The History of China - #116 - Tang 28: I, Xuānzong

Episode Date: January 22, 2017

Li Yi was never trained to be emperor. Not only was he the thirteenth son of Xianzong, but he'd been ruthlessly mocked and belittled his whole life by his entire family for being an idiot, an invalid, and a mute. But when his hated nephew dies in 846, he's going to shock the world by revealing he was faking it the whole time, and go on to become the last good emperor of the Tang before its final bow. Time Period Covered: 846-859 CE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I, Li Chen, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, the original holy and bright, honest and martial, the level and cultured, the chapter of benevolence, the godly and clever, this, that, and the other, for I shall not trouble you with all my titles. Who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as E the Idiot, or That Li E, or Li E the Silent, or at best as Poor Uncle Guang, am now about to write this strange history of my life. Starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reached the fateful point of change where, some years ago, at the age of 36, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the golden predicament from which I have never since become disentangled. Alright, as fun as it is to try to continue on in the style of Robert Graves' titular Claudius, in the interest of both clarity and copyright law,

let's get back to our regular narrative perspective. Still, as we'll see today, the life of the man who would be known as Emperor Xuanzong, and that of Uncle Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, are more than a little striking, and well worth drawing the comparison, silly though it may be. Before going any further, though, let's start with that name, Xuanzong. Wait a minute, you're probably already saying to yourself, that sounds familiar, haven't we already done a Xuanzong? Well, yes, and no.

We have indeed covered the life and times of Li Longji, a.k.a. Emperor Xuanzong, of the early and mid-8th century, back in episodes 95 through 98. But here and now, we run once again into the wonderful world of Chinese homophones, and the frustrations of a tonal language. Li Longji, you see, was Xuanzong, meaning profound ancestor, whereas our current emperor, Li Yi, would be known to history as Xuanzong, meaning the all-embracing. Did you hear the difference? Well, no points deducted for you if you didn't.

But they are very different words that just so happen to sound exactly the same, except for the tone in which they're spoken. It's tempting to raise one fist to the sky and say, Why, China, why? But then I think about the perennial bugaboo of ESL students and internet comment section trolls alike, there, there, and there, and suddenly feel a little bit more forgiving. Still, it's been a real hassle for every historian trying to write about these

two different emperors in English, with a few different ways of trying to address it. The Wade-Giles, and therefore absolute worst, method was to tack on a silent extra letter I in the middle of Xuan, which, as usual for good old Wade Giles, made absolutely no sense and completely messed up any attempt to actually read it correctly. Modern Chinese romanization, through Hanyu Pinyin, spells them the same, but simply includes the tone markers which indeed distinguishes them visually, but still leaves us rather high and dry in terms of an audio-friendly differentiation to an audience that, by and large, isn't used to tonal languages. That leaves us with option C, which is to adopt the European-style convention of tacking on a regnal number to the name, as in Xuanzong II. And that's well and good, so long as we remember that

it's not actually the same name. It just sounds like it is. In the end, though, and considering this already rather long explanation, I'm gonna just go ahead and go forward calling him Xuanzong, and you'll all know that I'm not talking about Li Longji of the 700s, but Li Chen slash Li Yi of the 840s and 850s. Deal? Deal. As I said at the end of the last episode, Xuanzong was not the son of the preceding Emperor Wuzong, but in fact the uncle of the previous three emperors, Wuzong, Wenzong, and Jingzong. He was the thirteenth son of the late Emperor Xuanzong, who we discussed back in episode 112. As his birth order would suggest, Prince Li Yi was never, ever expected to rule. In terms of both succession order and his own personality, it must have seemed so utterly out of reach as to not even bother thinking about,

much less preparing for. His early life did not help his prospects either. Not only was he the baker's dozenth son of Xianzong, but he was frail and sickly as a child, and purportedly seemed to have occasional hallucinations and visions as well. This, of course, painted a target on his back from the get-go, and many in his family quickly came to write him off as essentially an invalid and an idiot to be shunned, ignored, or mocked as the situation saw fit. Li Yi would in time learn to use this written-offness as a means of self-protection and even survival. People thought him an idiot?

