The History of China - #123 - Tang 34: In the Rearview

Episode Date: May 14, 2017

We take a sweeping look back at all 289 years of the Tang one more time before pressing into the 5 Dynasties and beyond, and also take a look at some of the aspects of 9th centuryChinese society that are more frequently overlooked... like women's fashion, regional cuisine, playing cards, and toilet paper. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of Terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. Fellow Agora podcast, When Diplomacy Fails by Zach Twamley, is soon going to be turning five years old. His is an excellent journey across time, showing us moment by moment those key

periods when the time for talk has come and gone. But here's the weird thing. There's been this strange, gigantic gift box just sitting on Zach's desk here at Agora HQ, and the note only says, Do not open until May 18th. I wonder what might be inside. Find out what's in the box on May 18th when Zach finally celebrates five years of diplomatic failure. That's When Diplomacy Fails, part of the Agora Podcast Network. And now, on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 123, In the Rearview. Before saying a final farewell to the late Great Tang Dynasty, and stepping fully into the tumultuous but relatively brief Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period of the mid-10th century, and then into the Song Dynasty beyond that, it has been a long time since we've had the opportunity to really pull back and take stock of what all has happened in the last 289 years since the victory of the Li clan over the Yangs of the Sui Dynasty. By my count, the last real wide-scale look-back episode

was released only a little less than a year ago, and which you can find as episode 105. It dealt with the Tang Dynasty up to the end of Empress Wu's reign in 764. Now, in writing today's episode, I toyed with the idea of having it pick up from there and simply running through the back half of the Tang, but then I figured, eh, where's the fun in that? Moreover, it's been about a year, and I certainly don't expect us all to remember all of the great moments from the first half of the dynasty. So today, we'll be looking at the whole thing, and as per usual, out of the thick of things and up at 30,000 feet to press fast forward. So 289 years in about 40 minutes or so, let's go. Under the auspices of the Sui dynasty

in the first two decades of the 7th century, the population of China had been burdened with an increasingly onerous set of requirements by the emperors of the imperial Yang clan. Massive levies of corvy labor was requisitioned from across the empire each year and tasked with the difficult and highly dangerous work on megaprojects like the reconstruction of the Great Wall and the Sui's personal pet project, the construction of what would become the Grand Canal linking north to south. All told, thanks to the lack of accidents, disease, and what we'd have

to imagine would be abysmal working conditions, conscripted labor had fatality rates consistently about as high as 40% each year, which I'm sure we'll all agree could not have been good for civic morale. And all that on top of the fact that every laborer tasked with months of back-breaking state mandated labor was yet another set of hands not working the small family farms on which their families depended for survival. But the megaprojects, hated as they were, would not be what drove the Sui out of power. Instead, the final straw would come from both of the Sui emperors deciding that they simply must have the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, no matter the cost. Canals were extended north to beyond where Beijing sits now, and armies of millions shipped up into Manchuria and to the

banks of the Liao River to seize Pyongyang and dethrone the Goguryeo kings once and for all. That would prove nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, as the Koreans proved, as they would frequently across history, that they were rather singularly well-equipped to repel Chinese overland invasions. The first Sui army was crushed, and then a second, and then a third one was called off when the Korean king, Yongyang, offered to submit to Sui authority, but then a fourth plan when he subsequently reneged on the offer. The massive, pointless loss of life, accompanied by years of bad harvests, and the little grain that was being produced being diverted into the Korean boondoggle, resulted by the mid-610s in a series of large-scale agrarian rebellions throughout the empire.

The people were mad as hell, and they weren't going to take it anymore. In the midst of this conflagration, who should arise but Li Yuan, the Duke of Tang, and his gaggle of uncommonly kick-ass kids. The Duke and his sons took their army of rabble and marched down south from fortified headquarters in Taiyuan toward Chang'an to do battle with the Sui Imperial armies. Meanwhile, his daughter, the Princess Pingyang, snuck out of the capital and to Taiyuan in order to mount a civil resistance of her own, forming under her direct command the Women's Army. Between the two of these forces

and the not insignificant backing of the Turkish Kayan, the Sui proved to stand little chance indeed. Within two years, Emperor Wen of Sui had gone from being divine lord of the realm entire to being strangled to death by his own indignant generals after having been forced to flee south of the Yangtze. Meanwhile, the Duke of Tang's armies had captured and set up shop in the imperial capital, Chang'an, briefly ruled for the Sui child puppet emperor, Gong,

