The History of China - #104 - AnShi 4: Crowns in the Gutters

Episode Date: July 18, 2016

The AnShi Rebellion grinds on to its bitter conclusion, claiming lives at a rate unprecedented in human history. Crowns and throne will be cast to the wind by fathers and sons alike, and in the end China will before force to decide between national cohesion and national sovereignty… a true devil’s choice, if ever there was one. Time period covered: 756 – 764 CE Major Historical Actors: Tang Dynasty: Retired Emperor Xuanzong [d. 762] Emperor Suzong (Li Heng) [r. 756-762] Emperor Daizong (Li Yu) [r. 762-779] Yan Dynasty: An Lushan [d. 757] Emperor An Qingxu [r. 757-759] Emperor Shi Siming [r. 759-761] Emperor Shi Chaoyi [r. 761-763] Uyghur Khaganate: Tengri Bügü Khagan [r. 759-779] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the British Before launching in today, let me take a moment to recommend you check out fellow Agora Network member Heather Tesco, the voice of the Renaissance English History Podcast. From Shakespeare to witchcraft to the Tudors and beyond, join Heather as she explores the birth of the modern world

from the perspective of the British Isles. Find it wherever fine podcasts are sold, or on theagorapodcastnetworks.com. Please also come and visit us over at thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com for additional information, maps, and illustrations, listener questions, and discussions, and also to find out how you can become a patron of the show through Patreon. Thanks again, and now, on with the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 104. Crowns in the Gutters. In mid-December, 1887, Marxist philosopher Friedrich Engels, who was then residing in

London, looked to the future and delivered what can, looking back, only be described as a work of pure prophecy. He wrote, quote, No war is any longer possible, except as a world war, and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another, and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done. Famine, pestilence, general demoralization both of the armies and of the mass of the people produced by acute distress, ending in general bankruptcy, collapse of the old states and their traditional state wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by the dozens on the pavement and there will be nobody to pick them up. Absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor. Only one result is absolutely certain, general exhaustion. This,

my lords, princes, and statesmen, is where in your wisdom you have brought old Europe, when nothing more remains to you but to open the last great war dance. End quote. Suffice it to say, almost to the letter, Engel's prophecy proved true over the course of the First World War. But if we were to turn and apply it retroactively to the likes of the Anlushan Rebellion, half a world and more than a millennium before he wrote those words. They would fit just as well. As we've mentioned in past episodes, it would take the mechanized armaments of the early 20th century to produce a conflict capable of out-killing the 8th century Chinese rebellion, which to this day remains the third deadliest conflict in human history. So bearing that in mind, let us march, eyes wide open, into the Great Meat Grinder, beginning in the year 758 in northern China.

As you recall, by this point, An Lushan, the mad general who had declared this war against the Tang regime in the first place, was now dead, murdered by his own lieutenants with the approval of his likewise mentally disturbed son and heir, An Qingshu. Meanwhile, over on the Tang side of the line, there had likewise been a changing of the guard, as Crown Prince Li Heng had unilaterally declared himself the new emperor, Suzong, and sent notice of such to his aged father that, oh yeah, you're now the retired emperor, dad. Enjoy Chengdu. Well, don't get too terribly comfortable with An Qingshu or Suzong, because they're not going to be around for too terribly long. At the outset of 758, things seemed to be going quite well for the Tang army,

which was quite the change of pace, and very poorly indeed for the reeling Yan rebel force. The rebels had just been driven out of both capitals that they had expended so much manpower and energy to take in the first place, and had in fact been driven all the way energy to take in the first place, and had in fact been driven all the way back to their home territory in northeastern Hebei province. On the heels of this stream of victories, the Tang court made the very intelligent decision to reverse their policy of brutality towards the rebel belligerents, and instead began offering

rewards and promotions for defectors, and pardons for those captured in battle. This proved to be an extremely effective strategy, as many of the rebel commanders had sensed the ominous shift in the wind, and began surrendering to the still-advancing Tang forces one after another. Such a turn of ill fortune had, understandably, ruffled more than a few feathers among the rebel commanders, and none more so than the general Shi Siming. And just so you know, the Shi family is going to be quite important moving forward, and indeed is where the second half of the rebellion's most common name, the An Shi Rebellion, comes from. So, you know, you might want to jot that down.

