The History of China - #105 - Tang 18: Retrospective

Episode Date: July 27, 2016

Before getting into the latter half of the Tang Dynasty, we take a look back at the 175 years we’ve covered since the Sui first reunified China at the conclusion of the Period of Disunion. Join us on this high-altitude, rapid journey charting the highs and lows the the 2 & a half dynasties we’ve looked at since Episode 76. Time Period Covered: 581-764 CE Major Historical Figures: Sui Dynasty: Emperor Wen (Yang Jian) [r. 581-604] Emperor Yang (Yang Guang) [r. 604-617] Tang Dynasty: Emperor Gaozu (Li Yuan) [r. 618-626] Princess Pingyang [d. 623] Emperor Taizong (Li Shimin) [r. 627-649] Emperor Gaozong (Li Zhi) [r. 650-683] Emperor Zhongzong (Li Xian) [r. 684-684] Emperor Ruizong (Li Dan) [r. 684-690] Zhou Dynasty: Empress Regnant Wu Zetian (Wu Meiniang) [r. 690-705] Tang Dynasty (restored): Emperor Zhongzong (Li Xian) [r. 705-710] Emperor Ruizong (Li Dan) [r. 710-712] Princess Taiping [d. 712] Emperor Xuanzong (Li Longji) [r. 712-756] Emperor Suzong (Li Heng) [r. 756-762] Emperor Daizong (Li Yu) [r. 762-779] Northeastern Protectorate/ Yan Dynasty: Emperor An Lushan [r. 756-757] Emperor An Qingxu [r. 757-759] Emperor Shi Siming [r. 759-761] Emperor Shi Chaoyi [r. 761-763] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War

and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. Before launching in today, I feel I must put everyone on notice that in the near future my production timetable may be somewhat slowed down. This is because with the beginning of the coming school year, in about a month or so, I'll be taking on an AP European History class, which I expect will significantly eat into my free time. So rather than an episode of once every 7-10 days, it might be closer to a fortnight between updates. But never fear, regardless of how fast or slow I can pump them out, the history of China will keep chugging right along, ever onward into the future. One other little message, in the days and weeks to come, I'll be beginning to reboot the first several episodes, at least the earliest ones up until I actually stop recording on my computer's

inbuilt mic. I've gotten much better sources than I initially had access to, and so my hope is that by putting a better foot forward, more listeners will be inclined to stay on and listen through to the end of the series. I'm planning to get several episodes recorded in batches and then release them all at once. I'll make mention of when and which ones I get released in future episodes, but do consider going back once they're out and giving them a re-listen. They're not just rehashed, there's actually quite a bit of new ground covered, so I'd like to know what you guys think. Okay, that's it for announcements. Please enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 105, Retrospective My oh my, what a long, strange, and interesting period we have all just gone through together. It's been an awful lot that has been squeezed into a very short period of time. Last week, we finished out the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade for the Tang that was the Anshi Rebellion. And looking ahead, well, it's not all sunshine and rainbows there, either. The century and a half to come is in fact going to be little more than a painful spinning-out process for the Tang. Though, not for you. I'll make every endeavor to keep it as interesting as possible. But before we get into that, I'd like to take this moment of introspection and reflection

to recount how far we've come. By my count, it's been almost 30 episodes since we really did a solid retrospective, which was number 76, taking stock at the tail end of the period of disunion, as of 589. Since then, we've managed to march through a solid 175 years, 11 emperors, 1 empress, and 2 and a half dynastic orders. And a partridge in a pear tree. So we've covered more than enough to require a bit of a refresher before we press onward into the latter half of the tongue. Like we did with our overview of the period of disunion, what we're going to do this time is in effect zoom out to about 10,000 feet and give a broader macro outline of the major changes and shifts, rather than getting down into the nitty-gritty

like we normally do. So it's going to be sort of like an end-of-chapter summary, as such. Okay? Okay. Let's go. We pick up in the year 581, and China is in the middle of being reunited into a single political entity after some 400 years of near constant civil warfare. This was, rather self-evidently, no mean feat. One does not simply reunify China after four centuries of ethnic strife. But thoroughly ignoring this truism, Yang Jian, the Duke of Sui, who had first served as the Minister of Defense and later on as the Imperial Regent to the state of Northern Zhou, well, he went right ahead and did it anyway. After winning widespread favor by abolishing many of the more cruel and wasteful policies of the recently dead Emperor Xuan, Yang Jian would stay on as the Regent of Northern Zhou for all of about a year, until at last he got tired of playing babysitter to the juvenile

