In Our Time - The An Lushan Rebellion

Episode Date: February 16, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the An Lushan Rebellion, a major uprising against the imperial rule of the Chinese Tang Dynasty. In 755 AD a senior general, An Lushan, orchestrated a plot against Emperor Xuanzong, taking the regime's capital city before declaring a rival dynasty in northern China. The rebellion lasted eight years but was eventually put down by Tang forces. Although the dynasty's authority was restored, it never regained the prosperity of previous generations. The An Lushan Rebellion displaced millions of people and killed many more. It changed the relationship between the Chinese state and neighbouring powers; but it also left a rich cultural legacy in the poetry memorialising this seismic event.With:Frances WoodLead Curator of Chinese at the British LibraryNaomi StandenProfessor of Medieval History at the University of BirminghamHilde de WeerdtFellow and Lecturer in Chinese History at Pembroke College, Oxford.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the 8th century AD, the largest and most powerful city in the world was Chang'an in eastern China. This was the capital of the Tang Dynasty, the family that ruled an enormous and prosperous empire

during a period wildly regarded as a golden age for Chinese culture. But in 755, the Tang Empire was brought to its knees by a bloody uprising which resulted in the destruction of Chang'an and the overthrow of its emperor. The leader of this insurrection was a powerful local leader, An Lushan. The rebellion he led lasted for eight years before it was eventually quashed. The death toll was substantial, and the Tang Empire never recovered. And these events left an imprint on Chinese culture which remains today. With me to discuss the An Lushan rebellion, a Francis Wood, lead curator of Chinese at the British Library,

Naomi Standen, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Birmingham, and Hilda de Viette, fellow and lecturer in Chinese history at Pembroke College, Oxford. Francis Ward, could you tell us something about the Tang Dynasty? It lasted from 600, roughly to 900, 618 to 907. It followed a very short brief, rather characterised as brutal dynasty, which re-established control over China as we know it. So the Tang dynasty ruled over China, which was very much the same size as it is today, minus the Central Asian provinces. So a massive land area.

And the Tang was, I think, as you said, Chang'an, the capital was really was the greatest city in the world at the time. It had a population of maybe up to two million. It was beautifully controlled. The city itself had been carefully designed on traditional principles, divided by walls with markets in specific places, but filled not only with Chinese, but also with full. foreigners. It was a magnet people from the surrounding world. You have many

traders who came across the silk roads from Central Asia. But also I think one of the things that shows the Tang at his greatest is that Japan and Korea also looked to China. China was the great cultural pinnacle. The Japanese took the language, the architecture, the interior design,

the clothing styles of the Tang. Chinese Buddhism also entered Japan. So things that we think of as characteristically characteristic of traditional Japanese culture actually came from China. So China during the Tang sort of radiated its cultural power across the whole East Asian sphere.

And I think one thing that is interesting which shows how Chinese people think of the Tang today is that the standard term for China town in Chinese is Tang Renji, which means the street in which the people of Tang lives. So they still consider themselves, as it were, the sons of the Tang.

Can we talk a bit more about this magnificent city in the 8th century when there were hovels over most of the world. And you said it was brilliantly designed and organised with the wards and walls dividing one section of society from another section of society. Was it spectacular in its architecture?

Oh, certainly. I mean, not very much survives. There are a couple of temples which survive, not in Chang'an itself, but elsewhere. But Tang building was incredibly beautiful. And you also have the temples in Nara in Japan, which are direct models. They are of contemporary Chinese building,

and they are massive, incredibly impressive. But it wasn't just, again, Chinese building styles. I mean, there were six Zoroastrian temples in Chang'an. There was a Nestorian Christian church. There were Manichaean temples. And so you had an incredible

variety of richly coloured and beautifully built incredible great assemblages. The idea of masses of different sorts of people in China is a bit alien to our thoughts of China because we think of it over the last few hundred years, a thousand years or something was a place that kept out foreigners

that wanted to proceed by under its own steam. Indeed, it is extraordinary. Chang is very different from any other period in Chinese history when, in a sense, the kind of the attraction of foreigners to China is actually celebrated. I mean, it permeated particularly the aspects of kind of grander life that Central Asian fashions, Central Asian styles, the great fat concubine Yangue Fei wore flowing Central Asian robes.

