THE EMPIRES OF THE SUI AND THE T’ANG
(A) The Sui dynasty (A.D. 580-618)
1 Internal situation in the newly unified empire
The last of the northern dynasties,
the Northern Chou, had been brought to an end by Yang
Chien: rapid campaigns had made an end of the
remaining petty states, and thus the Sui dynasty
had come into power. China, reunited after 360
years, was again under Chinese rule. This event
brought about a new epoch in the history of the Far
East. But the happenings of 360 years could not
be wiped out by a change of dynasty. The short
Sui period can only be described as a period of
transition to unified forms.
In the last resort the union of the
various parts of China proceeded from the north.
The north had always, beyond question, been militarily
superior, because its ruling class had consisted of
warlike peoples. Yet it was not a northerner
who had united China but a Chinese though, owing to
mixed marriages, he was certainly not entirely unrelated
to the northern peoples. The rule, however, of
the actual northern peoples was at an end. The
start of the Sui dynasty, while the Chou still
held the north, was evidence, just like the emergence
in the north-east some thirty years earlier of the
Northern Ch’i dynasty, that the Chinese gentry
with their landowning basis had gained the upper hand
over the warrior nomads.
The Chinese gentry had not come unchanged
out of that struggle. Culturally they had taken
over many things from the foreigners, beginning with
music and the style of their clothing, in which they
had entirely adopted the northern pattern, and including
other elements of daily life. Among the gentry
were now many formerly alien families who had gradually
become entirely Chinese. On the other hand, the
foreigners’ feudal outlook had influenced the
gentry, so that a sense of distinctions of rank had
developed among them. There were Chinese families
who regarded themselves as superior to the rest, just
as had been the case among the northern peoples, and
who married only among themselves or with the ruling
house and not with ordinary families of the gentry.
They paid great attention to their genealogies, had
the state keep records of them and insisted that the
dynastic histories mentioned their families and their
main family members. Lists of prominent gentry
families were set up which mentioned the home of each
clan, so that pretenders could easily be detected.
The rules of giving personal names were changed so
that it became possible to identify a person’s
genealogical position within the family. At the
same time the contempt of the military underwent modification;
the gentry were even ready to take over high military
posts, and also to profit by them.
The new Sui empire found itself
faced with many difficulties. During the three
and a half centuries of division, north and south had
developed in different ways. They no longer spoke
the same language in everyday life (we distinguish
to this day between a Nanking and Peking “High
Chinese”, to say nothing of dialects).
The social and economic structures were very different
in the two parts of the country. How could unity
be restored in these things?
Then there was the problem of population.
The north-eastern plain had always been thickly populated;
it had early come under Toba rule and had
been able to develop further. The region round
the old northern capital Ch’ang-an, on the other
hand, had suffered greatly from the struggles before
the Toba period and had never entirely recovered.
Meanwhile, in the south the population had greatly
increased in the region north of Nanking, while the
regions south of the Yangtze and the upper Yangtze
valley were more thinly peopled. The real South,
i.e. the modern provinces of Fukien, Kwangtung
and Kwangsi, was still underdeveloped, mainly because
of the malaria there. In the matter of population
the north unquestionably remained prominent.
The founder of the Sui dynasty,
known by his reign name of Wen Ti (589-604), came
from the west, close to Ch’ang-an. There
he and his following had their extensive domains.
Owing to the scanty population there and the resulting
shortage of agricultural labourers, these properties
were very much less productive than the small properties
in the north-east. This state of things was well
known in the south, and it was expected, with good
reason, that the government would try to transfer
parts of the population to the north-west, in order
to settle a peasantry round the capital for the support
of its greatly increasing staff of officials, and
to satisfy the gentry of the region. This produced
several revolts in the south.
As an old soldier who had long been
a subject of the Toba, Wen Ti had no great understanding
of theory: he was a practical man. He was
anti-intellectual and emotionally attached to Buddhism;
he opposed Confucianism for emotional reasons and
believed that it could give him no serviceable officials
of the sort he wanted. He demanded from his officials
the same obedience and sense of duty as from his soldiers;
and he was above all thrifty, almost miserly, because
he realized that the finances of his state could only
be brought into order by the greatest exertions.
The budget had to be drawn up for the vast territory
of the empire without any possibility of saying in
advance whether the revenues would come in and whether
the transport of dues to the capital would function.
This cautious calculation was entirely
justified, but it aroused great opposition. Both
east and south were used to a much better style of
living; yet the gentry of both regions were now required
to cut down their consumption. On top of this
they were excluded from the conduct of political affairs.
In the past, under the Northern Ch’i empire in
the north-east and under the Ch’en empire in
the south, there had been thousands of positions at
court in which the whole of the gentry could find
accommodation of some kind. Now the central government
was far in the west, and other people were its administrators.
In the past the gentry had a profitable and easily
accessible market for their produce in the neighbouring
capital; now the capital was far away, entailing long-distance
transport at heavy risk with little profit.
The dissatisfied circles of the gentry
in the north-east and in the south incited Prince
Kuang to rebellion. The prince and his followers
murdered the emperor and set aside the heir-apparent;
and Kuang came to the throne, assuming the name of
Yang Ti. His first act was to transfer the capital
back to the east, to Loyang, close to the grain-producing
regions. His second achievement was to order the
construction of great canals, to facilitate the transport
of grain to the capital and to provide a valuable
new market for the producers in the north-east and
the south. It was at this time that the first
forerunner of the famous “Imperial Canal”
was constructed, the canal that connects the Yangtze
with the Yellow River. Small canals, connecting
various streams, had long been in existence, so that
it was possible to travel from north to south by water,
but these canals were not deep enough or broad enough
to take large freight barges. There are records
of lighters of 500 and even 800 tons capacity!
These are dimensions unheard of in the West in those
times. In addition to a serviceable canal to the
south, Yang Ti made another that went north almost
to the present Peking.
Hand in hand with these successes
of the north-eastern and southern gentry went strong
support for Confucianism, and a reorganization of the
Confucian examination system. As a rule, however,
the examinations were circumvented as an unimportant
formality; the various governors were ordered each
to send annually to the capital three men with the
required education, for whose quality they were held
personally responsible; merchants and artisans were
expressly excluded.
2 Relations with Turks and with Korea
In foreign affairs an extraordinarily
fortunate situation for the Sui dynasty had come
into existence. The T’u-chueeh, the Turks,
much the strongest people of the north, had given
support now to one and now to another of the northern
kingdoms, and this, together with their many armed
incursions, had made them the dominant political factor
in the north. But in the first year of the Sui
period (581) they split into two sections, so that
the Sui had hopes of gaining influence over them.
