The History of China - #106 - Tang 19: Not Quiet on the Western Front

Episode Date: August 7, 2016

You would think that finally quelling the largest rebellion on Earth would by the realm back into peaceful harmony. Unfortunately for the Tang, you’d be wrong. While China was forced to spend every waking moment in the Northeast desperately trying to drive back An Lushan for the past 7 years, the Tibetans went ahead and moved in from the West, cutting off Chinese access to the Far West Protectorate, and by 763 poised to deliver a devastating broadside to the already-devastated Tang Empire. And as if that’s not enough, in the middle of all this, a loyal military commander has false accusations of treason leveled against him by a paranoid regional official, but then through a series of zany happenstances is forced to actually rebel against the government for fear of being convicted and killed for the initial false charges. This is why we can’t have nice things… Time Period Covered: 763~770 CE Major Historical Figures: Tang Empire: Emperor Daizong of Tang (Li Yu) [r. 762-779] Crowned Prince Li Kuo General Guo Ziyi, Guard Commander of Chang’an General Pugu Huai’en [d. 765] Luo Fengxian, Imperial Eunuch Official Xin Yunjing, Governor of Hedong Yu Chao’en, Commander of the Army of Divine Strategy [d. 770] Tibetan Empire: Tsenpo Trisong Detsen Uyghur Khaganate: Tengri Bögü Khagan (Qutlugh Tarqan Sengün) Major Works Cited: Chamney, Lee (2012). “The An Shi Rebellion and Rejection of the Other in Tang China, 618-763.” University of Alberta. Dalby, Michael T. (1979). “Court Politics in Late Tang Times” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3. Liu, Xu. (945). Jiu Tang Shu. Ouyang, Xiu (1060), (tr. Colin Mackerras, 2004) “The History of the Uyghurs” in Xin Tang Shu. Sima, Guang. (1084). Zizhi Tongjian. Wang, Bing-Wen (2012). “A Tragedy of Marriage and Politics: the Puku Huai’-en Rebellion” in New History Journal (新史學雜誌). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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her own homepage, unapologeticcapitalist.com, or otherwise find her wherever the finest podcasts are on tap. And now, enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 106, Not Quiet on the Western Front. Hello everyone, and welcome back to our regularly scheduled narrative episode. When last we spoke, both in the narrative and where we left off in the retrospective, we had just finished out the An Lushan Rebellion in the year 763,

which had been immediately preceded the year prior by the death of Emperor Suzong in 762, whose six-year stint on his mobile throne had been spent in its entirety trying to stamp out the fires of rebellion. He had been succeeded by his eldest son, Crown Prince Li Yu, who at the age of 36 acceded to the throne as Emperor Daizong. So, just to be clear here, Daizong is the grandson of Xuanzong, the emperor under whom the whole period of rebellion kicked off a mere seven years ago. Daizong had begun his reign well enough, and was able to carry the Tang standard that final yard, and with the overwhelming assistance of the Uyghur Khanate, to whom you may recall the Tang Empire had pretty much been forced to vassalize itself beneath in order to secure the steppe riders' military support, had surrounded

and then forced the suicide of the final rebel Yan monarch, Shi Chaoyi. Still, taken on the whole, Daizong's reign was, by all accounts, little more than a 16-year-long stint of a sad trombone sound effect. Professor Dalby, for instance, writes, quote, Daizong was not the sort of man capable of producing a dramatic improvement in the court's position, end quote. Nevertheless, in spite of the profound relief that must have come from at last stamping out the Anshu rebellion, that sentiment would prove brief indeed. The total focus of the Tang Empire had, by necessity, been focused on the northeast of Hebei, but that would prove to have consequences all its own, most especially from the west