There were dancing elephants and dancing horses imported from Fergana, and the emperor, and particularly the emperor who ruled at the time of the Anlushan rebellion, was terribly fond of the Sogdian whirling dance, which was performed by his fat concubine with sort of flying taffeta skirts and red boots as she danced around on a little ball spinning across the stage. So, I mean, it was a completely cosmopolitan empire at the time. Now, Mr. Adnan, so this is an enormous place we're talking about. It's quite difficult to comprehend it, really, in the 8th century.

given the sort of grimness that was growling away over most of the rest of the world. Can you just give us some idea of the space of it, of the size of it? Francis has indicated, can we have a little more detail? If you want distances, then it's about 2,000 by about 2.5,000 miles, broadly speaking, not counting that corridor that runs from the main part of the Tang Empire through into Central Asia, which the town control until the Anneshan Rebellions. It stretches down to a south coast, but not with very much control down there. So there are outposts on the south coast, important ports,

trading across the South seas to Japan and Korea, as Francis was saying. Up in the north, there are contacts with Korea over land and also by sea, and many, many contacts with the nomadic peoples of the steppe, close interactions with those people and in fact those have been going on for hundreds of years before the Tang as well ever since the end of the Han Dynasty and about 200

there have been intensive contacts in that whole northern zone it seems to me reading about this program it's like almost an undiscovered ocean that's the history I was brought up with there in this great oceanic China and the Persians are coming in and the Arabs are coming in

the Manchurians are up there and the Japanese are across there It's all this landmass. It seems that I've just made a discovery here. A bit late, but there you are, Marco Polo. Was there got that first if he existed? Yes, it really is gigantic. And the distances were, I mean, it took months to get,

on ordinary travels, it took months to get places. Although the messengers could travel, I believe it was something like 300-Lea-day, which is about 100 miles. a day on horseback for emergency communications. How did they govern it then, this massive thing? Well, there was a sophisticated bureaucracy, a bureaucratic administration. Was it a meritocracy again?

Already a meritocracy? Yes and no. It was not really. If you wanted to become part of the administration, you needed to have education and education required money. And at this point, basically, you could have only have money if you were an aristocrat. And so there were, it was, in the first part of the dynasty, it began as an aristocratic government under the Empress Wu, Uza Tien, the first, the only female emperor of China. She brought in a more meritocratic system of exams and really fostered exam candidates. And they began to take senior positions in the, in the bureaucracy. But after her reign,

there was a return to, and certainly by the time we get up to Anlusan, the aristocrats have begun to come back again. They're starting to take the exams, but they're still aristocrats. So how do they run these 2,000 miles one way, 2,000 and 1,000 and 1,000 and other way, with the Persians, the Arabs and the Manchurians and the Koreans, how do they run it? They send out from the capital, in the ideal,

and for the first part of the dynasty, this did actually work most of the time. They send out from the capital officials who go out into the prefectures, which are the divisions, the districts into which the empire was divided. And those people have authority over civil administration, a certain extent military administration as well. They are responsible for maintaining registers of the population,

which are the basis for collecting taxes, which obviously is what the empire needs to run. There's a system of censors, as in to censor something, who keep an eye on how everything works and make sure that people are doing what they're supposed to do and aren't being corrupt and so on and so forth. There's increasingly there are commissioners

by the time we get to the reign of the emperor in which the Andlishan rebellions happen, we have a system of commissions which are extra. They are outside the standard administration and they go off and do particular things like improve the transportation of grain to the capital, for example. And there's a lot of money spent on the army

and it's the army that enforces it in basically really fundamentally this is enforced by the military the interior provinces are not it's not military rule in that sense but the Tang Empire had expanded dramatically in the first part

of the dynasty and by the time we get to the period leading up to Anne Lushan there has beginning to be a bit of a retrenchment to the Tang haven't lost huge amounts of territory, but they are coming up against powerful neighbours who they can't defeat. And so they're turning more from expansion to defence. And what that ends up, the

upshot of that, the practical upshot, is that you start to get on the borders, in the border territories, the development of provinces run by border governors who have military and increasingly civil authority as well to collect taxes. Was there any marked change in the way that the Tang dynasty held its power in the middle of the 8th century just before the rebellion. It was the development of those military provinces that was probably the biggest change. And what it meant was that authority from the centre effectively became devolved to the provinces, to the border provinces. Held it about, let's start to Anneshan.