At first both sections of the Turks had entered into
alliance with China, but this was not a sufficient
safeguard for the Sui, for one of the Turkish
khans was surrounded by Toba who had fled
from the vanished state of the Northern Chou, and
who now tried to induce the Turks to undertake a campaign
for the reconquest of North China. The leader
of this agitation was a princess of the Yue-wen family,
the ruling family of the Northern Chou. The Chinese
fought the Turks several times; but much more effective
results were gained by their diplomatic missions, which
incited the eastern against the western Turks and vice
versa, and also incited the Turks against the Toba
clique. In the end one of the sections of Turks
accepted Chinese overlordship, and some tribes of the
other section were brought over to the Chinese side;
also, fresh disunion was sown among the Turks.
Under the emperor Yang Ti, P’ei
Chue carried this policy further. He induced
the Toeloes tribes to attack the T’u-yue-hun,
and then himself attacked the latter, so destroying
their power. The T’u-yue-hun were a people
living in the extreme north of Tibet, under a ruling
class apparently of Hsien-pi origin; the people were
largely Tibetan. The purpose of the conquest
of the T’u-yue-hun was to safeguard access to
Central Asia. An effective Turkestan policy was,
however, impossible so long as the Turks were still
a formidable power. Accordingly, the intrigues
that aimed at keeping the two sections of Turks apart
were continued. In 615 came a decisive counter-attack
from the Turks. Their khan, Shih-pi, made a surprise
assault on the emperor himself, with all his following,
in the Ordos region, and succeeded in surrounding them.
They were in just the same desperate situation as when,
eight centuries earlier, the Chinese emperor had been
beleaguered by Mao Tun. But the Chinese again
saved themselves by a trick. The young Chinese
commander, Li Shih-min, succeeded in giving the Turks
the impression that large reinforcements were on the
way; a Chinese princess who was with the Turks spread
the rumour that the Turks were to be attacked by another
tribe and Shih-pi raised the siege, although
the Chinese had been entirely defeated.
In the Sui period the Chinese
were faced with a further problem. Korea or,
rather, the most important of the three states in Korea,
had generally been on friendly terms with the southern
state during the period of China’s division,
and for this reason had been more or less protected
from its North Chinese neighbours. After the unification
of China, Korea had reason for seeking an alliance
with the Turks, in order to secure a new counterweight
against China.
A Turco-Korean alliance would have
meant for China a sort of encirclement that might
have grave consequences. The alliance might be
extended to Japan, who had certain interests in Korea.
Accordingly the Chinese determined to attack Korea,
though at the same time negotiations were set on foot.
The fighting, which lasted throughout the Sui
period, involved technical difficulties, as it called
for combined land and sea attacks; in general it brought
little success.
3 Reasons for collapse
The continual warfare entailed great
expense, and so did the intrigues, because they depended
for their success on bribery. Still more expensive
were the great canal works. In addition to this,
the emperor Yang Ti, unlike his father, was very extravagant.
He built enormous palaces and undertook long journeys
throughout the empire with an immense following.
All this wrecked the prosperity which his father had
built up and had tried to safeguard. The only
productive expenditure was that on the canals, and
they could not begin to pay in so short a period.
The emperor’s continual journeys were due, no
doubt, in part simply to the pursuit of pleasure,
though they were probably intended at the same time
to hinder risings and to give the emperor direct control
over every part of the country. But the empire
was too large and too complex for its administration
to be possible in the midst of journeying.
The whole of the chancellery had to
accompany the emperor, and all the transport necessary
for the feeding of the emperor and his government
had continually to be diverted to wherever he happened
to be staying. All this produced disorder and
unrest. The gentry, who at first had so strongly
supported the emperor and had been able to obtain anything
they wanted from him, now began to desert him and
set up pretenders. From 615 onward, after the
defeat at the hands of the Turks, risings broke out
everywhere. The emperor had to establish his government
in the south, where he felt safer. There, however,
in 618, he was assassinated by conspirators led by
Toba of the Yue-wen family. Everywhere now
independent governments sprang up, and for five years
China was split up into countless petty states.
(B) The T’ang dynasty (A.D. 618-906)
1 Reforms and decentralization
The hero of the Turkish siege, Li
Shih-min, had allied himself with the Turks in 615-16.
There were special reasons for his ability to do this.
In his family it had been a regular custom to marry
women belonging to Toba families, so that he
naturally enjoyed the confidence of the Toba
party among the Turks. There are various theories
as to the origin of his family, the Li. The family
itself claimed to be descended from the ruling family
of the Western Liang. It is doubtful whether that
family was purely Chinese, and in any case Li Shih-min’s
descent from it is a matter of doubt. It is possible
that his family was a sinified Toba family, or
at least came from a Toba region. However
this may be, Li Shih-min continued the policy which
had been pursued since the beginning of the Sui
dynasty by the members of the deposed Toba ruling
family of the Northern Chou the policy
of collaboration with the Turks in the effort to remove
the Sui.
The nominal leadership in the rising
that now began lay in the hands of Li Shih-min’s
father, Li Yuean; in practice Li Shih-min saw to everything.
At the end of 617 he was outside the first capital
of the Sui, Ch’ang-an, with a Turkish army
that had come to his aid on the strength of the treaty
of alliance. After capturing Ch’ang-an he
installed a puppet emperor there, a grandson of Yang
Ti. In 618 the puppet was dethroned and Li Yuean,
the father, was made emperor, in the T’ang dynasty.
Internal fighting went on until 623, and only then
was the whole empire brought under the rule of the
T’ang.
Great reforms then began. A new
land law aimed at equalizing ownership, so that as
far as possible all peasants should own the same amount
of land and the formation of large estates be prevented.
The law aimed also at protecting the peasants from
the loss of their land. The law was, however,
nothing but a modification of the Toba land law
(chuen-t’ien), and it was hoped that
now it would provide a sound and solid economic foundation
for the empire. From the first, however, members
of the gentry who were connected with the imperial
house were given a privileged position; then officials
were excluded from the prohibition of leasing, so
that there continued to be tenant farmers in addition
to the independent peasants. Moreover, the temples
enjoyed special treatment, and were also exempted
from taxation. All these exceptions brought grist
to the mills of the gentry, and so did the failure
to carry into effect many of the provisions of the
law. Before long a new gentry had been formed,
consisting of the old gentry together with those who
had directly aided the emperor’s ascent to the
throne. From the beginning of the eighth century
there were repeated complaints that peasants were
“disappearing”. They were entering
the service of the gentry as tenant farmers or farm
workers, and owing to the privileged position of the
gentry in regard to taxation, the revenue sank in
proportion as the number of independent peasants decreased.
