The History of China - #112 - Tang 24: Make Tang Great Again!

Episode Date: November 8, 2016

Young Emperor Xianzong has a plan to restore China's supremacy in the 9th century world... and - surprisingly enough - it involves precisely zero walls being built. Time Period Covered: 805-820 CE Le...arn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. confront the armies of Islam once, and lose for that matter, the machinations of those great empires of the West will influence, both directly and lose, for that matter. The machinations of those great empires of the West will influence, both directly and indirectly,
Starting point is 00:00:49 the Middle Kingdom in the centuries and millennia to come. So I invite you to join Elias Belhaddad in the history of Islam as he covers the inception of it in the sands of Arabia to its expansion as the global faith it is today. That is the History of Islam, part of the Agora Podcast Network. And now, enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China.
Starting point is 00:01:32 Episode 112. Make Tang Great Again. We finished out last time with the double death of the ancient emperor Dezong of Tang, as well as his paralyzed, mute heir, Shenzong, who, in the six months or so that he sat on the throne before dying and or being murdered, just managed to successfully appoint his own heir before kicking off. Thus, on September 5th of 805, Dezong's 27-year-old grandson, Luchun, would inherit the throne of the Tang Empire as Emperor Shzong, his temple name meaning constitutional ancestor. And assuming you're not just tuning in for the first time, you'll understand what a dubious inheritance that was. Tang China, let's face it, had seen better days. Now, I've been spending a goodly portion of the last, oh, dozen or so episodes pounding in exactly what had been
Starting point is 00:02:24 causing that, and I assure you we will do a little bit or so episodes pounding in exactly what had been causing that, and I assure you we will do a little bit more of that pounding in again today. But in brief, the two biggest culprits had been, first, the economic gears of empire grinding to a screeching halt due to untenable taxation policies and record levels of graft and corruption at almost every tier of government. And second, all together now, yes, that's right, the An Lushan Rebellions, ongoing reverberations for the political and military situation all across the realm. And maybe that was actually a good thing, at least from the perspective of preparing the eventual Emperor Xianzong for the task at hand.
Starting point is 00:03:11 He had grown up as royalty, yes, but hardly during the most auspicious or luxurious time in his dynasty's regime. To borrow an idea from Dan Carlin, monarchs have often been said to either be moving their dynasties up the power scale through sheer hard work, so-called wooden clogs, or allowing them to slip into indolence and extravagance, and thus descend in the silk slippers of opulence. Running with that metaphor then, Xianzong had witnessed the descent of both his grandfather, and briefly at least, his father as well, in their silk slippers. And that upbringing, surrounded by a combination of humiliation and helplessness, may have singularly prepared his feet to once again don the wooden clogs and get back to work. Professor Dalby puts it unequivocally of the reign we're studying today, quote, As events in his reign amply demonstrate,
Starting point is 00:03:57 Xianzong combined a strong resolve to restore the prestige of the imperial house with a detailed and sophisticated knowledge of the political forces within his own court. He was the strongest emperor in late Tang times. End quote. And I'm sure you'll agree that is one heck of a vote of confidence. To be sure, it's going to be an uphill battle all the way. His family and its hold on imperial power have been in sharp decline, as we've discussed at length, for more than a century at this point, and it was going to take an Atlantean effort to achieve. Though whether or not that's the correct Greek allusion to attribute to Shen Zong's efforts remains up in the air. Another possibility might be that of Sisyphus, but I do
Starting point is 00:04:42 want to give the guy his due credit. He wouldn't be around, after all, to see his boulder ultimately roll back down the hill. From virtually day one in office, Xianzong made it his overriding mission to reassert the centralized authority of the imperial court over the peripheral interests of the empire, with target number one being the jiedushi, that is, the military governors of the borderlands, who had proved to be such an incredible thorn in the side of imperial stability for almost half a century at this point. But he must have known from the outset that he would, at least at first, need to tread very carefully and cautiously around those regional governors
Starting point is 00:05:21 who wielded such tremendous autonomy and military strength. Where his grandfather had rather disastrously gone in guns blazing, and as a result had seen even more pieces of his empire peel away for his unpreparedness, Qianzong was determined to learn from such mistakes and make doubly sure that all his pieces were in place before overtly acting against his renegade governors. Chief among that set of objectives was to undo the damage his grandfather had done between the court and the throne. You remember that, right? Dezong had grown so disgusted with the apparent inability of the regular bureaucracy to mete out his will that he had, by his late reign, completely gotten around the regular court by appointing and then relying completely upon
Starting point is 00:06:05 his so-called inner court to penetrate the bureaucratic red tape in whatever ways he might deem necessary. Well, Shanzong either understood the short-sightedness of that methodology, or at the very least knew that he could not control his grandfather's inner court in the same way. In either case, though, the outcome would be the same. He needed the trust and cooperation of his officials and ministers in the regular court far more than his predecessor ever had. The courtiers were cautious about this new emperor's appeals to them, and rightfully so. After all, Dezong had begun his own reign with grand talk of working together and all that, only to cast them aside and then ignore them all later on
Starting point is 00:06:47 when they didn't break his way on every decision. Nevertheless, in due time, Xianzong would win over the majority of the court to his sincerity. Not through grand gestures or speeches, but in fact, the opposite. Dalby explains, quote, Xianzong's decrees were understated and modest,
Starting point is 00:07:06 laying emphasis on a return to proper official procedures and the re-establishment of the moral climate at court. For example, he ordered that all such auspicious gifts be handled by the appropriate bureaucratic authorities. He did not want to see them, to know about them, or to do anything but devote himself to the pursuit of kingly virtue. End quote. His grandfather, on the other hand, had been rather infamous for having had a soft spot for such tributary gifts. Xianzong likewise returned to the customary, but long cast aside, tradition of the Imperial Act of Grace, which had not been issued since at least 793, some 13 years prior.
