The History of China - #109 - Tang 22: Innie or Outie?

Episode Date: September 22, 2016

Dezong has had it up to here with his mumbling, bumbling, stumbling courtiers and their inability to solve the empire’s problems. So he’s going to give them 3 last shots to prove the worth of the bureaucracy, and when they strike out, he’ll turn toward his private inner count to make the Tang Empire great again. Time Period: 786-795 CE Major Historical Figures: Emperor Dezong of Tang [r. 779-805] Chancellor Cui Zao (term of office: 785-787, exiled and d. 787) Chancellor Li Mi [term: 787-789, d. 789] Chancellor Dou Can [term: 789-792, d. 793 by forced suicide] Chancellor Lu Zhi [term: 792-794, exiled] Director of Finances Pei Yanling [792-796, d. 796] Major Works Cited: Dalby, Michael T. "Court Politics in Late Tang Times" in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3. Sima, Guang. Zizhi Tongjian, vol. 234, 235 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 109, Innie or Outie? It's that time of year again when the full moon hangs high in the autumn sky, and it's time to gather up the family, light lanterns to the moon goddess, Chang'e, and eat mooncakes. Actually, skip that last one. You'll thank me later. Yes, it's time to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Never mind that it's not actually quite autumn just yet. Oh, lunar calendar, you're so silly. Nevertheless, no matter where you might be, here's wishing you all a happy Zhongqiujie. Alright, let's get started.

We last left off with the court of Tang Dezong somehow managing to continue its existence and at least nominal reign over the Chinese empire, in spite of the emperor repeatedly shooting himself in the foot policy-wise, especially when it came to not goading his governors into rebellion against him. As of the year 785, Dezong and his regime had been dragged pretty thoroughly through the mud, but had managed to pull his reign out of what had seemed to have been a death spiral, albeit now lording over a fractured and thoroughly Byzantine court bureaucracy, only barely clinging itself to the edifice of control over the now more-than-ever thoroughly autonomous outlying provinces. Today, then, we're going to see Emperor Dezong's attempted solutions to his terribly fractious and dizzyingly complex court crisis, which will consist of the creation of yet

more bureaucratic mechanisms, of course. If one can fight fire with fire, who's to say you can't fight bureaucracy with yet more bureaucracy? In seriousness, though, the need for the creation of the so-called inner court, as I mentioned at the end of last episode, followed a long and storied Tang Dynasty tradition, hearkening back to the likes of Taizong, Xuanzong, and even Empress Wu. That was the need for a private body of learned scholars to act both as the sovereign's personal advocates, as well as in private a frank and unbiased reality check for

a sovereign who often found himself far removed from the practical effects of the policies he wished to enact, and whom the official court often feared to speak against lest they face harsh reprisals for overstepping the bounds of propriety. So then this inner court, or neiding, was not a part of the official body politic, but rather a subset of elite scholars and eunuch officials who acted as the personal advisors and draft writers for the emperor's wishes and edicts. The fact that it existed purely as a private entity made it especially useful to the imperial will, since it was beholden to no other official agency, and could cut through the bureaucratic red tape that hampered, and often is not outright paralyzed, so much of the regular outer court's civil and military hierarchy. Of course, this is how it started. But like its

imperial predecessors, namely the Han-Lin Academy of Shanzong and the Scholars of the Northern Gate of Empress Wu, to name a couple, its apparent usefulness will in time see it evolve into an official part of the court outright, ironically nullifying its one truly useful characteristic by rendering it a part of the Tang dynasty's bureaucratic rat's nest rather than an entity apart. Or, as they put it in the Cambridge History of China, quote, The development of the late Tang inner court was an example of a recurrent phenomenon in Chinese institutional history, namely the creation of personal imperial staffs to expedite government work. After a time, these staffs ossified and were absorbed into the bureaucracy, to be replaced, in their turn, by new personal staff. End quote. And round and round it went. Yet even in its earliest and least official

iteration, the inner court of Dezong was anything but a united or cohesive group with uniform interests. Professor Dalby writes, quote, In many, the eunuchs and the Hanlian scholars stood at opposite poles of philosophical outlook and social respectability. The former Hanlian scholars, for instance, held deep political and personal connections to their fellow scholar-officials in the differing departments of the outer court, and as such often sided with their interests as well. The eunuchs, on the other hand, social and political pariahs that they tended to be, had far less attachment to the wills and whims of the outer court, and often pursued their own narrow subset of interests instead.

