The History of China - #117 - Tang 29: The Gathering Storm

Episode Date: February 11, 2017

The Tang Empire enters its death spiral. The cumulative effects of more than a century of economic mismanagement intersects with the peasantry and military's respective gripes with the government to disastrous effects south of the Yangtze River. Rebellions beget further rebellions as the whole enterprise spirals down toward the drainpipe. Time Period Covered: 859-873 CE Major Historical Figures: Emperor Yizong of Tang (Li Wen/Cui) [r. 859-873] Princess Tongcheng [d. 870] General Wang Shi General Zhuye Chixin (later Li Guochang) Governor-General Linghu Tao Qiu Fu, rebel leader, "Grand Generalissimo of the Empire" [d. 860] Pang Xun, rebel leader [d. 869] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and select what you think we're worth. Thanks, everyone. And now, enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 117, The Gathering Storm. Last week, we went over the reign period of the Tang Dynasty's last good emperor, Xuanzong II, the monarch who had surprised everyone by punching way above his presumed weight class, so much so that he would be known in the historical annals as Little Taizong, and to those of us who are also Roman history fans, as China's Claudius.

And as you'll no doubt also remember, he also surprised everyone by becoming no less than the fourth Tang emperor to die early as a result of years and years of self-poisoning in the pursuit of immortality. As promised, today we're going to be shifting away from the affairs of the imperial court at Chang'an and sweeping our focus out to the larger empire to, in essence, watch it begin to die. There will be large-scale rebellions, intrigue, and decisive moments to come, but nevertheless, the death of the Tang dynasty is not going to happen in one single knockout blow. Instead, it's much more akin to that most gruesome and torturous of Chinese execution methods, the death by a thousand cuts. Sounds fun, right? Well, I'll try to do my best.

None of this is going to sound terribly new or different for all of you who've been following along with the narrative, all 29 episodes of it so far. Indeed, we've been talking, and talking, and talking, about many of the eventual causes of death for, oh, about 200 years now. And so, rather than going through and once again exhaustively recounting every single failure point that has been and will continue to stack up one atop the other, I think we'll all be better served if I more or less hit the highlight reel instead and keep it relatively macro. Believe me, we could get lost in the court politics alone essentially forever, if any of us actually had the patience for that. And we'll certainly be touching upon that today as well. But as I just said, we're now almost at the 30-episode mark for the Tang. Well,

33 actually, when I count the suite on the An Lushan Rebellion. And that is rather mind-blowing for me. I did four whole centuries of the Han in 17 episodes, and prior to that, the 800 years of Zhou in just 10. Meanwhile, I know that my rate of speaking since then has probably doubled. So yeah, sorry if it all seems a little bit rapid-fire at this point. But whereas before it was a struggle to find enough reliable information, I'm now very much at the point where the difficulty comes in actually parsing through the sea of information available, and then drawing a, hopefully, entertaining narrative from it.

That's also in part why the rate of the new episodes has slowed down considerably in the last year or so. It's much more time consuming to have to decide what to keep and what to cut than it is to simply include everything that one can find and hope it's enough. Well, that, and the day job, and the family, and everything else, but you get the point. Alright, let's get on with it. We have a new emperor sitting on the throne in Chang'an, the unpopular and ineffective Yi Zong. So let's briefly take a look at his reign in court before leaving Chang'an behind and venturing down

to the far south. Yi Zong certainly had his work cut out for him from the get-go. You'll remember from last time that he had not been the shu-in-as-air that his position as eldest son would typically have meant. His father, it seemed, didn't like him very much, instead strongly preferring his third son, though never actually making his succession plans official. As such, upon Shanzong's death, the palace was thrown into yet another bout of deadly court intrigue, ultimately resulting in the executions of three eunuchs who'd been entrusted with Shenzong's supposed final wishes that his third son accede to the throne, and Yizong being promoted instead. The fact that it had once again been the eunuch bureau choosing who would be the next monarch