Who was it and where did you come from? Anne-Han first emerges in the records in the early decades of the 8th century. And he then emerges as a soldier along the northwestern periphery of the Tang Empire. Now, there's a lot of uncertainty about the background of Anoucheon, particularly also his ethnic background. But based upon his last name, Anne, we can draw the conclusion that he was most likely of Sogdian descent. The Sogdians were one of those many peoples who became. in part of the Tang Empire. They originally lived in what is now Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, but many of them were resident in Chang'an, but also in other cities in Tang, China.

And they worked there as merchants, but also like And Dushan as soldiers. By being a soldier, And Dushan did what many of his male relatives did. But he was unlike many others in that he was very successful. He rose through the military ranks quite quickly. So by the early 740s, he had... had obtained one of those commands that were, that known we referred to just a minute ago. He became the military governor of Pinglu, which is located in what is now Manchuria or northeast China. And he was so good at this that very soon afterwards, one or two years afterwards, he also obtained the military command of the adjacent region, Fan Yang.

This meant that he was in charge of quite a substantial part of the particularly North of eastern borders of the Tang Empire. And he had... When you say in charge, you mean he was collecting the taxes. He was in charge of the army that was enforcing the collecting of taxes. Not at this point. So at this point, he is the military governor. So what do you mean by in charge?

It does mean that he has at his disposal somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 soldiers. So he has a very extensive military at his command. Now, in part because of the reasons, again, that we pointed to, even though he initially only had military power. He very quickly also obtained some civil powers in that same region. He became an inspector for the entire region north of the lower reaches of the Yellow River. And so gradually he obtained in addition to his military powers, also some civil powers. And those would put him in good stead in controlling a very substantial part and a core part of the Tang Empire.

Now, in addition to being a very successful military governor, he was also very adept at cultivating relationships at court. at the very beginning of his military career, he had been sent on one or two missions to the capital in Chang'an. And there he made connections with some of the most important people at court at the time. One of them was the favorite concubine of Emperor Suenzong, who was in charge at the time, Yan Kui Fei. And he ingratiated himself with her, and she even allegedly made him her adoptive son. This certainly also made him very much liked by the emperor himself, but it's important to keep in mind that at this point the emperor is not necessarily calling the shots anymore.

He has taken a backseat to government. And perhaps the most important person in running the empire at this point is a man called Li Lin Fu. He's a prime minister at this point and who for more than about 15 years controls the government in Tang China. He becomes the protege of this man. and that certainly puts him in very good stead. So he's in good stead. Now, quite soon he's going to, in our terms of this programme, he's going to lead a rebellion.

What changed? What changed? Well, it's important to keep in mind that Al-Lu Shan is not necessarily unusual at this point. There's several other men who like him. They're foreigners who are in charge of a military region and who have good connections at court. But men in that situation can turn against their patrons when things go wrong.

And this is essentially what happened in the case of Al-Lu Shan, his main patron, the Prime Minister Lili Nfu, passed away in 752, and things began to change for Annocheon at court. And he was in charge of intelligence network that alerted him to the fact that things were changing. And so he was in a position to move quickly when that happened. So he was out of favor at court.

They were conspiring against him at court. His great patron at court, the Prime Minister, had died. And he had to make a move. He had to sort of go and re-aggratiate himself or do the other thing. That's right. And it seems that he hadn't been planning this for too long. That in the early years, he did show up at court and was actually quite successful in persuading Emperor Svanzhong. That, you know, he intended to be loyal that he was not preparing what others were accusing him of.