Now, word did not immediately reach General Shi about the whole patricide-slash-regicide that had just gone down in Luoyang, since he had been rather busy up north, laying siege to the heavily defended city of Taiyuan, with approximately 100,000 troops at his command. After a full month of siege works failed to breach the city's walls, the missive finally arrived from, what's this now? Emperor An Qingshu? Informing Shi Seming of the fact that the old emperor was dead, long live the new emperor and all that, and oh by the way, you're now to drop whatever it is you're doing up there and immediately head back to Fanyang to guard the old headquarters as its military governor. And so there he had

remained from about the middle of 757 onward. But we'll get back to Shi Seming in a moment. Right now it's time for me to make a confession. Last episode, I made a bit of a mistake in terms of location. I said that following the fall of Luoyang, An Qingshu had retreated north to Fanyang, but that was not correct. He did retreat northward, but not to Fanyang, but rather to Ye City, which is today called Anyang. Yeah, I know, right? How could I ever allow for such a mistake? So the new emperor was not in the old capital, but instead roughly halfway between Luoyang and Fanyang. So there at Ye City, Emperor Qingxu and his rebel force of some 60,000 had managed to get themselves surrounded by the Tang army yet again and put under yet another siege as he waited for reinforcements to coalesce and rebuild his personal army's strength. Now time and again,

An Qingxu tried to break the siege lines and escape once again northward, but time and again the Tang lines held fast and hemmed the rebel emperor in, preventing his retreat. And as for Shi Seming up in Fanyang, well he decided that riding the fence was a really good idea at this point, and nominally pledged himself, along with a whole slew of other rebel generals, back to the Tang side in order to take advantage of their favorable terms at this point, and nominally pledged himself, along with a whole slew of other rebel generals, back to the Tang side in order to take advantage of their favorable terms at this point. By the new year of 758-759, desperate, An Qingshu sent word to Fan Yang, begging Shi Seming to aid him in breaking out of the siege of Ye, and according to some accounts, even offering Shi the throne if he assisted the Yan emperor.

Well, as you might imagine, that caught Shi Ziming's attention real quick. And it was right about that time that he got an idea. An awful idea. Shi Ziming got a wonderful, awful idea. First, he unilaterally declared himself the imperial prince of Yan, thus placing himself in the legitimated line of potential royal succession. Then, with his army, General Shi duly marched southward to engage the Tang armies encircling Ye City. Now, in the Tang ranks themselves,

there appears to have been a textbook case of too many chefs spoiling the soup. They were under the command of no fewer than nine generals, which was about eight too many. And predictably, that led to a precipitous lack of military coordination, or the ability to react quickly to, say, an enemy army riding in from the north unexpectedly. The two armies clashed on the 7th of April, 759. And though the Tang seemed to have been caught flat-footed by the Yan army's attack, nature itself intervened, though to Hu's ultimate advantage is rather up in the air. It went down like this. A large thunderstorm rolled

in over the two armies, and spooked both sides before much in the way of real damage could be done to the assembled, if disorganized, Tang force. However, in the confusion the storm brought, the Yan army fled northward, while the Tang fled south, which meant, yep, the siege of Yan city was effectively lifted. Qin Shu's forces within Ye city were subsequently able to raid the abandoned caches of equipment and supplies left behind by the Tang as they had fled, and they returned behind the walls of Ye. Meanwhile, Shi Seming's force returned to the walls, and General Shi feasted his troops in celebration of this glorious victory, and raised his own pavilion before the gates of the city, before sending word to An Qingshu that he would like to meet with him,