Well, in the dangerous world of the 9th century Tang politics, so much the better. With the powerful and ruthless bureaucrats and eunuch bureau seating and unseating princes and emperors essentially at their whim, being taken for a harmless fool at least kept him off of anyone's hit list of potentially dangerous opponents. The worst of it stemmed from his three nephews, the three former emperors, and their occasional visits to the residence of the collective imperial princes, the so-called Sixteen Mansions. The brothers seemed to have taken a particular delight in humiliating and tormenting their uncle, Li Yi, whom they mockingly called Uncle Guang,

and they were said to have frequently made a game out of trying to get him to talk by mocking him, a thing that he did so rarely that he was often taken for a mute as well. But when Emperor Wuzong surprised everyone by plunging into what would be a terminal illness in the year 846 at only 31 years old, the court found itself in something of a bind. Wuzong had sired sons, yes, but they were still small children and declared unsuitable for elevation from the very get-go, and Wuzong had plumb run out of eligible brothers. As such, it was quickly determined, mostly by the high officials of the eunuch bureau, that the only reasonable choice left to the imperial clan was poor Uncle Guang, idiot mute, or not. And that was a decision that was fine and dandy with the eunuchs and with the outer court,

since sitting a moron on the throne would be sure to suit their own ends and bottom lines just fine. But man, oh man, were they all in for a shock, and very quickly. Before the ink was even dry on the proclamation naming Li Yi as the crown prince and legal successor to the rapidly dying emperor, it turned out that, by the way, idiot Uncle Guang had been faking it the whole time, dramatically overplaying both his physical frailty and his assumed mental deficiencies. As it turned out, he had spent the years of his life until now carefully filing away each and every grievance and humiliation heaped upon him by his family. Dalby writes,

quote, end quote. As a quick aside, the proclamation that had named him crown prince also officially changed his name from Li Yi to Yi Chen for Byzantine ceremonial reasons. But in any case, from here on out, I'm simply going to call him Emperor Xuanzong. The freshly enthroned monarch had long ago come to the conclusion that his father's death had actually been orchestrated by his half-brother M Zong and his mother, Empress Dowager Guo. Thus, he would spend the next five years systematically hunting down any and everyone who he thought had been involved in the whole alleged murder plot. Lady Guo,

who would die in 848, he refused to allow to be buried next to his father's tomb, as was customary, and it's thought that he might have even sped her along to an early demise. His half-brother, Xuanzong posthumously demoted in ancestral rituals, along with his now three dead sons, Xuanzong's hated imperial nephews, which, as per the Chinese view on the afterlife, as, in effect, an extension of the hierarchical and ritualized family relationships in life, was about the harshest punishment he could inflict upon them. The long-suppressed thoughts and feelings about the way things used to be seemed to become a preoccupation for this new emperor, even when he wasn't taking vengeance against those who he blamed for the destruction

of those good old days. He very notably hired any and every storyteller he could find to regale him with their tales of forty years ago, and even showed a strong preference for hiring the descendants of those officials who had dutifully served his father during the Yuan He era. As for his own immediate family, Xuanzong took care that they never would feel the kind of torment or resentment that had been shown to him in his early years. For his mother and still-living brothers, he spared no expense in their comfort and care, and he doted on his sisters as well as his daughters. In fact, at one point, his eldest daughter committed an absolutely massive faux pas of smashing her chopsticks and dining spoon in his presence in order to demonstrate her unwillingness to marry the man

to which she'd been betrothed. The princess was so confident of his unwavering affection for her, in spite of what would have been in almost any other case a near-unforgivable action in the presence of the sovereign, that she felt that not only would she not be punished, but that her outburst would get him to reverse his decision entirely. And in both assumptions, she turned out to be right on. The marriage was cancelled, and the father-daughter relationship no worse for the wear. Yet in spite of the careful attention that he paid to his family, it's quite strange then that he never decided on formally naming an heir.