But these accusations came back time and again. So what triggered his decision to lead his army to conquer the two great cities, including Shang-an in China? If we go by his, allegedly, by his own words, It is the moves by the Prime Minister Yang Guo Zhong to act against him, to accuse him of this loyalty that really triggered it. When he first rose up in arms, he claimed that he would overthrow the tongue because Yang Guo Zhong, the prime minister, had essentially turned against it. So was there more him, really?

Indeed. It's quite simple in that. I'm not trying to be silly. It was quite simple in that sense. They would get him if he didn't get down. From the course of things, there were certainly historical examples that indicated that if indeed, if he did not move, and there were these accusations going around,

that they could call him to court at any point, ambush him, and that would be the end of it. Francis Wood, the rebellion broke out in 755. Can you tell us how it began? What specifically triggered it? We've got nearly there with what's been saying to build up. Well, it takes some time. I mean, the first thing is, is An Nushan moves with his troops,

but he doesn't get to Chang for a considerable amount of time. I mean, there's quite a lot of resistance. And it's a long way. And it's a very long way. There are indeed to get your soldiers across. And the whole rebellion actually is it lasts a long time. And there's an awful lot of kind of nothing happening in it, as it were. It's a very much a kind of stop and start event.

I mean, it has its kind of, it has its moments when Anne Lushan does move finally on the capital. I mean, leaving aside for the moment, Loyang, the secondary capital. But when he does move upon the capital, It's thought that possibly 180,000 or so of the imperial troops make a rather ill-judged attack on his army and are destroyed. And then the emperor freeze. On Anlushan's army, they attack it. And ill-judged, they didn't stay in the pass and bottle him out.

They took to the plane or only. And when you said destroyed, you mean the lot of them or what? Well, it's difficult. You have no kind of, nobody was there collecting figures. But that army in effect was annihilated, was a disqualified. was disappeared and the emperor flees the capital. But there are all sorts of complex factors involved.

I mean, in the sense that also the foreigners come back in again, if you like, that the emperor or the imperial powers try to make links and make successful links for a while with Uyghur armies who come in and help and then you've got Tibetans as well. So you've got the kind of the outside polities also being part. Can we just, can you come and reserve that?

for a second, perhaps. I just want to get to... This man has set off in the north and he captures these two main cities. He captures Loyang and then Chang'an. So how did he capture them? It seems not implausible, but we'd like to know.

We've got the great Yang Empire. He's traveled a long way with his army, however big it is. The Yang dynasty has a very big army. How does he get these two cities? Let's start with the Loyang first and then go to the great Chang'an. He marches from his provincial capital, which was broadly speaking where Beijing is now,

and he makes a very quick approach to Loyang. It only takes him, there are three quite quick battles, and then he gets to Loyang. And the rest of the resistance basically melts away as he approaches Luoyang. When he gets to Loyang, basically there are no defenders. And after a minimal amount of time, the leader of the officials within Loyang in the secondary capital of the Tang, a man called Daashi Shun, leads the officials out of the capital to welcome the conqueror. Because that's what you do in the Chinese world. This is how politics works. So I'm not being facetious here, but isn't what we would call a surrender, or is it? I mean, can we just? Yes, it is a surrender.

It's basically the official surrender to him. But what they feel that they are doing is recognizing that this man at the head of this victorious army is potentially the bearer of the mandate of heaven and therefore the legitimate ruler. So the religious thing comes in here because they think he might have been nominated by heaven to become the next emperor so they want to be on his side. Right. I wouldn't say religious, but yes, the thought is... Well, what is happening if it isn't religious? It's a thought system rather than about worship. Yeah, well that's religion is, but never mind. Let's go. Let's move on for that.

So that's Lawyang. So the official surrender to Anlushan, and he basically takes them under his wing. Most of them agree to work for him. They get sent back to do their jobs that they were doing before, but now they're working for him instead of for Shenzhenz. As Francis was saying, there is then one of the many lulls in this long,

drawn out rebellion because the Tang Empire in Chang'an, the emperor is in Chang'an at that time, they get themselves together, they organise a defence, a little bit too late for Loyang, but they bottle up the pass, as you say, with these 180,000 troops, and they sit there for months, neither of them really doing much. And then there's this ill-judged campaign. which opens up Chang'an to Anlu Shan. Once the Tang army is destroyed, the Tang army is destroyed, he is able to march on Chang'an,

at which point the court and the emperor looks at what's coming, and they say, there's no way we can survive this because our army is gone, and they take a hike. They abandon the capital. The emperor and his retinue, and most of the officials leave Chang'an, and most of the population leave too. What about the concubine?