One of the reasons for the flight of farmers may have
been the corvée laws connected with the “equal
land” system: small families were much less
affected by the corvée obligation than larger
families with many sons. It may be, therefore,
that large families or at least sons of the sons in
large families moved away in order to escape these
obligations. In order to prevent irregularities,
the T’ang renewed the old “pao-chia”
system, as a part of a general reform of the administration
in 624. In this system groups of five families
were collectively responsible for the payment of taxes,
the corvée, for crimes committed by individuals
within one group, and for loans from state agencies.
Such a system is attested for pre-Christian times
already; it was re-activated in the eleventh century
and again from time to time, down to the present.
Yet the system of land equalization
soon broke down and was abolished officially around
A.D. 780. But the classification of citizens into
different classes, first legalized under the Toba,
was retained and even more refined.
As early as in the Han period there
had been a dual administration the civil
and, independent of it, the military administration.
One and the same area would belong to a particular
administrative prefecture (chuen) and at the
same time to a particular military prefecture (chou).
This dual organization had persisted during the Toba
period and, at first, remained unchanged in the beginning
of the T’ang.
The backbone of the military power
in the seventh century was the militia, some six hundred
units of an average of a thousand men, recruited from
the general farming population for short-term service:
one month in five in the areas close to the capital.
These men formed a part of the emperor’s guards
and were under the command of members of the Shensi
gentry. This system which had its direct parallels
in the Han time and evolved out of a Toba system,
broke down when short offensive wars were no longer
fought. Other imperial guards were staffed with
young sons of the gentry who were stationed in the
most delicate parts of the palaces. The emperor
T’ai-tsung had his personal bodyguard, a part
of his own army of conquest, consisting of his former
bondsmen (pu-ch’ue). The ranks of
the Army of conquest were later filled by descendants
of the original soldiers and by orphans.
In the provinces, the armies of the
military prefectures gradually lost their importance
when wars became longer and militiamen proved insufficient.
Many of the soldiers here were convicts and exiles.
It is interesting to note that the title of the commander
of these armies, tu-tu, in the fourth century
meant a commander in the church-Taoist organization;
it was used by the Toba and from the seventh century
on became widely accepted as title among the Uighurs,
Tibetans, Sogdians, Turks and Khotanese.
When the prefectural armies and the
militia forces weakened, special regional armies were
created (from 678 on); this institution had existed
among the Toba, but they had greatly reduced these
armies after 500. The commanders of these new
T’ang armies soon became more important than
the civil administrators, because they commanded a
number of districts making up a whole province.
This assured a better functioning of the military
machine, but put the governors-general in a position
to pursue a policy of their own, even against the
central government. In addition to this, the
financial administration of their commands was put
under them, whereas in the past it had been in the
hands of the civil administration of the various provinces.
The civil administration was also reorganized (see
the table on pages 83-84).
Towards the end of the T’ang
period the state secretariat was set up in two parts:
it was in possession of all information about the economic
and political affairs of the empire, and it made the
actual decisions. Moreover, a number of technical
departments had been created in all, a
system that might compare favourably with European
systems of the eighteenth century. At the end
of the T’ang period there was added to this
system a section for economic affairs, working quite
independently of it and directly under the emperor;
it was staffed entirely with economic or financial
experts, while for the staffing of the other departments
no special qualification was demanded besides the passing
of the state examinations. In addition to these,
at the end of the T’ang period a new department
was in preparation, a sort of Privy Council, a mainly
military organization, probably intended to control
the generals (section 3 of the table on page 83),
just as the state secretariat controlled the civil
officials. The Privy Council became more and more
important in the tenth century and especially in the
Mongol epoch. Its absence in the early T’ang
period gave the military governors much too great
freedom, ultimately with baneful results.
At first, however, the reforms of
A.D. 624 worked well. The administration showed
energy, and taxes flowed in. In the middle of
the eighth century the annual budget of the state
included the following items: over a million
tons of grain for the consumption of the capital and
the palace and for salaries of civil and military officials;
twenty-seven million pieces of textiles, also for the
consumption of capital and palace and army, and for
supplementary purchases of grain; two million strings
of money (a string nominally held a thousand copper
coins) for salaries and for the army. This was
much more than the state budget of the Han period.
The population of the empire had also increased; it
seems to have amounted to some fifty millions.
In the capital a large staff of officials had been
created to meet all administrative needs. The
capital grew enormously, at times containing two million
people. Great numbers of young members of the
gentry streamed into the capital for the examinations
held under the Confucian system.
The crowding of people into the capital
and the accumulation of resources there promoted a
rich cultural life. We know of many poets of
that period whose poems were real masterpieces; and
artists whose works were admired centuries later.
These poets and artists were the pioneers of the flourishing
culture of the later T’ang period. Hand
in hand with this went luxury and refinement of manners.
For those who retired from the bustle of the capital
to work on their estates and to enjoy the society
of their friends, there was time to occupy themselves
with Taoism and Buddhism, especially meditative Buddhism.
Everyone, of course, was Confucian, as was fitting
for a member of the gentry, but Confucianism was so
taken for granted that it was not discussed. It
was the basis of morality for the gentry, but held
no problems. It no longer contained anything
of interest.
Conditions had been much the same
once before, at the court of the Han emperors, but
with one great difference: at that time everything
of importance took place in the capital; now, in addition
to the actual capital, Ch’ang-an, there was
the second capital, Loyang, in no way inferior to
the other in importance; and the great towns in the
south also played their part as commercial and cultural
centres that had developed in the 360 years of division
between north and south. There the local gentry
gathered to lead a cultivated life, though not quite
in the grand style of the capital. If an official
was transferred to the Yangtze, it no longer amounted
to a punishment as in the past; he would not meet
only uneducated people, but a society resembling that
of the capital. The institution of governors-general
further promoted this decentralization: the governor-general
surrounded himself with a little court of his own,
drawn from the local gentry and the local intelligentsia.
This placed the whole edifice of the empire on a much
broader foundation, with lasting results.
2 Turkish policy
The foreign policy of this first period
of the T’ang, lasting until about 690, was mainly
concerned with the Turks and Turkestan. There
were still two Turkish realms in the Far East, both
of considerable strength but in keen rivalry with
each other. The T’ang had come into power
with the aid of the eastern Turks, but they admitted
the leader of the western Turks to their court; he
had been at Ch’ang-an in the time of the Sui.
He was murdered, however, by Chinese at the instigation
of the eastern Turks. The next khan of the eastern
Turks nevertheless turned against the T’ang,
and gave his support to a still surviving pretender
to the throne representing the Sui dynasty; the
khan contended that the old alliance of the eastern
Turks had been with the Sui and not with the
T’ang. The T’ang therefore tried to
come to terms once more with the western Turks, who
had been affronted by the assassination; but the negotiations
came to nothing in face of an approach made by the
eastern Turks to the western, and of the distrust
of the Chinese with which all the Turks were filled.