Emperor Jing, overthrew him and his dynasty in a grand ceremony, then had the deposed six or seven-year-old covertly assassinated along with almost 60 members of his imperial family, and then acted shocked, just shocked, that such a thing had happened. I mean, how could this possibly have come to pass? In typical fashion, the new dynasty took the name of the old duchy, and so Yang Jian was enthroned as the founding emperor of the Sui dynasty, as Emperor Wen. With that, Wen and his new Sui turned to deal with the last object in the way of a fully unified China, that pesky Chen dynasty down south of the Yangtze River. Well, Emperor Wen took a page from the strategy that had seen the end of the Three Kingdoms era

and built ships, lots of ships, big ships. And then in 588, once his shiny new fleet was ready to go, they set sail down the Yangtze and alongside half a million strong strike force from the north rolled over anything the Chun could send against them. In less than a year, the Sui troops entered the southern capital of Jiankang, which is today Nanjing, and razed it to the ground. With the reunification war over at last, Emperor Wen got it into his head that massive,

huge megaprojects were the order of the day, specifically the renovation and expansion of the Grand Canal Network that would ultimately link the south to the north and the capital to everywhere else. That would all be well and good, except for the fact that the peasantry was going to be making it, in forced corvée labor gangs, for a goodly portion of any given year. And that forced labor had the unfortunate tendency of killing about half of whoever was conscripted. But in spite of that little detail, and the fact that the taxes were higher than most people might have really liked,

all in all the people were happy enough just to not finally be engaging in civil war, so they generally just grinned and bore it. Emperor One would, all in all, reign for a grand total of 23 years, and in spite of the expensive and dangerous megaprojects, his would have been remembered as an almost perfect period of rule, were it not for one pesky little detail, which was, to be sure, his attempted conquest of the Korean peninsula, which ended in a dismal failure and christening one of the overriding traditions that would mark the Sui monarchy, disastrously titanic military defeats in Korea. With one's death in 604, it would be his son, Yang Guang, who would replace him on the throne, amid long-standing allegations that he'd actually killed dear old dad in order to take the

top job ahead of schedule. Yang Jian would, conveniently enough for us, be remembered as Emperor Yang, and his 14-year-long stint on the throne would involve him mainly continuing all of the projects started by dad, the Grand Canal, as well as the invasion of Korea, as well as starting in on yet another taxing megaproject, the reconstruction of the Great Wall, which had been in a state of disrepair and neglect since the disintegration of the Han. Like the Grand Canal, the wall's reconstruction was exceptionally dangerous work, and over the course of the project, some sources estimate that it may have cost the lives of as many as six million laborers. Yang was the kind of guy who liked to follow in the footsteps of father,

and so, ever the dutiful son, he would repeat dad's invasion of Korea, with similarly disastrous results. But he also went one further, and commenced with an invasion of the kingdoms to the south of China as well, specifically Champa, in what is today southern Vietnam. Unfortunately for all involved, this would likewise continue a long and storied tradition, which is that northern armies trying to invade Southeast Asia uniformly get absolutely chewed through by the tropical diseases within, often before they ever even meet an enemy army. This lovely series of terrible and terribly expensive debacles managed to simultaneously bankrupt the state and throw the population into

open revolt against the throne. Though Yang tried to do the equivalent of plugging his ears and saying, la la la, I can't hear you, to anyone wishing to talk about the rebellion, he ultimately grew worried enough about it, as it continued to grow and grow and grow, that he would at last in 616 do something about it. By which I mean he decided to move south, out of Luoyang, and into the massive palace constructed at Jiangdu,