drove the rest of the imperial ministers absolutely mad. Yizong himself was never terribly concerned about the actual affairs of governance, and in the grand tradition of all the worst Chinese emperors, from the outset lost himself in wine, women, and massively expensive pet projects. Yizhong's particular thing was Buddhism, and to be clear, he was very much for it, unlike some other Tang emperors. He spent money on Buddhist projects, ceremonies, and performances throughout his years on the throne, with little concern for the cost, which would, ultimately, and when combined with the massive expenditures and financial shortfalls we'll discuss in just a minute,

completely drain the imperial treasury of the surplus his father had so painstakingly accumulated. One particularly notable example of this emperor's wastefulness and excess comes from late in his reign, when in 870, his eldest daughter, the princess Tongchang, died of an illness. He would order more than 300 family members of the doctors who had failed to cure her imprisoned before the princess was laid to rest in a startling ornate ceremony. The Zizitongian describes the scene.

Quote, The members of the Wei household, the princess's in-laws, fought over the ashes of the items burned as offerings to the princess in order to sieve out the gold and silver among the ashes. The clothing, jewelry, and toys burned filled 120 wagons each. The paper ceremonial guards and paper guard corps were decorated with colorful silk, jewelry, and jade, as were the items that she would be using in the underworld,

such that the light reflected from them as far as 20 li away. The emperor awarded the funeral household over 100 hu of wine and cakes that required 40 camels to bear them to supply the workers laboring at the funeral. The emperor and consort Guo missed their daughter greatly, and they commissioned the musician Li Keji to author a musical piece entitled Century of Lamentation, with sad and delicate tones and several hundred dancers set to dance to it. The palace storage provided large numbers of jewels to decorate the dancers, and some eight hundred bolts of silk serving as the carpet they danced on. After the dance was over, the jewelry that fell off them covered the ground completely. End quote.

Bearing in mind this kind of ostentatious display, let's now turn once again to that issue that has vexed the empire for some two centuries, the ever-exciting monetary and tax policies. They were in 859 much as they'd been in 700. That is, a complete and ruinous mess. But at this point, every time the Tang regime thought their financial woes couldn't get any worse, it turned out that, actually, they could. The Tang economy had been in the red for some time now, but by the mid-9th century, that hobble had festered into a terminal decline. Our late Shanzong had exacerbated the situation by incurring enormous military costs

with his campaigns. His successors, however, would prove, for all their many faults, to rein in the military budget, at least. This would, however, prove to be too little, too late. We have talked about the nature of the imperial tax system at some length, but a little refresher never hurt anyone. Following the An Lushan Rebellion in the 750s, the Tang economy had entered into a decades-long period of currency inflation that saw the value of cash coins plummet. By 780, the plotting government had finally tried to address this crisis by reappraising its tax rates and instituting the so-called two tax system on the peasantry Unfortunately, they had managed to implement this policy shift just in time for the Tong currency to reverse course and enter into a phase of

steep deflation By the end of the decade those factors had collided into a stark reality the peasantry, far from paying a roughly equal or lesser amount than they'd been obliged to in the 760s and 770s, were now paying something like three to four times the real value of the original tax quota before the reforms. To this, the government had essentially shrugged and said, tough luck, since the imperial coffers were in dire need of the extra revenue.

Peasantry, be damned. This ballooning tax rate was buffered by periodic tribute offerings from regional officials directly to the emperor's personal treasury, as well as a re-imposition of the salt monopoly tax. That monopoly was swiftly followed up by monopoly taxes on goods such as tea, malt, and liquor. Yet for all that, in spite of the fact that on paper the empire should have been making more money than ever before, since after all tax rates were higher than they'd ever been, the reality on the ground was both shocking and horrifying to the members of the court.

Somehow, impossibly, total revenue was actually shrinking over time. As to how this could have been the case, it's actually pretty simple. Faced with ruinous taxation practices, more and more of the peasantry were simply pulling up stakes and going off-grid. Professor Robert M. Summers writes, quote, Increasing numbers of peasants left their own lands to escape their tax obligations, to become tenants on the rapidly increasing estates of rural landowners who could protect them from government taxation, thus posing a serious social and fiscal problem for the government, end quote.

The fiscal problem is rather clear, but how would that have caused a social problem? Essentially, what was happening with the peasantry of Tang China was rather similar to the process of feudalization in medieval Europe or Shogunate Japan. Formerly small, private farmers entrust their security and labor not to the state, but to powerful regional lords, leading to a realignment of the basic ideas of vassal-lord relationships and loyalties. In essence, a kind of balkanization and eventual emergence of warlord states instead of a unified empire. The imperial government's response to this growing crisis was the opposite of helpful.

