The History of China - #115 - Tang 27: The Third Disaster of Wu

Episode Date: January 8, 2017

The new Emperor Wuzong will have a lot on his plate right from the get-go. Foreign threats and domestic squabbles will frame his early reign, but it's his own fanatical devotion to Daoism and antipathy to Buddhism that will define his reign. Period Covered: 840-846 CE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. Before we get into it today, let me first take a moment to suggest you check out our friends X Xander and Eric, over at the Reconsider podcast. There, they take on one pressing political issue facing Western democracies with a fresh, researched, in-depth, and challenging perspective, helping listeners see the full context behind the issue and make up their minds on their own. Reconsider. Find it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, Or at the Agora Podcast Network. And now, on with the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 115, The Third Disaster of Wu

Last time, we began, and ended, the reign of the Tang Dynasty's 18th emperor, Wenzong, and his close-but-no-cigar plot to take the palace eunuchs down a peg or two. When that hadn't panned out, Wenzong had then died in the year 840 at the age of only 30 or 31, as a result of an old illness coming back. Wenzong, you may recall from the end of last episode, did have one natural son and heir, but the young prince had been arrested and then mysteriously killed back in 1838, leaving the imperial court in turmoil over to whom succession should fall in light of the reigning monarch's failing health.

That question would be answered in a rather bloody fashion, and as always in 9th century China, by the court eunuchs. Already, two sons of the late emperor Muzong had sat the throne in quick succession. First is worthless layabout, the eldest, Jingzong, followed by the well-meaning but impotent, Wenzong. In 840 then, the eunuch bureau would throw its weight once more behind yet another son of Mu Zong, this time the ninth of his ten sons, Prince Li Chan, who would be enthroned after a brief mourning period for his elder brother that same year at the age of 26, and quickly set the tone of his reign to come by ordering the suicide of two of his own brothers who had been competitors for the throne, as well as their supporters, including ranking members of government

and even Wenzong's own favorite concubine, the Lady Yang. It would be that willingness to shed blood, combined with events external to the empire itself, that would shape Li Chan's period of rule and, in the end, earn him his temple name, Wu Zhong, the Militant Ancestor. Yet for all the imperial fanfare and drama, there is and will be, over the course of this new emperor's period of rule, another figure who, while often eclipsed and in the background, is at least as important to the story. He's actually not new to our tale,

as we introduced him last time as one of the major players in both the Nioh-Li factional strife and the Sweet Dew plot. But since he's going to be pretty central to today's story rather than a bit player, I think he's worth a reintroduction. Li Dayu was, in 840, 53 years old, and had been serving as Wenzong's chancellor between 833 and 837 until he took up a jiedushi military governorship out in the provinces. In spite of the successional dispute at the top, Li Dayu would retain his high-ranking position among the court, and shortly after Wuzong's secession, returned to Chang'an to once again helm the pinnacle of the officialdom over the entirety of the emperor's reign. It is, in fact,

directly from Li Dayu that we get several illustrative primary quotes from this era regarding his master's wishes and challenges in the form of his personal missives. Very early into this second tenure as chancellor, there is an incident that lets us see the divergent temperaments of both the young emperor and the aged official as they squared off against one another. Wuzong, influenced by the still vindictive eunuch officials headed by Qiu Shiliang, was seriously considering sending two of his personal messengers out to the provincial residences-in-exile of the two former chancellors of Wenzong, who had made the grievous error of backing one of Wuzong's rival brothers to the throne.

That mistake had already cost them both their jobs in 840, but at the eunuch Qiu's insistence, the imperial messengers would be dispatched to complete the job and order the former chancellor's That mistake had already cost them both their jobs in 840, but at the eunuch Chiu's insistence, the imperial messengers would be dispatched to complete the job and order the former chancellor's suicides as well. In spite of having once been bitter political opponents to Li Dayu, the new chancellor nevertheless lobbied the throne fiercely on his rival's behalf. Professor Dalby writes, quote, With no regard for his partisan advantage, Li argued fiercely for the lives of his political opponents, petitioning the emperor on their behalf not once but three times and mobilizing court opinion to the cause. Finally, Wuzong growled to Li Dayu, I shall spare them,

but only on your account, end quote. It would prove an exchange that was emblematic of Wu Zong and Li Dayu's entire relationship between 840 and 846. Wu Zong, the brash, quick-tempered, stubborn, and fanatically religious monarch in a political marriage with the charming, quick-witted, calculating, secretive, and haughty Chancellor Li. An odd couple, indeed. As a politician, Li Dayu's style and outlook was definitely more toward the authoritarian end of the Confucian spectrum.