where he could sit back, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this rebellion stuff to blow over. How's that for a slice of fried gold? Well, that went about as well as the Winchester. And Young was shortly thereafter dispatched in a palace coup, strangled to death by his fed-up officials with his own silk scarf after no poison could be found. He had bankrupted the realm, killed millions of his own people in vanity projects and fruitless wars, sparked rebellions that threatened to plunge the empire back into full-blown civil war less than 50 years after it had finally been reunited, and thus definitively earned

his place on the top 10 worst emperors of all time list. Back up in the north, though, the rebellions against the corrupted, and now dead, Sui emperors had reached a fevered pitch, with one army of particular note, for our purposes, led by the father-son-daughter combo of, respectively, Duke Li Yuan of Tang, Li Shemin, and Princess Pingyang. The Li family, the duke himself a first cousin of Yang of Sui by his mother, rose in rebellion from the fortified military zone of Taiyuan in 617, with father and son riding off to the south to engage the imperial army, while Princess Pingyang stole away from the capital on her own to raise up an army for herself, comprised mostly of peasants and women.

Both Tang armies proved themselves remarkably effective against the by now shattered and demoralized Sui imperial forces, and so by winter of that same year they had managed to seize the capital itself and much of the surrounding region. The Duke of Tang initially set himself up as the regent of the puppet emperor Gong of Sui, a very temporary arrangement that would last all of about six months until word arrived at Chang'an of Yang of Sui's murder at the hands of his general. At that, Li Yuan had his little puppet Gong formally cede the throne to him, and he established the Tang dynasty on the 18th of June, 618 as the founding emperor Gao Zu, an imperial

temple name by the by that we've heard several times before because it literally means high progenitor or founder. As for poor prepubescent former Emperor Gong, he would not prove long for the world and, wouldn't you know it, would wind up dead later that fall. Whoops. Well, what are you gonna do? Emperor Gaozu's reign would be something of a middling stint, only about eight years, and much of which would be involved in the legwork of bringing all the rebellious territories and would-be warlords back into the fold in an attempt to repair the damage the second Sui Emperor had done to the empire's shaky bedrock. A large part of this would be conducted on the battlefield by his second son and the man who's often considered to be the

co-founder of the dynasty, Prince Li Shemin. But the other aspect would be conducted at home, trying to put the imperial coffers back into something of approaching working order. Initially, upon seizing the capital, in fact, it was in such a sorry state of disarray that the newly established court was forced to write new laws and decrees on the reverse sides of the old Sui edicts due to an acute paper shortage and the lack of any money to purchase more. Yeah, yikes. Moreover, over the course of the Tang Rebellion, Gaozu had been forced to nominally vassalize himself to the Guk Turk Khanate to the north in exchange for support and a promise to totally not stab him in the back while he was dealing with the Sui. Nonetheless, in short order, Gaozu would be able to flip the script on the Guk Turk

Khanate. Thanks to a combination of effective intriguing and politicking, Gaozu would be able to flip the script on the Gukturk Khanate. Thanks to a combination of effective intriguing and politicking, Gaozu was able to drive a wedge so deep into the Khanate, in fact, that it would actually split into eastern and western halves, which was far easier for the Chinese to deal with. Prince Ximing and the Tang armies would work tirelessly over the course of the next several years to either cajole, buy off, or kill any and all who were still rebelling against the Tang's new world order. This counterinsurgency strategy would be capped off by the decisive Battle of Hulao Pass in May of 621, in which not one but two key rebel warlords had massed their forces in an attempt to breach the strategic defense points between

Chang'an and Luoyang, and therefore wrest control of the capital region from the Tang's hands. Thanks to the strategy of the crown prince, the imperial army was able to outmaneuver and overwhelm the rebel force, ending in a shattering victory for the Tang, the capture of one warlord on the field, and the subsequent surrender of the second in Luoyang less than a week later. Now that was great in and of itself, but the fact was that Prince Ximing was more and more forced to contend with several of his own brothers, including the sitting crown prince who stood in the way of his ascent to the throne of Tang. That whole situation would culminate a few years later on July 2nd, 626, when Prince Ximing preemptively assassinated two of his rival brothers, including the heir, at the Xuanwu Gate of Chang'an.