The idea of reducing tax quotas for affected regions was unthinkable. So instead, they simply maintained the quotas as is, and instead declared that in regions with significantly fewer households than were on the registry, the amount would simply need to be reapportioned to the remaining households, and they would have to make up the difference. This, of course, triggered a vicious cycle of causing even more peasant farmers to sneak off in the dead of night, leading to even more impossibly high tax burdens on the remaining families, causing them to want to escape, and on and on and on. It was largely due to this kind of policy that finally resulted in the imperial court killing its golden goose, the wealthy provinces of the lower Yangtze River Valley. Ever since the de facto killing its golden goose, the wealthy provinces of the

Lower Yangtze River Valley. Ever since the de facto loss of the majority of the North China Plains, which you'll remember had once been the economic heart and soul of the empire prior to the rebellions of the mid-8th century, the Lower Yangtze had been the rock upon which the whole imperial financial system had stood. Yet by the mid-830s, the situation in the southeast had grown dire. In 835, for instance, a proposal to try to increase regional revenues by transplanting all of the tea trees in the province onto official plantations had almost resulted in an outright peasant rebellion against the idea, a threat deemed so serious that according to the Song Dynasty-era encyclopedia entitled the Se-Fu-Yuan-Guei, or the Outstanding Model from

the Storehouse of Literature, in order to carry out this transplantation plan, the government would need to be prepared to, quote, exterminate the population or force them into resistance in the hills, end quote. Suffice it to say, the government was not ready to exterminate the population of the province over tea trees, and so the proposal was dropped. Nevertheless, as we'll see in a minute, the unrest in the south would remain at a boiling point, ready, willing, and able to bubble over. Because of these kinds of ham-handed blunders, even in periods of relative peace and stability internally, such as the reign of Xuanzong II, the average annual state revenues were falling some 3 million strings of cash short of the imperial expenditures,

which totaled about 12 million strings per year. So that is to say that the empire of the 850s was operating at about a 25% deficit each year, every year, for decades on end. Yeah, not great. As dire as this situation was for the local and imperial governments, it's pretty safe to say that it would have been even worse for average people, who in ever-increasing numbers decided that fleeing into the mountains and taking up lives of banditry and rebellion was preferable to paying the state's egregious tax rates. This state of affairs was so bad even in the 830s and 40s that at least one governor along the Yangtze was compelled to maintain a, we can imagine, very costly military force in order to keep piracy along his stretch of the river at bay. In 845, another provincial governor, and notable poet of the era, Du Mu, sent a letter to the then-chancellor, Li Dayu, detailing the extent of what he was having to combat. He wrote that the band of pirates numbered

more than a hundred strong, and included many transients who had journeyed to the south from the north. These groups had concocted a rather brilliant scheme, according to Governor Dew. They were smart enough to know that the goods that they were stealing would be hot, so to speak. That is, that it would be suspicious indeed if they returned to the north with a huge amount of southern goods. Just as important, it was going to be difficult to transport the variety of the loot all that way, and so they came up with an ingenious workaround, tea leaf-based money laundering. It worked like this. The bandits simply waited until it was tea harvesting season, then made their way into the villages and cities posing as merchants, and exchanging their stolen goods for tea leaves from the local plantations. This tea, much lighter and easier to transport,

as well as to any inspector completely legitimate, would then be transported back to their home regions where it was traded for cash and other local goods without arousing official suspicion. Such criminal activities were widespread enough and worrying enough for the government that it responded early on by attempting to harshen up its laws against the economic effects of banditry. Punishment for banditry itself had long ranged up to the death penalty, but in the 830s that was expanded to include those who knowingly dealt in black market goods. This measure backfired, however, in that even its own proponents at the imperial court largely admitted that it was primarily for show, to look as though they were getting tough on crime, while in practicality it would have been almost impossible to enforce.