About 624 there were strong Turkish invasions, carried
right up to the capital. Suddenly, however, for
reasons not disclosed by the Chinese sources, the
Turks withdrew, and the T’ang were able to conclude
a fairly honourable peace. This was the time of
the maximum power of the eastern Turks. Shortly
afterwards disturbances broke out (627), under the
leadership of Turkish Uighurs and their allies.
The Chinese took advantage of these disturbances, and
in a great campaign in 629-30 succeeded in overthrowing
the eastern Turks; the khan was taken to the imperial
court in Ch’ang-an, and the Chinese emperor
made himself “Heavenly Khan” of the Turks.
In spite of the protest of many of the ministers,
who pointed to the result of the settlement policy
of the Later Han dynasty, the eastern Turks were settled
in the bend of the upper Hwang-ho and placed more
or less under the protectorate of two governors-general.
Their leaders were admitted into the Chinese army,
and the sons of their nobles lived at the imperial
court. No doubt it was hoped in this way to turn
the Turks into Chinese, as had been done with the
Toba, though for entirely different reasons.
More than a million Turks were settled in this way,
and some of them actually became Chinese later and
gained important posts.
In general, however, this in no way
broke the power of the Turks. The great Turkish
empire, which extended as far as Byzantium, continued
to exist. The Chinese success had done no more
than safeguard the frontier from a direct menace and
frustrate the efforts of the supporters of the Sui
dynasty and the Toba dynasty, who had been living
among the eastern Turks and had built on them.
The power of the western Turks remained a lasting
menace to China, especially if they should succeed
in co-operating with the Tibetans. After the
annihilation of the T’u-yue-hun by the Sui
at the very beginning of the seventh century, a new
political unit had formed in northern Tibet, the T’u-fan,
who also seem to have had an upper class of Turks
and Mongols and a Tibetan lower class. Just
as in the Han period, Chinese policy was bound to be
directed to preventing a union between Turks and Tibetans.
This, together with commercial interests, seems to
have been the political motive of the Chinese Turkestan
policy under the T’ang.
3 Conquest of Turkestan and Korea. Summit
of power
The Turkestan wars began in 639 with
an attack on the city-state of Kao-ch’ang (Khocho).
This state had been on more or less friendly terms
with North China since the Toba period, and it
had succeeded again and again in preserving a certain
independence from the Turks. Now, however, Kao-ch’ang
had to submit to the western Turks, whose power was
constantly increasing. China made that submission
a pretext for war. By 640 the whole basin of
Turkestan was brought under Chinese dominance.
The whole campaign was really directed against the
western Turks, to whom Turkestan had become subject.
The western Turks had been crippled by two internal
events, to the advantage of the Chinese: there
had been a tribal rising, and then came the rebellion
and the rise of the Uighurs (640-650). These
events belong to Turkish history, and we shall confine
ourselves here to their effects on Chinese history.
The Chinese were able to rely on the Uighurs; above
all, they were furnished by the Toeloes Turks with
a large army, with which they turned once more against
Turkestan in 647-48, and now definitely established
their rule there.
The active spirit at the beginning
of the T’ang rule had not been the emperor but
his son Li Shih-min, who was not, however, named as
heir to the throne because he was not the eldest son.
The result of this was tension between Li Shih-min
and his father and brothers, especially the heir to
the throne. When the brothers learned that Li
Shih-min was claiming the succession, they conspired
against him, and in 626, at the very moment when the
western Turks had made a rapid incursion and were
once more threatening the Chinese capital, there came
an armed collision between the brothers, in which
Li Shih-min was the victor. The brothers and
their families were exterminated, the father compelled
to abdicate, and Li Shih-min became emperor, assuming
the name T’ai Tsung (627-649). His reign
marked the zenith of the power of China and of the
T’ang dynasty. Their inner struggles and
the Chinese penetration of Turkestan had weakened
the position of the Turks; the reorganization of the
administration and of the system of taxation, the improved
transport resulting from the canals constructed under
the Sui, and the useful results of the creation
of great administrative areas under strong military
control, had brought China inner stability and in consequence
external power and prestige. The reputation which
she then obtained as the most powerful state of the
Far East endured when her inner stability had begun
to deteriorate. Thus in 638 the Sassanid ruler
Jedzgerd sent a mission to China asking for her help
against the Arabs. Three further missions came
at intervals of a good many years. The Chinese
declined, however, to send a military expedition to
such a distance; they merely conferred on the ruler
the title of a Chinese governor; this was of little
help against the Arabs, and in 675 the last ruler,
Peruz, fled to the Chinese court.
The last years of T’ai Tsung’s
reign were filled with a great war against Korea,
which represented a continuation of the plans of the
Sui emperor Yang Ti. This time Korea came
firmly into Chinese possession. In 661, under
T’ai Tsung’s son, the Korean fighting was
resumed, this time against Japanese who were defending
their interests in Korea. This was the period
of great Japanese enthusiasm for China. The Chinese
system of administration was copied, and Buddhism
was adopted, together with every possible element
of Chinese culture. This meant increased trade
with Japan, bringing in large profits to China, and
so the Korean middleman was to be eliminated.
T’ai Tsung’s son, Kao
Tsung (650-683), merely carried to a conclusion what
had been begun. Externally China’s prestige
continued at its zenith. The caravans streamed
into China from western and central Asia, bringing
great quantities of luxury goods. At this time,
however, the foreign colonies were not confined to
the capital but were installed in all the important
trading ports and inland trade centres. The whole
country was covered by a commercial network; foreign
merchants who had come overland to China met others
who had come by sea. The foreigners set up their
own counting-houses and warehouses; whole quarters
of the capital were inhabited entirely by foreigners
who lived as if they were in their own country.
They brought with them their own religions: Manichaeism,
Mazdaism, and Nestorian Christianity. The first
Jews came into China, apparently as dealers in fabrics,
and the first Arabian Mohammedans made their appearance.
In China the foreigners bought silkstuffs and collected
everything of value that they could find, especially
precious metals. Culturally this influx of foreigners
enriched China; economically, as in earlier periods,
it did not; its disadvantages were only compensated
for a time by the very beneficial results of the trade
with Japan, and this benefit did not last long.
4 The reign of the empress Wu: Buddhism and
capitalism
The pressure of the western Turks
had been greatly weakened in this period, especially
as their attention had been diverted to the west,
where the advance of Islam and of the Arabs was a new
menace for them. On the other hand, from 650
onward the Tibetans gained immensely in power, and
pushed from the south into the Tarim basin. In
678 they inflicted a heavy defeat on the Chinese,
and it cost the T’ang decades of diplomatic
effort before they attained, in 699, their aim of breaking
up the Tibetans’ realm and destroying their power.