It's not as though he could have possibly forgotten. Over the course of his entire reign, Xuanzong's ever-anxious officials constantly pestered him to name one already. Nor does it seem that he was terribly indecisive on the question. Dalby points out that there seems to have been a clear favoritism toward his third son. Yet for all that, he just never seemed to get around to it, almost certainly because he did not want to break Confucian tradition in passing over his first two sons. That decision, however, would ultimately result

in yet another succession struggle at the end of his life, in which the eunuchs would once again play kingmaker. In terms of his style of rule, Xuanzong II, keen as he was on his own family's long history, was able to learn from the very best examples of his own imperial house. He very consciously modeled his own reign on that of the greatest Tang emperor of them all. Of course, I mean Taizong. Taizong and his era of true vision, you may recall, had been so tremendously successful, in large part because he encouraged his officials to give honest criticisms and reports to him,

and then actually listened to them. And so, so too, did Xuanzong, encouraging and rewarding frankness and honesty. Where he differed from his great ancestor, though, was that while Taizong had encouraged a cordial and collaborative, one might even be inclined to say friendly and kind of relaxed, atmosphere in his relationship with his officialdom, Xuanzong was forced to take a very different tact. It was probably due in no small part to the emperor's own ongoing and totally justifiable vindictiveness. After all, the vast majority of these officials now serving him had been the servants of his

nephews before him, and one suspects that none of them had gone out of their way to assist or defend him from his family's torments back when he'd been merely Uncle Guang. But it also seems likely that this tact with these officials might have been born out of a genuine need, that is, the need to inspire awe in his person and compliance with his dictums. Xuanzong would have been self-aware enough to know, and let's be frank, would have been made to know frequently by his brothers and nephews, that he was not a naturally impressive figure. Taizong had led an army, established a dynasty, choked his own brother to death with his bare hands, and then forced his father to retire all before he was 30.

That guy didn't need any help being impressive and inspiring a natural state of awe. Xuanzong, on the other hand, Li the idiot, had been running a rather large respect deficit for basically his whole life, and so now he needed a way to make up for that, to force respect for him where it would not be coming naturally. So he became an absolute stickler for the tiniest little details of court etiquette and formality, and combined it with his own cantankerously acid wit to make sure that everyone was precisely aware of just how on top of everything he was. High government bureaucrats, for who several entire regimes now had been on very long leashes indeed, with the former emperors having been either too lazy, too weak, or too preoccupied

to bother reining them in, suddenly found themselves humiliatingly berated for even minor deviations from proper protocol, and routinely belittled by an emperor who, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly as often as not seem to know more about their jobs and the issues they were bringing before him than they themselves. Again, from Dalby, His information for such formal court sessions, at which he grilled visiting governors and newly appointed local officials mercilessly, came from his study of important data about the empire and from meticulous briefings prepared by his staff. His punctiliousness in the matter of decorum and substance was so notorious that after 10 years as a chief minister under Xuanzong, Ling Hu Tao was on one occasion so unnerved by the emperor's

questions that his clothes were soaked through with sweat even though the weather was cold. End quote. Xuanzong didn't just demand to be taken seriously, he made it absolutely impossible to take him as anything else. His personality would prove to be able to do what none of his predecessors had been able, to so overwhelm the court bureaucrats that he would eclipse and silence any further strings of the factionalism that had so plagued the Tang court since the death of Xuanzong's father long ago. Speaking of ranking members of powerful political factions, of the first decisions he would make as sovereign,

among the easiest would be that it was time to say so long to Minister Li Dayu. You remember him, right? Minister Li had risen from mere leader of the Li faction to power and prominence as chief minister on the coattails of the emperor's least favorite nephew, Wu Zong. Li would be systematically and ruthlessly demoted all the way from the top of the mountain down to the literal bottom of the Chinese world, winding up as nothing more than a petty officer stationed on the island of Hainan, the nadir of Chinese officialdom, which put him geographically and career-wise as far away

from power and prestige as he could possibly be. There, Li Dayu, once the imperial chancellor, would die in obscurity in early 850. With him would also be thrown out the prescriptions of Buddhist clergy that had been enacted at Wuzong's behest, but by Li Dayu's hand. Though Buddhism would never quite regain its former standing within the empire as it had enjoyed in the early Tang, this would be the end of the final real official purge against its practitioners within the empire. Buddhism had managed to survive, and would in time thrive anew. 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. From a revolution based on hope and liberty, to its descent into the infamous reign of terror, there's plenty to discuss, and plenty of grey to explore. One can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So if you're looking for your next long-form, binge-worthy history podcast, one recommended by universities and loved by

enthusiasts, then check out Grey History, The French Revolution today. Or simply search for The French Revolution. The early period of Xuanzong's rule seemed to have been one of stock-taking, reappraisal of the past, and organization of knowledge. It was a period characterized by the production of more than a dozen historical and governmental compilations, which is startlingly high for the era. Xuanzong stressed an understanding of, and adherence to, the laws, and he not only talked the talk, he also walked the walk. Criminal laws were tightened and legal procedures regularized and made to adhere to precedent rather than the more ad hoc approach of earlier administrations. But don't be fooled, this was no big crackdown. Rather, it was actually something of the opposite.