before they got around to recycling some old edicts and Bob's your uncle to establish the Tang dynasty with Li Yuan as its founding emperor, Gao Zu. See you, Gong. Enjoy that farm upstate. Gao Zu would reign for a little over eight years, until 626, when his second son, Prince Li Shemin, murdered his eldest brother and then one of his younger brothers at the Xuanwu Gate incident, strode into his father's presence armed and armored, which was a big no-no, and proceeded to tell dad that he'd be taking control of the empire from here on out, thanks very much. Li Ximing would become Taizong, who I can't say enough is pretty much the origin story of a superhero. The guy was like a living weapon, but it turned out that he could govern like a boss as well. In stark contrast to what

many at the time had feared, he had become... he became one of the most hard-working, intelligent, and just emperors, not only in the Tang line of monarchs, but actually in all of Chinese history. He encouraged his advisors and ministers to give him honest assessments and opinions, rather than just being yes-men, and then, get this, he actually listened to them. Who'd have thunk, right? Oh yeah, and then, in 629, he curb- curb stomped the Khan of the Eastern Tujue Guk Turks so hard that he was acknowledged as the heavenly Khagan of all the Turkic peoples the following year. A decade later, he'd initiate a series of campaigns against the Western Tujue tribes

around the Tarim Basin, a process that would be continued by his successor, Gaozong, and ultimately would retake the long-lost westernmost portions of the ancient Han dynasty as the Shiyu Protectorates, all while fending off frequent attacks from the new kid on the block, the Tibetan Empire of Songsheng Gaopo. In 643, the Byzantine Empire, known to the Tang Chinese as Fulin, but also simply dubbed as the continuation of Daqin, aka Rome, established direct diplomatic relations with Taizong's government, the first time that that had happened since the late 3rd century, when Emperor Keras's envoys and their gifts had been received by the court of Emperor Wen of Jin. Late in his life, Taizong was forced to order the

suicide of two of his sons and overthrow his heir thanks to their incessant plotting, leading to the succession of his ninth son, Li Zhi, as the lawful heir. But it wasn't long before Taizong developed the creeping suspicion that in this decision he'd made a huge mistake, yet nonetheless managed to put off actually fixing that mistake until his death. In 644, he decided to give the whole Korea situation another go, after receiving a military request for aid from the larger of the two southern Korean kingdoms and nominal Tang ally-slash-vassal, Silla, which was being attacked by Goguryeo from the north, and its weaker partner to the southwest of the peninsula, Baekje. This turned out to, once again, have been a terrible idea, and one of Taizong's great regrets once the campaign stalled out and he was forced to retreat ahead of the coming winter.

He'd actually been preparing a second campaign to be launched in 649, but died before it could begin, likely because of alchemical poisoning, which will be a running theme throughout the course of this entire dynasty. He was succeeded by Li Zhi, who became Emperor Gaozong. Gaozong inherited, along with the throne, a book written by dad instructing him how to essentially not mess the gig up, in effect a kind of emperoring for dummies. Gaozong was aided by capable ministers, but personally was known to have been weak and indecisive. In fact, just about the only thing he was sure of was that one of his dad's youngest

consorts was smoking hot and definitely didn't deserve to be carted off to a monastery, as was custom. This affair might have even begun behind Taizong's back while he was still alive. But in any case, now that he was in command, Gaozong had few compunctions against breaking social customs and releasing the beauty from her monastic vows and back into his harem. She was called Wu Zhao, and she would become one of Gaozong's concubines, then quickly one of his consorts, then his prime consort, and then the empress consort, and her eldest son becoming heir to the throne, replacing his older but lower-stationed half-brother. This last step was accompanied by widespread and reportedly horrendous reprisals against her rivals within the Imperial Harem and

the court at large. Throughout her life, people who crossed her, be they high officials or allegedly even several of her own children, would mysteriously… die shortly after. Convenient, that. By 660, with her husband Gaozong sickly and frequently out of action due to things like dizzy spells, fainting, and even repeated strokes, Empress Wu had become a de facto equal to her husband, sitting in on court meetings behind a curtain, issuing policy decisions in her husband's stead, and earning himself the nickname one of two divine sages. In 665, despite his ill health, Gaozong was preparing for the greatest ceremony of the past six centuries, the sacrifices to heaven and earth atop Mount Tai, intended to show that thanks to