Shortly thereafter, he would force his father to retire in favor of him, becoming Emperor Taizong. In spite of the rather un-Confucian method he'd employed to secure his position on the throne, Taizong would prove himself over the course of his reign to be an able, thoughtful, and dare I say, even moral ruler. In fact, assuming we can never get the time set aside to get the damn thing recorded, a few other Agora podcast members and I have a show in the works comparing and contrasting the rule of Taizong to that of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the last of the so-called

good emperors and widely acknowledged as a philosopher king. And, spoiler alert, I think Taizong would win out against old Marky Mark. But I'll let you know when and if that ever gets produced. Anyway, back to Taizong, he would prove himself such an able ruler in large part because he knew what he knew. But just as, if not much more importantly, he knew what he didn't know, and relied on a tight, trusted circle of advisors to give him their candid and honest assessments of situations. In spite of the recent final success in reuniting China under his rule, in 629, Taizong's empire would be threatened from without by the eastern Gukturk Khanate under its Ilig Khagan. After failing to secure a much-coveted

marriage alliance with the Tang imperial family, the Khagan mounted an all-out assault on the Chinese holdings of the north, prompting a massive counterpunch by the imperial army. By 630, the power base of the eastern Turks had been thoroughly crushed, and its leader, Ilig Khagan, captured and delivered in chains to the Chinese capital. In celebration of this glorious victory over one of China's long-standing foreign enemies, Taizong took center stage in a grand ceremony that would see him proclaimed, in addition to his title of the Son of Heaven, as the Heavenly Kagan of all Turks, in principle at least uniting all the peoples of the steppes and the Chinese heartland under a single divine sovereign.

Such a dramatic victory would not see the end of foreign campaigns, however, and for much of the rest of Taizong's reign, the armies of the Tang would be engaged against the likes of the Tibetan Empire, the Western Turks, the Goguryeo Koreans, and even into the deserts of the far western regions along the Tarim Basin. Many of these campaigns would end in dramatic successes and rapidly expand Chinese control over its peripheral regions to the north, south, and west. But for the whole course of his reign, like the Sui emperors before him, Goguryeo would rebuff Taizong's every attempt at conquest, up until his death in 649 after 23 years in power. Taizong would be succeeded by probably one of the most unlikely of his descendants. His son, yes, but not even close to his eldest. Crown Prince Li Zi was in fact the ninth son of Taizong.

It was only through a complex series of events involving courtly intrigue, backstabbing, exiles, and decreed suicides that he be named the heir to the throne in 643. And even that had initially been intended only as a temporary placeholder until a more permanent heir could be found. That replacement, however, never came to pass, and so when Taizong died some six years later, it was Li Zi who ascended the throne as Emperor Gaozong. The first half of Gaozong's reign we can chalk up more or less as retaining the overall infrastructure and thus functionality of his father's reign, thanks in large part to the bureaucrats and the bureaucratic mechanisms at play themselves. Together they would continue to spin on and just do their jobs,

even as Gaozong himself proved very much unable to fill in his father's imperial shoes. This situation would be further complicated by the joining of the imperial harem by one Wu Menyang, a former servant of Taizong, whom Gaozong had become very enamored with during his stint as imperial heir. Against all propriety, Gaozong called concubine Wu out of her position within a Buddhist monastery following Taizong's death, as was custom, and instead reinstated her as one of his own imperial consorts. Over the first half of the 650s, then, Consort Wu would rise to the ranks of the Imperial

harem, all the while displaying both her ability to hold the attention and affection of the Emperor, as well as her ability to ruthlessly use any and all means at her disposal to get rid of her enemies and further empower herself. In 655, after accusing the Sitting Empress and the Prime Consort of witchcraft against her, she was able to supplant them both as the Empress Consort of Gaozong, and then oversaw her two rivals' immediate executions. For most women, that would have been the endgame, but for Empress Wu, it would only be the beginning. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such.