A clarification, regularization, and even narrowing down of criminality and of punishments. Quote, the emperor seemed to have been inclined to and of punishments. Quote, Moving over to foreign affairs, last time we looked at the North and the Uyghur crisis that had been decisively and brutally put down under the command of Wu Zong and Li Dayu. Xuanzong would have an interesting foreign policy situation all his own, but his will be to the far west and south. The Tibetan Empire, that had long been the highland boogeyman to the Tang regime, had over the course of the 840s begun to terminally destabilize. Following the death of its king Long Dharma in 842, the powerful plateau force had begun the process of disintegration that would reach its final phase in the early reign of Emperor Shanzong.

This was actually great news for the Tang Empire, since the unexpected collapse of not only one, but both of its powerful neighbors in such a short time period freed up enormous amounts of manpower and funding that had been locked down in static defense for almost a century at this point. Emperor Xuanzong and his ministers wasted little time in capitalizing on this rapidly changing geopolitical chessboard. Critically, the decision was made to not commit resources towards any effort to retake the farthest-flung outposts of the Western Protectorate, owing largely to financial constraints and the fact that at this point,

there was no potential gain worth that kind of risk or expenditure. Still, in rapid succession, the near-Northwest that had been under Tibetan occupation for decades began breaking free and declaring their allegiance, sometimes of their own volition, back to the Tang once again. The Gansu Corridor, that critical link between the Chinese heartland and the far west, had long been lost to the Tang emperors and controlled by the forces of Laja. But now with the fragmentation of the Tibetan Empire, warlordism had sprung up and resulted in widespread conflicts between the regional generals and their

governors. Into this burgeoning chaos, a Chinese adventurer by the name of Zhang Yichao saw a chance at glory that he just couldn't resist. Raising an army of his own composed of supposedly mostly Chinese, although it seems to be much more likely that they would have been Sinicized Tibetans and Turks and mixes thereof, in 851 Zhang Yichao campaigned against the fractured Tibetan generals, and had such success that he was able to secure the majority of Gansu for himself, from Lanzhou in the east to as far west as Tunhuang. These regions he'd go on to pledge to the service of Chang'an in a letter that he sent to the imperial court, much to their surprise and delight. For his initiative and loyalty,

Zhang would be promoted to the post of Governor-General of Gansu and the commander of his now-imperial army, rechristened with the name Hui Yichen, the Army of Restored Allegiance. A far more difficult challenge than the northwest more or less just falling back into their lap would be posed to the capital in the steppelands skirting the Great Wall some 300 kilometers due north of Chang'an. Here in and around the Odos Loop lived yet another border people, the Tangxiang or Tangut tribes. The Tanguts had lived as a peripheral people since at least the 7th century,

when they had been forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands by Tibetan expansionism, and had thereafter been forced to eke out an existence in the spaces between the three great powers of the era, the Tibetans, the Chinese, and the Uyghurs. Here they had practiced their nomadic lifestyle, bred horses, and functioned as middlemen and go-betweens for the trade networks between Chang'an and Ordu Balik for a century and a half as Tang vassals under the so-called Loose Reins System to Chang'an. This system had remained intact until the unexpected crumbling of not just one, but two of the three regional powers that had presented a very unique opportunity indeed.

The Tanguts, you see, had rapidly swelled from tiny bands into a large and cohesive force as they began accepting and taking in other bands of Tibetans and Uyghurs fleeing the political turmoil of their respective empires. This loose-rein system and the governors that operated it turned out to be, from Dalby, quote, the original source of unrest in the area during the 9th century. The governors oppressed the Tanguts, cheating them of a just price for their horses and camels

and profiteering at the expense of the traveling merchants, end quote. With the swelling of their numbers, however, as well as an influx of smuggled weapons from China, the emboldened Tanguts had begun a series of rebellions against their local overlords beginning in the 820s and 830s, which by the late 840s had swelled into a large revolt and dangerous enough for Chang'an to sit up and take notice. Emperor Xuanzong initially tried to resolve the revolt in a conciliatory fashion and remove the governors against whom the nomad populations were revolting.