He seemed to have idolized and sought to emulate the strong chief ministers of the early Han era of the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE, and we're told that his favorite book was even older than that, the Guanzi, which had been penned by the prime minister of the state of Qi, Guanzhong, more than 1300 years prior, in the 7th century BCE, and which blended Confucian, Taoist, and legalist elements into a synthesis that, at least on paper, tempered the more extreme or idealistic elements of each philosophy. This philosophical bent was aided and abetted by Emperor Wuzong himself, who, in stark contrast to what had become long-standing Tang court tradition, did away with the practice of having policy issues debated in front of him by several equally ranking ministers. But as said,

now entrusted virtually every important decision of state to Chancellor Li Dayu alone. And that state of affairs suited Chancellor Li, something of a lone wolf by nature, just fine. Rather than frequently consulting with his peers and colleagues about important matters of state, the Chancellor raised no small number of eyebrows at court by instead preferring to read and review the pertinent information regarding a decision to be made, and then essentially lock himself alone within his private garden to formulate his plan of action. And after some length of time, he would emerge, ultimately with a final draft already done. In spite of his peculiar and

solitary style of governance, there is no doubt that Li Dayu was an exceptional helmsman of the state. Again, from Dalby, quote, sympathetic historians. His skill at comprehension of detail, use of other men with due attention to their talents and weaknesses, coordination of large-scale governmental actions, and presentation of complicated proposals to the emperor is illustrated time and again. End quote. Had another man been set in his place as chancellor over the 840s, things might have turned out quite a bit differently for the Tang Empire as it squared up against the myriad challenges that the decade would bring to its doorstep, and almost certainly it would have been the worst for it. Though he was certainly not the only important or influential politician at court during this time, there's little doubt that between 840 and 846, it was

pretty much the Li Dayu show, and it would be upon him alone that the ship of state would capsize or stay aright. So let's go ahead and begin earning Wu Zong, the martial ancestor, his temple name, shall we? Mere months after his formal enthronement in the autumn of 840, a series of curious and disturbing reports began filtering back to the capital from the northern borderlands. Uyghurs had begun turning up and encamping all along the Ordos Bend of the Yellow River in what is today Inner Mongolia. It had started as a trickle and then become a stream, and by late 840 it had become a torrent of steppe tribesmen, women, and children perched right along the edge of the Chinese sphere, as the provincial governors

could do little more than just watch and wait. Their numbers continued to swell to as many as 100,000 strong, surely the largest single nomadic migration in centuries, at the least, and a situation that would have sent most emperors, quite understandably, into fits of panic. On the 11th of November, 840, the commissioner of the Tian De border army, Wen De Yi, sent a message to the capital expressing his and his people's fears regarding the mass of barbarians that day by day continued to swell further. He wrote, quote, their tents fill the horizon. From east to west, for sixty li, I cannot see the end of them, end quote. Yet in spite of the governor's and the court's fears of a planned

invasion, the truth of the situation was that the Uyghur tribes were not pressing south to invade, but to escape. As we've seen virtually every time we discuss the steppe tribes and confederations at any length, it's important to always keep in mind that they were never a really unified people or state. Rather, as the term confederation implies, they were a conglomeration of many disparate tribes hewn together, often in fairly loose fashion, by a military leader, a khan, with enough power and gravitas to pull such a feat off, and proclaim himself a kayan or kagan. The Tang Empire, of course, was absolutely no stranger to this state of affairs on the steppe. The Imperial