and invited him to his tent. Before making his way to the victorious general directly, An, apparently unsure of exactly what he should do, sent a message repeating his previous offer of the throne to Shi Seming, who, in fine formal style, declined. But he then suggested that they could both perhaps be emperors, of co-equal, allied states. An, excited at the prospect of both being able to make good on his word to his savior and general at this point, while also retaining his own power and prestige in the bargain,

made for General Shi's camp at once to seal this new deal. An arrived at Shiz Pagoda, and upon meeting with the general, sank to his knees and gave his thanks, stating, I did not have the ability to uphold the empire. I lost the two capitals and was put under siege. I did not know that your royal highness would, on account of the death of An Lushan, arrive from afar to save me from certain death. I have no way to repay your kindness. End quote. At this, however, Shisaming's entire demeanor darkened, and rather than accepting An's thanks, he rebuked him harshly, stating, quote, However, you, the very son of An Lushan, killed your own father to usurp his throne. Such a display of treachery to your own father is against the very order of

heaven and earth, and can be neither tolerated nor forgiven. I arrived at the gates of Ye to attack the bandits here only on behalf of the true emperor of Yan, and will not stand here and listen to the flattery of such a regicide." You can imagine where it went from here. An Qingxu was arrested and swiftly executed alongside his two brothers and all of the generals within Yan who had not immediately submitted to Shi Seming's new order. Shi claimed dominion over all territories held by the An clan, and then declared himself the new emperor of Yan. And that was that.

Chomny notes that this course of events, though they might appear treacherous and even devious to our own perspective, was actually well in line within the standard Chinese sense of righteousness and justice at this point. He says, quote, The records of these proceedings show the extent to which the Yan rulers sought to emulate the style of Chinese rulers. Shish Siming's pronouncements demonstrated the three cardinal Confucian virtues. Benevolence, as he forgave An Qingxu's incompetence. Filiality, as he showed himself to be deeply offended by An Qingxu's betrayal of An Lushan. And righteousness, for punishing what under Confucian doctrine could not be forgiven.

Shi Siming's words and actions towards An Qingxu would not have been out of place in most imperial Chinese courts. The end state emulated the Tang in terms of the personal conduct of its rulers in addition to the actual form of the government, end quote. But Emperor Shi Siming's reign, like that of An Qingshu's before him, would be neither long nor glorious, and given that he had just ordered the death of An the Younger for the high crime of patricide, his end would be a truly ironic one. Siming shared more than a little in common with his former general and emperor, the late An Lushan. He is remembered as being of a similarly cruel nature and quick to use terror and the threat of immediate execution against his own men to enforce compliance with his orders. And just like on Lushan, he quickly

got the notion in his head that maybe his second son would prove to be a more worthy heir than his eldest, named Shi Chaoyi. It's worth noting first, though, that it was at this point that Shi Siming officially moved the capital of his rebel empire back up to Fanyang and ordered that the city's name be changed to Yanjing, meaning, appropriately enough, the Yan capital. Xi Ziming proved himself to be a far more capable ruler than the ineffectual An Qingshu had ever been. In June of 760, for instance, he was able to retake Luoyang from the Tang once again, though he would not take the step of redesignating the by this point clearly vulnerable and in any case thoroughly depopulated and ravaged city as

his capital any longer, and instead maintained Yanjing as his official headquarters. In the spring of the following year, Siming would mount a campaign to retake the main and likewise vulnerable capital of Chang'an, but this would prove to be his last. Siming was particularly harsh on his eldest son, and the undue pressure and constant threat of punishment for supposed failures ground down on Cao Yi, until they reached a critical breaking point on the 18th of April, 761. Cao Yi had been ordered by his father to oversee the construction of a triangular-shaped fort alongside a hill, and moreover, with the completely unreasonable stipulation that the whole structure must be completed that very day or else. Well, Shi Chaoyi went ahead and did just that,