However, when even that did not stop their raids into their neighbors' towns and farms, the emperor quickly resolved to quash this crisis with force. In this effort, the Chinese armies would prove ultimately victorious, but it would really be only nominal. The campaign would take more than five years, become an enormous drain on the treasury, and in the end, though the Tanguts and Tibetans would be pacified, they remained strong and undiminished both militarily and financially. This outcome will prove important going forward, into the end of the Tang and the beginning of the five dynasties

and ten kingdoms that is to follow, because these Tangut nomads will be among those who break away from central Chinese control and seize the westernmost regions of the former empire in the 11th and 12th centuries as the Western Xia or Xixia dynasty. Unfortunately, as we get towards the end of Xuanzong's reign, the records largely dry up. This is almost certainly in large part to be laid at the feet of the chaos and destruction that would accompany the death of the dynastic order toward the end of this century. In fact, even at the time, or at least as close to at the time as Chinese historians ever actually sat down to record events, in this instance an attempt to compile the reign of Shenzong in the early 890s, it was noted in frustration that, quote, not so much as

one single character, end quote, of a conventional record of his reign could be found for compilation. Ultimately, though the historians were able to cobble together about three chapters or so, based mostly on anecdotes and personal stories, which form the core of even our modern understandings of the man, the larger project proved so impossible that it was ultimately abandoned. What's very clear, though, is that more and more there was a fundamental disconnect between the capital and its court, and what was actually going on out on the borderlands of its own empire. The central government, it seems, was under the impression that because it had survived the ravages of the An Lushan Rebellion and then its eco-revolts in the Northeast, it had therefore proven itself to be resilient in the long term, and that its largely ad hoc solutions to crises had been and would remain sufficient to maintain social and political order across the realm. This popular view was bolstered in Wuzong and Xuanzong's respective reigns by the dissolution of first the Uyghurs

and then the Tibetans as strong political entities. After all, it's pretty easy to buy into an illusion of relative prosperity, strength, and growth when your rivals are literally crumbling Uyghurs and then the Tibetans as strong political entities. After all, it's pretty easy to buy into an illusion of relative prosperity, strength, and growth when your rivals are literally crumbling around you. But in terms of the territorial gains of the 840s and 50s, unbeknownst to the imperial court and its emperors, their dynasty's funeral attire had already been laid out, the coffin built, and the tombstone carved. By the end of Xuanzong's reign in 859, the Tang Dynasty had commanded the Middle Kingdom for two and a half centuries, but in that time had piled on layer after layer of bandages and quick fixes

to plaster over the deepening and widening cracks at its core. Economically, it had been in shambles for some 150 years, and even with Shenzong's relatively strong rule and attempts at economic reforms, by 850, only 30% of tax grain earmarked for the imperial storage granaries in the north had been delivered from the south, and only about half of the expected salt tax revenue had ever found its way to the capital, with the rest being skimmed into provincial and local pockets. Politically too, the fishers were showing through the fresh paint job. The once strongly centralized empire was, in effect, balkanizing into its component pieces yet again. Dalby writes, quote,

The important changes in the late Tang economy and society continue to take place, such as the growth of large landed estates in the hands of private individuals and the corresponding dislocation in the lives of private individuals and the corresponding dislocation in the lives of peasants. Some of these changes the government chose to ignore, and others it was not equipped to understand and act upon in more than rudimentary ways. The inherited weaknesses of the central institutions revealed themselves during the midnight century stability, primarily at flashpoints, mutinies, tax riots, and so forth.

Because they were relatively infrequent and isolated events, at least until the mid-850s, they could be suppressed by Chang'an under the illusion that the old remedies of force were still sufficient. Many fundamental problems went undiagnosed and uncorrected. As much as Chang'an might have wished to continue sticking its fingers into its ears and not listen to the creaks and snaps of the timbers underneath its very feet, more and more, in the 1850s and beyond, it would become unignorable.