The rise of the eunuch class to political power is probably best, and certainly most infamously embodied by the promotion of Dou Wanchang and Huo Xianming to the permanent dual command of the cornerstone of the central imperial military, the Army of Divine Strategy, following the emperor's safe return to Chang'an in 786 as a reward for their faithful service in his most desperate hour. That change to allowing eunuch military command of imperial armies would prove permanent this go-round, and go a long way towards cementing their position of preeminence in the later Tang reigns. Regardless of their personal connections to the members of the formal, regular governmental departments, it is clear that, as a whole, the outer court certainly viewed the inner court as a, quote,

alien body intruding itself between their own chiefs and the emperor, and thus as a great threat to their own power, end quote. Just who did these scholars think they were anyway? Barging into official functions like they own the place, listening in on conversations into which they held no rank, and purporting to act for the imperial will even while they held no title or rank? It's easy to see why the rank-and-file bureaucrat officials, who had not only spent decades passing exam after exam to be even considered for their official positions, and then often decades more slowly rising through the system by following the chain of command, might be more than a little

myth that these apparent nobodies just waltzing in and barking orders in the name of the emperor. The objects of a special ire were, as usual, the eunuchs of the inner court, who from even before its creation were subject to the intense hatred felt among the courtiers of Dezong's time. That was to be expected, of course, because since time immemorial, the eunuchs have been one of the three classes safe to hate upon to no end, the other two being foreign barbarians and women seeking political power. What Dezong likely had not seen coming, however, was that in placing his faith in eunuchs within

the inner court, he inadvertently would transfer more than a little of that latent hatred onto his own person. Dalby writes, quote, This theme was taken up by the literati historians of later times and magnified enormously. For allowing the inner court a place in court politics, Dezong has never been forgiven. End quote. This is all not to say that the inner court and its members were on the up and up all the time. They were at least as much as the inner court and its members were on the up-and-up all the time. They were at least as much as the outer court's department, and probably considerably more so, at the whims of the infamously capricious will of the emperor himself, most especially in the reigns to come.

But as for Dezong, he actually was pretty consistent in both his policies and personal behavior. A far cry, we might reiterate, from what classical imperial histories would have us believe. Commonly characterizing Dezong, the second Tang emperor to have abandoned the capital city, however temporarily, as simultaneously petulant, dishonest, secretive, and greedily despotic, in the same breath as they have called him gullible, weak-willed, and politically indifferent. I'm sure you'll agree the disconnect there is pretty sharp. In fact, it may well have been a result of Dezong's attempts to restore his own imperial prerogatives, in spite of the outer court, that led to his later vilification at their hands. The very basis of his attempts at reform, after all, had been predicated on a much

more prominent role for the sovereign in policy affairs than the courtiers and officials had become accustomed. And in the zero-sum game that was imperial politics, the consolidation of power in the person of the emperor, by necessity, meant the loss of power for the other members of the court. Over the period of 786 and 794 then, as time and again Emperor Dezong gave the government establishments multiple chances to either prove their worth in his new world order, or be cast into the shadows, they time and again managed to prove themselves complete disappointments for his purposes. It wasn't these repeated and systemic failures of the old order, and his mounting frustration and disillusionment with them, that he would feel at last compelled to oversee the

rise of the inner court over the course of his final decade in power. Before plunging into the ministers that would rise and fall before the ascendance of the inner court, I think it's fundamentally worth pausing the narrative for a moment and asking the question surely many of us are all thinking. Wait, wait, wait. It took him how long to actually make substantive reforms to the structure of his failing government? Yeah, the answer is decades. An autocratic absolute monarchy and the emperor is moving at a pace that might be measured on a geological timescale. What gives? Well, first of all, it's not even just Dezong. It's the whole apparatus, and it has been this way for the entirety of the Tang dynasty.

Remember that by this point, the political, economic, and social machinery of the Tang system of government have been in a state of abject failure for more than a century. Shenzong and Empress Wu were dealing with the failure of the government to adequately meet tax revenue targets more than a hundred years ago. And what did they do each and every time? Band-aids, quick fixes, minor stopgaps. We never see any of the kind of major policy reforms or shifts that just seem common sense to our own minds. Without a deeper understanding of the way the people of this time and place thought and felt, they can seem one and all to just be either incompetent simpletons at best and outright disastrous buffoons at worst. So what's going on here? To make heads or tails of what these people were thinking, we must attempt to see the world from their own perspective and

