The History of China - #98 - Tang 16: All Along the Watchtowers

Episode Date: May 17, 2016

We leave the capital behind to take a tour of the Tang Empire’s neighbors, both old and new. A tenuous peace with Tibet leads to a westward push putting the Chinese into contact – and eventual conflict – with the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate. Meanwhile, to the north and east rebellious Khitan tribesmen will spark a huge military buildup in the region under the control of one man, while the former Goguryeo reorganizes itself into the powerful state of Balhae, forcing the Tang Court to re-assess its diplomatic options. Time Period Covered: 730-750 CE Major Historical Figures: Tang Dynasty: Li Longji (Emperor Xuanzong of Tang) [r. 712-756] Gen. Zhang Shougui, Military Governor of Fanyang Gen. An Lushan, Military Governor of Pinglu, Prince of Dongping Tibetan Kingdom: Turgesh Kaghanate: Sulu Kaghan [d. 738] Abbasid Islamic Caliphate: Second Turkic Kaghanate: Bilgé Kaghan [r. 716-734] Kul Tigin [d. 731] Khitan and Xi Tribes: Ketuyu [d. 733] Balhae Kingdom: King Go [r. 698-719] King Mu [r. 719-737] King Mun [r. 737-793] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history.

Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts. Before we launch into the show today, let me first recommend that, after you're done here, of course, you go check out Roy Field Brown's excellent 10 American Presidents podcast. In each show, Roy Field has a guest give us the life and legacy of 10 of the U.S.'s most influential leaders. My personal favorite episode is, in fact, the first, which is the life and administration of Richard Nixon, as told by none other than Dan Carlin.

Yeah, that Dan Carlin. Please give it a listen, and while you're doing that, check out all of the other shows on offer through the Agora Podcast Network at www.agorapodcastnetwork.com. Thanks again, and enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 98, All Along the Watchtowers Last time, we focused on the economic and domestic policies that shaped Xuanzong's

middle reign during the 730s and early 40s, culminating in both that partial solution to the Tang Empire's long-standing currency crisis, as well as the rise of the minister Li Linfu to the highest levels of officialdom, and virtually unchallenged in his authority. Today, however, we're going to move away from the goings-on of the capital, to instead go on a bit of a tour of the Tang Empire's borders as a whole, as we look at the changing situation between China and its many neighbors, and just as importantly, those who would be trusted to guard the empire from its enemies, and how those decisions will shape the course of the later 8th century for Xuanzang's China and beyond.

We're going to start today in the West, since that's where the Tang China's biggest, baddest foe resides. I refer, of course, to the Tibetans. Now as a short little aside here, in previous episodes, I'd been referring to the Chinese name for the Tibetans as the Tu Fan, because that's virtually what every single one of the pronunciation guides I'd gotten my hands on told me it was. However, a friend of the show, Yuan Leo, pointed out to me a while back that the word in question, the one I'd been reading as Fan, can actually be pronounced as Bo, and in the case of the Tibetan kingdom, ought to. Tibet, to bò.

I mean, it makes sense, right? Fortunately, and face-savingly enough for me, Yuan reassured me that I am far from the only one who has been confused by this little hiccup. Certain Chinese words can, and do, change pronunciation in certain circumstances, because, you know, the language isn't hard enough already, and even native speakers can routinely mix them up if they're not in common enough use. Well, anyway, that's my esoteric pronunciation lesson for the day. Tibet is too bo, not too fun, but I'm just gonna go ahead and call them Tibet because I can. So there, moving along. So when last we left the Tibetan highlands, way back in the 720s,

an uncomfortable peace had descended between the two empires. Tibetan expansionism into Chinese territories had ground to a halt in large part, you may recall, because a civil war had broken out between their child king and the powerful M'gar clan that had sapped the majority of the Tibetan's military strength. Once that whole kerfuffle had been sorted out, by which I mean each and every member of the M'gar clan had been slaughtered during a grand hunt turned into ambush, the Tibetan king was once again able to consolidate his people's strength and push outward. This time, however, he opted not to push east into China, but west into Central Asia. Specifically, two kingdoms called Gilgit and Baltistan, which were in the Qajgar mountain range.