In the last year of Kao Tsung’s reign, 683,
came the first of the wars of liberation of the northern
Turks, known until then as the western Turks, against
the Chinese. And with the end of Kao Tsung’s
reign began the decline of the T’ang regime.
Most of the historians attribute it to a woman, the
later empress Wu. She had been a concubine of
T’ai Tsung, and after his death had become a
Buddhist nun a frequent custom of the time until
Kao Tsung fell in love with her and made her a concubine
of his own. In the end he actually divorced the
empress and made the concubine empress (655).
She gained more and more influence, being placed on
a par with the emperor and soon entirely eliminating
him in practice; in 680 she removed the rightful heir
to the throne and put her own son in his place; after
Kao Tsung’s death in 683 she became regent for
her son. Soon afterward she dethroned him in
favour of his twenty-two-year-old brother; in 690
she deposed him too and made herself empress in the
“Chou dynasty” (690-701). This officially
ended the T’ang dynasty.
Matters, however, were not so simple
as this might suggest. For otherwise on the empress’s
deposition there would not have been a mass of supporters
moving heaven and earth to treat the new empress Wei
(705-712) in the same fashion. There is every
reason to suppose that behind the empress Wu there
was a group opposing the ruling clique. In spite
of everything, the T’ang government clique was
very pro-Turkish, and many Turks and members of Toba
families had government posts and, above all, important
military commands. No campaign of that period
was undertaken without Turkish auxiliaries. The
fear seems to have been felt in some quarters that
this T’ang group might pursue a military policy
hostile to the gentry. The T’ang group had
its roots mainly in western China; thus the eastern
Chinese gentry were inclined to be hostile to it.
The first act of the empress Wu had been to transfer
the capital to Loyang in the east. Thus, she
tried to rely upon the co-operation of the eastern
gentry which since the Northern Chou and Sui dynasties
had been out of power. While the western gentry
brought their children into government positions by
claiming family privileges (a son of a high official
had the right to a certain position without having
passed the regular examinations), the sons of the
eastern gentry had to pass through the examinations.
Thus, there were differences in education and outlook
between both groups which continued long after the
death of the empress. In addition, the eastern
gentry, who supported the empress Wu and later the
empress Wei, were closely associated with the foreign
merchants of western Asia and the Buddhist Church to
which they adhered. In gratitude for help from
the Buddhists, the empress Wu endowed them with enormous
sums of money, and tried to make Buddhism a sort of
state religion. A similar development had taken
place in the Toba and also in the Sui period.
Like these earlier rulers, the empress Wu seems to
have aimed at combining spiritual leadership with
her position as ruler of the empire.
In this epoch Buddhism helped to create
the first beginnings of large-scale capitalism.
In connection with the growing foreign trade, the
monasteries grew in importance as repositories of capital;
the temples bought more and more land, became more
and more wealthy, and so gained increasing influence
over economic affairs. They accumulated large
quantities of metal, which they stored in the form
of bronze figures of Buddha, and with these stocks
they exercised controlling influence over the money
market. There is a constant succession of records
of the total weight of the bronze figures, as an indication
of the money value they represented. It is interesting
to observe that temples and monasteries acquired also
shops and had rental income from them. They further
operated many mills, as did the owners of private
estates (now called “chuang”) and
thus controlled the price of flour, and polished rice.
The cultural influence of Buddhism
found expression in new and improved translations
of countless texts, and in the passage of pilgrims
along the caravan routes, helped by the merchants,
as far as western Asia and India, like the famous
Hsuean-tsang. Translations were made not only
from Indian or other languages into Chinese, but also,
for instance, from Chinese into the Uighur and other
Turkish tongues, and into Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese.
The attitude of the Turks can only
be understood when we realize that the background
of events during the time of empress Wu was formed
by the activities of groups of the eastern Chinese
gentry. The northern Turks, who since 630 had
been under Chinese overlordship, had fought many wars
of liberation against the Chinese; and through the
conquest of neighbouring Turks they had gradually
become once more, in the decade-and-a-half after the
death of Kao Tsung, a great Turkish realm. In
698 the Turkish khan, at the height of his power, demanded
a Chinese prince for his daughter not,
as had been usual in the past, a princess for his
son. His intention, no doubt, was to conquer China
with the prince’s aid, to remove the empress
Wu, and to restore the T’ang dynasty but
under Turkish overlordship! Thus, when the empress
Wu sent a member of her own family, the khan rejected
him and demanded the restoration of the deposed T’ang
emperor. To enforce this demand, he embarked
on a great campaign against China. In this the
Turks must have been able to rely on the support of
a strong group inside China, for before the Turkish
attack became dangerous the empress Wu recalled the
deposed emperor, at first as “heir to the throne”;
thus she yielded to the khan’s principal demand.
In spite of this, the Turkish attacks
did not cease. After a series of imbroglios
within the country in which a group under the leadership
of the powerful Ts’ui gentry family had liquidated
the supporters of the empress Wu shortly before her
death, a T’ang prince finally succeeded in killing
empress Wei and her clique. At first, his father
ascended the throne, but was soon persuaded to abdicate
in favour of his son, now called emperor Hsueang Tsung
(713-755), just as the first ruler of the T’ang
dynasty had done. The practice of abdicating in
contradiction with the Chinese concept of the ruler
as son of Heaven and the duties of a son towards his
father seems to have impressed Japan where
similar steps later became quite common. With
Hsuean Tsung there began now a period of forty-five
years, which the Chinese describe as the second blossoming
of T’ang culture, a period that became famous
especially for its painting and literature.
5 Second blossoming of T’ang culture
The T’ang literature shows the
co-operation of many favourable factors. The
ancient Chinese classical style of official reports
and decrees which the Toba had already revived,
now led to the clear prose style of the essayists,
of whom Han Yue (768-825) and Liu Tsung-yuean (747-796)
call for special mention. But entirely new forms
of sentences make their appearance in prose writing,
with new pictures and similes brought from India through
the medium of the Buddhist translations. Poetry
was also enriched by the simple songs that spread
in the north under Turkish influence, and by southern
influences. The great poets of the T’ang
period adopted the rules of form laid down by the poetic
art of the south in the fifth century; but while at
that time the writing of poetry was a learned pastime,
precious and formalistic, the T’ang poets brought
to it genuine feeling. Widespread fame came to
Li T’ai-po (701-762) and Tu Fu (712-770);
in China two poets almost equal to these two in popularity
were Po Chue-i (772-846) and Yuean Chen (779-831),
who in their works kept as close as possible to the
vernacular.
New forms of poetry rarely made their
appearance in the T’ang period, but the existing
forms were brought to the highest perfection.