understanding. While modern society tends toward us being a result-oriented, forward-looking, and unidirectional straight line up and forward forever, the imperial Chinese worldview is fundamentally different. It sees the world, and for that matter the very order of the universe, as one of constant cycles and circles, and is fundamentally backwards facing. We might envision it as a spiraling out from an initial perfect center point, and always attempting to recapture that first state of perfection and glory. That's why, for instance, we get so many repeated dynastic names. Even at the time, it was widely understood that the system of imperial dynasties

was a never-ending cycle of birth, slow decay, overthrow, death, and rebirth anew, forever and ever. In this, the Tang dynastic rulers were certainly no different from the other Chinese dynasties. And if anything, as time had gone by and the line of Tang had proven itself across by now more than two centuries to be among the most enduring and great dynastic orders of the ages, the subsequent emperors had become ever more cautious

in their attempts at reform and ever less willing to deviate from the legacy and precedence of their venerated ancestors. What was good enough for great-great-great-grandfather Gao Zong is surely good enough for me, after all. Dalby puts it, quote, One is struck time and again by how conscious the late Tang emperors were of their debt to their ancestors. They were extremely reluctant to do anything that could not somehow be construed as fulfilling the mandate handed down to them from the past.

Tampering with the governmental heritage was to be avoided, if at all possible, end quote. This debt to their ancestors' legacy can in large part, and with no small sense of irony, be largely attributed to the Tang's increasing inability, as time went on, to effectively respond to emergent and shifting challenges and threats. Adaptation was a last resort, to be pursued only if all historic avenues had been exhausted, and even then only incrementally and with the greatest of reluctance. As such, as we'll come to see, though Dezong feared that too much change would be the undoing of his dynastic line, it was in fact changes happening too little and too late,

if indeed at all, that would once again spell the doom of many of his attempted fixes. But let's get back to the inner court itself, or to be more precise, the office of the chief ministry, which while an official part of the outer court bureaucracy, typically had its staff of between five and six scholar officials drawn from the ranks of the less official imperial bodies. These men were appointed and replaced at the emperor's whim, of course, and so there was a running rotation of more than three dozen over the course of Dezong's time on

the throne, which is far too many for us to bother with. For our purposes, there are four men who are worth paying special attention to. They will be doing their best to enact substantive reforms to the imperial order in order to save it, and in their string of failures, they will convince Dezong that bureaucracy is not the solution to the empire's problems. Bureaucracy is the problem. Our first chief minister is Cui Zhao, scion of the eminent Cui clan of Bolin, who had made a name for himself within the court through his conduct during the An Lushan rebellion, as well as through his outspoken idealism regarding government and

traditional Chinese culture. For this, he was promoted past several of his seniors in the officialdom and named chief minister in either 785 or 786, after Zhezong had taken the young man's outspokenness for an actual ability to manage government affairs. Within a year, Zhe had put forth a bold policy proposal to radically reorganize the government's bureaucracy. He put forth that all executive power should be re-centralized in the body of the chief ministry, with its individual ministers each appointed authority over a particular aspect of those responsibilities. Given that decentralization had been a huge part of what had gotten the Tang empire into this mess in the first place, though we know precious few specific details of Minister Cui's plan, there does appear to have been merit to it, at least

at the theoretical level. Professor Dalby writes, quote, had policymaking and administration been realigned as Cui Zhao had suggested, the regular bureaucracy might have recovered enough power to direct routine affairs, and thereby the collective self-confidence to merit the emperor's respect, end quote. But it was not to be. The fact that such a reform would have been a fundamental shake-up of what was by now the way we've always done things, meant that Dezong and his court were already very wary of any such plan. What's more, and likely at least as important, was that such sweeping centralization promised to put a fair number of powerful, important officials out of

a job, or at least much lower on the totem pole. And they weren't about to give up their prestige and position without a fight. The final nail in the coffin of Minister Cui's plan, though, was the vocal opposition of the governor of Zexi province along the Yangtze River Delta, the region consisting of modern Shanghai and its surrounding areas, a man named Han Huang. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, the French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. By contrasting both the experiences of contemporaries and the conclusions of historians, Grey History dives into the detail and unpacks one of the most important and disputed events in human history.

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one recommended by universities and loved by enthusiasts, then check out Grey History, The French Revolution today. Or simply search for The French Revolution. Governor Hahn sensed that this move to re-centralize the bureaucracy would cut into his ability to oversee and control those agencies that had made him so singularly rich and powerful, especially the salt and iron interests. He had, after all, been a former commissioner of the imperial salt and iron monopoly, as well as his stranglehold over the southern region's grain production, on which the capital region depended for its very survival.