Meanwhile, it inspired many of the outlaws, now justifiably in fear for their lives, to arm themselves, allowing them to more directly resist government agents. Faced with all this, what did the government do? Reassess its strategy? Ease off on the crippling tax burdens driving their people to lives of crime? Don't be ridiculous.

They doubled down, and by the end of Shenzong's reign in 858 had implemented even more draconian tax laws, and made the positions and future promotions of the governors of the Middle and Lower Yangtze Provinces contingent on them managing to extract as much money from the region as they could. It's not as though the government was blind to the negative effects their policies were having on the populace. Indeed, over these decades, missive after missive from numerous officials had been warning the central government in no uncertain terms that unless there was a major course change

forthcoming, the ship of state was inevitably headed for massive social unrest and revolts, and not just from the peasantry. The army garrisons in the south also seemed to have been fed up with their own situation. In the year 856, for example, within four months there were no fewer than three individual garrison revolts along the Yangtze, turning what had once been the most peaceful and stable part of the empire all of a sudden into one of its most violent and crime-prone. Up and down the canal networks of the south, as far down as the garrison at Hanoi, military revolts rocked the social order and only further contributed to widespread civil breakdown. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast

of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to Season 1 to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America and in the Caribbean, the first steps of the East India Company and the political battles between King and Parliament. Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war,

revolution, and regicide which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax. This would lead ultimately to the need to create a new Jedusha military governorship, the so-called Sea Garrison Army, for the southern reaches, the first time in more than 50 years that such a measure was deemed necessary. But even that would prove to be insufficient to quiet the empire, as it would

find out beginning in 859. So we're about to get into a series of rebellions, three altogether, and with each subsequent one building on the anger of the last. Today we're going to look at the first two and how they have been understood to have contributed, ultimately, to the final and greatest rebellion against the state, which we'll look at next time. The name Chiu Fu appears in the historical record in the year 859, the same year as his eponymous rebellion in the south. His origins are not recorded, and so we know very little about him as a person or his background. But Chiu Fu would be the first man in the era to successfully unite a large number of small bandit groups together into something resembling a real, directed fighting force, if however briefly. This band of outlaws under Chio's banner moved up from the south over

a period of months late that year, raiding and pillaging along the coastline as they moved from Taizhou up to Hangzhou near the Yangtze River, which they captured and then used as their headquarters. Now there had been a local garrison stationed within Hangzhou, but it provided no resistance whatsoever, since the 300 or so soldiers maintained within were undermanned, ill-equipped, and themselves angry enough at the central government to have unsuccessfully mutinied some four years before. So when they found themselves potentially having to face down Chofu's rebel army that was more than three times their number, rather than engaging in some suicidal

charge, the garrison troops just called for aid from the surrounding garrisons. The government, rightly alarmed at the prospect of the rebel force capturing cities and marching northward, quickly rallied all available troops to converge on the Choufu army and take it out. It turned out, though, that the rebel force was far more organized and battle-ready than the imperial troops had anticipated, and the government armies were utterly routed in a single shocking clash. Smelling blood in the water following this unexpected victory, thousands more peasants abandoned their farms and flocked to the rebel cause. From the Zizhi Tongjian, In short order, the loosely organized force had gone from a thousand men to perhaps as many as 30,000 and began to serve as an inspiration for smaller anti-government forces in other regions.

Bolstered by his successes, Qiu Fu opted to grant himself the title of meaning the Grand Generalissimo of the Empire. He then took the further step of declaring his own reign era and issued seals to his lieutenants emblazoned with the same, Tianping, the era of heavenly peace. An unmistakable slap in the face to the Tang regime's imperial authority. It's important to understand the situation that faced the imperial government in confronting this crisis. Not only was its financial situation a continually burning tire fire, but the specific location that Qiu Fu had chosen to base his rebel army was particularly vexing. Hangzhou, you may or may not be aware, is situated in northern Zhejiang province,

and Zhejiang has some of the wildest and craziest terrain in all of China. I've lived there, and I go back there every year, and I can say from personal experience that before they got giant boring machines to carve out tunnels through the mountains, it was a 12-hour-plus train ride just to get from one side of the province to the other. Its terrain is so rugged and difficult that not only did the Imperial Japanese Army not even try to capture the southern half, but the major city in the south, Wenzhou, was the only port city to not be captured by the IJA and served as China's own version of the Navajo Windtalkers thanks to their incomprehensible language born out of sheer isolation. There was only one man deemed capable of even having a shot,