The concubine. The favoured concubine. The favourite concubine. They all take to the road with one of the Imperial armies, which is there in the capital to protect the Emperor. The Imperial Army goes along, obviously, to protect the Emperor on the road. However, they don't get very far before the Army says, we're not going any further.

This is a mutiny. We are not going any further unless you get rid of that concubine, because it's all her fault. And so they force the Emperor to kill his beloved concubine before they will protect him and continue with him going west into exile. The reason for raising is that it sort of permeates Chinese stories for centuries until it's one of the great stories, isn't it? Absolutely. It's the great love story between Shenz-on and. We've done the love story, right.

Did he have, we're back to Anne Lashan. Did he have any specific aims or an overall strategy? He's got the two cities. He's got Chang'an. They've surrendered. They've said, we'll collect your taxes and here you are. Right. Does he have a strategy beyond that? Well, if we step back just a little bit,

it doesn't seem that there was a grand strategy behind this in the long run. In the early 740s, this was not in the scheme of things. But once Anrujan mobilizes his forces, it does appear that there is a clear strategy, that by taking the capitals, he's really striking at the heart of the empire. He's taking the cities that control the empire. And it doesn't also seem by the very nomenk,

that he uses, that he sees himself as the new emperor of China. So he sets up a new dynasty, the great Yan dynasty, which suggests also that the Tang Dynasty has come at its end. As Naomi was suggesting, he doesn't come up with an alternative system. He very much plans to substitute a system that's roughly equivalent to the one that he's familiar with and the one with which he has been collaborating for a long time. So he sets up a series of ministries that pretty much run like the Chinese imperial systems have been run for centuries. He incorporates the prefects who have been running the empire. And so in some ways, it explains his success as well,

that for a lot of the prefects, it doesn't make too much of a difference where they send the taxes. Once there is a new head, it just goes to this new head. And that system works quite effectively for Andou Shan as well. Francis, what, the time industry doesn't give in. I mean, they're going to be there for a rather, they're going to, this is just to flash forward, they're going to be there for another 150 years.

So the emperor moves on and without his concubine and sets up his own court where and how effective it is it? Well, no, what happens is that the emperor, I mean, it's folklore, but I mean to some extent, obviously it's true. It's the emperor's son who takes over. The emperor senses son northwards, and the son proclaims himself. What happens to the emperor then?

Oh, the emperor is given the title of retired emperor. And the emperor, this lonely, sad man, and lives out the rest of his life in his old palace, you know, with eternally mourning the loss of his fat concubine. I mean, he's surrounded by memories of her, the pool in which she bathed, etc., etc. And so it becomes a kind of, as Naomi said, you know, the great romantic story of all time,

this song of endless remorse. But the sun carries on, and the Tang Dynasty re-establishes itself. And so we have two courts then. Did the sun set up an effective court? silence. Eventually, yes. But I mean, you have also... I mean, did they go, is it Rukuyapumiosote? Did they go to recover, bring their forces to another place, to attack it again? Yes, he doesn't go straight to trial. He moves there slowly. But, I mean, again, you've also got the problem of the An Lushan rebellion itself, sort of falling, collapsing inwards, because Anne Lushan is murdered, and then a whole series of successive bandit leaders are murdered.

And so there's a sort of internal collapse of the rebellion, as well as this... flight northwards by the soon-to-be new town emperor. I want to pull back a little bit, Frances, did this great city with which we started the programme, Francis gave us a very vivid picture of this great city, two million people, everything that was going on there. It fell. Now, did that, what impact did that have?

You've made it seem, and I'm not criticising you. I mean, you know, 50 million times more than I do. Made it seem, he came in, he took over, they said, okay, we'll do it for you, we did it for him. and that was that. Did this fall of this 2 million populated city of everything not have a bigger impact than that? It certainly did.