If ever there was a man Emperor Dazong could not afford to alienate, Governor Han Huang was it. As such, when word arrived at Chang'an voicing Han's opposition to Minister Cui's reform package and his intent to resist him, Dezong felt he had little choice but to back down. Within a few months of the policy being presented to the Emperor, Cui Zhao was transferred out of the chief ministry and his reforms cancelled. And that was strike one for the bureaucracy. Well, alright, youthful verve and idealism were right out, and so next De Zong turned to old age and experience

in the form of the venerated ex-chief minister, Li Mi, who was at this point nearing his 65th birthday. First, though, De Zong would have to actually find the old poet. You see, he'd spent the last several years wandering the mountains, practicing Taoist self-cultivation and searching for immortality, after he'd been unceremoniously kicked out of the last imperial court he'd served, after his rather too-on-the-nose poetry had offended both the former chancellor Yang Guozhong and general An Lushan, and so how's that for a controversial figure? He had been recalled on

and off since then, but had routinely managed to tweak enough noses and rub enough other officials the wrong way that none of his tenures in the imperial court had been very long at all. Nevertheless, he was considered an erudite and eminent figure, and perhaps just the sort of person who could solve Dezong's current problems. This bent was undoubtedly multiplied by Dezong's own personal connection to the old sage, having studied under Li Mi in his youth at the Blessed Isles Academy to the west of Chang'an, learning from masterly Taoism as well as alchemy, and inheriting Li Mi's fascination with proto-science and the search for immortality.

Now once again as an imperial chief minister, under his former pupil, Li Mi proved himself both capable and imaginative in his pursuit of results. Over the course of his two years in office, he urged stronger defenses around the canal networks, the reformation of the provinces to better defend against the potential threat of the Hebei warlords, reaffirming and bolstering the political alliance with the Uyghur Khanate, and perhaps most importantly,

the reintroduction and expansion of the military agricultural colonies along the frontier to drastically reduce the cost of border defense. By couching this seemingly new innovation as merely a reimagining of the classic Fu Ping militia system from the Han dynasty, and thus being in line with ancient precedent, Li Mi was able to convince the emperor and his court of the plan's merit. Li Mi further provided his financial acumen and ability to save the state money by successfully lobbying for an end to the imperial monetary support

for more than 4,000 foreigners, primarily Persians and Sogdians, who had been living in Chang'an and were now effectively stranded there after the Tibetan occupation of the Gansu Corridor had cut off their route home. The foreigners were still welcome in the capital, to be sure, but it would be no longer on the government's dime. They were going to have to earn their keep from here on out. Dalby writes, This alone saved the government half a million strings of cash

annually, end quote. So on his own merits, Li Mi was quite a success, and under his watch, the long-term outlook of the Tang regime began to substantively improve. However, as it so happened, it was right about this time that Dezong's personal focus began to shift ever more towards short-term successes and failures as his metric of overall imperial health. He wanted results now, not in twenty years' time. And by that metric, flawed and myopic though it was, Li Mi's solutions weren't doing enough fast enough. For instance, by Li Mi's last year in office, and on earth for that matter, he had convinced

the emperor of the absolute necessity to refuse to accept the irregular tribute gifts he had customarily received from the provincial governors in lieu of a regular tax. Li Mi argued, correctly and successfully, that by accepting these gifts, Dezong was undermining his own sovereignty over the regions, in effect recognizing his own governors as kind of a semi-autonomous vassal prince, rather than as agents of his own united government. Yet in spite of agreeing to end the acceptance of the tribute gifts, Dezong nevertheless resumed the practice less than half a year later, owing to his own short-term financial necessities. His inability to see the forest for the trees, and his apparent waffling on such a critical pillar of his own economic policy, undoubtedly contributed to later historians like

Sima Guang, characterizing Dezong as corrupt and double-dealing. It seems far more the case, though, that he was less corrupt than he was simply short-sighted. The truly fatal flaw of Li Mi's time in office was, ironically, his own eminence. And by that, I mean he was a really old guy. He served from 785 to 787, at which point, really old guys do what they do. He died. That was, of course, an inevitability, and not by itself the flaw. Rather, it was the fact that Leamy had, quote, always played the role of a lone sagely advisor, and apparently had never cultivated an extensive political following, end quote. As such, with his death in 787, so too went the sum total of his political acumen and policy directives.