and, you guessed it, the Tibetans. The Tang Empire had been lucky, in a relative sense at least, that the Anshui Rebellion had broken out precisely when it did. Why, you might ask? Because almost at the same time, the Tibetan Empire had itself been locked into a civil war all its own. And going off on a tangent for a moment, zooming way out to Asia as a whole, it's interesting to note just how many major world rebellions seem to have occurred just about exactly the same time here in the mid-8th century. We had the Uyghur Rebellion

in 742, the Abbasid Rebellion breaking out in 747, the Tibetan Revolt of 755, not to mention the on-again-off-again uprisings of the Khitan and Shi tribes of the northeast that had immediately preceded the An Lushan Rebellion. It just goes on and on and on. Taken on the whole, it seems pretty clear that the mid-8th century was a period of considerable instability for much of Central and Eastern Asia. Anyway, the Tibetan internal conflict had staved off his simultaneous invasion from the far west over the course of the Anshu Rebellion, which, had it happened like that, probably would have spelled the end of the Tang regime then and there. But the newly crowned Tibetan Sanpo, or Emperor, had managed to get his ducks in a row and quell

his own rebellion by the following year. Tang China, meanwhile, had at this point another six years or so of rebellion to contend with, and had pulled virtually all of its military strength from the far western protectorate. This essentially would allow the Tibetans to simply roll in and start taking city after city at their leisure, which, as you can probably guess right now, is exactly what they did. Professor Dalby writes, Fighting along the border was endemic in the 730s and 740s. After the outbreak of the Anlushan Rebellion, the Tibetan king, Chisong Detsen, decided to take advantage of China's internal troubles. He ordered his cavalry forward in a gradual advance through the Tang circuits of Longyu and Hexi, which lay in what are now eastern Gansu and Qinghai provinces, end quote. In other words, Tibet began gobbling up the borderlands between the two empires,

critically, including China's one and only route to the westernmost holdings, the Gansu Corridor, and there was nothing the Tang court could do about it. Year after year, almost like clockwork, the Tibetan armies would press a bit further and seize a few more cities along China's steadily retreating western borders. By 763 then, again the year after the conclusion of the Anshi Rebellion, the Tibetan armies were by then heavily entrenched within the western border of the Guanne Circuit, which was the circuit it should be said that directly abutted the capital region itself to the northwest. Nevertheless, in spite of this creeping incursion from the west, the Tang court almost seemed not

to notice, or at least didn't take the looming threat very seriously at all. Dalby explains and says, quote, the Tang court did not take the Tibetan threat seriously enough, probably because China was also under foreign pressure from the tribes in the Ordos area and, at least psychologically, from the Uyghurs as well. End quote. It would be 763, though, that would finally break the Tang court out of its malaise regarding the Tibetans, by means of sheer shock and awe. Late in the year, the city prefect of Binzhou opened his city gates to the Tibetan forces, who then occupied the city as a forward staging point.

Binzhou, though not terribly remarkable in and of itself, was nevertheless a terrifying loss for the Tang court because the city stood only 125 kilometers from Chang'an, and thus provided a near-perfect forward operation space for an attack on the now at this point twice-sacked capital city. Daizong, taking a page from his grandfather, answered this threat in the true spirit of Xuanzong, and immediately fled the city along with his court, tail tucked firmly between his legs. As for the rest of the city's populace, noble and common alike, they were left to fend for themselves. Though by this point, I can only assume they must have just been like, oh what, this again? Even the defense force that Daizong did manage to leave behind to protect the city, which was led by the general Guo Zeyi and the crown prince himself, took a look around and said

well screw this, and then also retreated from Chang'an ahead of the now inevitable Tibetan attack. And attack the Tibetans did! In the 11th month of 763, their cavalry swept into the by now almost entirely abandoned city and proceeded to loot and burn it at their leisure for the next two weeks. All those lovely, newly reconstructed buildings that had so recently been erected to replace the ones that had just been burned down to rubble the last time the city was taken by An Lushan were now once again reduced to ash and rubble.