Starting point is 00:07:47 An Act of Grace, by the way, was essentially a blanket edict issued periodically in which the emperor pardoned all, or at least almost all, criminals, gave gifts, and bestowed promotions onto officials and generally tried to make everyone happy. It was, at least in many respects, something of a jubilee in the classical sense. As such, the 806 Act of Grace, issued in concordance with the change of the era name to Yuan He, meaning Fundamental Harmony, was a welcome return to the long-abandoned proper form. More than that, though, it also paid a special attention to the officials, both civil and military, that Xianzong knew he would need on his side in the years and decades to come. The act accorded almost every official some form of recognition or promotion,
Starting point is 00:08:37 with special favor given to those at the highest tiers of the bureaucracy, as well as placating those elements of society who had long been neglected or even forgotten for their services to the realm, or might otherwise be holding some kind of a grudge, such as descendants of military heroes who had nevertheless failed to gain official posting. Finally, and just as important, it also promised to return the act of grace to a normal, frequent occurrence within the empire. This might sound, from an outsider's perspective, not too terribly important, but we must understand that if one of a monarch's chief jobs is to maintain their realm's faith in the stability and order of that empire, there is little a new emperor could have done to more
Starting point is 00:09:20 engender the fulfillment of such a promise than to reinstitute the traditions of old. As such, when the first opportunity to reassert his imperial prerogative against the governors came only in 806, Xianzong actually let it slide. Early that year, the governor-general of Xichuan Circuit died, and his subordinate, a man named General Liu Pi, demanded what was by now the expected right, which was to succeed him at Chengdu, with only a nominal courtly confirmation. Now you'll surely remember that that was, per normal imperial custom at least, a big no-no. Political and military appointments alike were legally at the pleasure of the monarch,
Starting point is 00:10:01 and certainly not inheritable. In fact, Xianzong, upon learning of the former governor's death, had actually dispatched his own replacement to the great southern city. But that system had of course been thrown under the train with the rash of rebellions and the subsequent autonomous warlords era, and as such the imperial replacement was rejected outright by Liu Pi and sent packing back to Chang'an. So Xianzong went ahead and confirmed the lieutenant general's demand and allowed him to become the new acting Jie Jushi. Having been enthroned mere months before, after all, it seems that Xianzong quite understandably didn't feel secure enough in his position
Starting point is 00:10:39 to be issuing ultimatums just yet. But as is so often the case, if you give someone an inch, they'll see if they can take a mile. And so it was with the new governor, Liu. A mere two months following his quote-unquote appointment to the job, Governor Liu, in all likelihood taking Xianzong's caution for weakness, unilaterally went ahead and annexed two of his neighboring provinces, and unified them all into what is roughly modern Sichuan. Distant though this was from the capital, this arrogant affront to imperial authority on the part of Liu was an act Xianzong could not afford to let slide. West Jiannan province, after all,
Starting point is 00:11:19 sat on the very edge of Tang territory, bordering the ever-looming threat that was the Tibetan Empire to the West. For a governor to act in such a brash manner clearly threatened to break the whole region off from China, and potentially even into a state hostile to Chang'an and allied with the Tibetans. It's not like that had never happened before, after all. And so when this latest request came in for West Yannan, asking for imperial confirmation, Governor Liu found out very quickly that he had vastly underestimated the temperament of this new Tang emperor. Xianzong quickly rejected the missive, and then with all haste dispatched the palace armies themselves to put an end to this funny business out in Sichuan. By that very autumn,
Starting point is 00:12:03 the imperial armies were marching on the wayward province, and Governor Liu, who seems to have been taken quite by surprise at this unexpectedly robust imperial backbone all of a sudden, was captured by the palace armies, with an unexpected ease. He and his chief lieutenants would subsequently be carted back to the capital, where they would face execution. At last, the Jiedushi of Sichuan was appointed directly by the court, and the southwest would be firmly back under the command of the central government going forward. As you might well imagine, word of this new and robust modus operandi from the capital soon reached the other would-be autonomous governor-generals across the empire. By the following spring, they had all been put on notice that