Now, we might think, well, that's great for the Chinese, right? The Tibetans are distracted over in Central Asia, and they're not bothering Tang interests anymore, right? Alas, the capture of the Kashgar kingdoms meant that by 722 or 23, the Tibet had effectively seized control of the only overland routes between the Tang Empire and the Indus Valley of India, which meant the drawing up of trade between the two civilizations. I imagine you can see the problem. Faced with the understandably daunting prospect of an overwhelming Tibetan invasion, the king of Gilgit ran and told Daddy, by which I mean his suzerain, Emperor Xuanzong, that the big kids were being mean to him.

Xuanzong responded in turn and ordered the armies housed in the Anshi garrisons of the far western protectorate to mobilize against this westward incursion. The Anshi garrisons were able to drive the Tibetan armies out of Gilgit, thus securing Chinese trade routes to India. Neighboring Baltistan, however, was not so lucky and was quickly annexed by the Tibetan Empire prior to 725. Following the Feng and Shan sacrifices atop Mount Tai that was the focus of the end of episode 96, the imperial court urged Xuanzong to conclude a permanent peace treaty with Tibet, citing the enormous cost of the frontier defenses that had to be maintained while war remained an immediate possibility. Emperor Xuanzong, however, was not having any

of this lovey-dovey peace business. He had not forgotten the Tibetans' treachery the last time he'd conducted peace negotiations with them. They'd signed the peace and then turned right around and launched an all-out offensive against Gansu back in 714, after all, earning the Tang Emperor's eternal distrust of any overtures they might be expressing. Thus, rather than opening up diplomatic channels, Xuanzong prepared for further aggressive actions in 725. And that was just fine with the Tibetans because they were preparing their own series of renewed strikes against the Chinese at right the same time. Professor Twitchit writes of the conflict, quote, In 725, some Tibetans had joined in turgesh raids on the Tarim oases. Now, from 726 to 729,

hostilities again flared up on the Chinese border. The Tibetans repeatedly raided Chinese territory in the Gansu Corridor, while Chinese armies repeatedly struck into the Kokonor region. What Tuchik calls Kokonor, by the way, is the former Mongolian name for modern Qinghai province of China, and in particular the region immediately surrounding Qinghai, or Kokonor, Lake. You can basically think of it as the province that is sandwiched right between eastern China and Tibet. Qinghai Lake is a saline lake, hence all three primary names for it, Qinghai in Chinese, Kokonor in Mongolian, and Tsongonpo in Tibetan,

all translate to the Teal Sea. It has a surface area of about 1,700 square miles, making it almost the same size, just a little bit smaller than the Great Salt Lake of Utah. From about 728 onwards, the Chinese gained the upper hand in their strikes against Tibetan holdings in Qinghai. And the following year, the Tibetan Empire sued for peace. Xuanzong was hesitant to trust their word this go-round, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, after all, but he was at last convinced to enter into negotiations that resulted in a peace treaty concluded in early 730.

The Tibetan king formally acknowledged Chinese supremacy and its nominal vassalization to the Tang Empire, and a great stele was erected on the border, inscribed with the terms of the peace between the two kingdoms. As medieval pieces went, the Sino-Tibetan Treaty did live a fairly long lifespan, about six years, before relations once again degraded into conflict in 736. That would last more or less unendingly throughout the 740s and into the early 750s. As to what happened that destroyed the peace pact between China and Tibet? Well, I'm glad you asked, because in order to sort this out, we're going to have to push even further west, into the bowels of Central Asia,

and run into an empire that we've almost never directly encountered before, the Arabs and their Islamic Abbasid Caliphate. We're actually entering a truly and magnificently fascinating period, not just in Chinese history, but in world history as a whole. And I'm proud to be but one of the people producing a show that can help contribute to its understanding as a whole. So let me break character for a moment to suggest that if you're interested in Islamic history, you should check out the History of Islam podcast by Elias Belharad. Or if you're interested in what the people of Anatolia and the Eastern Roman Empire were doing to combat the emergent Arab threat from their walled city fortress that was Constantinople,