Shortly before his death, as his health began to fail him, Li Mi urged the emperor to appoint a man named Dou Can to the role of chief minister, to assist and ultimately replace him. It seems rather unclear as to what these two men's particular connection was to one another, and even less clear as to why Li was so insistent on Do succeeding him to office. What is clear is that while Dazhong did at last assent to Li Mi's insistent request, he did so only with great reluctance, a reluctance that would prove itself well-founded. Curiously, there appears to be little information on the majority of his three-year stint as chief minister, between 787 and 790. The accounts tell us of him working long hours, often staying behind long after-court audiences,

had finished to personally discuss further state matters with the emperor in confidence, and was Dezong's willing partner in trying to quickly build up the state's treasury by any means necessary. Where Doe slipped up, however, and badly, is clear enough. As we've seen time and again, the one universally fatal misstep a public official can make in imperial China, or modern China for that matter, is living a life too flagrantly ostentatious and appearing too nepotic in his appointments of friends and family members. Do Tan did both, leading to his political enemies lodging formal complaints with Dezong,

accusing the chief minister of forming a political clique or party, strictly illegal under imperial law. In early 792, unable to clear himself of the charges, Dōtan was dismissed from his post in Chang'an and exiled to the far south, and here is where he made his final mistake. Along his long journey southward, he was foolish enough to accept money from various governors along the way. When word reached the emperor, Dezong interpreted this acceptance of gifts from his governors as an act of sedition against the state. From a certain point of view, perhaps, it might have seemed as though the governors were paying the exiled official a kind of tribute. Dezong's initial reaction was to order the arrest and execution of essentially anyone

and everyone Dezong had ever known or associated with, and it was only with great difficulty that the man who would replace Dezong, whom we'll discuss in a moment, managed to talk him out of the murderous course of action. Dezong's friends, family, and associates were spared, but Dezong's own fate was sealed. He was arrested by imperial agents and beheaded, and then had his extensive properties and estate confiscated by the government and deposited into the imperial treasury directly. And that was strike two. As we will get into more next time, the early 790s were, much like the 780s,

not a good time for the Tang Empire, to put it mildly. Not only had now ex-Chief Minister Do's bungling machinations split the imperial mechanism right down the middle into two cliques, and ground us working into an effective halt every time the chief officials of those groups were at odds with one another, which was, you know, pretty much always, but economically supply problems and rampant currency deflations continued on unabated.

In central China, a series of floods and famines ravaged the countryside and its populace, provoking further mutinies by provincial garrisons. And through all this, the Tibetan Empire just kept on raiding and pillaging along the southwestern frontiers, demanding an imperial response, and the funds to support such a thing, neither of which the empire could afford to meet at this point. As Dalby puts it, quote, these were not auspicious times, end quote.

And into this raging sharknado would step the last of our chief ministers today, Liu Zhi. Does that name sound familiar? Well, if so, gold star to you, because we've actually already been introduced to Liu Zhi last episode, when Dezong had appointed him as a young, undistinguished member of the Hanlin Academy to one of the emperor's top personal advisors over the course of the Hebei Governor's War, and whom had been the architect of the emperor's peace-without-victory strategy in order to keep the empire from fracturing apart altogether. Well, Lu is back, and now in a much more official capacity. In terms of his professional acumen, Lu Zhi proved himself as eminently capable of the tasks

as he'd been an imperial advisor. The surviving texts from his regime contained skillful analyses of the fundamental problems of the era and subtle methods of correcting them, from tax systems and addressing the system's inequalities to political reforms aimed at economic long-term recovery. In all these, Lu Jia proved himself to have been a forthright and extremely intelligent agent in the service of the dynastic order's recovery and health. Yet for all that, his greatest enemy was in fact himself and his great big mouth. The shifting of gears from personal private advisor under the auspices of the Hanlin Academy

to a public official post as chief minister would prove a disastrous change to the now middle-aged Liu Jie. The two posts, you see, were radically different from one another, not only in duties, as one might expect, but also in matters of propriety and the style of rhetoric acceptable. A Hanlin academician, you see, was able to address the emperor privately, personally, and even bluntly when needed, and served in much the same function in the, quote, confident manner and sermonizing tone of the Confucian advisors of antiquity, feeling free to speak his mind because such proceedings took place behind closed doors, end quote. You can imagine what the outcome might be of such a blunt and at times even belittling tone when addressing the sovereign emperor in open court. The chief minister was accountable