And then, just to add insult to injury, the Tibetans went ahead and managed to rustle up a brother of one of the Chinese princesses that had been married off to the Tibetan Emperor 50 years ago, by this time a truly ancient old man, and mockingly placed him on the throne as their puppet Chinese Emperor. It was a truly embarrassing and costly defeat, but the Tibetan capture of Chang'an would not last long. At the end of their two-week plunder orgy, the Crown Prince and General Guo's Defense Force was at last able to recapture the capital and send a message to the emperor hiding out in Shanzhou, which was a town halfway between Chang'an and Luoyang, that it was now safe

to return. Far from being some glorious military counterstrike that forced the Tibetans out, however, it seems far more likely that, having already stripped the city bare of its valuables and then thoroughly demonstrated that the Chinese heartland was well within their grasp, the Tibetan army then simply withdrew back to Binzhou, booty in hand. When Dai Zong did at last make his way back to the fire-gutted ruin of a city, he quickly had his cousin, the Tibetan puppet emperor, executed, but that must have been a cold comfort indeed. Dalby writes, quote, Undiminished in strength, the Tibetans retired only as far as their base

camp in western Shanxi, the same place from which they had set out six months before. For the next thirteen years, until 777, the Tibetans attacked almost every autumn, which was the usual campaign season." It was a situation so predictable and so predictably dire that General Guo Ziyi sadly commented that against the might of the Tibetan forces, the Chinese defenders were little more than an easily spooked mob. For much of the following decade, the Tang Chinese army would be able to field less than a quarter of the soldiers the Tibetans were able to muster, thus presenting no great challenge to their annual raids. But probably the worst outcome for Chinese prospects was the loss of Longyu and its pasturelands,

some of the most fertile in the empire, and with it, access to the horses that they had bred there. The end result of this crippling loss to the Chinese cavalry was that the Tang court was forced to become even more dependent on the Uyghur Khanate and the cavalry support it so generously offered, at insanely inflated exchange rates, of course. But at least in terms of indignity, the worst was yet to come. And it came that year, 764, in the form of one of the Tang dynasty's own war heroes, the man who had almost single-handedly secured the Uyghur Khan's aid against An Lushan, and then convinced them not to destroy the capital city when they had retaken Chang'an on the emperor's behalf back in 762. I'm talking about General Pugu Huayan.

In the course of the Anshi Rebellion's denouement, General Pugu had been ordered in his capacity as imperial liaison to the Uyghurs to personally escort the Khagan and his retinue back to the steppelins, as part of a larger demobilization of auxiliary forces in 763. The war party had entered Hadong province, headed northwest, when that plan would go straight to hell. The governor of Ha Dong, for reasons Dalby says are not entirely clear, out and out refused to grant the general and the khan the expected and customary cash of rations for an allied

army in transit. He also refused to meet with Pugu or the khan and refused to play the part of host to the retinue. Now, in spite of the reason for this not being fully understood, we can make some educated guesses. We know, for instance, that by this point, the Chinese were extremely distrusting of foreigners and or barbarians, to the point that they'd been willing to use the excuse of even being seen talking to a group of Tibetans as pretext to kill the Chancellor Yang Guozhong back in episode 102. Then tack on to that the fact that there would have been a widespread paranoia that a very powerful military commander like General Pugu

might be in cahoots with a foreign power and might, you know, turn around with that power and strike at the empire, since after all that had literally just happened. Whatever his reasons, the governor of He Dong went one further than simply withholding rations from the Uyghur army as it transited across his territory. He then out and out accused General Pugu of intending treason against the Tang throne. The formal accusation reached Emperor Dai Zong, and he took this apparent threat quite seriously and ordered a full-scale investigation into the allegations to be conducted by one of his eunuch servants, surnamed Luo. In the summer of 763, Luo made his way to the Hedong provincial capital, Taiyuan City, and met with the governor regarding the accusations he had filed against General Pugu. The governor repeated his accusations and then paid a bribe to the eunuch official.