Li clan, you may remember, were themselves of partially Turkic origin, and had come into power with the backing of one such steppe confederation, the Gukturk Khanate, before they'd been forced to turn to its successor in the mid-8th century to fend off the An Lushan invasion. Yet it was that successor state, the Uyghur Khanate, or rather what was now left of it, that was now camped so dangerously uncomfortably close to Chinese territory. What had happened in the half-century since the Uyghurs' rise to primacy in the aftermath of the An Lushan Rebellion? As early as the 820s, one of the Confederacy's subjugated vassal tribes, the Kyrgyz of the

Mongolian Plateau in southern Siberia, had taken advantage of a perceived Uyghur weakness and launched a rebellion intended to unseat their overlords. The Kyrgyz ruler styled himself Khagan in his own right around 820, and the two factions of steppe riders would commence a 20-year-long struggle for control over Central Asia, all leading up to the Kyrgyz Bilge Khagan issuing a direct challenge to his foe, the Uyghur Hesa Khagan. As recorded in the New Book of Tang,

The winter of 839-840 would bear that threat out in particularly devastating fashion for the Uyghurs. Heavier than usual snows killed off much of their livestock, which in turn led to famine and disease among the tribe's people. On the tail end of this devastating winter, a renegade Uyghur general who had defected to the Kyrgyz Khan returned to the Uyghur capital of Ordubalik alongside his neword, and at the head of an army of as many as 100,000, and proceeded to slaughter Husa Kagan and his retinue, and put the rest of the Uyghur peoples to flight. Just like that, the Kyrgyz had made good on their Khan's rebellion, and thrown off the Uyghur domination. However, it should be noted that, in the end, Bilga Kagan did not carry out his previous threat to take the Uyghur's golden tent, and race horses and plant flags in front of it. Rather, he contented himself with simply burning the great tent and the Uyghur

banners while his men plundered the capital. Yet for this great victory, the Kyrgyz tribe did not follow their predecessor's precedent and set up shop in the Orkhon Valley. Michael Dromp, in his book Tang China and the Collapse of the Uyghur Empire, writes of this curious vacuum in the Orkhon, quote, The Kyrgyz did not replace the Uyghurs in the Orkhon Valley, but remained focused in their homeland in the region of the upper Yenisei Valley to the north. The Uyghur heartland then entered into a dark period about which little is known until its re-emergence to the light of history in the 13th century with the rise of Genghis Khan, end quote. For the remnants of the once mighty Uyghur peoples now put to flight, there were two main directions they chose to flee.

The first direction was westward to the regions of Gansu and the Tarim Basin, which are, in case you're not near a handy map of 9th century China right now, respectively the corridor that had once linked the Chinese heartlands to the far western protectorates and the region of the protectorates itself abutting the vast wasteland of the Taklamakan Desert, dividing China from modern Kazakhstan. That far western region would, it would turn out, become the permanent homeland of the Uyghur peoples even through today, known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. But Xinjiang reincorporation into the Chinese Empire is a tale for another day and another dynasty. We are instead going to be following the other half of the Uyghur population as they made

their way not west but rather south, once again to the Ordos Loop of the Yellow River and squarely into the sights of Emperor Wuzhong. The Uyghurs along the Ordos were led by the brother of the murdered Khagan, a man by the name of Prince Ormuzd, which, as a brief tangent, was apparently a deriv led by the brother of the murdered Khagan, a man by the name of Prince Ormizd, which, as a brief tangent, was apparently a derivation of the name of the supreme god of the ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda. So, how's that for a nice Iranian tie-in? Drump notes that in spite of the Tang Chinese's propensity to staff its borders with walled garrisons stocked with troops, by 840 the Uyghurs arrived at the borders of the empire and found it a very sorry state indeed. He writes, quote,