publicly to one another and to the administrative bureaucracy as a whole, and risked annoying, overpressuring, or even opening the emperor up to ridicule if he did not tread carefully. And Liu Jie, though a wonderful personal advisor, proved himself either unwilling or unable to effectively make the shift from one role to the other. Dalby writes, quote, as chief minister, he continued to be just as self-assured and exacting as he had been during his long tenure in the Hanling Academy. His remonstrances against the emperor's short-sightedness may have been well-founded, but the way he put them was hardly tactful, end quote. Decisions and royal prerogatives that to Dazong seemed perfectly justifiable were instead thrown

back in his face by Liu Zhe, in public, who characterized them as indicative of a rising tide of imperial greed and avarice, deeply embarrassing the emperor and nullifying any former friendship the pair might have once shared. And that was strike three for the bureaucracy, as far as the emperor was concerned. The emperor took steps to drastically curve Liu Zhe's ability to do his job effectively, though whether this was intentional or just happenstance remains unknown. Regardless, in spite of Lu's furious protestations, the emperor passed over the chief minister's own protege when an opening appeared at the head of the Department of Public Revenue,

and instead appointed his own candidate, a man named Pei Yanling. As revenue chief, Pei seemed to have liked to do two things, and two things only. The first being raise money for Dezong's personal treasury by every shady method in the book, and the second being stymieing Lu Jia's efforts at legitimate reform at every turn. The first earned him a special place in the Chinese historian's literary circles of hell, since the revenue he generated, he did so primarily through clever, or as Sima Guan would think it, devious, means of account manipulation and, as we might say, cooking the books to improve the apparent budgetary situation, as well as through just out-and-out theft of private property

belonging to hapless commoners under the paper-thin guise of official confiscation. The latter part of his job, that of him depriving Lu Zhi of the authority he needed to effectively do his own job, was less willful on Pei's part, though only a little bit so. See, while Lu Zhi was a disciple of the Hanlin Academy, Pei Yanling came from one of its chief competitor schools, the Zixian Academy of Libraries and Research. And while the Hanlin and Zhixian schools weren't quite the blood crypt level of rivalry, you wouldn't be that far off if that's what you wanted to think. They hated each other, and would stop at almost nothing to ensure that members of the other sect were unable to gain prestige or, you know, effectively do their jobs. Why Emperor

Dazong felt it wise to put a member of Mr. Miyagi's school in charge of one half of his government, and a member of Cobra Kai Dojo in charge of the other, who's to say? But Pei Yanling was really good at sweeping the leg of Lu Zhi. In late 794, Lu Zhi had had enough. Either Pei was going down or he was. And so, he launched into a tirade to end all tirades, formally accusing his nominal counterpart of all manner of immoral and illegal dealings. Frivolousness, greed, dishonesty, you name it. And at the end of this lengthy indictment, demanded that Pei be duly punished for his behavior. And Emperor Dazong was, to put it mildly, not amused. He knew who was buttering his bread, thanks very much, and it was Pei Yanling who was

raking in the tax revenue. Cash the realm badly needed in case you've forgotten over all that tiresome moralizing loo. And oh, by the way, just how much has your tiresome sanctimony filled up my treasury accounts recently, hm? Yeah, that's what I thought. You say it's you or Pei? Well hmm, gee, that's an easy choice.

I picked the guy actually filling my coffers. Bye-bye. Thus it was that Lu Jia found himself unceremoniously removed from his position as chief minister after only two years, in the winter of 794, and sent into effective exile to the far south, never to return. In fact, Emperor Dazong was so royally ticked off at the impudence of Lu's tirade that he actually seriously considered ordering Lu Jia's execution, which was itself shocking. As Dalbi points out, quote, the fact that the punishment of death was considered at all for an official who had rendered such distinguished service was itself an indication of Dezong's disenchantment with officialdom, end quote. With Lu Jia's departure from the capital,

the regular officialdom had had its third strike in the eyes of Emperor Dezong, and was now out. It had been weighed, measured, and found wanting, and the disgusted monarch would pretty much completely turn his back on it as an organ of government for the whole course of his final decade of rule. And so next time, we'll be looking at the end phase of Dezong of Tang's period of reign over the sickly dregs of the once-mighty Tang Empire, as he'll spend the rest of his life trying to figure out how he might be able to use his personal inner court, his army commanders, his cadre of eunuch servants, and his own fast-waning personal will to attempt to do what the whole creaking bureaucratic mechanism of government had proved unable to accomplish. Stop the decline of

Tang, both from within and from without. 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.