As Agent Lo, bribe in hand and ear now firmly bent, made his way back to Chang'an to deliver his reports, he made a stop in Fen Prefecture, which was controlled by none other than General Pugu and where his mother lived. Mother and son insisted that they play host to Luo and then threw him a grand feast complete with lively singing and dancing. Luo was apparently impressed enough that

he presented a gift to General Pugu, who then insisted that the eunuchs stay for a day further, since it would then be the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. Luo declined, however, saying that he must make for the capital without delay. But Pugu, in a baffling misguided attempt to apparently show just how sincere his request for the eunuch to stay for the holiday was, then hid the official's horse so that he'd simply have to stay. Now think about this for a moment. You roll into someone's home, a virtual stranger no less, and he lets you in, wines and dines you, and everyone has a fine time. But as you make your way down the driveway, back to your car, you realize it's disappeared, and the host is now jangling the keys in his hand and insisting that you stay the night. I think most of us would pretty quickly come to the

conclusion that we were now the subject of a horror movie. As you might imagine, Lua did not take the sudden disappearance of his horse right before he intended to ride out quite the way that Pugu had intended. Rather than thinking, oh, he must really want me to stay for the holiday, Luo instead came to the alternate and quite plausible explanation of, this dude's trying to kill me. From that perspective, his fleeing into the dark of night in an attempt to escape from Pugu's village was just a smart survival strategy. If the killer's in the house, you get out of the damn house. Meanwhile, Pugu Huayen, in reality truly just a considerate if somewhat overzealous host,

was shocked when he learned that Lowell had essentially run screaming into the night once he found his horse was missing. He seemed to have realized that his strategy of playing hide the pony with the official had rather spectacularly backfired. So he did the natural thing, which was of course to send his armed riders screaming into the night to track down and pursue the fleeing eunuch. But all just so that they could return his horse and explain that clearly there'd been some kind of a mistake. But Luo wasn't buying it,

and upon returning to Chang'an, submitted his official report corroborating the Hadong governor's accusations of Pugu planning to rebel with the Uyghur Khan. In response, the general sent an accusation of his own to Daizong, saying that Luo and the governor were clearly in cahoots against him, and that they were the ones that ought to be executed. For his part, Emperor Daizong made no action but to send mildly worded rebukes to both sides, more or less a, now now you guys, you cut that out now. Such a response, or rather lack thereof, would prove to be somewhat less than effective.

General Pugu probably didn't fully comprehend that Emperor Daizong's gentle finger-wagging had pretty much just saved his life and position, but instead to see it only from the perspective that the Emperor was not taking action as he had demanded either. So he sent another, even more strongly worded letter that read something like a sarcastic rebellious teen would send to his mom after she didn't let him stay out past curfew. He said, and I am paraphrasing here, oh I see how it is. Let me tell you about my crimes. I confess to having defeated rebellious tribes for you. I confess to believing in the Tang regime so strongly that I was even willing to kill my own son in order to encourage the army to victory. I confess to marrying my own daughter to the Uyghur

king to buy you the army that, oh yeah, won you the war. It went on and on and on like this. And then Pugu followed up his pretty epic rant with statements to the effect of the eunuch bureau has become far too powerful and the soldiers aren't being paid nearly enough, which, let's be honest,ary to meet with Pugu to let him plead the case in person, and that the general would even be willing to accompany the emissary back to Chang'an so that he could pay proper obeisance to the throne. The emissary duly arrived, and after tearfully explaining how this whole thing had all gone so wrong and how he was innocent of the charges leveled by the governor and the eunuch who were clearly out to get him, General Pugu then made ready to journey back to the Tang capital at the emissary's side. But then, at the last minute, he changed his mind when one of his lieutenant generals pointed out that going back to the capital was potentially walking straight into the tiger's

mouth if Daizong intended to order his execution. Thus, the emissary was forced to head back to Chang'an by himself and left with no option but to say that, oh, by the way, you remember how Pugu said that he'd come with me to prove that he wasn't going to rebel? Yeah, he changed his mind. From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg. From the Emancipation Proclamation to Appomattox Courthouse. From the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877. From Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. To Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history.