Garrison towns and their defensive walls had been allowed to fall into disrepair, and manpower was insufficient to counter any real threat, end quote. This lack of military preparation was further complicated by the fact that rather than running into a solid wall of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural Chineseness at the Tong border, which may have discouraged further encroachment or at least make the Uyghur peoples think twice about overplaying their hand with this erstwhile ally, what they instead found was that the northern borderlands was an ongoing cultural melting pot. As we've discussed before, it had been a state policy from at least

the time of the Han dynasty to resettle non-Han peoples within the empire, a policy that had shifted somewhat by the mid-9th century to the so-called loose-reign system, in which the resettled peoples were permitted to retain their own individual customs, dress, and languages. Thus, rather than coming to some stark realization like, oh, we're in another people's land now, the Uyghurs might be forgiven if, upon encountering no shortage of Turkic-speaking Xatwo, Tanguts, and Tuyuhun peoples all going about their lives in more or less the traditional manner, they assumed that there'd be little fuss if they just joined in as well. When Commissioner 1 Daiti's panicked missive reached the Imperial Palace, Wu Zong wasted

little time in appointing an official to head up the government's response to this emerging Uyghur crisis. Any guesses as to which of his officials he selected for this important and prestigious task? That's right, none other than Chancellor Li Dayu. Chancellor Li made haste to contact the ranking Imperial Commander in the Ordos region, the Jiedushi of Zhenwu, Liu Mian. General Liu was ordered to take a contingent of his own step-riders

and station them within the Yunjia Pass in order to head off a potential invasion by the Uyghurs. A wise precaution, but one that would ultimately prove unnecessary. The Uyghurs were not here to fight or raid, at least not raid that much. By January of 841, in fact, General Liu, apparently satisfied that these barbarian tribes possessed no immediate threat, sent a message to Chang'an informing the palace that the Uyghurs had withdrawn from the immediate

vicinity of the border, even though, as Dromp points out, Prince Ormizd had only shifted his people's position within the region, and was still very much around. Drompe suggests that such a relocation may have been a conscious decision on the Uyghur chieftain's part to try to placate the nervous Chinese border officials by displaying his tribesmen's peaceful intention and desire for asylum rather than pillage. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile, these people created one of the most enduring and significant cultures. Their tale comes to life in the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore the tales of this amazing culture,

from the legendary days of creation and the gods, all the way to Cleopatra, and everything in between. The History of Egypt podcast is written and produced by a trained Egyptologist. We go much deeper than your average documentary or magazine article to uncover tales of life, great endeavours, and the amazing arc of a mighty kingdom. The History of Egypt podcast is available on all podcasting platforms, apps, and websites. Come, visit ancient Egypt, and experience a legendary culture. By late March, the imperial court and Chancellor Li had been made aware of at least the broad

strokes of the Uyghurs' predicament, and just why exactly they'd shown up at the Tang's doorstep, hat in hand and unannounced. In the first of several missives to the Uyghur chieftain, called A Letter of Imperial Decree to the Rebellious Uyghurs, Li Dayu lays out his and his government's position as follows, which would pretty much characterize all of the Sino-Uyghur communications over the course of this period. the matter, we are deeply grieved. Our nation and your homeland have been joined for generations by good marriages. We have long been related by marriage, united in virtue and of one mind, to a constant envy of all other foreigners.

For this reason, the border has been without alarms, the frontier at peace. But you suddenly led an army of followers to camp south of the desert, and frequently came to Tienda to raid and plunder, seriously disturbing the border peoples. The army you have assembled is utterly lacking in legitimacy and honor. We are extremely disappointed that you have spoiled our former good relations in this way. You should simply report your plan of action to us, put forth effort in faithful End quote. In other words, yeah, we hear you've got problems. Well, who doesn't? We don't really know the details, but we'd really like it if you could just go back to wherever you came from and fix your problem rather than bothering us.

It wasn't until the following August that Ormizd's reply to Li Dayu's get-off-my-lawn letter arrived back in Chang'an, and it was unsatisfactory to the Chinese, to say the least. Rather than agreeing to just head back to their homeland, the Uyghur prince instead made it clear that they weren't going anywhere because they had nowhere left to go. And by the way, we also demand that you give us one of your fortified cities to use as our new headquarters. This back and forth continued on into the following year, along with a mounting insistence by the Tang Chancellor that if asylum was even going to be a possibility in the long term, then the Uyghurs were going to need to submit in a more formalized fashion to Tang suzerainty. This was a precedent that had hearkened back more than

nine centuries to when the Han Emperor, Xuan Di, had accepted the submission of the Xiongnu Chanyu, Hu Hanyue. Chancellor Li used this precedent with successful rhetorical flourish and pressed to the Uyghur Khan that, as they were the successor state of the Xiongnu Chanyu, Hu Hanyue. Chancellor Li used this precedent with successful rhetorical flourish, and pressed to the Uyghur Khan that, as they were the successor state of the Xiongnu, and the Tang was the inheritor of the mantle of the Han, it was only right that such a relationship be resumed in the same fashion. Prince Ornist balked at this notion of a resumed subservience to what had only recently been a nominal vassal state of his Great Comet, and simply reiterated that they required one of the Chinese's walled forts for their protection, and they intended to set up shop right there in River City. And that was Trouble, with a capital T that rhymes with C, that stands for conflict.