The Tangut Rebellion would be the first of the large-scale rebellions under Xuanzong's period of rule, but by no means the last. Late in his reign, armed popular revolts sprung up in the far south in regions like Guangdong, North Vietnam, Jiangxi, and Hunan, while in regions like Anhui and Zhejiang, there were two serious military mutinies against the central command. Though it would be Xuanzong II who oversaw the beginnings of this final unraveling of the family's political order, virtually no one has ever held him or his stewardship of the empire to blame. In hindsight, it seems something of a

miracle that the Tang regime had been able to survive the great rebellions of a century prior, or even the usurpation of Wu Zetian five decades before that. Since then, it had more or less just been surprising everybody that it had managed to just not die sooner than it actually did. Shanzong then did a reasonable job at holding his realm together for another fifteen years, which just so happened to be the period that the whole thing started to come apart. He happened to be wearing the Moth-Eaten Sweater when it began to unravel, but one can hardly blame him for its construction or care, or rather lack thereof. Nevertheless, after Xuanzong's reign the process will prove irreversible.

In the four decades to come the fate of the dynasty will slip away from the control of the imperial court and out to the individual actors and popular forces already hard at work in the outlying regions. As we move forward, then, we'll be spending significantly less time in the city of eternal peace, and much like our last great round of civil conflict, flooding from hotspot to hotspot instead. Before we bid farewell to the court of the Tang, though, we must first finish the tale of its last good emperor.

As the 850s wore on, Xuanzong began to succumb to that peculiar obsession that had been the undoing of so many Chinese monarchs, that is, the pursuit of immortality via alchemical means, namely quote, cinnabar that had been treated and subdued by fire, end quote. The poisons his imperial alchemists assured him would extend his life eternally began to take their toll on the emperor's body and mind over the course of the decade, resulting in the emperor, who had been from the outset a rather grouchy figure anyway, becoming even more easy to anger and with a goodly dose of paranoia thrown in to boot. Though some of his officials raised the alarm at this well-known sign of elixir poisoning that

were taking place before their very eyes, the alchemists waved their fears away, citing the explanations from their own medical books, such as the Sixth Century's Records of the Rock Chamber, which reads, quote, After taking an elixir, if you feel a body itch as though insects were crawling over them, or if your hands and feet swell dropsically, or if you cannot stand the smell of food and bring it up after you have eaten it, if you feel as though you were going to be sick most of the time, if you experience weakness in the four limbs, if you have to often go to the latrine, or if your head or stomach violently ache, do not be alarmed or disturbed. All these effects are merely proofs that the elixir you are taking is successfully dispelling your latent disorders.

End quote. How's that for a medical warning label? Kind of like a really intense version of the old Listerine tagline, the burn means it's working. In terms of physical ailments, the Dizhetongjian says that by the final year of his reign, 859, he had become bedridden and unable to move due to an enormous black boil that covered a large portion of his back and had since ulcerated and festered. Shortly before what must have been a very painful death indeed, Xuanzong entrusted his favored son, his third, Bi Zi, to the care of three of his personal eunuchs that he trusted to carry out his wishes. And I'd said before, though, that he'd repeatedly refused the calls to formally name an heir, so what would happen after his death was still very much up in the air. Immediately following the emperor's death in early September 859, at the

age of 49, these three eunuchs refrained from immediately reporting the sovereign's demise, an act that they would soon live to regret. Instead, they attempted to forge one last imperial decree, which would send the trio's hated political opponent within the eunuch bureau, the commandant of the Shansi army, Wang Zongshi, as far away from the capital as possible. Instead, Commandant Wang burst into the palace, seemingly to try to talk his way out of this demotion, only to find that the emperor, who had supposedly signed the order, was stone dead and surrounded by his three least favorite colleagues. Well now, you three, playing with the emperor's official seals, are you?

The army commander arrested the trio of would-be conspirators on the spot and quickly ordered their executions, and with them went any hope for Prince Li Zi to stake a credible claim to the throne. Commandant Wang would instead follow through on the typical successional order of the imperial princes, which was of course that it should be the eldest son of the emperor, Li Wen, who would ascend to the throne. The following day, Emperor Xuanzong's death was made public, Prince Li Wen was welcomed to the palace as the crown prince, and then enthroned as Emperor Yizong. But as we'll see next time,

there was a good reason for Xuanzong to have been so hesitant to put his firstborn first. As for next time, Emperor Yizong will quickly bore of the responsibilities of the throne, and turn to the perennial favorite pastimes of monarchs unsuited to the task, wine, women, and wealth, all while his empire starves, burns, and ultimately boils over into full-blown rebellion around him. Thanks for listening. 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.