the Tang monarch's efforts, the whole of civilization was at peace, and drawing thousands of emissaries from all over the known world, including as far away as the Umayyad Caliphate. Into this, Empress Wu rather famously inserted herself as once again Gaozong's equal by ascending the mountain as well and performing the ceremonies alongside him. It turned out, though, that the whole of civilization wasn't quite at peace after all, because in 667, after more than a decade of fighting, the combined forces of Tang and Shila had captured Baekje and launched a final assault on Goguryeo, with Pyongyang finally falling that year and some 200,000 prisoners removed and taken to Chang'an. In spite of these victories, the Tang Empire would repeatedly lose ground over the 670s, losing control of Korea once again to Shila, Manchuria to the Khitan and

Balhae, and several of its western territories to the resurgent Tujue peoples. By the beginnings of the 680s, Emperor Gaozong was routinely out of commission for months on end thanks to his failing health, and he would die in the winter of 683. The throne would pass to Li Xian, his seventh son, but Empress Wu's eldest surviving son, as Emperor Zhongzong. But that would only last for about a month and a half before he forgot to ask his mom's permission to appoint his father-in-law as chancellor, and so the Empress Dowager deposed Zhongzong and installed her 12-year-old son, Li Dan, as Emperor Ruizong. This overt act of usurpation would prompt several of the imperial princes to rebel against her absolute authority,

but that was all crushed in a matter of months. Ruizong would prove to be a good little puppet for about six years, until 690, when, at the age of 72, she demoted Rézong back to prince and became Wu Zetian, the first, last, and only Empress Regnant of China. With this sea change came a name change as well. Harkening back to the golden era of millennia prior, Empress Wu restyled the Tang dynasty as the Zhou dynasty. Her period of direct rule was of both terror and prosperity. She officially sanctioned Buddhism as being not just simply tolerated, but stationed actually above native Taoism, and even, briefly, associating herself and implying that she was a living Buddha. Though she cast off this label fairly quickly,

she continued to pay close attention to the optics of her reign by ordering the ancient and long-lost Nine Bronze Cauldrons of the Zhou to be recast to mark the dynasty's rebirth in her. Paranoid, with good reason, of the nobility of the now-displaced Tang court seeking her destruction, Wu unleashed secret police forces to root out and ruthlessly torture and execute any and all suspected of conspiring against her iron will. However, there were difficult days to come. Economically, the Tang had begun what would become its terminal decline as costs wildly outstripped the government's tax collection quotas, while militarily, the Chinese suffered a string of costly and embarrassing defeats to the north and west against the Tujie and Khitan. The foreign threats would be largely quelled by the end of the decade,

albeit on less than ideal terms for the nascent dynasty of Won. As the century itself drew to a close, so too did the reign of terror caused by Empress Wu's secret police force, which she had disbanded and its leaders ruthlessly purged in 697. The following year, now 80 years old, she'd take on a pair of lovers, beautiful young brothers in fact, by the names of Zhang Yizhi and Zhang Changzhong, or just the Zhang brothers. And it would be these handsome distractions that would prove the undoing of China's woman emperor. In 704, having been made dukes and also having royally angered just about everyone in the palace, save the empress herself of course, the Zhang brothers' tenures as eye candy for the empress culminated in repeated accusations of

corruption and their plotting to seize power for themselves. Now the empress initially approved of The Zhang brothers' tenures as eye candy for the Empress culminated in repeated accusations of corruption and their plotting to seize power for themselves. Now, the Empress initially approved of the court of ministers to launch formal investigations into the accusations, but then she turned right around and preeminently pardoned the brothers anyway. Deciding that enough was enough, in the spring of 705,

a conspiracy of generals and officials roped the former Emperor Zhang Zong into supporting them. The assembly approached the Empress's palace, dragged the brothers out into the courtyard, and cut their heads off on the spot, before reporting to Wu Zetian of what they'd done, and that her time on the throne was over. After giving the assembled group, including her son, a thorough dressing down, the sick, frail 87-year-old accepted the decision and yielded the throne back to her eldest son, before peacefully dying in December of that year. Yet even though he'd become the emperor again and the Tang dynasty had been nominally restored,

Zhongzhong still couldn't catch a break because his wife, now once again empress Wei, essentially walked all over the poor guy, just like mom had done his whole life. By 710, she and several other partisans had hatched a plot to kill Zhongzhong and become empress regnant herself, just like good old mother-in-law.