Li Dayu, who by this time had been holding back his own border generals and tribal enemies of the Uyghurs, who'd just been itching to get back at those interlopers for some time now, essentially threw his hands up in frustration at this point. It was simply impossible for the Tang government to accept such a large group of potentially hostile barbarians on their border using their stuff and not submitting to the imperial will. There was going to have to be a decisive resolution to this problem, but first the Tang military would need time to prepare. As I said earlier, the northern border guards had suffered greatly from a long period of neglect and had fallen into disrepair.

As they currently stood, there was simply no way the northern garrisons could hope to rebuff a concerted Uyghur push into their territory, much less hope to drive them back into the Gobi. What Li Dayu needed, therefore, was time. Time he would buy with gifts of food, clothing, and supplies while his agents moved with all haste to prepare for the reckoning that was to come. Hostilities would break out in early 843, with Li Dayu assuming the role of commander-in-chief of the strike force in a way that, according to Dalby, combined, quote, civil and military responsibilities more skillfully than any other late Tang chief minister, end quote. This was due in large part to the fact that while he retained overall command of strategy,

tactics, and other supply logistics from the capital to the front, he did not make the mistake of so many other Tang civil bureaucrats turned military commanders of trying to micromanage the whole affair himself. Rather, he left the tactical decisions on the ground up to the generals under his command, whom he had handpicked and felt he could trust implicitly. The result was a fantastic success for the remarkably coordinated Tang armies, a rare feat in this day and age. In short order, the Tang troops took the main Uyghur encampment by surprise, which swiftly devolved into a bloody, disorganized route for the disaffected tribesmen.

A group of some 30,000 Uyghurs were cornered by the Tang soldiers along the slopes of a mountain just south of the Gobi, where approximately 10,000 were slaughtered and the remaining two-thirds taken captive. This gruesome incident would actually go on to name the mountain itself, which ever after was called Shah Hushan, meaning Kill the Huns Mountain. As for the reticent leader of the Uyghur, Prince Ormizd, he would escape into the Gobi Desert, only to be hunted down and killed a few years later. The second major event of Wuzong's reign and Li Dayu's government would hit even closer to home. In spite of the fact that their precipitous foreign crisis had been averted, almost right after its successful conclusion, a domestic disturbance would rear its ugly head. This would be an issue that had played out time

and time again now for the empire for now almost a century. Yet another crisis in the northeast revolving around successional issues for the Jieduxia military governors. The province in question this time was that of Zhaoyi, which, like the other troublesome provinces of decades past, was nested in the semi-autonomous northeast of Shanxi. Interestingly, markedly unlike the majority of the northeast, Zhaoyi hadn't made any kind of a fuss before just now, and indeed had remained staunchly loyal to the throne since its creation back in 757. Now, quite frankly, we've gone over this almost exact situation quite enough at this point, so let's just summarize. In late 843, the son of the recently deceased governor wished to inherit the position. Chang'an was like,

no way, so the son rebels, and the government sends its army. And by late summer of 844, the rebellious son was murdered by his own underlings in the face of total defeat. It was actually Li Dayu's adroit handling of this crisis that would earn him

the title of Duke of Wei, which I had erroneously been referring to him for the past episode and a half. So sorry about that. My bad. The third and final major crisis of Wuzong's reign would follow close behind. Foreign crisis resolved, domestic crisis crushed, now it's time for a good old-fashioned religious persecution.

