Tang dynasty (618–907)

Tang 唐
618–907
The Tang dynasty in 700 CE
Dominant mode of production	Feudalism
Government	Monarchy
Area
• Total	5,400,000 km²

The Tang dynasty was a dynasty of imperial China that followed the Sui dynasty.

History

Founding

A brief period of civil war ensued after the end of the Sui dynasty, with a number of contenders seeking to establish their dynasty. The Li family were the leading contenders and, in 621, all of their opponents were disposed of, leaving the way open to establish their Tang dynasty with Li Yuan as emperor. The name Tang, like many dynasties before them, was the name of the district Li Yuan originated from. The capital was established at the historical site of Chang'an, with the city of Luoyang being used as a secondary capital.

Reign of Li Shimin

Li Yuan abdicated in 626 to his son Li Shimin, who reigned for 23 years until 649. He continued many of the practices started by the Sui dynasty. Additionally, he formalised the number of ministries to just six which was kept by all subsequent emperor dynasties down to the year 1911, when the Imperial structure of China was overthrown and the Republic of China was born.

He also created a separate bureaucratic institution to manage the affairs of the imperial household, creating a clear demarcation between the personal activities and finances of the royal family and the affairs and finances of the government. This demarcation was an important development because it removed the state a bit more from being the personal property of the emperor. It also proved to be a robust structure so as to prevent abuses by the royal family which had created problems in the past.

Finally, Li Shimin also extended Chinese power into Korea and what is now Vietnam. In the far west, Tang armies projected their power much further than any other dynasty before: they established direct Chinese control as far as Xinjiang province. Into what is now parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, protectorates were established with local rulers, contributing to the economic expansion of the Tang dynasty.

Zhao dynasty interregnum

Li Shimin eventually died and passed down the title of emperor to his son. In 690, empress Wu Zetian assumed the throne, an unprecedented event in China: all emperors before her had been men. She was also the last empress of China.

At a very young age (perhaps around 12 or 13, she came into the court as a concubine during the last years of Li Shimin—it is not clear that he actually met her. When the emperor died, the tradition was that all women and consorts at his court were retired into Buddhist temples so that the partner of an emperor could not become anyone else's partner.

On the first anniversary of Li Shimin's death, his son Li Zhi visited the former concubines and became captivated by Wu Zetian, who would have been around 15 years old at this time. He brought her back to the palace, making her his favourite consort. Eventually, he displaced his own wife and made Wu Zetian the empress, giving her direct proximity to the throne. At the same time, Li Zhi had no sons to inherit the throne but only nephews, making Wu Zetian the aunt of the next two emperors that followed. In 690, she set aside her nephew, who was still a very young boy, and assumed imperial power for herself.

Wu Zetian ruled for 15 years, and one of her first acts was to change the name of the dynasty to the Zhou dynasty, echoing back to the ancient dynasty. She stepped down in 705 from the throne, and her nephew, who had briefly reigned before her, returned to the throne. Wu Zetian died of natural causes shortly after.

The reign of empress Wu Zetian was a very unique moment in Chinese history. In traditional Chinese historiography about her, her story is presented as a pretty bleak event; the Confucian scholars who wrote her stories down didn't like that a woman was on the throne and they did everything they could to smear her reputation. Looking at the records of her 15 years rule however shows that she was an average ruler, who didn't innovate much but also stayed the course in terms of stability.

She was noted for her patronage of Buddhism, and for undermining the aristocratic recruitment system established by Li Shimin. As the royal court distrusted her, she sought to create alliances with minor families by recruiting them at the royal court and garner support from them instead.

Regin of Xuanzong

After Wu Zetian's abdication, her nephew (known as Xuanzong, personal name Li Longji) took the throne, reigning until the year 756—over 50 years. He is considered one of the great emperors in Chinese history, not because of his own achievements, but because he ruled over the golden age of the Tang dynasty, a time during which the economy flourished, the role of Chang'an as a trade center continued to be significant, and Buddhist culture flourished and both temples were built and great translation projects were carried out to further embed Buddhism in Chinese culture.

The first part of the eight century was also an age when some of the greatest poets in all of Chinese history were contemporaries: they knew and wrote each other, and created a very rich and dynamic moment in Chinese arts. Figures like Li Bo, Du Fu, Meng Haoran from that period are names that any Chinese schoolchild today would be familiar with and learn about.

Emperor Xuanzong was a competent emperor nonetheless but as he became older, he became more concerned with the inner life of the palace: notably the quest for immortality.