maybe, of dealing with these rebels now holed up in Zhejiang. And that was the then-Protector General of Vietnam, then called An-Nan, Wang Shi. Summers writes, quote, Wang Shi was without a doubt the most important Tang military commander during this period. He had already established a formidable reputation in the north, where his strict defensive arrangements at Jinzhou, in modern central Shaanxi, had protected the capital region from invasions from Inner Mongolia, and in the far south, where he'd been sent to pacify revolts which broke out in 858 in Annan, end quote. Wang was a military rock star of his age, and he had the confidence to match.

When asked by Emperor Yizong what he would require in order to defeat the Qiufu rebels in Zhejiang, Wang replied, quote, I only need enough men, and the bandits can certainly be crushed, end quote. When the imperial ministers spoke up complaining over the course of the audience that such an undertaking would prove very expensive to the already cash-strapped government, the general's reply was simple, direct, and spot-on. Whatever the cost of pacifying Zhejiang might be, the cost of not re-establishing imperial authority in the region as quickly as possible would be far greater than any campaign. Not only financially, but in terms of the integrity of the entire empire. The emperor, convinced, silenced any further objections from his ministers and decreed that General Wang be given whatever he required

to defeat the rebel force in the south. Wang would take the sizable garrisons of Zhongwu, Yizheng, and Huainan as his own, in addition to several hundred Uyghur and Tibetan cavalrymen which he had transferred from the northwest, marking the first time that foreign troops would be deployed so far to the south. Meanwhile, over in Zhejiang, Qiu Fu received word that none other than Wang Shi had been tasked with a campaign against him, and realized what a bind he was now in. Unsure of quite how to react to this, he asked his lieutenants for their advice, and they offered two potential plans. One of his officers, knowing that they might have as little

as 40 days before the great general of the south was upon them, proposed that they act immediately to seize control of the entire south before Wang could mobilize. This was, however, deemed rather more than Qiu thought his force could undertake, and he's said to have cut off his lieutenant with the reply, You're drunk. We'll discuss this more tomorrow. A second plan, far more limited in scope, was then set forth by another officer, who argued that the safest plan would be to go on the defensive from a secure position near the coast. From there, they could supply themselves through farming and fishing, retreating to offshore islands if necessary,

and in general, wait for this whole thing to blow over. It's possible that one or maybe even both of these plans might have been successful if enacted with due haste, but as it would turn out, the rebel leader Chou Fu proved incapable of making up his mind as to which to follow. That indecisive paralyzed his force and, in the end, would prove to be its downfall. General Wang, understanding that a major reason so many peasants had flocked to the rebel commander's cause was out of sheer hunger and desperation, set about opening the imperial grain storehouses of the south to the remaining populace, thus cutting off Chou's supply of reinforcements. While Chou Fu continued to waffle over how best to proceed, Wang acted decisively, recruiting local militias to further bolster his forces and surrounding the rebels' position by both land and

sea. From Summers, quote, the rebel soldiers, and even their women, resisted bitterly, but were finally smashed. Choufu was captured and sent to the capital in the sixth month of 860, no doubt for public execution, end quote. Yet even in spite of this victory, peace would still prove a distant dream to southern China. The very next year, in fact, long-standing tensions between the Tang governmental offices and the state of Nanjiao in the southwest at last degraded into Nanjiao declaring itself once more independent and the empire of Dali. Some of you might recall several reasons why Nanjiao, come Dali, would prove a very hard target for imperial armies to quell, in even the best of times, much less now that the

Tang state was in its terminal decline. The region was not only ethnically Nanhan, but also lay within an almost perfect natural fortress. A central valley sitting at an elevation of more than 7,000 feet and surrounded by impenetrable mountain ranges more than 14,000 feet high, accessible from the rest of China only through a pair of narrow, easily defensible gorges to its north and south. In addition, even if these geographic barriers were somehow breached, the Chinese armies would then have to face down the endemic tropical diseases that had more than once ripped through would-be invading forces.