Not until the very end of the T’ang period did
there appear the form of a “free” versification,
with lines of no fixed length. This form came
from the indigenous folk-songs of south-western China,
and was spread through the agency of the filles
de joie in the tea-houses. Before long it
became the custom to string such songs together in
a continuous series the first step towards
opera. For these song sequences were sung by way
of accompaniment to the theatrical productions.
The Chinese theatre had developed from two sources from
religious games, bullfights and wrestling, among Turkish
and Mongol peoples, which developed into dancing displays;
and from sacrificial games of South Chinese origin.
Thus the Chinese theatre, with its union with music,
should rather be called opera, although it offers
a sort of pantomimic show. What amounted to a
court conservatoire trained actors and musicians as
early as in the T’ang period for this court
opera. These actors and musicians were selected
from the best-looking “commoners”, but
they soon tended to become a special caste with a
legal status just below that of “burghers”.
In plastic art there are fine sculptures
in stone and bronze, and we have also technically
excellent fabrics, the finest of lacquer, and remains
of artistic buildings; but the principal achievement
of the T’ang period lies undoubtedly in the
field of painting. As in poetry, in painting
there are strong traces of alien influences; even before
the T’ang period, the painter Hsieh Ho laid
down the six fundamental laws of painting, in all
probability drawn from Indian practice. Foreigners
were continually brought into China as decorators
of Buddhist temples, since the Chinese could not know
at first how the new gods had to be presented.
The Chinese regarded these painters as craftsmen, but
admired their skill and their technique and learned
from them.
The most famous Chinese painter of
the T’ang period is Wu Tao-tz[)u], who was also
the painter most strongly influenced by Central Asian
works. As a pious Buddhist he painted pictures
for temples among others. Among the landscape
painters, Wang Wei (721-759) ranks first; he was also
a famous poet and aimed at uniting poem and painting
into an integral whole. With him begins the great
tradition of Chinese landscape painting, which attained
its zenith later, in the Sung epoch.
Porcelain had been invented in China
long ago. There was as yet none of the white
porcelain that is preferred today; the inside was a
brownish-yellow; but on the whole it was already technically
and artistically of a very high quality. Since
porcelain was at first produced only for the requirements
of the court and of high dignitaries mostly
in state factories a few centuries later
the T’ang porcelain had become a great rarity.
But in the centuries that followed, porcelain became
an important new article of Chinese export. The
Chinese prisoners taken by the Arabs in the great
battle of Samarkand (751), the first clash between
the world of Islam and China, brought to the West
the knowledge of Chinese culture, of several Chinese
crafts, of the art of papermaking, and also of porcelain.
The emperor Hsuean Tsung gave active
encouragement to all things artistic. Poets and
painters contributed to the elegance of his magnificent
court ceremonial. As time went on he showed less
and less interest in public affairs, and grew increasingly
inclined to Taoism and mysticism in general an
outcome of the fact that the conduct of matters of
state was gradually taken out of his hands. On
the whole, however, Buddhism was pushed into the background
in favour of Confucianism, as a reaction from the
unusual privileges that had been accorded to the Buddhists
in the past fifteen years under the empress Wu.
6 Revolt of a military governor
At the beginning of Hsuean Tsung’s
reign the capital had been in the east at Loyang;
then it was transferred once more to Ch’ang-an
in the west due to pressure of the western gentry.
The emperor soon came under the influence of the unscrupulous
but capable and energetic Li Lin-fu, a distant
relative of the ruler. Li was a virtual dictator
at the court from 736 to 752, who had first advanced
in power by helping the concubine Wu, a relative of
the famous empress Wu, and by continually playing
the eastern against the western gentry. After
the death of the concubine Wu, he procured for the
emperor a new concubine named Yang, of a western family.
This woman, usually called “Concubine Yang”
(Yang Kui-fei), became the heroine of countless stage-plays
and stories and even films; all the misfortunes that
marked the end of Hsuean Tsung’s reign were
attributed solely to her. This is incorrect, as
she was but a link in the chain of influences that
played upon the emperor. Naturally she found
important official posts for her brothers and all her
relatives; but more important than these was a military
governor named An Lu-shan (703-757). His mother
was a Turkish shamaness, his father, a foreigner probably
of Sogdian origin. An Lu-shan succeeded in gaining
favour with the Li clique, which hoped to make use
of him for its own ends. Chinese sources describe
him as a prodigy of evil, and it will be very difficult
today to gain a true picture of his personality.
In any case, he was certainly a very capable officer.
His rise started from a victory over the Kitan in
744. He spent some time establishing relations
with the court and then went back to resume operations
against the Kitan. He made so much of the Kitan
peril that he was permitted a larger army than usual,
and he had command of 150,000 troops in the neighbourhood
of Peking. Meanwhile Li Lin-fu died.
He had sponsored An as a counterbalance against the
western gentry. When now, within the clique of
Li Lin-fu, the Yang family tried to seize
power, they turned against An Lu-shan. But he
marched against the capital, Ch’ang-an, with
200,000 men; on his way he conquered Loyang and made
himself emperor (756: Yen dynasty). T’ang
troops were sent against him under the leadership
of the Chinese Kuo Tz[)u]-i, a Kitan commander, and
a Turk, Ko-shu Han.
The first two generals had considerable
success, but Ko-shu Han, whose task was to prevent
access to the western capital, was quickly defeated
and taken prisoner. The emperor fled betimes,
and An Lu-shan captured Ch’ang-an. The
emperor now abdicated; his son, emperor Su Tsung (756-762),
also fled, though not with him into Szechwan, but into
north-western Shensi. There he defended himself
against An Lu-shan and his capable general Shih Ss[)u]-ming
(himself a Turk), and sought aid in Central Asia.
A small Arab troop came from the caliph Abu-Jafar,
and also small bands from Turkestan; of more importance
was the arrival of Uighur cavalry in substantial strength.
At the end of 757 there was a great battle in the
neighbourhood of the capital, in which An Lu-shan
was defeated by the Uighurs; shortly afterwards he
was murdered by one of his eunuchs. His followers
fled; Loyang was captured and looted by the Uighurs.
The victors further received in payment from the T’ang
government 10,000 rolls of silk with a promise of 20,000
rolls a year; the Uighur khan was given a daughter
of the emperor as his wife. An Lu-shan’s
general, the Turk Shih Ss[)u]-ming, entered into
An Lu-shan’s heritage, and dominated so large
a part of eastern China that the Chinese once more
made use of the Uighurs to bring him down. The
commanders in the fighting against Shih Ss[)u]-ming
this time were once more Kuo Tz[)u]-i and the Kitan
general, together with P’u-ku Huai-en,
a member of a Toeloes family that had long been living
in China. At first Shih Ss[)u]-ming was
victorious, and he won back Loyang, but then he was
murdered by his own son, and only by taking advantage
of the disturbances that now arose were the government
troops able to quell the dangerous rising.