Starting point is 00:12:45 Xianzong wasn't messing around and wasn't just going to bend over backwards to their demands. Now, many of the new governors at this point opted to just ride it out and see how they could best manipulate this new situation to their own advantage, but certain others felt that a delayed response would only serve to further embolden the young monarch against them, and that they might as well strike before he had consolidated his own position. Of particular note were the two regional commanders, the governor of Xia Sui and Zhenzai Circuits, respectively. The governor of Xia Sui, one Yang Huilin, resisted this imperial reclamation of authority in a straightforward enough manner. He was ordered
Starting point is 00:13:25 to stand his armies down and then retire from his post, and he refused. And wouldn't you know it, here came the imperial armies a-calling. Before they could even knock on the prefectural door, however, one of Governor Young's subordinates remembered that, oh yeah, he would actually like to live another day, after all, and assassinated the rebellious commander, thus ending his abortive attempt to resist the throne. The Zhenghai Circuit in the northern Yangtze River Delta, fairly close to, though on the opposite side of the river from modern Shanghai and Hangzhou, was one of the wealthiest regions of the empire, having been made so by virtue of being one of the richest grain-producing regions of the Northern Empire. In a singularly
Starting point is 00:14:05 strange move, its governor, Li Qi, submitted a request to the capital too as a mean of displaying his loyalty to the emperor. Be allowed to journey to the capital and pay homage to the throne. It seems as though he either expected some kind of a refusal or at the most a simple assent like okay whatever, because going forward it quickly becomes clear that he never had any intention of actually following through with his journey to Chang'an. One might imagine his surprise then when the response from the emperor came back reading, why yes, you're more than welcome to come and pay homage to me at the capital, oh loyal governor. In fact, via binding imperial decree, I insist. This, uh, hadn't exactly been
Starting point is 00:14:48 what Governor Li had intended. Chang'an was such a long journey after all, and what with his eventual rebellion to plan, I mean, what? Anyways, do you think we could just put the trip off by just a little bit, like, I don't know, two years maybe? Because, uh, because I'm sick. Yeah, yeah, I'm sick. I can't travel. Very sorry. News of Li's sudden case of cold feet reached the emperor's ears, and rightly suspecting some sort of a monkey business afoot, he turned to his chancellor Wu for his own assessment. The chancellor, seeing right through the paper-thin excuses offered, stated that Li's offer to come, followed by his refusal, constituted nothing less than a blatant affront to Shanzong's imperial authority.
Starting point is 00:15:34 The emperor agreed, and penned one last letter to Governor Li to be delivered by his personal eunuch messenger, this time saying in effect, no, you're coming to the capital, and you're going to be appointed to my executive bureau of government. Why, you should be excited at such a tremendous promotion. And to this, Lee replied back, whiz. Conveniently leading out that the so-called mutiny against him had in fact been the brutal murder and then possible cannibalism of two of his own officers who had been urging him to obey the imperial edict sent to him already. But by this point the jig was up, and both Xianzong and Li Qi knew it. While the emperor began to once again roll out the imperial army, Li Qi sent messages to five of his most trusted
Starting point is 00:16:25 lieutenants that he had quietly dispatched to the five districts of his province, telling him that Operation Kill the Prefects was a go. And they would have gotten away with it scot-free too, if it wasn't for that meddling commander of Chong Prefecture, who had gotten wind of his little assassination in the making and made all the appropriate preparations, meaning that he had already killed the assassin sent to monitor him. Then he sent word to the other four prefects telling them all what was up and ensuring that this would-be coup would prove a total bust. Then, obviously, they all reported this whole sequence of events directly to the capital, and as you can imagine, Shanzong was not amused. As both the Imperial Army and the Loyalist Regional Army's neighboring Zhenhai Circuit began to tighten the noose around Li Qi's neck, he attempted to strike out in one last