And it didn't go as smoothly, as I may have suggested. Loyalist armies rose up against. Annooshaan came to the defense of the court. Response to the earlier question, how effective the alternative was at this point is still under question that the tongue eventually settles. But they don't really deal with the fundamental problem. That is the problem that,

large parts of the Tang Empire are now run by these military governors. But there's impact beyond what the immediate impact of taking over a city itself. If we look, for example, at the social impact, we've talked about the Tang dynasty, mostly being an aristocracy. Most of the aristocrats who were resident in the capital, and that was most of the families had been moved there in the early phases of the Tang dynasty. they disappear. They move south. And this also means that the backbone, the ruling backbone of the Tang Dynasty has gone. They kept lists of their Socratic families and lots of positions were filled from men who came from these families. This means that a completely new system comes into being, a system whereby those who approve themselves, not necessarily only through exams, but also through military achievements. achievement rise through the ranks much more quickly than they could before.

It also means that values change because when it is the case that aristocrats can't rely on their family background alone to acquire a position of status in society as well as in politics, it means that other things, as an educational background, begin to matter a lot more. But there's also a massive demographic impact and that's perhaps one that is really significant if we think about the long-term history of China. The scale of the massacre, I think, is something that's hard to estimate. But we do know that from this point on. You're at Russia.

We've got lots of time. I'm going to come to all that later. I just want to stay with that city for a moment. And this rebellion, it's two years in. When he's gone into that city, has Anne Lushan any ideas about it? Does he want to stay as it was with lots of foreign? and lots of dancing elephants and markets and people coming all over the place and trade and fashion centre and all that. Sorry to be so vernacular, but there you are. But does he want to say, no, I'll have a new, I'll make this a new sort of city. What do you think?

I don't think he has any idea of transforming it. I mean, it's a city he knows. I mean, the city that suffered more is Loyang, which was sacked. But Chang'an itself, I mean, although you get sort of poetic images of, you know, foxes stalking the streets and wild grasses growing between the flagstones, the city itself, is not destroyed and damaged, although again, they do get, they sort of, after Annal Lushan, you tend to get the annual invasion of the Tibetans who come and threaten nearby. But I don't think An Luchan had any idea at all of changing the city itself.

Yeah, and he also didn't have much time. So it's important to keep in mind that Al-Lushan is in charge for maybe about a year and a half after the rebellion and he's fighting. So he doesn't really have time to put a system in place that really isn't a functional alternative to what happened there. So you all call it the Anglishan Rebellion, and that's what it's called.

But two years into it, he was assassinated by a group led by, including what's his son. It was a time when sons assassinated fathers quite regularly, as far as I can make out. But this is an important one, front. So what was the consequence of that? Do you want to talk about that, Naomi? Well, the consequence of that was that his son was not a particularly good leader. This happened in, the murder happened in 757. And the Tang basically took advantage of this disruption

and disaffection within the rebel ranks. Anne Lushan's, one of his leading generals, a man called Scherziming, his power base was to the east of the capitals, and he began to pay more attention to his lands over there and his armies over there. and the loyalist forces took advantage. A man called Gord Zai, a very famous loyalist general, managed to get the support of an alliance with the Uyghur people from the northwest.

And they marched on Chang'an in November 757 and retook the city from Anne Luchan's successor. The horse was saying, just to clarify a bit, because there's lots of names and sorts of it, It was very strange, I think, to many of us of what's going on here. But we're only two years in. But this thing, you're talking about 757, but this thing goes on until 763. Anishan's been assassinated. The young have brought in mercenaries. They brought in the Uyghurs of mercenaries.

They brought in the Tibetans as mercenaries. Am I still on the... So they brought in mercenaries as their way to fight back. And this has proved to be successful at the beginning. Why did it then take them another six years? to crush the rebellion. Because there had been, because of the disorder that arose

as a result of the collapse of the official Tang administration, there were rebellions, quite separate rebellions, and revolts and so on, in the southern part of China, along the Yangza River, the southern river in China. And those provinces came to be, suffered great disorder. As their immediate, the Tang's immediate response to the rebellion

had been to extend the border system of independent, effectively autonomous power, where the civil and the military power were combined, they'd extended that system to the whole country. And so the whole country was now broken up into provinces led by governors who had most of the power within their area, both civil and military, and what that meant was that it was possible for there to be revolts.