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The French Revolution today. Or simply search for The French Revolution. Like his father before him, Gaozong did inherit the long-standing obsession with bringing Goguryeo to heel. In 658, the southern Korean kingdom of Silla requested Chinese aid against the two other peninsular powers, which gave Gaozong the prerogative he needed to launch a new round of invasions. Only this time, rather than only trying to invade from the north through Liaodong and Manchuria, now with Silla as an ally, the Tang planned to pinch Goguryeo from both sides, which proved itself to be a markedly more effective strategy. The smaller ally of Goguryeo, the Baekje Kingdom, fell and was occupied in 660 in spite of a Japanese navy sent to aid the Koreas, and thereafter it would be used as a staging point for further

pushes into Goguryeo proper. Nevertheless, in spite of this far more favorable position, it would still take the Tang Empire a further eight years to subdue the North Korean power and capture Pyongyang. Back at the palace, though, the Empress Wu had used this time period to shore up her own personal political power, and more and more came to dominate her weak-willed and easily controlled husband. By 665, she had achieved de facto co-equal rulership with her husband, and the two even sat together at official court proceedings, albeit with the Empress hidden behind a silk curtain. From this point on, the pair began to be referred to as the Two Saints. At the Empress's behest, the following year would see the completion of a ceremony that hadn't been carried out for more than 400 years, the sacrifices of Feng and Shan atop

the holy Mount Tai. Signaling her total domination over her husband, Empress Wu would actually accompany the emperor to the top of the mountain and perform the rite alongside him, declaring together to heaven and earth that China had achieved peace and prosperity within and without, and that the emperor, along with his empress, wished to let heaven know of this great achievement. Such a momentous event was witnessed by emissaries ranging from as far away as the Umayyad Caliphate to the west and Japan to the east. By the 760s, Emperor Gaozong's health increasingly began to falter, and as it declined over the course of the decade, Empress Wu began to take more complete control of the government's

mechanisms. Gaozong's frequent debilitating headaches eventually turned into a series of strokes, which some have posited may have been the result of long-term, low-grade poisoning by the Empress herself. Regardless of the reason, though, this left him definitively out of action for months and sometimes even years on end. Will would use her nearly complete lock on power to begin instituting a series of political purges aimed at rooting out any and all who might oppose her, including her own son, the sitting crowned prince, whom she probably poisoned. Primarily, though, this purge was directed at essentially gutting the bureaucratic officialdom which so opposed her and her personal style of rule. As she ruthlessly began to cut through

the aristocratic nobility that ran the state mechanism, she supplanted it with a system based on the old, but currently disfavored idea of using a meritocratic testing system to fill ministerial roles in government. In late 683, Emperor Gaozong at last succumbed to his illness and died at the age of just 55. The throne would be passed to his seventh son, the third by Empress Wu, and the eldest who yet survived, the utter wet noodle that was Li Xian, aka Emperor Zhongzong. Except, what's this? He did something without the explicit approval of Mommy Dearest, and in less than two months, Zhongzong was deposed by the Empress Dowager and sent packing to the Borderlands in disgrace and exile, as she had so many before him.

Next up was her fourth son, Li Dan, aka Emperor Rui Zhong. Likewise, a complete pushover, but at least he was smart enough not to get lippy with Mom and so managed to stick around a bit longer than Big Brother Zhongzong had. He would last a full six years on the throne, albeit locked inside his own palace under constant threat that his friends and family could be executed by mom at any time and not even allowed to go play ball out in the yard with his friends before dinner. But at last, Empress Wu decided that ruling through her sons was completely passe, and so suggested to Ruizong that he should write her a letter asking her to take the throne. And so he did, and she