A bit of poison in the emperor's cakes was all it took, and off shuffled the mortal coil for Zhongzong in mid-July. This didn't work out so well for Empress Wei, though, because Zhongzong's body had barely had a chance to cool off before his brother, the former emperor Ruizong, and his sister, chip off of mom's old block, Princess Taiping, rose in rebellion and overthrew the Empress and her child puppet. The attack was in fact led by Raizong's own son, Li Longji, and following its success and Empress Wei's decapitation, the pair reinstated Raizong to his own second shot at the throne. In return for leading the uprising that had returned into power,

Raizong awarded Li Longji by naming him the heir to the throne, even though he was not the eldest son. Ruizong would nominally rule for two years, during the course of which Princess Taiping and the Crown Prince Li Longji went from being allies to bitter enemies. At last in 712, when warned by Taiping that a passing comet foretold that he would lose his throne, Ruizong surprised everyone by voluntarily retiring and allowing the Crown Prince to take his place, keeping on as the retired emperor, while Longji was enthroned as Emperor Xuanzong. Though initially still playing second fiddle to his quote-unquote retired dad, Xuanzong took over more and more responsibility from Ruizong over the following year, until in the summer of 713, Princess Taiping was discovered to be plotting to poison Xuanzong, just like mom would have done. Xuanzong killed

her associates and then commanded her to commit suicide, an action Ruizong felt forced to approve of, and the following day ceded the remainder of his authority to his son. Xuanzong's reign would be the longest of the Tangs, more than 43 years, and between 713 and 741, his diligence and rule would restore much of the former imperial grandeur that had been lost since the heady days of Taizong. But while Xuanzong focused on the daunting task of trying to get the empire's financial situation in order, no mean feat in and of itself, as the years ticked by, he put more and more faith and power in the military governors along the borders. Their power grew so fast that by the 740s, as Xuanzong's diligence and rule gave way with time to heidinism, any single border army outstripped the power directly available to the throne.

Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered. Follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. The first real sign of the cracks developing in the Tang's facade of stability was the unexpected loss against the Abbasid Arabs at the Talus River in 751, which though pretty much insignificant unto itself, fatefully would mark the final end of

Chinese westward expansionism. The real doozy, though, would come just four years later, when the governor-general of the northeast, An Lushan, took his massive border army and declared war on the empire, throwing it into a colossal and devastating civil war that would force the emperor to flee to Sichuan and then accept that his heir, Prince Li Heng, had unilaterally declared himself emperor as Suzong, and that Xuanzong was now the retired emperor. Suzong would, at great expense and only with the timely but costly intervention of the Turkic Khans, drive the mad general An Lushan, and then his equally mad son, and then his former lieutenant, and then his son, back to the north, where the rebellion would at last be put down a mere eight years and between 15 and 30 million deaths later.

Though the Tang Empire, as an entity, managed to squeak through this rebellion and survive, the power of the throne and the imperial court had been fundamentally damaged and weakened to such an extent that according to historians like Samuel Adshead, it would cease to be the primary allocator of land usage in China for more than a millennium. This, combined with the undiminished power of the border governors, would see huge chunks of the empire effectively declare independence or ally with the rival states. The northeast would never again truly rejoin the fold, paying lip service to the throne, yes, while still going ahead and appointing their own successors and not even bothering to pay taxes to Chang'an at times. The far western garrisons of

the Tarim Basin would be lost by 792 Tibetan and Uyghur aggression that the weakened empire was unable to counter. Through all of this, the economic situation continued to deteriorate. Tax revenues fell as the governors turned warlords of some, the economic situation continued to deteriorate. Tax revenues fell as the governors turned warlords of some of the most productive regions of the empire opted to pretty much just go it alone. By the end of the century, in fact, more than half of the central government's revenues was coming from just a single source, which was the salt monopoly. There would be a brief hopeful period of rallying and recovery in the early 9th century, particularly under the deft rule of Emperor Xianzong, who in