Governors, if a governor chose to be on the Tang side, that was great, but if they chose to try and go it alone, there wasn't much the Tang court could do about it. So in fact they instituted warlords. Effectively, yes. So we don't have the simple battle like England trying to bash up France and France trying to bash up England. We have the Yang and the new transmonglification of the Angluchan rebellion,

but we also have rebellions all around the place in this vast empire. fighting against each other on different sides because we have the institution of the great warlords, not the great warlords, the warlords, they've got all the stuff, haven't they, they've got the army, they've got the civil, they've got the taxes, and they've seen that it can happen because Anneshan went and did it. So they can join in this in a big way,

which they did for the next few years. But going back to the young, they brought in the mercenaries. They brought in these very powerful, who eventually did the business. It's interesting because the Tang, the Weger force that was brought in at this point was really quite small.

It seems to have only been, a handful of thousands, four or five thousand, cavalry. But cavalry could be crucial in these battles. And it seems as if the Uyghurs were sufficient to tip the balance and bring... There were the Tibetans as well.

They kept coming in and having it got, didn't I? The Tibetans were not, I believe, allied with the Tang at this point. Yeah, the Uyghurs were the main force that worked with them, but always a risky choice because when they didn't get what they want, they could also turn against, and they did.

their military commanders. So it's important to keep in mind that in addition to these foreign mercenaries, there are also loyalist generals who come to the aid of the town. But it takes a little while to get them to coordinate their effort. And so it does take a while to take the... So we had what could for convenience be called mayhem going on for the next six years. And in that mayhem, there's a lot of slaughter which we've avoided it. Towns were sacked, armies.

Now, Stephen Pinker, in his latest book, about us being a lot less violent that we used to be used this example, used this particular rebellion as saying, look how bad it was then, a sixth of the then world's population. Well, I mean, that's what I read, so I'm just giving it to a sixth. That's what he says.

I can't have the page reference, but it's quite early in the book. A sixth of the then world's population was killed in those seven years. How does that tally with the evidence that you've got, Francis, Wood? Well, I think I can start, but others will kick in, I'm sure. I mean, I think one thing,

there are two things to say mainly. One is that when things happened in China throughout Chinese history, they always happen on a massive scale. I mean, even if it's natural disasters, who take the famine of 1876 to 78, I mean, between 10 and 13 million people die. These numbers, every time the Yellow Rivers, which is its course, millions of people are affected.

So in China, the numbers are always huge. But the most important thing is that it's the question of evidence. I mean, what an earth is this based upon? I mean, as we've seen, the rebellion lasted a long time, but there were lots of lulls and lots of places where nothing was happening. I mean, they're taking two sets of sort of census figures. You mean there, you mean Tiefen Pinker in this thing. Yes, sorry, yes.

And as Hilda has already said, this massive demographic shift is one very important thing. They're just leaving the place. Leaving the place. I mean, it's reckoned that about a third of people registered for tax pre-Anlu-Shan just disappeared from the registers. Now, they didn't all die. People say, fled or left. I mean, we have no idea whether they died or they fled.

You then have a completely different tax system after An Luchan connected on a different basis so that you're not comparing like figures, if you like. And I think what most historians would say is that the main thing is this demographic change. I mean, well, even with the area that Anne Luchan controlled, I mean, that was really lost to the town, and that was something like 25% of their revenue came from there. So you've got fragmentation, you've also got the disappearance of tax offices and tax registers. I mean, if you've got a certain amount of government chaos,

you don't actually keep the papers. So there's really very little in the way of evidence. But what evidence... Sorry, yes, after you're neighbour. I'm just trying to get at what evidence there is and what numbers there were sparked off by this extraordinarily dramatic claim that are six of the world's population in eight century.