At the time in China, coming from the time of the Northern and Southern dynasties, a spiritual practice known as religious Daoism (differentiated from the philosophical practice) was particularly concerned with seeking out immortality, being in communication with a spiritual realm which was populated by immortal beings. Part of the way this was done was through taking various chemical substances into one's body, producing heightened states of spiritual sensitivity (likely hallucinogenics). The people involved in this practice believed that they came in contact with spiritual beings who passed onto them various "recipes" for better concoctions to pursue their spiritual quest. Xuanzong became involved in these activities as he grew older, perhaps unsurprisingly.

At the same time, emperor Xuanzong became enamored with a woman known as Yang Guifei—from the earlier ruling Yang family deposed by the Li. Guifei was not her personal name, but a title meaning "precious concubine". She was selected by Xuanzong to become his favourite, and came to play a role in his life beyond that of a simple palace lady, becoming a partner and advisor in the affairs of state and other concerns. This made her a very powerful individual—at least potentially—so much so that Confucian officials at the court became jealous of her.

An Lushan rebellion

One constant problem in the Tang dynasty was the security of the frontier in the west, maintaining the defences along to border with inner Asia. The Tang dynasty continued the military colonies from the Sui dynasty, but also came up with new policies. One of these was to employ military forces from one part of the frontier in the defence of another part of the frontier. The Uyghur people for example, from the northwestern frontier, were sent to the defence of the northeastern frontier, where the people they were defending against had nothing in common with them.

One Uyghur individual employed in this capacity, known as An Lushan (likely Rakshan in his original language), was in charge of a Chinese garrison near where the modern city of Beijing is located. He was a very competent general and defended his part of the frontier effectively. This made him into a popular figure at Xuanzong's court. Every so often, these commanders would come to make a report to the capital and historical records show that when An Lushan came to the capital, he was received quite lavishly by the emperor himself.

Through these visits, An Lushan also became a good friend of Yang Guifei. Their relationship is recorded as being perfectly ordinary but jealous officials at the court chose to slander both Yang Guifei and An Lushan by claiming they were having an illicit affair. The emperor didn't believe in the rumours, but he was so persistently fed these rumours that eventually, he began having doubts. He summoned An Lushan to the capital. An Lushan was not unaware of the rumours, and so he refused to make the trip. This was taken as an act of guilt on the part of An Lushan, and so the emperor summoned him again, and An Lushan agreed to come to the capital.

An Lushan took his army with him to see the emperor. This triggered, in the year 755, the An Lushan Rebellion, which lasted until 763 and shook the Tang dynasty to its very core, as their rule up until then had been one of great successes and internal peace.

A number of battles and sieges took place, and he emerged victorious in every case, his armies growing each time. As he approached the capital, the emperor and courtiers decided to run away (despite having summoned him officially). They fled to the southwest into Sichuan and the capital of Chang'an was captured by the rebels. During this march, the emperor realized that he could not continue his relationship with Yang Guifei, and he allowed his courtiers to assassinate her.

The rebellion eventually subsided after both the emperor and An Lushan died (the first of old age, and the latter during the course of the rebellion), and both of their sons continued the hostilities in their fathers' stead.

With the capital lost, the royal family had to find new avenues of support against the rebels, the main method by which they made compromises with powerful military officials who were stationed far away from any hostilities. When approached by the emperor, these generals saw an opportunity to negotiate with the emperor and obtained concessions. For example, the court had to agree to relinquish the control of certain taxes, to be owned by the generals instead.

Decline and collapse

These deals were successful as they allowed the Li family to preserve its rule and defeat the rebellion. However, in granting these concessions, the dynasty weakened itself irreparably. After the An Lushan rebellion ended in 763, the Tang dynasty was never able to regain the dynamism and prosperity that they had previously enjoyed.

Soon, the same situation that had led to the demise of several earlier dynasties resurfaced: the Tang court directly controlled the areas around Chang'an and Luoyang, as well as certain areas (particularly in northwest China) that were traditionally under the administration of the ruling dynasty. But otherwise, large portions of the empire—although they continued to recognize the authority of the ruling family and continued to send tribute, kept bigger proportions for themselves and became increasingly autonomous.

At the same time, many noble families began to find legal mechanisms to grant their land to Buddhist monasteries, making their land tax exempt. The contract worked by giving ownership of the land to the monastery, with the family retaining rights to some of the use of the land, for example owning some of the harvest. With this mechanism, the family would ultimately make more profits from not paying taxes on the land, even if they only retained part of the harvest and could not use their land freely any more.

The confluence of these two phenomena led to a major loss of revenue for the royal family, who especially needed money after the several years of civil war. This led the government to increase the rate of taxations, mostly impacting smaller peasant families who didn't have much to their name in the first place. This not only caused unrest, but also increased wealth inequality.