Starting point is 00:17:15 desperate play. With the last 3,000 soldiers still following his commands, he ordered them to march against nearby Xuan Prefecture City, hoping to capture it along with its considerable wealth, and from there, well, I suppose he was just hoping to play it by ear. The commander of the 3000, though, saw the writing was on the wall, and knew that he and his men had exactly one way to get out of this situation alive. As such, once they'd been dispatched to take Xuan City and left the circuit capital, the triumvirate of commanders informed their soldiers that there had been a slight change in plan, namely that instead of marching to Xuan, they were going to turn right back around and capture Li Qi for the empire,
Starting point is 00:17:55 and thus earn a royal pardon one and all. Li still had a personal bodyguard of some 300, and they were apparently still willing to go along with the standing orders of apparently dying to the last man for the governor-general. All that seemed to have changed, though, when Li Qi learned that his own nephew had joined the alliance against him, causing Li to despair, tuck tail, and flee. In short order, though, he was caught and delivered in chains to the capital. You know, the place he'd been willing to rebel to avoid going to in the first place. Dragged in before the emperor at the beginning of December, Li Qi had yet more excuses to offer the unimpressed Xianzong. Li Zizhi Tongjian tells us that Li offered up the pretext of, it totally wasn't my idea to rebel, my officers made me do it. To which Xianzong replied, dude, you were the governor. The buck stops with you. Li Qi and his son were both executed by being cut in half at the waist.
Starting point is 00:18:53 And that might sound bad, but in fact, that was getting off pretty easy. Whereas usually his extended family would have all shared in the punishment, their long and distinguished service to the throne resulted in the decision coming down from the court to merely exile them all. As for Li and his son, well, at least it was only getting cut in half and wasn't death by a thousand cuts. So that's three rebellious provinces down and three Jeju ship positions back in the hands of centralized control. We must be getting close to wrapping up this whole period of independent rebellious governors, right? Not quite. Because remember when I said that Xianzong would spend almost all of his reign undertaking this effort? Well, his reign is going to last until 820, and we're still only at
Starting point is 00:19:41 the beginning of 808. So buckle up. These first three ones, by the way, were actually the easy ones. So starting now, the difficulty curve is going to go way, way up. Between 809 and 810, the imperial court is going to pivot from the south and turn toward a giant elephant in the room to the north. The governors of Hebei. You know, the ones who have effectively been independent warlords for the past 40 years. Like both his father's and his grandfather's previous run-ins with the governor's generals, the issue of hereditary succession, rather than a court appointment, would spark this flashpoint in the northeast. Unlike Xianzong's first three standoffs with his governors, this time it would be he and the court instigating confrontation, rather than merely reacting to their governors' oversteps.
Starting point is 00:20:29 And I mean, can we blame him? He'd just gone three for three with the governors of the south and west. Who wouldn't be riding high after that? The Hebei province in question for now was called Chengde. And when the son of his last jiedushi, who had died in late 808, requested the court's confirmation of his accession to the office early the following year, Emperor Xianzong decided to strike out at the practice of locally determined succession before the opportunity was lost. Rather than confirming the transfer of office from father to son directly, Xianzong instead played hardball, demanding a series of concessions from the would-be governor-general in exchange for his acceptance, notably including the voluntary surrender of two
Starting point is 00:21:10 prefectural cities from within Chengde Circuit back to central control. Initially, the would-be governor-general assented, but as negotiations continued over the course of 809, by the end of that year, it was clear to both sides that any hope of finding a consensus point had long since vanished. Negotiations broke down, and open hostilities once again erupted between Chang'an and the northeast. It seems likely that Xianzong was expecting this situation to be dealt with by his armies in much the same way that they'd successfully concluded the previous regional rebellions. But in making that assumption, he seemed to have forgotten one of the key lessons much of his entire dynastic line had spent their successive reigns
Starting point is 00:21:50 learning and then relearning about the northeast, namely that it's really, really hard to successfully attack northeastern China from the south. The terrain is just so very lopsidedly geared toward attacking the other direction that it has literally bankrupted and broken not just emperors, but entire dynasties in the attempt. I mean, just look at the Sui dynasty. Dalby writes, quote, By the early spring of 810, however, the imperial expedition against Chengde had run into trouble.