For five to six years, the Dali Empire's armies would terrorize the southwest of China, with the conflict only drawing to a denouement when the general charged with prosecuting the war effort against them was able to recapture his own regional capital city and construct a huge defensive wall around it. Dali had effectively seceded from the empire permanently, and by 880, the imperial court in Chang'an was agreeing to offers of a marriage alliance between the two states, a sign that even the emperor was aware and forced to accept the loss of this territory. Though, the rapidly crumbling edifice of the Tang would mean that the marriage would never be seen

through. In all, the almost decade of war between the two states would prove inordinately costly to the Chinese, when it could afford such costs the least. This included the large-scale casualties, to be sure, but also the sheer economic weight of needing to supply and reinforce the garrisons, as well as man the borders of the southwest, further compounded the Tang Empire's already dire financial straits. Again from Summers,

Attempts were made to make up for these shortfalls, but they ultimately landed on the backs of, who else, the already overburdened to the point of breaking peasantry. They would be pushed over the edge in 862-863 by the flooding of the Yellow River, affecting regions as far as Luoyang to the west and Suzhou to the east. Soldiers in the region would mutiny in 864, which was put down by General Wang Shi, who was still stationed relatively nearby in Zhejiang, even two years after the conclusion of the Choufu Rebellion. Wang was successful in suppressing the troop mutiny

and took no leniency on those he captured, executing large numbers of them while disbanding the rest. That move would, however, not have the intended effect of quieting the stirrings of discontent against the regime. The disbanded soldiers, with little else to do after all, themselves became groups of bandits that proceeded to terrorize and pillage the countryside over the course of 864, leading the throne, at last, to throw up its hands and issue a general pardon for any former soldiers

who willingly returned to the fold and re-enlisted into the imperial army. This would prove effective, at least in the short term, and resulted in about 3,000 soldiers returning to service, to be restationed in the region of Wuning, within the rugged and tropical Lingnan mountain ranges of the far south in the garrison city of Guizhou in modern Guiyang. Only a few years later, in mid-868, the provisions officer of the Wuning army would lead his own revolt against the empire at the head of an initial force of some 800 soldiers. His name was Pang Xun, and with his newly formed rebel army began the long march back north towards the Yangtze region. The imperial court, having learned of this latest revolt, decided that maybe another carrot would work in lieu of the costly stick. They sent word to the rebels as they marched, informing them that should they lay down their arms and desist, they would all be pardoned and allowed to return to their homes under imperial escort.

Peng and his men complied, but suspected that it was nothing more than a trick that would ultimately result in their massacre once they'd been returned to Guizhou. As such, they took steps to secretly rearm themselves, and rather than returning southward, continued north, crossed the Yangtze River, and continued into the Huai River Valley of central China, the domain of the Jiedushi general and former chancellor Linghu Tao. Governor Linghu, in spite of his officers' calls for him to smash the relatively small force under Peng Shu's leadership, allowed the band to pass through his territory unmolested, saying that as long as Peng caused no trouble south of the Huai River, quote, the rest is not our affair, end quote.

Such was the growing sentiment of regionalism versus concern for the empire as a whole that had gripped many of the regional governors in the late 9th century. Summers explains, quote, Ling Hu Tao's decision to let the Peng Xun group pass peacefully through his territory has been castigated by some later Chinese historians who consider it an almost inconceivable dereliction

of responsibility on the part of the former chief minister. But in the context of the general unrest and tension in the Lower Yangtze and Huai River region, and in view of Linghu Tao's own strained relationship with the court, his decision seems perfectly understandable. End quote. In other words,

Governor Linghu's position was one of NIMBY, not in my backyard. The Pangshun rebels would capture and sack the prefectural city of Suzhou in late 868, once again spurring the disaffected peasantry to flock to his cause in the thousands, with some even burning their regional city gates ahead of the swelling rebel army's arrival. Bandits from across the south soon joined the cause as well, from places far and wide like Shandong, Huaixi, Huinan, and Zhejiang, in all extending to more than 10 prefectures. And yes, I have a set of new maps just waiting to be colorized, translated, and posted, so be sure to check the website. That is still the historyofchina.wordpress.com. In spite of this initial success, perhaps even because of it,