I'm Rich. And I'm Tracy. And we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era, 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. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. The situation that we're setting up here is almost a textbook case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A loyal military commander has false accusations of treason leveled against him by a paranoid regional official, but then, through a series of zany happenstances, is forced to actually rebel against the government for fear of being convicted and killed for the initial false charges. The initial face-off between Pugu Huai'en and Emperor Daizong would not at first prove violent. Though the two armies faced each other down from Fun Prefecture and Chang'an, respectively. The emperor once again tried to diffuse this situation in as conciliatory a fashion as he could. Namely, he offered General Pugu a promotion to the highest ceremonial government post in the empire. If only he'd come to the capital and show that he remained a loyal servant of the regime.

But Pugu must have felt that he couldn't trust any such promises, and so was forced to decline. He had chosen his path, and no honeyed words potentially hiding a dagger for his heart would sway him from that course. And so it was that hostilities between General Pugu's army and the Tang Empire would break out in early 764, when the general sent a detachment led by his eldest son to attack the Hedong provincial capital, Taiyuan. Now, if up until this point you've been thinking to yourself, Taiyan, Taiyan, haven't we talked about that before?

You're right, because it's the city that the founder of the whole Tang dynasty, Duke Li Yuan, aka Emperor Gaozu, based his rebellion against the Sui from, in no small part because the city was virtually impregnable to attack. So, guess what happened when Pugu the Younger was sent to attack it? Correct, it proved to be impregnable to attack, and the assault was a miserable failure. Such a miserable failure, in fact, that in the aftermath of this fiasco, in the middle of a heated argument between Han and non-Han soldiers within the regiments, the Han Chinese soldiers straight up murdered their commander Pu Gu the younger. When the general learned of this, in fact,

he informed his own mother of this tragic outcome, and she, enraged and no doubt broken-hearted that he had committed their family to this course of rebellion in spite of her objections, tried to kill Huai'en then and there. He escaped, however, and left his mother behind before withdrawing with his army to Lingwu in the west. There, now with no other options, he entered into negotiations with none other than the Tibetan Empire to enlist their army as his allies against the Tang army. Dalby writes,

Pugu's principal allies were the Tibetans, who were ready to attack Chang'an and needed only skilled leadership with inside knowledge of China in order to sweep to a grand victory. Some Uyghur mercenaries joined them as well. This nucleus grew into an enormous army that in the autumn of 764 terrorized the people living in the western approaches of the Chinese capital. There was an attempt to storm the great walled city in early winter of 764, but the commander of the city defenses, General Guo Ziyi, was able to stave it off. Beaten back, but undeterred, Pugu, the Tibetans, and the Uyghurs withdrew to their winter quarters to plan the next campaign season strategy.

That would come by the midpoint of the next year, when preparations had been laid, the strategy finalized, and the troops made ready. The final strike against the beating heart of Tang China was about to commence. General Pugu's strategy was as bold as it was to be effective. Draw the Chinese defenders out onto the field, and then envelop the defending army and attack them from the flanks, before marching on Chang'an, seizing the capital, and with it the regime for himself and his allies. But then, he died. Or, as Dalby put it, Pugu, quote, suddenly dropped dead in his camp, end quote, on the eve of the Great Attack, September 27th, 765. Immediately, the whole of the operation, and the army itself for that matter, was thrown into utter disarray. In the midst of this inauspicious and unexpected loss of their principal commander, the Tang

defending general Guo sent messages to the Uyghur elements of the rebel army, entreating them that if they were simply to withdraw back to their own lands, this whole unfortunate incident could simply be chalked up as a mistake to be forgiven and forgotten. No harm, no foul. The Uyghurs seem to have pretty much shrugged their shoulders and said, yeah, okay, that works for us. And then ridden off into the sunset, leaving Pugu's army and the Tibetans hanging out to dry.