accepted. Thus, on the 16th of October, 690, Empress Wu became Emperor Wu Zetian, and the Tang was officially reformatted into the Zhao Dynasty. She was at this point 66 years old, and just kicking into high gear. For the next decade and a half, Emperor slash Empress Regnant, Wu, would single-handedly dominate every aspect of the imperial mechanism, taking on boy toy lovers and then casting them aside when she tired of them, and just generally making every red-blooded Confucian pull their beard hairs out in shock and consternation that a woman could and would do such a thing. Nevertheless, though she'd renamed the dynasty,

she nevertheless inherited all of its problems, political, financial, and military, that had faced the Tang in the run-up to her usurpation. For one, the tax system was a complete mess by this point, and the Tang economy had been running on fumes for decades now, which meant that when the Tibetans came a-knocking from the western highlands, and the Turks started rabble-rousing in the northwest, and the Khitan tribes came riding down from the northeast, the Zhou political order was at pains to pay for border defense. Fortunately for China and Empress Wu, the Tibetans collapsed into a civil war,

the Khitan were militarily defeated, and the Turks were far more interested in raiding than conquest. The Tang-slash-Zhou political order would remain intact. Empress Wu's ultimate undoing would be her favoritism and purported extensive sexual liaisons with the Zhang brothers, to whom she granted tremendous political power. They abused this as much as they possibly could, until the remaining imperial officials simply couldn't take it anymore. By the spring of 705, after being pardoned by the aged and ailing empress for the umpteenth

time, the Zhang brothers finally broke the camel's back. A cabal of military officers, government officials, and the former emperor Zhang Zong stormed the empress's private quarters in Luoyang, dragged the Zhang brothers into the courtyard, and then cut off their heads. The 81-year-old sovereign, woken by the commotion, came out of her palace, approached the armed retinue, and then harshly castigated all present before turning around and going back to bed, fully knowing that her reign was over. Zhongzong would have his second stint as emperor of the now-restored Tang dynasty beginning on February 23rd, 705. However, Zhongzong's wife, Empress Wei, quickly proved herself to be Empress Wu 2.0 and quickly dominated her husband just as

thoroughly as Mom ever had, especially once Wu Zetian died in December of that same year. The Tang imperial court quickly descended into a brutal game of three-way political chess between Empress Wei, Wu's daughter the Taiping princess, who was also just like her mother in the scheming department, and the other former emperor, Ruizong, all while Zhongzong did what he did best and sat impotently on the throne looking pretty, Ruizong, all while Zhongzhong did what he did best and sat impotently on the throne looking pretty. Zhongzhong's second reign would last a mere five years before he died in 710, probably poisoned by his own empress, Wei. One of his sons was placed on the throne, but that wouldn't last through the end of the month, as a combined force backed by the

Taiping princess and the former emperor Ruizong, but commanded by a mutual clansman of theirs, Li Longji, stormed the palace, murdered the empress dowager and the child emperor, and once again sat Ruizong on the throne on the 21st of July. The first major decision Ruizong had to make for his second stint on the throne was who his heir should be. The choice was obvious, it should be his eldest son, but in typical Ruizong fashion, he waffled and managed to make absolutely no decision whatsoever. At this, his eldest son, But in typical Rae Jong fashion, he waffled and managed to make absolutely no decision whatsoever. At this, his eldest son, no doubt well aware just how badly things tended to work out for the guy sitting in the big chair, wrote a letter to his dad saying,

Hey, thanks, but no thanks. That left the Klansman, who had so distinguished himself by killing a woman, her attendants, and a 15-year-old kid in a political mass murder just weeks earlier, Li Longji, to be named as heir to the throne. This decision finally laid at his feet. Reizong would then go on to do his best impression of a wallflower for the subsequent two years before he was at last relieved to be informed that there was a comet passing through the sky heralding the end of an imperial reign. Jumping at the chance, he said, no one has to kill me if I just give the throne away,