the Pengxun rebellion rather quickly began to devolve into sheer brutality. Once again from Summers, quote, Although there was now a real possibility of a general rebellion, Pengxun continued to think in more modest and conventional terms, hoping as a result of victory merely to be appointed military governor of Wuning. Even within these limited aims, it became necessary for him to press more and more peasants into his army and to confiscate the wealth of local gentry and merchants,

often with great brutality. His soldiers, moreover, were totally undisciplined, and once the Tang armies began to mount an effective campaign against him, the peasants quickly deserted the rebels, followed soon afterwards by Peng Xun's own officers and his gentry supporters. End quote. It would take another year of fighting, but by the ninth month of 869, the Pangshun Rebellion was at last put down. One of the most important figures in the suppression of this rebellion was not Chinese

at all, but instead a Xatoturk chieftain by the name of Zhuye Chixin and his army of 3,000 Turkic cavalry. Zhuye's contributions to the war effort would prove so decisive, in fact, that following the revolt's suppression, he was bestowed one of the greatest honors the empire could hand out, the right to use for himself the imperial surname. He would thereafter be known by the Chinese name Li Guochang, and it will be his son, Li Keyong, who will play a pivotal role in first the Huangchao rebellion yet to come, as well as to become the founder of one of the northern states that will make up the dynasties of the eponymous Five Dynasties. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Instead, we will at last return to Chang'an and our spin-thrift-in-chief,

Emperor Yizong. Professor Summers describes his civil policies as follows, quote, "...Historians of this period stress Yizong's personal extravagance, his irrational cruelty, and his capriciousness. Some of the Emperor's actions were quite irrational. No official was safe protesting against anyone close to the real centers of power. When one minister presented a memorial which warned the Emperor of plots involving the brother of his favorite consort, Yizong ordered the minister's execution and the removal of his entire family from the official registers. End quote. But even beyond this arbitrariness and excess, one of the main

features of Yizong's reign was its sharp break with the politics and precedents of the past. The emperor used favorites and arbitrarily employed his power in a way that was very reminiscent of that of Empress Wu, and it left a strong legacy of bitterness and division within the empire. But Summers goes on to point out that such a comparison isn't exactly fair. Not fair, that is, to Empress Wu. Quote, the Empress Wu rarely acted irrationally. Moreover, her politics had diluted the power of the older aristocracy and broadened the political base of the dynasty. Yidong's policies, in contrast, clearly narrowed the political base of the central government, at least at the top levels." Positions that used to

be filled with politically important clansmen and powerful regional players were, under Yidong's myopic rule, now brimming with his personal favorites, eunuchs, the nouveau riche, and those with personal, marriage, and business connections to the imperial family. On a completely unrelated note, the great American philosopher Mark Twain once said, history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. In any event, 873 would prove to be Yizong's final year on the throne. Perhaps coincidentally, or maybe because the 39-year-old felt his health beginning to slip away, he ordered that a ceremony that had not been

conducted since 819 once again be carried out, the presentation of the finger bone of the Buddha to the imperial palace. Several of his advisors warned against such a ceremony, citing the fact that the last emperor who had brought the bone to court, Yizong's grandfather, Emperor Xianzong, had died shortly after the ceremony. It was just bad luck. Yizong, however, would not be deterred, replying, quote, So long as I see it once while living, I have no regrets about dying, end quote. And wouldn't you know it, the wary officials' warning of bad luck were right. Later that year, some four months before his 40th birthday, Emperor Yizong's health took a nosedive, and he would die in mid-August,

having once again failed to officially name an heir. And so, next time, an 11-year-old named Li Yan will succeed his father as Emperor Xizong, the third-to-last monarch of the Tang Dynasty. And he will be enthroned just in time for the third and largest of the late dynasty's rebellions to come bursting out of Shandong to ravage the nation for nearly a decade and put the Tang Dynasty into the final phase of its terminal decline. Thanks for listening. Have you ever gazed in wonder at the Great Pyramid? Have you marvelled at the golden face of Tutankhamun? Or admired the delicate features of Queen Nefertiti?

If you have, you'll probably like the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore tales of this ancient culture. The History of Egypt is available wherever you get your podcasting fix. Come, let me introduce you to the world of ancient Egypt.