and completed the entire fort in one day. But when Emperor Siming returned that evening, rather than praising a job well done, he instead harshly criticized that Chaoyi hadn't yet plastered the outer walls with mud. As he rode off, he called back behind him, to his own son and his subordinates. You miserable wretches! After I'm through with the capture of Shan Prefecture, I'll come back here and kill you all! Well, that got everyone's attention real quick,

but probably not in the work-really-hard way that Siming had probably intended. Instead, it put everyone tasked with the fort's construction into a save-my-own-skin frame of mind, and there seemed to be only one sure way to do that. It was Shi Seming, or them. That night, Chao Yi's chief lieutenants conferred with their commander and laid it all on the table. Look, they told him, we need to kill your dad. You know it, we know it, we all know it.

You can either back us up on this, or if you don't, we're just going to go ahead and defect to the Tang instead. Well, what was he going to do? Chao Yi agreed with the plan, and they put it into action immediately. Riding at the head of 300 soldiers, Chao Yi's lieutenant, Luo Ye, approached Emperor Siming's encampment. Luo managed to buy off the guard commander and convinced him to look over there for a while, while the 300 soldiers surrounded the Yan Emperor's tent and seized him and then bound him with rope. The initial plan had been to take him back towards Luoyan, but as the party made its way back in that direction, with the royal prisoner in tow, Lieutenant Luo started worrying that someone might notice that the Emperor was missing and then attempt to mount a rescue or something. And so, to ensure that that couldn't happen, he took a length of the rope and strangled the 58-year-old Shi Seming then and there.

The parallels between the murder of An Lushan by his eldest son, who feared replacement by his younger half-brother, and the murder of Shi Seming by his eldest son, who feared replacement by his younger half-brother, are far too striking to be ignored. Li Chiaomi posits that the near-mirrored fates of the two elder emperors of Yan was the result of an interesting ethnic dimension, writing, An Qingshu and Shi Qiaoyi's situations had a great deal in common. Both were elder sons in danger of being replaced by younger half-brothers.

More importantly, both were the sons of first wives who were overlooked by their fathers in order to elevate ethnically Han second wives as empresses. The paranoia of Qingxu and Chaoyi may have been due to their fathers' apparent desires to create a Han-style dynasty. Having seen their mothers replaced by Han women, both of these usurpers may have realized that they would have no place in a Han household." To this I will say that while Chami chalks up both Lushan's and Siming's murder by their sons as paranoia, as the old saying goes, it's not really paranoia if they are actually out to get you. Regardless, things were looking truly grim as Shi Chaoyi assumed the throne of Yan. As Dalby puts it in the Cambridge History of China, quote, three murders and four emperors within five years

must have weakened the rebels terribly, but the movement persisted because the Tang government did not take any effective action, end quote. And it was actually even worse than Dalby makes it out to be. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations,

or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Almost immediately after declaring himself the emperor, Shi Taoyi was informed, to his horror, that one of his vassals had betrayed the Yan state, viciously sacked the new capital of Yanjing,

before turning the city over to the Tang. Had the Tang court just pressed a little bit further, that would have likely been the end of it, game, set, and match. And yet it did, well, nothing. Why might that have been? Well, as we discussed last time, the major offensive push that had seen the Tang army recapture the two capitals had been based around a ruinous alliance with the Arabs and Uyghurs. The Uyghur Khan, in particular, had agreed to press on to Luoyang and no further, which obviously severely curtailed the Chinese ability to press whatever advantage the recapture of the two capitals had netted them. As the mortal danger the Yan rebels seemed to pose faded away in the face of their crippling defeats,

so too did this last desperate alliance to save the dynastic order. Emperor Suzong had dispatched his son and heir, the crown prince Li Yu, to take command of the Tang army, but that hadn't been panning out very well at all. Again from Dalbi, quote, the generals did not follow the orders from their heir apparent, who was a very ineffective commander-in-chief, nor did they readily cooperate with one another. End quote. The entire Tang war effort, so recently having gone on a very successful offensive, by the beginning of 759 had devolved into a static, debilitating defense. This inertia was further compounded in 762 by the near-simultaneous deaths of first the retired Emperor Xuanzong at age 76, and only two weeks later followed by the