A wave of rebellions broke out in the 870s and captured the imperial capital of Chang'an in 880. However, most of the rebels were not peasants, and their leader Huang Chao made himself a new emperor. He kept old aristocrats in power and killed many of his own followers. Tang forces retook the city, but the dynasty soon collapsed into five rival states.

All of these conditions eventually culminated into a crisis. Civil wars broke out around China with powerful generals trying to wrestle territories from their peers. In the last years of the 9th century, military forces penetrated into the imperial palace and massacred the eunuchs, making the final emperors of the Tang into puppets of military warlords.

This process ended in the year 907 when the last claimant to the throne of the Tang was deposed and murdered, which led the dynasty to completely disappearing.

Neo-Confucianism

At the beginning of the 9th century, a movement to revive the centrality of Confucianism in Chinese political culture and operations of the state started to appear, the biggest of which was the Gu Wen (old-style prose) movement, a literary movement led by Han Yu.

Han Yu

Like several of the Gu Wen advocates, he was a new kind of figure in the Tang imperial government. Coming from a minor aristocratic family, he entered imperial service by taking one of the occasionally-held imperial examinations, demonstrating literary accomplishment as opposed to simply being born in privilege.

He critiqued the problems that were plaguing China at the time through literary culture. As a member of the scholar elite, he considered that the centrality of literary culture was fundamental to the functioning of politics (the Confucian shi). To Han Yu, prose writing should be as clear and simple as possible, communicating the author's ideas clearly. He criticized the flowery prose that came about in the Southern dynasties, saying it was a kind of writing in which people were more concerned about how they were saying something rather than what they were saying.

He blamed this development on two influences: Buddhism, and religious Daoism (a response from within Chinese culture to the arrival of Buddhism). He considered that both were bad influences on Chinese civilization largely because they represented the rejection of the family as Confucius envisioned society. Buddhism especially directly challenged the worship of the ancestors that had been central to Chinese spirituality since ancient times. Han Yu argued that with Buddhist monks not having children and thus not continuing their family line, there were no descendants to carry out offerings to the ancestors who would be abandoned.

He advocated a return to the values of Confucianism in essays, two of his most famous ones being titled The origins of the Dao and The memorial on the bone of the Buddha.

In Memorial, he took on a major event that happened in his time: a bone of the Buddha's finger was brought to Chang'an, attracting many pilgrims with it. The emperor himself had announced that he would go to the monastery and pay his respects to this relic. Han Yu wrote a letter to the emperor saying (in a very straightforward Confucian manner) this was not appropriate for the emperor of China to do, "paying respect to the rotten corpse of a foreigner"—underlying that not only was it problematic for the emperor to give meaning to a body part (bodies, and the people taking care of them, being on the fringes of society in ancient Chinese culture), but moreover that the Buddha was a foreigner, which was scandalous to Han Yu.

The emperor was not pleased by Han Yu's letter, and sentenced him to exile in the fringe parts of South China, near the border with what is now Vietnam. This punishment happened several times in the course of Han Yu's career, owing to this direct approach to matters of policy, and was often a death sentence as malaria or other tropical diseases would contaminate the exiled.

Han Yu died in 824. While he and the other Gu Wen theorists never achieved enough influence to sweep over the entire nation, they created an intellectual position which became part of the ongoing discourse on Chinese culture. The values that Han Yu advocated for would later be picked up again in the 11th century.

Han Yu himself did not talk about financial questions; he attacked Buddhism on moral grounds of it being foreign, undermining the family, Confucian values and Chinese culture.

Purge of Buddhism

In 845, 20 years after Han Yu's death, a great purge of Buddhism took place—mainly as a response to Han Yu's criticism as well as the fiscal problems facing the dynasty. Emperor Wuzong, a fanatical Daoist, issued edicts to ban Buddhism and established monasteries from China. This created a great rupture in Buddhist monasteries: monks and nuns were told to return to their families, and their monasteries torn down.

More importantly, monastic lands were also confiscated and turned over to the royal family, which allowed for a new stage of land redistribution, giving it back to small farmers which the court could tax. In effect, over several decades privately-owned aristocratic lands (originally handed to monasteries to avoid taxes) were seized by the government who could now tax this land even more.

The purge of Buddhism lasted only 6-7 years, by the early 850s, Buddhist monasteries were able to be re-established and quickly reappeared in China. However, they did not have their land restored; without these land holdings to support themselves, monasteries were unable to reacquire the large population base that they had before.

While this return of tax revenue helped the government, it did not support the dynasty for very long.