his 15 years of rule reorganized the imperial finances and the salt tax in an attempt to stabilize state revenue, and brought the powerful Shenzhe army under the direct control of the palace, at least somewhat balancing out the military preeminence of the governor-generals out in the provinces. They might still have bigger, badder armies, but at least the throne now had an army itself that could be counted upon. In fact, Xinzong would manage to bring all but two of the rebellious and independently-minded provinces of the northeast to heel with judicious use of the Shenzhen's force before his untimely demise in 820, helped along either by an assassin's poison or, more likely, long-term self-poisoning via alchemy potions. Somewhat ironically, in spite

of the budgetary crisis that plagued the throne, the realm as a whole actually somewhat benefited from the relative slackening of centralized authority. Though state tax revenues continued to dry up, private trade actually flourished for a period, thanks to fewer bureaucratic restrictions opening up markets and new modes of trade. That was helped along by widespread black markets, counterfeit currency, and banditry of government-controlled sectors of the markets, probably most notably the salt trade. On the downside of Xianzong's reign, he had allowed the eunuch officials of the inner court unprecedented powers and privileges, including sole command of the Shenzhen army, which enraged and terrified many officials

of the outer court. By the time of Xianzong's grandson, Wenzong's reign, in the 830s, their Holan power within the capital had grown so overwhelming that Wenzong attempted to have them eradicated, which backfired spectacularly in 835 with the Sweet Dew Plot and resulted in the executions of the emperor's key supporters and the seizure of near-total power by the eunuch class, marking the beginning of their apex in Tang history. By the mid-840s, the Tang had had yet another run of so-so-to-bad emperors, and power fell into the lap, quite unexpectedly, of the family mute, Uncle Li Yi, the idiot, who would shock everyone by proving himself an emperor so competent that he'd be known in the histories as Little Taizong, and who we've come to know in this podcast as Xuanzong II,

or just China's Claudius. Under him, the empire had one last gasp of stability as the emperor curbed the influence of the warlords abroad and the eunuchs at home. But it would prove too little too late. When he succumbed once again to alchemical poisoning in 859, so too died any real hope of the Tang regime long outliving him either. The 860s would see rebellion after rebellion break out in the Shanxi regions, primarily small-time bandits and sometimes

farmers, simply opting out of the unfair system of taxation that crushed their livelihoods more and more with each passing year. Nonetheless, the rebellions were typically able to remain suppressed by their regional governments, even while the imperial government proved unable to meet their threat, once again showing the devolution of power to lower, smaller chunks of territory. But it wouldn't be until the mid-870s that these bandits and rebels would turn into a real existential threat under the banners of a former salt smuggler, Huang Chao. Remaining one step ahead of the armies sent to stop him, whose commanders, it should be mentioned, were in no big hurry to actually, you know,

catch him, Huang Chao was able to march down south and sack the great port city of Guangdong, infamously initiating a brutal pogrom against the resident foreigners living in the city, known as the Guangzhou Massacre. Huang Chao would turn back north and march on both capital cities, prompting the emperor, now Shizong, to take flight to Chengdu, Sichuan. Huang's reign of terror over the capital would last out the year, but he'd finally be driven off and then killed in 884 by the governor-generals of the realm, putting an end to his decade of plundering and killing his way through the nation. Yet the damage caused by the Huang Chao rebellion had sent the Tang imperialist structure into its terminal phase. Now utterly powerless, the emperor controlled little more than the capital itself,

and even that only nominally. Much like the end phase of the Han dynasty, regional warlords, most notably the likes of Li Kayong, Li Maozhen, and Zhu Wen, competed over possession of the emperor to use for their own ends. This back and forth would finally end in 907, when the last possessor of the imperial person, Governor Ju-won, finally did away with the pretext of still serving the Tang, and replaced it with later Liang, initiating the beginning of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms era. And so we're once again all caught up and back to the early 10th century. Welcome back. So now that we've completed that political look back, I'd like to take the rest of this episode to examine some of the other aspects of the Tang society that we haven't really covered nearly as much as they deserve. Things like culture, science, and hey, even fun.