Emperor Wuzong was a Taoist, but not just any old run-of-the-mill Taoist. He was frequently described as being an out-and-out fanatic, especially as his reign progressed. Meanwhile, for what had been several centuries at this point, Buddhism was gaining more and more ground among both the populace at large and the government officialdom. Which is not to say that there hadn't been its fair share of detractors within high society as well. In 819, for instance, the Confucian official and poet Han Yu wrote to the imperial court expressing his deep concern about a procession that was to take place in which the Buddhist finger bone would be paraded through the capital and then into the palace with the then emperor, Xianzong, in attendance. Han Yu had written, quote,

Your servant begs leave to say that Buddhism is no more than a cult of the barbarian peoples spread to China. The Buddha's sayings contain nothing about our ancient kings. He understood neither the duties that bind sovereign to subject nor the affections of father and son. If the Buddha were still alive today and came to our court, he would be escorted to the borders of our nation, dismissed, and not allowed to delude the masses, end quote. But that would prove to be little more than a warm-up for what our current emperor, Wuzong, was about to bring down upon the adherents of the Eightfold Path. He would promulgate an edict in the year 845, spelling out exactly what he thought about this foreign little cult that had been allowed to fester inside his borders for far too long.

This quote is a little bit long, but it's fantastic, and I think it deserves to be read in full. So here it goes. Quote, We have heard that the Buddha was never spoken of before the Han dynasty. From then on, the religion of idols gradually came to prominence. So in the latter age, Buddhism has transmitted its strange ways and has spread like a luxuriant vine until it has poisoned the customs of our nation. Buddhism has spread to all the nine provinces of China. Each day finds its monks and followers growing more numerous and its temples more lofty. Buddhism wears out the people's strength, pilfers their wealth, causes people to abandon their lords and parents for the company of teachers, and severs man and wife with its monastic decrees.

In destroying law and in injuring humankind, indeed nothing surpasses this doctrine. Now, if even one man fails to work the fields, someone will go hungry. If one woman does not tend to her silkworms, someone will go cold. At present, there are an inestimable number of monks and nuns in the empire, all of them waiting for the farmers to feed them and the silkworms to clothe them, while the Buddhist public temples and private chapels have reached boundless numbers, sufficient to outshine the imperial palace itself. Having thoroughly examined all earlier reports and consulted public opinion on all sides, there no longer remains the slightest

doubt in our mind that this evil should be eradicated. End quote. Now that is some pretty heavy sentiments going on there, and while Wu Zong was a fanatic, he also wasn't exactly wrong on the whole the monks and nuns are a drain on our national resources thing. In spite of the piousness in which his language was couched, it was the underlying economic motivations that Dalby agrees was the first and foremost driving factor behind the disaster to follow. The recent wars with the Uyghurs and then Zhaoyi province had only exacerbated what we all know had been a never-ending carousel of ruinous finances for the empire. Copper mines had continued to slow their production in the face of ever-increasing

demand for specie, and the imperial treasuries were essentially straining to the breaking point, in no small part from just the physical lack of bullion to mint coinage. Meanwhile, over the course of the 820s and 830s, the Buddhist temples that had sprung up across the land were positively flourishing. Over the centuries, the Buddhist clergy had built up a staggering amount of physical wealth in the form of gold, silver, and copper icons, statues, and ritual implements. The monks of China had managed to find a loophole in the long-standing Buddhist prohibitions against such worldly economic activities by justifying their hoarding of precious metals as benefiting the religious community as a whole rather than just for one

individual. By this point in our story, though, the massive bullion reserves stashed away in Buddhist temples all across the empire had become a millstone around the neck of the Tang Empire's economy, strained as it already was by simply not having enough metal to mend sufficient coinage. This problem was further exacerbated by the enormous tracts of land that had been given to the faith over time, oftentimes some of the most productive and profitable estates in the land, but which were almost entirely exempt from taxation on that production, as were the huge number of clergymen and women who worked it. Moreover, and it should be made clear, this religious purge was not only directed against Buddhism, but instead a more general drive by the emperor to purge China of all foreign elements.