It's a fairly big claim, isn't it? It catches your attention. The demographic shift, in fact, had begun before Anlouchev. And we already see people falling off the registers in the 50 years leading up to An Lushan. And so it's already a problem. And it's actually, that is part of the reason why the provincial governor's system is brought in

to try and stem some of that, the problems arising from the loss of tax revenue because you haven't got the people on the registers. Anybody got any numbers around this table? Yes. The thing we do have is that comprehensive sense is, comprehensive, of course, meaning covering the entirety of the tongue empire. It doesn't mean that everybody,

who was alive was registered. But in 742 was a census taking and about 8.5 million households lived in Tang China at that point. Now, depending on how many people you put in a family, that's somewhere between 45 million to perhaps 50 million

people. We don't really have reliable figures for the following decades. For the reasons that I already mentioned, at that point, there is no unitary government that can hold the census. But if we go to some reliable figures, centuries later, in 180, for example.

Another census, comprehensive census is taken when the area is roughly covering time, but slightly smaller in the song. And at that point, the population is 15 million. Now, certainly a major increase, but what is interesting is that the increase is very unevenly distributed, so that there's only a 25% increase in the north,

and in some areas in the south, there's 300% increase. So what this indicates is what has happened throughout these centuries, and already, as as Nomew suggested in the decades before, is that lots of people started moving south, in part because they were fleeing from the dislocation as a result of the rebellion,

but also in part because there were better opportunities in the South. And from this point onwards, South and Central China becomes the economic and cultural heartland of Chinese history. The other figures that we have come from the analytic records, which tell us, they give us a basic account of what happened, and they're kind of boring, but they're useful because they do provide some numbers. And if you read those, they show quite clearly where the campaigns are moving,

which towns are being taken, and if there is an important massacre, they will tell you. And if you read those accounts, we get an occasional massacre, tens of thousands of people killed. There's two or three of those in the eight years of the records. And that's completely normal for a Chinese war. This happens when Chinese are fighting each other. It happens when Chinese are fighting foreigners. There is nothing abnormal. It's grotesque, of course, in the absolute numbers, but in Chinese terms, this is not unusual. Can we, I just, I didn't realize so much time ago. I'd just be told me, we only got three minutes left.

Can you give us the bold strokes of the consequences of this rebellion, Francis? The tongue is restored, but it never has the same vigour. The taxes change, and as Hilda has said, one of the most important things is this great shift in sort of cultural centres. down to the south of China, which is partly to do with water transport, so the Yangtze Delta is something that comes up. But I think what's frightfully important is that the two great poets of the period, Li Bai and Dufu, are considered to be China's greatest poets ever. And so the fact that they wrote at that time really does kind of keep the 8th century very much in the forefront of people's minds.

So in terms of literature, that period, the 8th century with the Anelaghan Rebellion in the middle, is the golden age of Chinese poetry. I would say that two main things. There's a lot of soul searching that happens as a result of that. Some of that is expressed in literature in the form of social critique. Some of it in the form of a turn inward that something went wrong. It may have to do with some of the larger factors, the political and military factors we've pointed to, but perhaps it's also because we have lost track of our civilizational roots.

One of the foremost intellectuals of the 9th century, a man called Han Yu, perhaps one of the most influential pieces, a very short prospect, on rediscovering the original way, where he points to the fact that we should go back to our Chinese civilizational roots and get rid of foreign imports like Buddhism and military governors. Do you want to develop this idea of inwardness, the Confucian loyalty to the state at all costs

and foreigners not good? One of the things that comes out of this is that you have 150 years of continued Middle laterisation after Anne Lusanne and then the Song Dynasty comes in in 960 and the Song come in with a very strong memory of Anne Lusanne and they are allergic to military action and they do their utmost to promote the civil over the military and they're very successful in doing that or at least in controlling the military at court and not allowing it to take over and one of the ways they do that is to really emphasise loyalty and a different kind of loyalty instead of a pragmatic loyalty

where you surrender to the guy who's got the biggest army it is an unlawful. an undying loyalty that they were trying to promote. That once you are loyal to a particular emperor and a particular dynasty, that's how you stay. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Francis Wood, Hilda DeViette and Naomi Standon. And next week we'll be talking about the physics of electrical conduction and the electronic revolution. Thanks for listening.

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