The Tibetan army, not knowing what exactly had just happened, but fearing that there was some devious deception on the part of the Tang and Uyghurs together, decided to cut their losses as well and to retreat, which then left Pugu's corps of rebels twisting in the wind all by their lonesome. With themselves nowhere to retreat, no commander now, and all of a sudden vastly outnumbered by the imperial army, the rebels surrendered en masse and were taken captive. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of this thoroughly unexpected victory

over what had just been looking like the second coming of An Lushan, the propaganda machine within the capital went into overdrive, attributing the regime's change in fortune to nothing less than divine intervention itself. And perhaps it was. It's not every day, after all, that a rebel leader is just struck dead on the eve of his conquest. In any event, the would-have-been Pugu Huay-An rebellion served not only as a propaganda tool for the Tang, but essentially served as something of a wake-up call for many within the regime's upper echelons. Pugu's treachery, after all, hadn't just sprung up out of nowhere, but had been forced by the actions, and in some cases conspicuous inactions, of the government as a whole. Puga's abortive uprising wasn't even an isolated incident.

Rather, it was simply the largest and most immediately threatening of several instances of generals going rogue for very similar reasons. Dalby writes, Indeed, the central government helped to cause problems of this sort by allowing various private feuds to influence state affairs and by ignoring the need for consistent policies on collaboration and treason. Despite the elaborate channels established to investigate and prosecute alleged collaborators, it was quite clear that politics, and not law, was the deciding factor in a great many cases. End quote. On the one hand, it was obvious that with the right connections, even out-and-out rebel commanders could potentially skate back into the fold with

little more than a wrist slap, if even that. Heck, Hugu Huayun had been promised by the emperor himself that in spite of his convicted treason to the throne, he'd be able to not only retain his titles, but would actually be promoted to the office of Taibao, one of the highest honorific offices in the realm. So what was that supposed to mean for those who actually remained loyal and did what they were supposed to be doing, and for that were passed over for such high honors in favor of appeasing prodigal generals and rogue agents? Rumors, intrigue, and impulsive actions taken by those in the government, more and more seeking little more than their own advancement, regardless of the cost, both further sapped the regime's and the people's morale, their faith in the government as a whole,

and further degraded the dynasty's ability to actually repair the damage already done to its image and governmental structures. Into the swirling circle of shadows, rumors, and intrigue would once again step our old friends, the eunuch officials. The eunuch class had lost much of its prestige since the high highs of the Han Dynasty half a millennium prior. The warlords of the period of disunion had had little time or use for their machinations. The Sui hadn't had time to really let them dig themselves in, and the founding emperors of the Tang, seemingly having learned the lessons of the past well, had strictly forbidden eunuch slaves from holding high office.

Emperor Taizong, for instance, decreed that eunuchs were to be restricted to the status of commoner in perpetuity, and that they could hold no office of their third rank or above. Yet here in the latter half of the Tang dynasty, the eunuchs will, as a class, rise well above their once lowly station, and eventually surpass even the former high watermark of the late Han. Dalby writes, Before too long, however, these stringent early rules were under assault as the usefulness of the eunuchs became apparent to the various emperors. The department of the Inner Palace, which eunuchs had staffed from the beginning of the dynasty, but which had been concerned originally only with routine palace management,

became the biggest and most important of the offices concerned with the imperial household as a whole. This situation had particularly ballooned back in the turn of the 8th century, when Empress Wu had been handing out nominal official titles like Halloween Candy, until by the time of Xuanzong and now Daizong, the department contained more than 3,000 eunuch officials. It had been Xuanzong, over the course of his four-decade reign, who had reinstituted the practice of using eunuchs as his personal go-betweens, confidential couriers, and covert intelligence agents. But it would be his grandson, Dai Zong, in the aftermath of the Anshi Rebellion that would really open the doors back