death by illness of the reigning Emperor Suzong at age 51. All at once, the imperial command structure of the Tang Dynasty came crashing onto the shoulders of the crown prince Li Yu, a singularly weak and ineffectual man at this point, who had only managed to maintain his position as the heir thanks to the backroom machinations of the court eunuch Li Fuguo, who had overseen the extra-legal killings of both the empress and her two sons who were vying for control of the throne immediately prior to Suzong's death on the 16th of May. Li Yu would ascend the throne two days later as Emperor Daizong, but would not assume power. That was instead left to the scheming eunuch Li Fuguo, who placated Daizong saying, You, emperor, just remain in the palace.

Let this old servant of yours handle what is outside. End quote. Now that might well have been a recipe for further disaster for the Tang. As we've seen time and time again, when nefarious courtiers sink their claws into weak sovereigns, that usually spells trouble. And yet this would not prove to be the case for Daizong, in spite of such an ominous beginning to his reign. In short order, he seems to have somehow roused himself out of whatever stupor had led him to

place his trust and power into Li Fuguo, and by late that summer had not only reversed his decision to place overall political authority into the eunuch's hands, but had outright stripped him of all titles altogether, and by the following winter ordered his assassination. But this period of uncertainty and crisis of leadership would prove more than enough to destabilize the tenuous balance of power between Tang and Yan. Sensing the hesitancy on the part of his Tang enemy, and fully aware of his own tenuous situation, the new Yan emperor, Sui Chaoyi, attempted to tip the scales in his faction's favor. He would dispatch an emissary to the new Khagan of the Uyghurs in late 762, informing the

step-riders that the Tang Chinese were in a state of disorder and ripe for a major attack to crush them once and for all. Intrigued, but wary of such a claim, Dengli Khagan called up his army and marched to the northern border of the Tang territories. From there, he would dispatch scouts to assess this claim of Tang weakness and the state of the Tang's defenses, and see just how ripe the Chinese empire really was to a potential assault. At this, according to Dalby, A Tang envoy sent on a routine goodwill mission to the Uyghurs reported that the nomads had been in contact with Shi Chao-i, the rebel emperor,

and had been persuaded to change sides. At this same moment, the envoy said the Uyghurs were mobilizing a huge army, end quote. Now I know what I just said about Emperor Daizong being ineffectual, but I have to give credit where it's due. In this instance, he was really thinking quickly, and dispatched the one man who might have a chance of staving off this secondary invasion from the northwest, a Turkish general and member of the Tang court named Bugu Huayan, who had been pivotal in the cementing of the initial Tang-Uyghur alliance by marrying his daughter to the Khagan several years prior. Chomny writes, quote, In the end, the Tang narrowly managed to save their alliance with the Uyghurs through the intervention of the Khagan's wife, a daughter of Bu Gu Huayan, who brokered a meeting between her father and husband. The former convinced the latter that the leadership in Chang'an, under the newly crowned Emperor Daizong,

was strong enough to challenge a Uyghur invasion. Dengli Kagan, realizing that perhaps the Chinese were not quite the pushovers that the Yan emissary had made them out to be, instead opted to renew the terms of his alliance with the Tang Empire, aided along, of course, by a massive bribe sent by the Chinese to sweeten the pot. Interestingly, Chomny points out that, quote, everyone involved in brokering this peace was a Turk. The Tang government was not only subservient to the Uyghurs, but also dependent on Turks within China to make critical diplomatic decisions. End quote. The renewed alliance between Uyghur and Chinese