Starting point is 00:22:22 It was a very expensive operation to begin with, and the problem of coordinating the disparate units sent by loyal provinces into a single effective fighting force turned out to be insurmountable. All that was further compounded by the emperor's highly irregular decision to appoint as overall force commander one of his own eunuch officials, which proved to be highly controversial and demoralizing to his armies. By the middle of that year, up to his neck in logistical problems and having not yet even made contact with the enemy force, Xianzong allowed himself to be convinced that the northward campaign was premature. He would instead confirm the
Starting point is 00:23:01 hereditary governor-general of Chengde, and both sides would stand down. At least for now. Qianzong had lost the fight, sure, but he had at least been smart enough to figure that out before he could have lost much, much more than just face in the process. He had pulled back from what was shaping up to be yet another disastrous campaign northward, and in doing so had spared his strength, and quite possibly his whole reign, to live and fight another day. 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
Starting point is 00:23:40 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. Moreover, even with this latest, less-than-exemplary showing in the field, the momentum was pretty clearly still on the emperor's side. That would be evidenced in 812, when the governor-general of Weibo, another long-independent province of the northeast, voluntarily submitted to court authority
Starting point is 00:24:17 and agreed to put an end to more than 40 years of hereditary succession of the governorship. Dalby writes of this turn of events, quote, Xianzong responded to the submission with a large grant of money and with several acts of courtesy, as a gesture of goodwill to a prodigal subject now returned. This effortless triumph seems to have been a turning point in the whole process of centralization. For all at once, a major strategic and psychological obstacle was removed at no military cost to Shan'an. The next several years, 809-814, would see a lull in military operations against the governors of the borderlands. This seems to have been for a few reasons. First, and probably foremost,
Starting point is 00:24:59 the fact that, as Dalby puts it, quote, the emperor's drive for military centralization pushed the Tang state, government, and populace alike, near to the puts it, quote, the emperor's drive for military centralization pushed the Tang state, government, and populace alike, near to the limit of its capacity, end quote. Remember, if you will, that this isn't the great and glorious empire of Gao Zong and Tai Zong of eras before. The empire had been much diminished since the good old days, and could only be pushed so far, so fast. So what's an ambitious young monarch to do with such a rickety old machine like that? Well, here comes the second likely reason for the hiatus in military adventurism. Economic and political reforms, in anticipation,
Starting point is 00:25:37 of course, for future campaigns. There were three key issues that had been like millstones around the neck of the Tang Empire for generations at this point, and as such, none of them are going to sound terribly surprising to any of us. They were, respectively, currency issues, now having entered a long period of deflation and thus soaring prices, second, the massive crippling corruption of the provincial administrators and tax collectors, and finally, and resultantly, the inadequacy of hard currency to meet the demands of the central government to carry on its campaigns. All three are obviously interconnected, and so Xianzong was going to have to tackle all three at once if he was going to be able to pay for his wars of recentralization.
Starting point is 00:26:22 And so we will do the same. We will tackle them all in turn. Deflation, then corruption, and finally the state of the government's coffers. The issue of deflation was made worse year in and year out by two primary factors. First, that it simply didn't have enough copper to meet the demands of its own economy, both because of private hoarding of the ore and, of course, the ever-rampant practicing of counterfeiting. This was compounded by the second fact that the stopgap solution to that old problem, which was using bolts of silk as stand-ins for hard specie, had become unworkable, in large part thanks to the predatory lending agreements that Tong had been forced into with the Uyghur Khanate in the 780s and beyond. In the 780s, those factors had combined
Starting point is 00:27:05 with the existential threat of war to result in the opposite problem, namely hyperinflation. But since the conclusion of peace with Habe, 30 years prior, prices had dropped to as little as 10% of their former highs. Now that's all well and good for Joe Citizen, but it's definitely not wonderful if you're a government trying to collect taxes based on a percentage of what's spent, especially if your conversion rate continues to, inexplicably, be pegged to the value of copper coinage as of 779, as it was in the Tang Empire. Imagine the US government, for instance, using the value of the dollar of 1975 to make its 2017 budgets, and you'll understand why that's just nuts. All of this was made all the value of the dollar of 1975 to make his 2017 budgets, and you'll understand
Starting point is 00:27:45 why that's just nuts. All of this was made all the worse by the fact that all three levels of county, provincial, and then central government showed an untenable amount of graft and skimming. Each rung of government was legally entitled to keep a small percentage of the revenue it took from its populace, but the great majority of that was to go straight on to the central treasury. However, it was easy for the provincial governors, who played the part of middlemen in this process, to cheat the central government, either by falsely reporting the current price levels of grain and cloth in their areas, or even, in some cases, by flatly refusing to send their full quotas to the court. How had these governors gotten away with such a practice?