In all this, two things seem interesting
and important. To begin with, An Lu-shan had
been a military governor. His rising showed that
while this new office, with its great command of power,
was of value in attacking external enemies, it became
dangerous, especially if the central power was weak,
the moment there were no external enemies of any importance.
An Lu-shan’s rising was the first of many similar
ones in the later T’ang period. The gentry
of eastern China had shown themselves entirely ready
to support An Lu-shan against the government, because
they had hoped to gain advantage as in the past from
a realm with its centre once more in the east.
In the second place, the important part played by
aliens in events within China calls for notice:
not only were the rebels An Lu-shan and Shih Ss[)u]-ming
non-Chinese, but so also were most of the generals
opposed to them. But they regarded themselves
as Chinese, not as members of another national group.
The Turkish Uighurs brought in to help against them
were fighting actually against Turks, though they
regarded those Turks as Chinese. We must not bring
to the circumstances of those times the present-day
notions with regard to national feeling.
7 The rôle of the Uighurs.
Confiscation of the capital of the monasteries
This rising and its sequels broke
the power of the dynasty, and also of the empire.
The extremely sanguinary wars had brought fearful suffering
upon the population. During the years of the rising,
no taxes came in from the greater part of the empire,
but great sums had to be paid to the peoples who had
lent aid to the empire. And the looting by government
troops and by the auxiliaries injured the population
as much as the war itself did.
When the emperor Su Tsung died, in
762, Tengri, the khan of the Uighurs, decided to make
himself ruler over China. The events of the preceding
years had shown him that China alone was entirely defenceless.
Part of the court clique supported him, and only by
the intervention of P’u-ku Huai-en,
who was related to Tengri by marriage, was his plan
frustrated. Naturally there were countless intrigues
against P’u-ku Huai-en. He entered
into alliance with the Tibetan T’u-fan, and in
this way the union of Turks and Tibetans, always feared
by the Chinese, had come into existence. In 763
the Tibetans captured and burned down the western
capital, while P’u-ku Huai-en with
the Uighurs advanced from the north. Undoubtedly
this campaign would have been successful, giving an
entirely different turn to China’s destiny,
if P’u-ku Huai-en had not died in 765
and the Chinese under Kuo Tz[)u]-i had not succeeded
in breaking up the alliance. The Uighurs now
came over into an alliance with the Chinese, and the
two allies fell upon the Tibetans and robbed them of
their booty. China was saved once more.
Friendship with the Uighurs had to
be paid for this time even more dearly. They
crowded into the capital and compelled the Chinese
to buy horses, in payment for which they demanded
enormous quantities of silkstuffs. They behaved
in the capital like lords, and expected to be maintained
at the expense of the government. The system of
military governors was adhered to in spite of the
country’s experience of them, while the difficult
situation throughout the empire, and especially along
the western and northern frontiers, facing the Tibetans
and the more and more powerful Kitan, made it necessary
to keep considerable numbers of soldiers permanently
with the colours. This made the military governors
stronger and stronger; ultimately they no longer remitted
any taxes to the central government, but spent them
mainly on their armies. Thus from 750 onward
the empire consisted of an impotent central government
and powerful military governors, who handed on their
positions to their sons as a further proof of their
independence. When in 781 the government proposed
to interfere with the inheriting of the posts, there
was a great new rising, which in 783 again extended
as far as the capital; in 784 the T’ang government
at last succeeded in overcoming it. A compromise
was arrived at between the government and the governors,
but it in no way improved the situation. Life
became more and more difficult for the central government.
In 780, the “equal land” system was finally
officially given up and with it a tax system which
was based upon the idea that every citizen had the
same amount of land and, therefore, paid the same
amount of taxes. The new system tried to equalize
the tax burden and the corvée obligation,
but not the land. This change may indicate a
step towards greater freedom for private enterprise.
Yet it did not benefit the government, as most of the
tax income was retained by the governors and was used
for their armies and their own court.
In the capital, eunuchs ruled in the
interests of various cliques. Several emperors
fell victim to them or to the drinking of “élixirs
of long life”.
Abroad, the Chinese lost their dominion
over Turkestan, for which Uighurs and Tibetans competed.
There is nothing to gain from any full description
of events at court. The struggle between cliques
soon became a struggle between eunuchs and literati,
in much the same way as at the end of the second Han
dynasty. Trade steadily diminished, and the state
became impoverished because no taxes were coming in
and great armies had to be maintained, though they
did not even obey the government.
Events that exerted on the internal
situation an influence not to be belittled were the
break-up of the Uighurs (from 832 onward) the appearance
of the Turkish Sha-t’o, and almost at the same
time, the dissolution of the Tibetan empire (from
842). Many other foreigners had placed themselves
under the Uighurs living in China, in order to be able
to do business under the political protection of the
Uighur embassy, but the Uighurs no longer counted,
and the T’ang government decided to seize the
capital sums which these foreigners had accumulated.
It was hoped in this way especially to remedy the
financial troubles of the moment, which were partly
due to a shortage of metal for minting. As the
trading capital was still placed with the temples
as banks, the government attacked the religion of
the Uighurs, Manichaeism, and also the religions of
the other foreigners, Mazdaism, Nestorianism, and
apparently also Islam. In 843 alien religions
were prohibited; aliens were also ordered to dress
like Chinese. This gave them the status of Chinese
citizens and no longer of foreigners, so that Chinese
justice had a hold over them. That this law abolishing
foreign religions was aimed solely at the foreigners’
capital is shown by the proceedings at the same time
against Buddhism which had long become a completely
Chinese Church. Four thousand, six hundred Buddhist
temples, 40,000 shrines and monasteries were secularized,
and all statues were required to be melted down and
delivered to the government, even those in private
possession. Two hundred and sixty thousand, five
hundred monks were to become ordinary citizens once
more. Until then monks had been free of taxation,
as had millions of acres of land belonging to the temples
and leased to tenants or some 150,000 temple slaves.