would prove to be quite the double-edged sword, however. On the one hand, it would give the Tang the soldiers and drive they would require to once again seize the initiative against the Yan rebels and go on the offensive. On the other hand, the Uyghur Khan was now all too aware of the hegemonic power he now held over the Tang dynasty. The Khagan opted to descend from his capital at Ordu Balik, and personally oversee the military operations against the reeling Yan. Emperor Daizong likewise dispatched his own heir, Crown Prince Li Ko, to act as the commander-in-chief of the Chinese side of the forces. And it would be the meeting between Uyghur Khan and Chinese prince that would trigger the latest faux pas between the two civilizations. Upon meeting the Khagan, the Crown Prince either

neglected to or simply refused to pay proper homage to what amounted to his nation's suzerain. At this, the Khagan instead suggested that the prince should instead perform a Uyghur ceremonial dance to show his respect. The prince's advisors, however, balked at such a suggestion, and complained before the Khagan himself that it was completely inappropriate for a Chinese prince to perform some foreign barbarian rite, and that it would be an affront to the heir of the dragon throne's dignity to have to stoop so low. And that, it turned out, was precisely the wrong thing to say. Understandably offended at this insinuation that his Khanate's culture was deemed to be lesser than that of his

Turko-Chinese vassals, Dengli Khagan demanded that the Tang ministers who dared speak so lowly of the Uyghur Khanate, be dragged before him and then whipped to death. Chomny writes, quote, While the prince did not, in the end, perform the dance, there were no repercussions for the murders. The power and hegemony of the Uyghurs over the Tang government was made abundantly clear. End quote. In spite of this fatal faux pas, the Tang-Uyghur alliance was sealed and moved forward towards the re-re-re-capture of Luoyang, which to no one's great surprise fell easily on November 19th, 762. This fourth capture now of the once great city would actually

mark the last major battle against the Yan rebels in the war. It would seem that the rebellion of An and Shi had at last burned itself out. But that would mean little to the residents of Luoyang, who were once again about to endure yet another sacking at the hands of the Uyghur barbarians. And it was to be even worse than last time. The first Uyghur sacking of the secondary capital, you may remember from last episode, had raged on for three entire days before its denizens had at last been able to buy off the horsemen with a huge bribe of silks and embroidery. This time, though, there would be no such ransom. Dalby writes, quote,

The Uyghurs, who had been spoiling for a fight, went on a rampage of killing and looting after the capture of Luoyang, not against imperial troops, but against the defenseless common people." It would be a period of violence and chaos that wouldn't truly begin to taper off for the next three months, as the city was plundered for everything and everyone deemed valuable by the victorious armies. And this is not to imply that the Tang army tried to stop what was happening in the city. Much to the contrary, according to Dao Bi, the Tang soldiers themselves viewed the residents of the beleaguered former capital as little more than rebel sympathizers one and all,

and gladly partook in the pillaging of the city themselves. By the time this horrific act of misplaced frustration and vengeance against the city's population at last began to ebb, several entire districts had been reduced to rubble and ash, and the whole region surrounding the capital had been completely devastated. As I'd mentioned a minute ago, the second sacking of Luoyang would prove to be the final nail in the coffin of the An Shi rebellion. The rebel emperor, Shi Chaoyi, would be forced to flee north, but given that Yanjing had already been handed over to the Tang authorities, he had precious few places left to flee. Increasingly harried by the Tang forces, Chaoyi attempted to make a run for the borderlands in

a desperate bid to seek refuge among the Xi or Khitan peoples of the northeast. Meanwhile, the Tang court once again enacted a conciliatory policy towards the remaining rebel generals and officials, encouraging them to defect from what was ever more obviously a lost cause, by promising that they would not only be pardoned for having been a rebel, but would in fact receive positions within the Tang command structure commensurate with what they currently held under the Yen. Such a policy proved quite effective, and Xishuai found himself increasingly isolated as more and more of his once-loyal armies peeled themselves off and disappeared into the dark of night to get out while the getting was good.