Starting point is 00:28:29 Well, we've actually been talking about it off and on for a few episodes now, but it was often through the practice of irregularly sending the so-called tribute gifts directly to the emperor in lieu of regular taxation. A policy that was very addictive to emperors like De Zong, because they frequently came just in time to get him out of an acute financial crisis, but that his ministers in the court absolutely loathed because these gifts came at the direct expense of overall financial stability for the realm. It's hardly surprising, then, that there was simply not enough revenue actually making it into the central government's coffers to fund Xianzong's undertakings. From the Zizhetongjian, Chief Minister Li Zifu reported as of 807 that a mere 8 out of 15 provinces were regularly paying
Starting point is 00:29:13 their taxes, and that total revenue was down to as little as one quarter of what they'd been at the end of Emperor Xuanzong's reign in the 750s. Okay, so those are the problems, and they've been the problems for, like, ever. So what is this court going to do about them? Enter stage left, Minister Pei Ji, who had a plan. Now, the real ins and outs of it kind of remain murky to me because I'm an economic neophyte, but insofar as I've been able to tell, there are two major points of Minister Pei's grand strategy to get the emperor the cash that he so desperately needed, and they are as follows. First, regulate prices, especially that of silk. His plan was to fix this essential good to a median point and then reintroduce it as a complementary currency to copper coinage, which again was in critical shortage. And second was to bring the taxation system under a uniform and centrally
Starting point is 00:30:10 managed collection agency, thereby removing those multiple levels at which graft could occur, and simultaneously lowering the tax rates on individuals by more evenly distributing the burden. So win-win, right? Those sound pretty darn good in theory. You know, regulate prices, supplement the currency, and monitor tax collection to prevent embezzlement. But in practice, it was somewhat more difficult. It's one thing to say you're going to regulate the price of silk, after all, but quite another to actually make the economy stick to that price, a truism that the government would wrestle with for more than another decade. The whole plan to curb corruption was likewise more show than substance,
Starting point is 00:30:54 and even with the increase in oversight, quote, there were still many ways in which the provincial governors could continue to thwart the application of central laws, end quote. Still, in spite of them not being flawless panaceas to the empire's ongoing financial problems, they were still demonstrably a step in the right direction. Politically, these reforms reaffirmed the
Starting point is 00:31:17 emperor's prerogative to directly control and administrate his province's economic policies, rather than having to rely on the local, and often actively hostile, officialdom. Likewise, it does seem to have managed to collect both lower tax rates while upping the overall revenue for the court, even if not by nearly as much as Pei Ji might have hoped. It would prove enough, at least, to finance what Shanzong had been wanting since 809, which was, of course, the ability to recommence his campaign against the holdout warlords, which he would do beginning in 814. And so that year, Shanzong came out swinging in a campaign that would last the next five years.
Starting point is 00:32:00 His main target this time, and ultimately his greatest single victory in the campaign, would be not against one of the Hebei governors, but instead something a little bit closer to home. The central focus between 814 and 817 would be a region known as Huaixi, along the Huai River that runs between the Yellow and the Yangtze in north-central China. Huaixi was of such import because its placement along the Huai afforded it the ability to directly threaten the empire's ability to use its own canal networks to funnel grains, troops, supplies, and everything else to the far corners of the realm, and to the capital for that matter. To cut off the canals was to cripple the empire's ability to respond,
Starting point is 00:32:43 or even feed itself. Thus, to have the region under the control of a hostile governor simply wasn't going to fly. As was typical, tensions turned into hostilities over the issue of succession. Wu Yunji demanded the right to succeed his father, and Chang'an, reasoning that Huaixi was isolated and surrounded by loyalist provinces, quickly turned the young man down. What had seemed from the outset to be another easy win for the central government, though, would slog down into a multipolar insurgency from three different sides, as other regional governors realized that if they did not band together to knock Shenzong back here and now,
Starting point is 00:33:21 they'd each be taken down one after the other. The campaign against Huixi itself started out poorly enough, since even though there were four imperial armies dispatched against the region, the commanders seemed to have a critical difficulty in working together, and moreover, none of them wanted to risk their own forces in a direct assault. Thus, the initial campaign dragged out over 814 and 815, and then into 816, when from Hebei, here came the army of Chengde once again to harass and distract the central forces from the primary objective. And then, the terrorists came. Seriously, the terrorists. The Jidushe of Pinglu province sent in guerrilla agents to the capital and beyond to sow chaos in an attempt to prevent an imperial victory in Huaixi.