up to eunuchs advancing their careers and interests past the glass ceiling that had been the third rank. The first of these eunuchs to seize such an opportunity had been Li Fuguo, who as you may recall had secured his high status, brief though it would prove to be, by masterminding the plot to overthrow the Empress of Suzong in the wake of the late Emperor's death, and who had secured Daizong on the throne. In spite of the fact that Daizong had pretty quickly reversed Li's rewards and had him assassinated, he would nevertheless set a number of important precedents for the eunuch class that would persist for the remainder of the Tang period. They were, for instance, control of personal access to the emperor, direct eunuch participation in the business of running the central government, provincial appointments, and even the ability

for eunuchs to intervene in the armed forces in times of successional disputes. I'm sure you'll agree that is quite the wide swath of powers acquired more or less all at once, and a big reason why classical Chinese historians, almost one at once, and a big reason why classical Chinese historians almost one at all took great care to blame the mid-century emperors for allowing the eunuch class's evil influence to once again spread across the dynastic order. But of all the power secured for the eunuchs, it was surely that last one, the use of military force, that would ultimately secure the eunuch's strength in the latter half of the Tang. That right had been effectively solidified in 763, when Emperor Daizong had fled Chang'an ahead of the Tibetan Empire's capture and sacking of the city, as we discussed earlier.

As I mentioned, he had fled to Shanzhou, where he'd been met by and placed under the protection of the Army of Divine Strategy, or Shen Zichun, which, lo and behold, was commanded by the eunuch Yu Chao'an. Now this was a most irregular situation and never would have been tolerated in one of the central imperial armies. It had only come about because the Army of Divine Strategy was actually a displaced borderlands guard force from the northwest that had been reassigned to the interior during the chaos of the Anshi Rebellion. And as we all know, things work a little differently out on the borders. Regardless of the impropriety of a eunuch in command, however, after Daizong safely returned to the capital the following year, he would show his gratitude for the army's protection and his

admiration of their strength and reliability by incorporating the Army of Divine Strategy directly into the Palace Guard Corps and retaining the eunuch commander Yu Chao'an as the force's chief officer. Such an integration into the central imperial fighting force would prove crucial to the stability and integrity of the central Tang imperial administration, however diminished that might now be. Dalby puts it, The increasing concentration of the armies on the frontiers had severely weakened the palace guards in the first half of the 8th century, and the addition of the Shenzhe troops made a dramatic difference in their fighting strength. Now, for the first time in decades, the court could field a force under its own control and no longer had to rely exclusively

on the goodwill of the loyal military governors, end quote. Commander Yu would oversee the construction of a permanent base for his Army of Divine Strategy just to the west of Chang'an proper over the course of the 760s. Nevertheless, it appears his newfound power, prestige, and wealth rather quickly went to his head. There were bound to have been plenty of detractors in the court warning the Emperor that placing a eunuch in such a position of power would not end well, and Yu Chao'en wasted little time in confirming many of their fears. He managed to push his way into areas of the government that his class was still outright banned from participating in, and where his presence was described as being regarded as a

grotesque irregularity. Amid the rising tide of complaints, eventually even Daizong came to have his own concerns, and in 770, thanks to a needlessly complicated plot that we won't get into, Yu was at last put to death, and a regular bureaucrat installed in his place as the commander of the Army of Divine Strategy. However, he had solidified the precedent of eunuchs making capable and reliable military field commanders, though admittedly, it would require another war and more than a decade for that process to be repeated. We're going to finish out today with a brief overview of the other group that came into

prominence in power during Daizong's early reign and the immediate aftermath of the Anshu Rebellion, the Financial Specialist Class. Now, if you've been listening since the beginning of this dynasty at the least, you should immediately remember why they're going to be important. But the Sparks Notes version is that the Tang regime had never really been the best with that whole economics thing, and had kept its books out of the red primarily through physical expansion. And when that failed, trying to put band-aids on the gushing monetary arteries of the state. And when that didn't work, just sticking their collective fingers in their ears and chanting, I can't hear you, I can't hear you, la la la.