In the spring of 763, however, Xishuai would meet his destiny when his retinue was intercepted by Tang loyalists ordered with his capture. There's actually a degree of uncertainty as to how he exactly died. Some sources claim that he was betrayed and murdered by his own lieutenants in exchange for their lives once they surrendered to the Tang War Party, while others say that, knowing that there was no way out of his predicament, Chao Yi found a suitable spot and then hanged himself before he could be captured alive. Regardless of the specifics, though, with Shi Chaoi's death, so too died the last vestiges

of the Yan Dynasty and the Anshi Rebellion. His lieutenants presented their dead sovereign's head to the Tang army as it approached, and they were taken into custody. In exchange for their service to the throne, in apparently, at least, killing the last Yan emperor and bringing the rebellion to an abrupt but welcome close, Chaoyi's four top lieutenants were granted by the throne military governorships over the quarters of the Hebei region in exchange for their agreement to an immediate and final peace. So this certainly sounds like a victory for the Tang and a defeat for the dream of Hebei's independence from central imperial authority. Certainly that's how the imperial court at Chang'an treated it.

Xichao's head was sent back to the capital and paraded through the city streets amid wild celebration over the Tang's final victory over this most devastating of rebellions, and the imperial court engaged in all manner of vociferous backpatting and self-congratulation. But in reality, by all accounts, the Tang had merely managed to blunder its way into this apparent victory. And once again, according to Dalby, quote, Thus, without actually winning the war, or even conclusively proving that it could be won, the Tang government stumbled through its gravest crisis, and arbitrarily declared the Great Rebellion at an end.

End quote. And so, cue the yackety sax music. What's more, when viewed from a certain perspective, one can make the very plausible claim that, declaration of victory or no, the Tang had lost far more than they had managed to gain in this so-called victory. What had this war even been about, after all? If we view it from the official Tang perspective, that it was an outright and total assault on the

dynasty as a whole and aimed at the complete usurpation of China by foreign barbarian powers, well, obviously it had failed. If, however, we once again look at the war aims, but this time as they'd been laid out by the rebel commanders themselves, in which the objective was squarely aimed at the political secession and independence of the Hebei region from the rest of Tang China, well in that case we're forced to arrive at a very different conclusion regarding the war's outcome. The fact was, with the confirmation of the formerly rebel generals as the new lord's paramount of Hebei, the region had achieved near total political independence for itself. Sure, let the Tang parade Chichaui's head on a pike all they wanted. It didn't change the fact that Chang'an was now fundamentally incapable of enforcing any

of its demands on the region, and that the so-called governor-generals were the de facto kings in their own right, who needed to pay little more than lip service to the son of heaven in Chang'an. Dalby writes, quote, In several ways, Chang'an was forced to treat these provinces as important semi-foreign states, despite the damage to its prestige or, more accurately, to its self-esteem. End quote. Chiamni agrees, saying, quote, If Hebei separatism was the real goal of the Yan, then that goal had been achieved. End quote. Indeed, for centuries after the conclusion of the Anshu Rebellion, An Lushan, An Qingshu, Shi Seming, and Shi Chaoyi were all worshipped as

virtual gods by the population of Hebei, in spite of the fact that they had nominally lost the war. In any case, as we'll discuss at length next time, the Tang imperial court would have precious little to celebrate and precious little time to do so before they'd be facing down yet another existential crisis. But let's draw back from the nitty-gritty details and ask the question, what does it all mean? I'd like to finish out today with a look back at the overall war and what it meant for Tang China. To put it bluntly, it was in every possible respect a complete fiasco for the Chinese state. The Tang Empire in 754, the year before the rebellion, had been the envy of the world, probably the single most wealthy, populous, powerful,

and cosmopolitan society on earth at the midpoint of the 8th century. And yet, less than a decade later, by 763, it had been reduced to a burnt-out shell of that former glory, cut off from its western holdings in the lucrative Silk Road trade routes, forced to vassalize itself beneath the Uyghur Khaganate, and roped into a hugely unfair trade agreement with them, one which saw the Uyghurs every year send a few thousand old nags and broken draft horses to Chang'an in exchange for hundreds of thousands of bolts of silk in return. Moreover, the centralized bureaucracy of the Tang regime itself had been irrevocably weakened. Once an efficient, centrally run state apparatus had now been disassembled and broken down by the rigors of war, and by its end, the peripheries of the Chinese state had reverted to what amounted