Starting point is 00:34:12 The governor of Pinglu reasoned, correctly, as it were, that should Huaixi fall, his own territory would be close to the top of the list of next targets of Xianzong's campaign of centralization. And so, the Pinglu covert agents went on the warpath. From the Cambridge History of China, quote, Pinglu terrorists assassinated an aggressive chief minister in Chang'an, sabotaged grain reserves, and more than once started fires in the eastern capital of Luoyang. The confusion and despair might have undone a lesser emperor, but Xianzong held firm. In spite of the distractions, the assassinations, and the campaigns of terror raging across the
Starting point is 00:34:51 empire, Xianzong managed to maintain both focus and discipline in both himself and his commanders, with the help of his loyal chancellor, Li Fengji, who stressed the importance of concentrating on the one objective that really mattered here. No, not stamping out the Pinglu terrorists, not beating back the Chengde guerrillas, but rather bringing the whole reason for the collective outburst to its final end, that is, stamping out the resistance from Huaixi. Thus, by mid-817, Xianzong had managed to marshal enough of a military force to launch an all-out attack on the provincial capital, the fortified city of Caizhou. In what Dalbi posits was, quote,
Starting point is 00:35:32 one of the late Tang history's most crucial battles, end quote, the three-month-long assault on the city would at last see the imperial forces break through its defenses and seize control of the metropolis and those within, critically including the rebellious governor-general, Wu Yuanji. In accordance with his long-standing principles in both rule and warfare, Emperor Shanzong had issued standing orders that the populace of the captured city was to be treated with leniency, and as such, only the high command staff of the rebellion were dragged back to Chang'an to face execution. Nevertheless, the province as a whole would face a punishment, at least of sorts. Unwilling to risk the empire's critical canal juncture point ever falling into a single individual's hostile hands again,
Starting point is 00:36:17 the whole province of Huaixi was subsequently dissolved and redistributed to two of its neighbors. In the wake of this shattering imperial victory at Huaixi, the governors of both Pinglu and Chengde, as well as the remaining autonomous governorships of Henghai and Yuzhou, were forced to fundamentally alter their own political calculus. It now seemed no longer a question of if Xuanzong could bring the whole of his imperium to heel, but now only a matter of what the best terms for themselves they might be able to salvage from the wreckage of their own failed campaigns against him. The governor of Chengde, for his part, quickly came to terms with Cheng'an, surrendering two of his prefectural cities and sending two of his own sons to the capital as
Starting point is 00:36:59 hostages for his promise of submission and good behavior in the future. Henghai, the smallest and newest of the Hebei provinces, had seen which way the wind was blowing even before the fall of Huaixi, and had long since worked out its own separate peace with the throne, which left only two provinces still askance of the imperial will. In the case of Yuzhou, what is today the city and region surrounding Beijing, its governor had carefully maintained his neutrality, neither relinquishing his own autonomy nor acting overtly against the throne. As such, his territory would never be touched by the palace armies, and would instead
Starting point is 00:37:36 be allowed to voluntarily submit to Xianzong while retaining at least some semblance of regional autonomy. As for Pinglu, in spite of its terror tactics against the two capitals, the emperor held out a very similar offer to the province's governor. Surrender a quarter of your prefectural cities and send a son as hostage. To which the governor agreed, only to later renege on the promise. And that was that. By 819, the upstart province had been quelled, its governor dragged back to the capital for execution, and the territory itself, much like Huaixi before it, dissolved and redistributed to its loyalist neighbors. The Tang Empire was still not all that it had once been. The far western
Starting point is 00:38:18 regions, for instance, and the further trade routes of the long-abandoned Silk Road would remain locked away from Chang'an, and Tang China found itself now no longer the sole hyper-power of East Asia, but now one power among several in a multipolar world. Nevertheless, in 15 short years, Xianzong had managed to undo almost all of the damage the rebels and pretenders of the late 8th century had wrought upon the Middle Kingdom. China was once more a powerful, unified, and centrally run empire, rather than a loose
Starting point is 00:38:51 collection of nominally submissive warlord states. Its emperor and his court were thrumming along with a kind of positive synergy that hadn't been seen in generations, and there was real, substantive, and positive economic changes being enacted. That while far from perfect, seemed to be doing quite a bit to stabilize the imperial economy that had been in effective freefall for more than a century. This was a victory for China, the Tang Dynasty, and for Emperor Shanzong personally, full stop. And at only age 42, he would have justifiably been riding high.