Ill treatment of likely similar effect was directed at the resident populations of Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians, and Manichaeanism as well. The sentiments of persecution reached their apex in the year 845, alongside Emperor Wu's official condemnation of the religion. Along with his edict, Wu Zang ordered the systemic repossession and destruction of first some 40,000 smaller shrines, monasteries, and estates held by the church, before turning his attention to the monolithic temples that were at the heart of the capital and the empire's other great cities. Dalby writes, quote,

A mere handful of exceptions were granted. The superior prefectures were to be allowed one temple apiece, and Chang'an and Luoyang were permitted to retain two, manned only by 30 monks per temple. Purportedly, this process was directly overseen by Chancellor Li Dayu, although that does remain uncertain. That last part, though, about each remaining temple only being allowed 30 staff, would prove to be possibly the most devastating aspect of Wuzong's persecution. All told, by this period, there were as many as a quarter million people across the empire who had taken up monastic

vows, which amounted to a sizable portion of the population that had effectively opted out of the tax system, and that wasn't going to stand. As of 845, all 250,000, save for the skeleton crews left to man the surviving temples, were forcibly stripped of their vows and returned to laity. And we really are talking about forced here, since although we have no certain number, accounts say that a large number were killed or injured in the process. In one particularly noted example, the Japanese monk in attaché to an ongoing diplomatic mission from the Heian court, whose name was Enin, would himself be expelled from China along with other foreign priests and monks. It's unclear how long this third great

purge of Buddhism and other foreign faiths might have gone on, or to what further depths it might have sunk in the process, had Emperor Wuzong been around to keep it going through his personal beliefs. However, fortunately for Buddhist adherents, Wuzong would die less than a year after issuing his anti-Buddhist proclamation, which had the effect of grinding the persecution to a virtual halt with the accession of his uncle to the throne. As the 840s had reached its midpoint, you see, Wuzong had become radicalized in his Taoist faith by his equally fanatical priests.

That had bore itself out not only in hostility to competing religion, but also the time-honored Taoist imperial tradition of ingesting toxic substances in the pursuit of alchemical eternal life. The faith's preoccupation with magic and life eternal had actually caused many in the upper officialdom to turn away from Taoism, and it had increasingly become career suicide to be seen as tied too closely to the faith. Nevertheless, Wuzong had delved deeply into the beliefs and practices of those priests who promised him a means to achieve immortality, and began imbibing a cocktail of substances,

many of them outright poisonous. This slow poisoning of the body and mind of the emperor had become increasingly obvious as the 840s wore on, and by the middle of the decade he was noted as having wide mood shifts and becoming increasingly ill and weak. Did he stop taking the toxic mixers, though? Of course not. He was this close to eternal life. He would seek a similarly mystical solution for his increasing health problems, though, which was to change his given name. As a practitioner of cosmology and astrology, Wu Zong came to the conclusion that his birth name, Chan, was throwing off the balance of

his qi. Thus, he decided that if he changed his name to a character with more fire energy in it, like Yan, that would put him back into balance, and he could get back to his character with more fire energy in it, like Yen. That would put him back into balance, and he could get back to his regimen of arsenic, all healthy. You'll be shocked to learn, then, that the name Switcheroo did not have the intended curative effects, and Wuzong's condition continued to worsen over the course of 845. As the inevitability of what was happening to the Emperor sank in, the court began to scramble to find another potential successor. Though the emperor had five sons, they were all still small children, and it was determined that another branch of the household would better fit the bill.

It would once again be the ranking members of the eunuch bureau who would act quickest to secure their own preferred candidate, Wuzong and his brother's uncle, Prince Li Yi, whom they seemed to have selected because they thought of him as dim-witted and thus easy to control. As they, and we, will come to see next time, though. Boy, were they wrong about that. In any case, shortly after Prince Li Yi's confirmation to the Eredom, and just two months before Emperor Wuzong's 32nd birthday, his heavy, metal-laden body finally succumbed in late April of 846. His legacy was to be remembered as a

tireless warrior against barbarians and foreign religions, and his succumbing to fanaticism and madness at the end of his six years in office. Next time, we'll go ahead and turn to the man who would surprise everyone, especially those people who put him in power, by secretly actually being intelligent the whole time and not the dolt they thought he was. The Tang Empire's last reasonably competent emperor, China's own Claudius, Emperor Xuanzong II. Thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze.

It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.