And that was all well before An Lushan had killed or displaced more than half the taxable population, and then Hebei, the most densely populated and wealthiest region in the whole empire, had been effectively ceded to regional warlords. So, yeah, getting some actual economists in here might be a really good idea. Better late than never, right? The big deal with these economic specialists that differentiated them from, say, normal imperial officials was the scope of their powers. Regular officials had very defined and constrained spheres of powers

within their own little specific realm of policy, and no one stepped on anyone's toes and everyone got to feel important and happy. These new economic commissioners, on the other hand, held the authority to pretty much go wherever they wanted or needed to, and cut across established departmental boundaries into whatever others they needed to in order to coordinate government actions as a whole, enough to maybe, just maybe, stem the economic bleeding. Dalby puts it, quote, they were particularly useful for problems involving both court and provinces, the sort of thing that was too technical for the emperor's chief advisors, but also too far-reaching to be within the discretion of an ordinary administrator, end quote. So what did these economic commissioners do exactly? Well, they registered vagrant and delinquent households back into the tax books. They took personal

control of the collection and transportation of land tax revenue back into the imperial treasury. They oversaw the reimplementation of the old Han-era monopoly on salt production, which, confusingly enough, took the old Han-era title as well of Salt and Iron Commission, even though iron wasn't actually included in the monopoly anymore, because, you know, precedence beats practicality. It was the re-establishment of the salt monopoly that proved particularly effective, as evidenced as early as even a few years after its initial implementation, when it alone accounted for more than half of the total imperial revenue stream. This example serves both as a tribute to its effectiveness, as well as the dire straits the

Tang economic situation had been leading up to in the 760s. If just one monopolistic tax on one essential good can more than double your income, yeah, you were in deep trouble. This emergent class of highly skilled economic specialists would, over the course of the subsequent decades, further expand their powers and spheres of influence, all in the pursuit of trying to pull the Tang dynasty's economy out of its flaming nosedive. Those would include some solutions that might seem obvious to us today, but at the time they were quite revolutionary, including the idea of an official imperial budget to be adhered to and the implementation of property tax in addition to the old land tax.

It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, however, and there were inevitably some aspects of the Tang economic tire fire that even their powers combined couldn't quench. One of the big ones was the currency. Oh, man, the currency. As I took time to really delve into back in episode 97, the economic theories that had prevailed over the first half of the Tang were inadequate, let's just say, to effectively govern or regulate hard currency coinage over a region as vast as the Tang Empire at its height. That had changed little in

the near half-century between Xuanzong's early attempts at currency reform and the economic specialists' own attempts now in the 760s. And as such, in spite of their best efforts, the cash coin continued to prove a massive boondoggle that stymied any and all attempts to regulate or stabilize its value. All in all, though, their efforts would prove remarkably effective, and Dalby writes, quote, although they were not completely successful at their work, they managed to keep the quite dismal economic situation from becoming disastrous, end quote. They might not have been able to put out the engine fires, but they were at least able to

keep the wings attached and avoid plowing into the oncoming mountainside. And hey, two out of three ain't bad. Next time, we'll continue our tracing of the back half of Emperor Daizong's reign, as he continues to be an ineffectual nitwit over the course of the 770s, where he'll oversee the re-rise to prominence of Buddhism as a state religion, but otherwise continue to just sort of drag the whole process of national recovery down into a stagnant malaise. We'll also chronicle the rise and fall of one of the era's real-life Icaruses, the life, career, and death of the politician Yuan Cai, a man who soared just a little too close to the sun for his own good.

Thanks for listening. 400 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 Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.