and passed the throne to Crown Prince Li Longji, just as fast as he could. Longji would become Emperor Xuanzong of Tang. And so here we come to the big kahuna of the Tang Dynasty. In all, Xuanzong would reign for more than 43 years, the longest in the entire 289-year-long dynastic period. Moreover, his would, even more than that of Taizong before him, really proved to be the Golan era of Tang China. Inflation, which had run rampant under the likes of Gaozong, Empress Wu, and her two wet noodle sons, was at last curbed and the economy stabilized. The imperial court was curbed of its worst excesses and expenditures. Executions were brought way, way down, including its outright abolition in 747 by imperial

decree. And once again again imperial officials were listened to and felt that they could speak and advise frankly and forthrightly without fear of being cast out to the fringes of the empire or face torture and mutilation at the hands of secret police forces for their troubles. In an attempt to maintain and moreover continue the expansion of the Chinese frontier, which had by this point been expanded to its greatest extent since the highest highs of the great Han Dynasty nearly half a millennium before. While at the same time attempting to rein in the cost of such a massive operation for the central bureaucracy, Shenzong's chief ministers

would wind up pursuing a series of policies that would see their ultimate undoing. In essence, step by step, they began deregulating the military and decoupling it from the central administration's direct oversight and control. Instead, the central civilization of the Chinese heartland would be surrounded and protected by a system known as jiedushi, which is to say the borderlands were occupied and administered by protectorate armies, which would be regionally controlled by their own military governor-generals. Now, ostensibly, these governor-generals were themselves to be answerable to the central body politic, and for the most part they were, but you only really need one slip-up to

ruin your whole soup, don't you? This backsliding would begin at about the furthest point one could possibly get from the Chinese capital and still claim to be in China, and that was the Chinese half of Transoxiana in the far western regions of Central Asia. All those little tribes, city-states, and minor kingdoms constantly quarreled. And so it was in 751, when two petty kings got into a quarrel, and one king went running to the Tang protectorate army of the far west for aid. That was normal enough, except the other Transoxianian king went running the other direction and started begging another Asian power for their help. It was the Abbasid Caliphate, which had only just recently completed its conquest of the Umayyads. The two armies clashed

along, or near enough to, the Talus River in what is today modern Kazakhstan, and the Chinese army was dealt a decisive and embarrassing defeat. By itself, this battle was so little regarded and unimportant, though, that it almost escapes mention in most of the contemporary histories from either perspective. By itself, it was just a pebble rolling down a hill, but this particular pebble would presage the rock slide that was to follow. The next major military mess that would follow on the heels of Talus would be the decision by the Southern Protectorate General to commence with an invasion of the seamy jungles of southern China. And as was tradition, some 70 to 90% of the Chinese troops sent in never emerged again, having essentially had their faces melted off Indiana Jones style by the

tropical diseases they encountered. This would prove to be a bit more troubling than Talus, because it meant that what was supposed to be the major counterbalancing force for, oh, I don't know, let's say the Northeastern Protectorate Army were to start a rebellion, was now thoroughly underpowered and ill-equipped to deal with this completely hypothetical rebellion. In 755, that hypothetical became a horrifying reality when the Governor General of the Northeast Protectorate, An Lushan, did what everyone had been pretty well screaming for the past half decade that he was going to do, and launched a full-scale rebellion against the Tang Empire. While it does remain up in the air as to what his real aims really were, they definitely weren't what he first said that they were,

which was that he was only acting in the interest of the throne by trying to depose the Prime Minister with whom he had had long-standing beef. In a blitzkrieg rivaling even that of the Wehrmacht, the army of An Lushan rolled southward, barreling through Hebei province and capturing the secondary capital of Luoyang in less than a month. Once there, General An declared what was probably his real strategy, the formation of a new dynasty, which he called the Yan. Well, that would seem bad enough, but it would be compounded later that year when, in a supreme act of stupidity, the Tang prime minister ordered the last line of defense out of its impenetrable fortification within the Tongguan Pass, which was the only real way to move