Starting point is 00:39:27 And then, he died. The hows and whys of it are as mysterious as they've been controversial, but the fact of the matter is that at the height of his reign that was so full of promise, Xianzong keeled over stone dead. Now, just because it's impossible for anyone to know why he died certainly doesn't mean many haven't tried to figure out what happened, or to put it somewhat less charitably, concocted a narrative in line with their own preconceived biases. And so we'll finish out today with a brief overview of those possibilities and the suspects into the mysterious death of the last great emperor of the Tang Dynasty. Let's first take a look at
Starting point is 00:40:06 the classic explanation, the usual suspect any time someone important turns up dead in this era. That is, the eunuchs did it. I mean, why not, right? It's almost the perfect scapegoat solution. The ministers feared them, the historians hate them, and the Confucian moralists despised them. And why? Why, because they were far too close to the emperor's private lives. And so, of course, it's easy to point the finger at them and say, aha, well, they must have poisoned Xianzong. Those scheming schemers, we should have never trusted them. And that's certainly been the prevailing theory for about the thousand years since his death. Yeah, the eunuchs did it. Sure, why not?
Starting point is 00:40:50 But did they? In the words of Cicero, qui bono? Who benefits from Xianzong's death? From that perspective, the whole eunuch explanation loses at least some of its water. Yes, it's entirely possible that one or more eunuchs may have deliberately killed the sovereign in one of their ever-ongoing power struggles behind the scenes, with the blame most commonly laid at the feet of Chen Hongzhi. And certainly, with the benefit of historical hindsight and what later generations of eunuchs would do to the men sitting in the Tang throne, it can retroactively be implied that, hey, why not, they would do it later on. This might just have been the first instance of that pattern. But Professor Dalby
Starting point is 00:41:30 writes, quote, on the other hand, why should the eunuchs as a group harm an emperor who had done so much for them already? End quote. It seems more likely at this point that the eunuchs as a class would have been divided between pro-Shanzong and pro-successor camps than Confucian writers might have otherwise liked to admit. Another explanation, perhaps the second most usual suspect in Chinese murder mysteries, is that a woman did it. Specifically, one or more of the imperial consorts in an attempt to secure the throne for their own progeny. This is also a possibility, and one with plenty of historical precedent. Yes, Empress Wu, I'm looking at you. But there has been a third possibility kicking around in all of this that, by no means new, nevertheless has often been overlooked or simply dismissed by the classical
Starting point is 00:42:22 historians as obviously eunuch disinformation. But Dalby seems to think it warrants more careful consideration. Maybe, just maybe, the answer to who killed Qianzong is... no one. Or at least not intentionally. It might have been little more than an accidental drug overdose. Bear with me. Let's think way, way back to the very first emperor of China,
Starting point is 00:42:50 the founder of the Qin dynasty, Qin Shi Huang. He spent the whole back half of his life searching for a potion of immortality before arriving at the conclusion that drinking mercury was the answer, with entirely predictable and gruesome results. Well, the emperors of Tang weren't exactly going around drinking mercury anymore, but they were no less fascinated with the idea of an elixir of immortality, and just like Qin Shi Huang, they spent an inordinate amount of time, energy, and money on the hunt for that mixture that would allow them to live forever.
Starting point is 00:43:26 And in this, Xianzong was no exception. It's probable that the alchemists in his employ, and there were many, would have consulted the great medicinal almanac of the era, the 7th century tome entitled Dan Jing Yao Zhe, or the Classic of Essential Alchemical Formulas. Its author, Sun Simiao, aka the King of Medicine, had a very specific formula for an elixir of eternal life, and let's just go ahead and take a look at the ingredient list, shall we? Gold, jade, hematite, so far so good, uh-oh, arsenic, cinnabar, sulfur, mercury salts, and, oh, there it is, mercury outright. I guess I spoke too soon. Suffice it to say, the medicines Shanzong would have been taking to make him immortal were not only killing him, but probably also making him insane, erratic, and more violent with time. All behaviors very much attributed to
Starting point is 00:44:31 him all at once, beginning in 618 up until his death two years later. In the end though, we cannot do better than those that have come before us, which is simply to ascribe our own understandings onto an ancient mystery and nod our heads sagely at how enlightened we all are. In that, at least, we and the Confucians can all smugly nod our heads together. But even the author of the Zizhi Tongjian, Sima Guang, very biased though he was, was forced in the end to bow before the speculative nature of it all. Maybe Shanzong was murdered. Maybe he accidentally poisoned himself. Heck, maybe he had a brain aneurysm or something. When all is said and done, it is, then as now, quote,
Starting point is 00:45:17 impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood, End quote. So, here we sit. Xianzong suddenly toes up and is work only half done. And so, next time, we're going to plunge ever onward into Xianzong's successor, Emperor Muzong, and the increasingly important and increasingly infamous role the court eunuchs will be playing in the era of late Tang. We've hit our last big uptick in the roles of the monarchy dice here with Yang Xianzong, and unfortunately for the Tang dynasty, it's all downhill from here. Thanks for listening. 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
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