Thus the edict of 843 must not be
described as concerned with religion: it was
a measure of compulsion aimed at filling the government
coffers. All the property of foreigners and a
large part of the property of the Buddhist Church
came into the hands of the government. The law
was not applied to Taoism, because the ruling gentry
of the time were, as so often before, Confucianist
and at the same time Taoist. As early as 846
there came a reaction: with the new emperor, Confucians
came into power who were at the same time Buddhists
and who now evicted some of the Taoists. From
this time one may observe closer co-operation between
Confucianism and Buddhism; not only with meditative
Buddhism (Dhyana) as at the beginning of the T’ang
epoch and earlier, but with the main branch of Buddhism,
monastery Buddhism (Vinaya). From now onward the
Buddhist doctrines of transmigration and retribution,
which had been really directed against the gentry
and in favour of the common people, were turned into
an instrument serving the gentry: everyone who
was unfortunate in this life must show such amenability
to the government and the gentry that he would have
a chance of a better existence at least in the next
life. Thus the revolutionary Buddhist doctrine
of retribution became a reactionary doctrine that
was of great service to the gentry. One of the
Buddhist Confucians in whose works this revised version
makes its appearance most clearly was Niu Seng-yu,
who was at once summoned back to court in 846 by the
new emperor. Three new large Buddhist sects came
into existence in the T’ang period. One
of them, the school of the Pure Land (Ching-t’u
tsung, since 641) required of its mainly lower
class adherents only the permanent invocation of the
Buddha Amithabha who would secure them a place in
the “Western Paradise” a place
without social classes and economic troubles.
The cult of Maitreya, which was always more revolutionary,
receded for a while.
8 First successful peasant revolt.
Collapse of the empire
The chief sufferers from the continual
warfare of the military governors, the sanguinary
struggles between the cliques, and the universal impoverishment
which all this fighting produced, were, of course,
the common people. The Chinese annals are filled
with records of popular risings, but not one of these
had attained any wide extent, for want of organization.
In 860 began the first great popular rising, a revolt
caused by famine in the province of Chekiang.
Government troops suppressed it with bloodshed.
Further popular risings followed. In 874 began
a great rising in the south of the present province
of Hopei, the chief agrarian region.
The rising was led by a peasant, Wang
Hsien-chih, together with Huang Ch’ao, a salt
merchant, who had fallen into poverty and had joined
the hungry peasants, forming a fighting group of his
own. It is important to note that Huang was well
educated. It is said that he failed in the state
examination. Huang is not the first merchant who
became rebel. An Lu-shan, too, had been a businessman
for a while. It was pointed out that trade had
greatly developed in the T’ang period; of the
lower Yangtze region people it was said that “they
were so much interested in business that they paid
no attention to agriculture”. Yet merchants
were subject to many humiliating conditions.
They could not enter the examinations, except by illegal
means. In various periods, from the Han time
on, they had to wear special dress. Thus, a law
from c. A.D. 300 required them to wear
a white turban on which name and type of business
was written, and to wear one white and one black shoe.
They were subject to various taxes, but were either
not allowed to own land, or were allotted less land
than ordinary citizens. Thus they could not easily
invest in land, the safest investment at that time.
Finally, the government occasionally resorted to the
method which was often used in the Near East:
when in 782 the emperor ran out of money, he requested
the merchants of the capital to “loan”
him a large sum a request which in fact
was a special tax.
Wang and Huang both proved good organizers
of the peasant masses, and in a short time they had
captured the whole of eastern China, without the military
governors being able to do anything against them, for
the provincial troops were more inclined to show sympathy
to the peasant armies than to fight them. The
terrified government issued an order to arm the people
of the other parts of the country against the rebels;
naturally this helped the rebels more than the government,
since the peasants thus armed went over to the rebels.
Finally Wang was offered a high office. But Huang
urged him not to betray his own people, and Wang declined
the offer. In the end the government, with the
aid of the troops of the Turkish Sha-t’o, defeated
Wang and beheaded him (878). Huang Ch’ao
now moved into the south-east and the south, where
in 879 he captured and burned down Canton; according
to an Arab source, over 120,000 foreign merchants
lost their lives in addition to the Chinese.
From Canton Huang Ch’ao returned to the north,
laden with loot from that wealthy commercial city.
His advance was held up again by the Sha-t’o
troops; he turned away to the lower Yangtze, and from
there marched north again. At the end of 880
he captured the eastern capital. The emperor
fled from the western capital, Ch’ang-an, into
Szechwan, and Huang Ch’ao now captured with
ease the western capital as well, and removed every
member of the ruling family on whom he could lay hands.
He then made himself emperor, in a Ch’i dynasty.
It was the first time that a peasant rising had succeeded
against the gentry.
There was still, however, the greatest
disorder in the empire. There were other peasant
armies on the move, armies that had deserted their
governors and were fighting for themselves; finally,
there were still a few supporters of the imperial
house and, above all, the Turkish Sha-t’o, who
had a competent commander with the sinified name of
Li K’o-yung. The Sha-t’o, who had
remained loyal to the government, revolted the moment
the government had been overthrown. They ran the
risk, however, of defeat at the hands of an alien army
of the Chinese government’s, commanded by an
Uighur, and they therefore fled to the Tatars.
In spite of this, the Chinese entered again into relations
with the Sha-t’o, as without them there could
be no possibility of getting rid of Huang Ch’ao.
At the end of 881 Li K’o-yung fell upon the capital;
there was a fearful battle. Huang Ch’ao
was able to hold out, but a further attack was made
in 883 and he was defeated and forced to flee; in
884 he was killed by the Sha-t’o.
This popular rising, which had only
been overcome with the aid of foreign troops, brought
the end of the T’ang dynasty. In 885 the
T’ang emperor was able to return to the capital,
but the only question now was whether China should
be ruled by the Sha-t’o under Li K’o-yung
or by some other military commander. In a short
time Chu Ch’uean-chung, a former follower of
Huang Ch’ao, proved to be the strongest of the
commanders. In 890 open war began between the
two leaders. Li K’o-yung was based on Shansi;
Chu Ch’uean-chung had control of the plains in
the east. Meanwhile the governors of Szechwan
in the west and Chekiang in the south-east made themselves
independent. Both declared themselves kings or
emperors and set up dynasties of their own (from 895).
Within the capital, the emperor was
threatened several times by revolts, so that he had
to flee and place himself in the hands of Li K’o-yung
as the only leader on whose loyalty he could count.
Soon after this, however, the emperor fell into the
hands of Chu Ch’uean-chung, who killed the whole
entourage of the emperor, particularly the eunuchs;
after a time he had the emperor himself killed, set
a puppet as had become customary on
the throne, and at the beginning of 907 took over the
rule from him, becoming emperor in the “Later
Liang dynasty”.
That was the end of the T’ang
dynasty, at the beginning of which China had risen
to unprecedented power. Its downfall had been
brought about by the military governors, who had built
up their power and had become independent hereditary
satraps, exploiting the people for their own
purposes, and by their continual mutual struggles undermining
the economic structure of the empire. In addition
to this, the empire had been weakened first by its
foreign trade and then by the dependence on foreigners,
especially Turks, into which it had fallen owing to
internal conditions. A large part of the national
income had gone abroad. Such is the explanation
of the great popular risings which ultimately brought
the dynasty to its end.