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty: His Life, Times, and Legacy. Albany: State University of New York Press.