to regional warlordism. Not to mention that the entire northeastern region of Hebei had been effectually ceded to the nominally submissive rebel generals. This breakdown of the central bureaucracy would prove to be the irreversibly catalyzing factor that would ultimately see the unified Chinese state slowly but surely break down over the course of the next century and a half into the era of further political upheaval in the early 10th century, called the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Financially, of course, the news was just as grim. Chomney writes, quote, the rebellion had also wrought massive and damaging economic changes. The traditional apparatuses of taxation and land

distribution were damaged irrevocably, end quote. Add to that the fact that an ever-increasing amount of Chinese wealth was being pilfered by the trade agreement with the Uyghur Khanate and their moneylenders, and the effect was devastating to the prospect of Tang economic recovery. And then there was the human cost. Oh man, the human cost. It's difficult, impossible really, to get a truly accurate accounting of the precise number of people killed over the course of the rebellion, but it's a staggering number regardless. Like most wars, there had been a large number of combat deaths, yes, but that number had been absolutely dwarfed by the number of civilian deaths wrought by mass starvations, slaughters, and diseases wreaking havoc through entire populations.

Remember, for instance, the siege of Suiyang, where the Chinese defenders were ultimately reduced to eating their own civilians, until by the time the rebel armies broke into the city, there were reportedly only 400 people left from what had once been a population of 30,000? Well, that had just been one siege during one year of a war that had raged on for more than seven all across the north and northeast. We can attempt to get an idea of the overall human cost of the rebellion

by comparing censuses taken before and after the war. The imperial census of 755, taken immediately before the outbreak of hostilities, showed an empire-wide population of almost 53 million subjects in nearly 9 million households. In contrast, the census taken the year after the conclusion of the rebellion, 764, gave a population of only 16.9 million in 2.9 million households, which would have been roughly equivalent to one-sixth of the total global population of the 8th century disappearing. Even almost a century later, the census of 855 would see that rise to a mere 4.9 million households, which is a little more than half

of what had been counted a hundred years prior. That is not to say, however, that 36 million plus people were just exterminated over the course of the Anshu Rebellion. To the contrary, many historians, like Charles P. Fitzgerald, have pointed out that, given the bureaucratic breakdown the rebellion precipitated, a significant amount of that number of missing persons are likely a result of a combination of people moving away to avoid the conflict and the census takers themselves being unable to properly count the number of remaining residents in the post-war period. Moreover, something approaching a quarter of what would have formerly been considered the Empire's taxable population, by the war's end, now resided in either foreign

occupied territory or autonomous regions like Hebei that were now not subject to imperial tax collectors. Regardless of the actual number of war dead and displaced, though, it was a conflict the likes of which had never been seen before, much less in such a brief period of time, and a conflict that would require the likes of machine guns, armored tanks, aircraft, and explosives to surpass even a millennium later. Yet for all that pain and death, the conflict is, finally, at an end.

And so the Tangs should hope to be able to settle down and begin repairing the damage the rebellion had wrought to their beleaguered society. Except, oh wait, the Uyghurs, Arabs, and Tibetans have all been made very much aware of the uniquely weak situation China now finds itself. And they, one and all, have no intention of giving the Middle Kingdom any room to catch its breath. And so next time, we'll be turning back westward to see all of that hard work in the Anshi Protectorate for all of those years erode away to nothing. Thanks for listening. Have you ever gazed in wonder at the Great Pyramid? Have you marvelled at the golden face of Tutankhamun?

Or admired the delicate features of Queen Nefertiti? If you have, you'll probably like the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore tales of this ancient culture. The History of Egypt is available wherever you get your podcasting fix. Come, let me introduce you to the world of ancient Egypt.