In fact, let's just go ahead and start with the fun. Much more than previous dynasties, the Tang citizens, especially those of the upper class, liked to enjoy themselves and made sure to set aside plenty of time to do so. Owing in no small part to the diffusion of the northern cultures into mainstream culture, and especially the royal household, it's unsurprising that many popular pastimes utilized the horse and the bow, including archery, grand hunts, and polo. Some slightly less cost-intensive activities popular with the masses were games like soccer, cockfighting, which was another favorite of several emperors, and large-scale games of tug-of-war. Though long vacations were relatively infrequent for government officials, at least by our standards, they were nevertheless regular

and expected. Every three years, an official was given between 15 and 30 days off to go visit their families out in the province that they came from, depending on how far they needed to travel. Weddings of children yielded nine days off from work, and three days for a son's right of manhood. Added to these infrequent vacation periods, regular holidays were scattered across each year. Most notably, the Lunar New Year and Lantern Festivals in late winter, the Cold Food Festival and Tomb Sweeping Festivals in spring, dragon boat and ghost festivals in summer, and mid-autumn and water lantern festivals in the fall. Each of these would have a period of one to three official festival days over the course of which regular society came to a standstill, and many of the strict city ordinances were suspended for the duration. In the city of

cities, for instance, the capital, Chang'an, the strict curfews typically enforced were lifted for such festivals, especially the lantern festival, so that everyone could enjoy the celebrations and feasts held beneath the soft red glow of the paper orbs overhead. Speaking of the capital, though centrally planned and under tight restrictions for most of the year, Chang'an was nevertheless quite cosmopolitan, serving as the home not of just the imperial family and seat of government, but also as many as 2 million people if we count the city center and the urban areas surrounding it. Among these throngs, as many as 25,000 foreign residents made the great capital their home, which, true enough, not nearly as many as a city like Guangzhou's 250,000 foreigners prior to

Huang Chao's attack, but hey, let's be fair, Guangzhou was a commercial center and lucrative trade port, while Chang'an was in the middle of a semi-arid plain. The foreign residents of the Tang capital were of all stripes, reflecting the fact that it really was one of the world hubs of trade and culture. Persians, Taikarians, Transoxianans, Uyghurs, Turks, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Tibetans, and Indians all called the city home, and were even allowed to marry ethnic Chinese. Under the restriction, however, that they would need to remain in China and couldn't take their Chinese wives with them if they decided to leave. On the subject of women, they too experienced something of a golden age during the Tang, at least partially evidenced by the fact that there had been so many women with

significant levels of power, up to and including the monarchy itself. While we must always remember that we are still talking about the ancient past, and thus any sense of equality or the like must still be graded on a heavy curve, Tang women, at least those of the upper urban classes, enjoyed a significantly broader degree of social equality and access to the public sphere than in periods before. They could become priests and even leaders in Taoist and Buddhist monasteries, for instance. Even in the oldest profession, that of prostitution, women found that they could sometimes provide a degree of financial and social control that would be seen in few eras prior to the Tang. The Yueji, later called Damingji, were the forerunners of, and perhaps the direct inspiration for, the likes of Japanese

geishas. And like the geishas, these courtesans were highly trained to sing, dance, and perhaps the direct inspiration for, the likes of Japanese geishas. And like the geishas, these courtesans were highly trained to sing, dance, and converse with their clientele. Though certainly the vast majority of these yeji ended their careers sadly and poorly, as their looks faded, some would be able to find refuge in monasteries, and a select few even became quite wealthy and socially connected as headmistresses of their own bordellos. Fashion-wise, it is of particular note that the Tang society had a rather liberal view of women's fashions, even by modern Chinese standards, as rather famously, a recent Chinese television drama about Wu Zetian, called, appropriately

enough, The Empress of China, was forced to do extensive reshoots when the modern Chinese government deemed the period-accurate costumes to be a little too risqué for their audiences. Cuisine, too, had greatly expanded during the Tang with the re-establishment of long-term foreign trade. Far from subsisting merely on the five grains of old, citizens of the empire, or at least those of sufficient means, had access to foodstuffs from all over the known world. Ingredients like garlic, soybeans, turnips, hazelnuts, yams, and taro all became common staples, as did fruits like apples, peaches, and pomegranates from places like Samarkand. Sugarcane had been imported from India and successfully cultivated in China,