an army from Luoyang to Chang'an, or vice versa, and ordered them onto the offensive. They were caught in the open and eradicated by the Yan rebel army shortly thereafter, thus paving the way for the rebels to advance onto the now unguarded primary capital at Chang'an. Realizing how deeply they'd just screwed themselves with that little maneuver, the entire imperial government and anyone else who could abandoned the city just days ahead of the rebel front lines and fled southward towards Chengdu and Sichuan, far to the south. But only a couple of days into the trip,

the imperial retinue and its bodyguard was stopped at a waystation called Ma Wei Outpost by a group of Tibetan emissaries. When the prime minister attempted to speak with them and tell them that they had no food to give and they needed to let the imperial retinue pass, the latent tensions within the army boiled over. Blaming Prime Minister Yang for this whole situation,

and not at all unjustly, it should be said, the Tang bodyguard stormed forward, accused the prime minister of collusion with the enemy foreign agents, and killed him and his son on the spot. They then went on to demand the life of his sister, one of Emperor Shenzong's favorite consorts, and seeing that there was no other option, the aged emperor reluctantly accepted this demand and she was strangled.

Emperor Shenzong would continue on at full speed to Chengdu, but ordered his son and heir, Li Heng, to stay behind to explain the plan to those following the imperial retinue, and then to head northward and attempt to mount a resistance to the rebel advance. Once arriving at the northwestern garrison of Lingwu, the crown prince was persuaded to unilaterally declare himself the new emperor regnant and send word to his father that he was now the retired emperor. Xuanzong responded in the affirmative by simply sending the imperial regalia to his son in replacement. Li Hung would thereafter be known as Emperor Suzong. In order to effectively cobble together a force capable of turning the tide of the war against An Lushan, Su Zong was forced to turn to both Arabs and Ferganans of the far west,

as well as an offshoot of the Turks that had stitched together its own Khanate through conquest in recent years, called the Uyghurs. The promised price was steep indeed, but Su Zong's generals and representatives were able at last to convince the foreign powers to aid it against the Yan rebels. In short order, the combined Tang-Uyghur army was able to turn the tide and recapture first Chang'an and then Luoyang in 757. That same year would see the beginning of the implosion of the so-called Yan dynasty, starting with the murder of the both mentally and physically ill An Lushan with the consent of his son in January of that year. The younger An would take the throne just in time to see the Tang retake the two capitals and force the Yan armies back

north into Hebei. There, An the younger would himself be betrayed and murdered by his general, Shi Siming, who seized the throne and managed to re-retake Luoyang, only for his son, Shi Chaoyi, to order his death in 761 after the father threatened to have the son and his lieutenants all killed. The following year, 762, Emperor Suzong became ill and died, passing the throne to his son, Crown Prince Li Yu, who became Emperor Daizong that May. And it would be under Daizong that the final holdout, Yan Fortress, was at last seized in December of 762, and the ruinous war brought to a final conclusion early the following spring with the suicide of Sichao Yi as imperial forces closed in around him. It was a victory,

but a very costly one. The Tang Empire had effectually ceded sovereignty of Hebei to the regional governors, it had lost control of the Gansu Corridor to the west and thus was cut off from its far western holdings, and had been thoroughly depopulated to an extent never seen before, losing from its census recordings as many as 36 million people to death, displacement, or fleeing from a population high of more than 50 million just prior to the war. And so, there we have it, more or less, at least. The sweep of nearly two centuries condensed into an easily digestible 40-ish minute podcast. China's gone from disunited warring factionalism to United State, to boring factions to United State, to warring factions, and now back to United State. Oh, if only it were just that simple. Regardless, the grandeur of the Tang

dynasty has, sadly, reached its zenith, and following the conclusion of the Anshi Rebellion that tore it apart both politically and ethnically, it will never again reach the high highs of the likes of Taizong or Xuanzong's period of rule. Alas, going forward, we are going to be slipping ever downward, where the best a regime can hope to do is to staunch the bloodloss temporarily, where warlordism, tribalism, and regionalism will more and more trump national unity, and we will spend the next century and a half spiraling ever closer to the black hole that is, once more, complete social collapse and civil

war. Thanks for listening. 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.