subsequently becoming extremely popular. In terms of meats, pork and chicken were staples across the empire, while lamb was an especially popular choice in the north and west. But such common foods were by no means the limit of what was available. Also popular was camel, bear, and get this, sea otter. You'll note that I didn't mention beef, because eating an animal with as much agricultural value as cattle was discouraged. That, along with the rising tide of Buddhism across the country, which held cattle as sacrosanct, meaning that very few people were very interested in eating a steak. Meanwhile, in the South, seafood of course reigned supreme. Jellyfish cooked in a combination of cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, cardamom, and ginger was quite popular, as were oysters cooked in wine,

and recipes featuring sea creatures as exotic, and sometimes dangerous, as horseshoe crab and pufferfish. Shrimps were, then as now, of course, a staple. Also on the subject of food, while common people preserved their foods through the more common methods like pickling, sun-drying, smoking, and salting, the wealthiest of the wealthy, and of course the emperor himself, had a rather special method, refrigeration. They would have constructed pits which could be filled with ice, either collected locally or where necessary and feasible, imported from other regions. As the owner of the world's largest icebox at the time, the emperor employed a set of laborers who would yearly stock his fridge with a thousand three by three foot blocks of ice cut from frozen creeks and mountain valleys.

So think of those singing guys at the beginning of Frozen, and you've essentially got it. This kind of luxury allowed for one of the really decadent treats of the time for the elite. Chilled melon, even at the height of summer. It's not quite a carton of Chunky Monkey, but it will do in a pinch. In the realm of information technologies, paper was of course by this time old hat, so common and cheap that it was actually being used as toilet paper, as noted with horror and disgust by Islamic visitors who couldn't, and they've got a point here, couldn't understand how that was a better idea than washing with water after you were done doing your business.

But the real innovation in books and records was the invention of woodblock printing presses as of the 9th century, as evidenced by one of the earliest surviving woodblock works, the Diamond Sutra of 868, which was discovered in 1974 near Xi'an, while even earlier non-book printings have been dated as far back as the 650s. The level of mass production this afforded Chinese society greatly accelerated literacy rates nationwide, and would even lead to the invention of things like playing cards. Alchemy can tend to get a bad rap, but only if you're trying to eat it. In fact, experiments

in chemical formulas would lead to a wide range of non-lethal applications in what amounted to pre-chemistry, including waterproofing of silks, fireproofing buildings, and polishing varnishes for things like weapons and mirrors. Tang scientists would also see production of a true porcelain on a wide enough scale that it was exported and sold in markets as far away as Persia, where it was highly prized. But probably the area of society for which the Tang period is most celebrated and respected was its literature and art, both of which were of such quality and style that they're often considered as China's greatest golden age of culture. Though there are surely countless works that have been lost to time, more than 48,000 works of literature by 2,200 authors have survived to the present. Poetry was a required aspect of taking the imperial examinations, and so authors

were fiercely competitive in their writings. The two main styles to come out of the dynasty were guxi and jintishi. Guxi, meaning literally ancient style, as its name suggests, was a classical style dating back to antiquity. It consisted of uniform lines of five to seven syllables each, and experienced a great revival in the Tang under masters like Li Bai of the early 8th century. Jintishi, meaning modern style or regulated verse, is arranged into couplets with four, eight, or in some styles an unlimited number of lines. Unlike Gu Shi, all couplets had to be rhyming, though the subsequent evolution of spoken Chinese have rendered many of those rhymes obsolete, and a whole host of other structural rules that we won't get into. The great Jintisha poets of the Tang were Wang Wei, Cui Hao, and Du Fu. Prose likewise flourished, with authors like Liu Zongyuan and Han Yu breaking away from the

Piantiwen poetic style of writing things like histories, criticizing it for being flowery and formal at the expense of being vague and often inaccessible. What would become known as their guwen, or classic prose movement, would instead seek to more closely emulate the more straightforward style of ancient writers like Sima Qian, a shift for which that those of us, like me, for whom ancient allusion and metaphor are impenetrable nightmares are eternally grateful. Alright, that will finish us off for today, and for the Tang once and for all. Next time, we're following the breakup of the empire into its warlord states in the north and south over the next half century, beginning with the man who had founded the very first of the five dynasties, Zhu Wen, aka Taizu of later Liang.

Thanks for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.