you ought to check out Robin Pearson's The History of Byzantium podcast. They're both fantastic shows and have allowed me to place China's own interactions with the larger world of the 8th century into a more complete picture than I otherwise might have been able. So thanks, both of you. So back to the narrative, we're actually going to be simultaneously discussing two civilizational pressures pushing back against Tang Chinese interests in the far west. As I already said, the Abbasid Arabs, but also the Turkish Khanate. And before moving forward, that should not be confused with the Turkic Khanates. They are related, but it's more helpful to think of them as distinct entities rather than melding them both together. For our

purposes, the Turkish and the Turks are politically and culturally distinct cousins. For many of us, probably most of us, the regions we're about to talk about are distinctly alien and will have even less of a reference point in our collective consciousness than normal, which I know is already shaky at best. I'm not going to even attempt to make heads or tails of the ever-shifting political landscape of Central Asia at this time. Perhaps one of you can create a podcast devoted to that. For the purposes of this show, though, it's so much of a fluid patchwork of nomadic step-tribes and tiny kingdoms that, though, it's so much of a fluid patchwork of nomadic steppe tribes and tiny kingdoms that, frankly, any attempt for me to try to assign borders would be a bad farce at best. Even if we look at a map today of the region in question, we're talking about interconnected regions of at least four separate modern countries, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Instead,

though I might reference a particular place when it comes up, in general, I'm just going to pretty much refer to the area as a whole by the name given by the Romans, which is Transoxiana, the lands beyond the Oxus River. Alright, so the Turgesh and the Arabs are in Transoxiana. They had been fighting a lot. In 724, for instance, the Turgesh, under their Sulu Kagan, had dealt the Abbasids a resounding defeat in a battle known to Arabic historians as Yawm al-Atash, or the Day of Thirst, which had resulted in the

almost total collapse of Arabic authority in Transoxiana for the remainder of the decade, and set their plans of eastward expansion back some 15 years in all. The Tang court, meanwhile, had been keeping tabs on this little conflict beyond its borders, and seeing that the Turkish seemed to have the Arabs on the run, decided that a formal alliance with Sulu Khagan was in order to secure their interests in the region. As usual, they approached the Khagan with an offer of a marriage to a so-called Chinese princess, in fact, the daughter of the nominal Khan of the Western Turks, by now a thoroughly Tang Chinese puppet. But while Xuanzang's agents held out the olive branch with one hand, with the other, they were sure to strengthen Tang

defensive lines throughout the Anshi protectorate. Sulu Kaghan was obviously a force to be reckoned with, and so the far western garrisons were bolstered, according to Twitchit, to more than 20,000 soldiers in each of its command districts, and all supported by the ubiquitous Tuntian agriculture systems which allowed the soldiers to grow and produce their own food within the fortified colonies. This was supplemented by a system of taxation put in place in the early 730s that levied a toll on any and all traders traversing the Silk Road. The bolstering of defenses in Anshi was necessitated not only by Sulu Kaghan's personal military might, but also by the fact that he had already concluded successful marriage alliances with both the

Tibetans as well as the Eastern Turkic Khanate, neither of which were particularly friendly to Tang Chinese interests, formal peace treaties notwithstanding. It was a delicate balancing act of alliances and treaties, and Xuanzang wasn't about to leave the fate of his westernmost holdings onto a piece of paper or a so-called princess alone. This cautious defensive strategy would prove its worth in 736 when Sulu Kaghan, now old and infirm and having lost the use of one arm thanks to a stroke, failed to conquer the wealthy city of Samarkand. Knowing that his whole-on power was predicated on victory and victory alone, Sulu was forced to immediately turn around and attack the Chinese territories in the Tarim Basin to prove that he hadn't lost it. The Bolshar's Anshi garrisons, however, proved to be a wise investment,

and the Chinese were able to crush the Turgesh push. Sulu Karandin pivoted once again and launched himself once more at the Arabs. Again, however, the Turgesh Khanate was routed by its foes, signaling the end of Sulu's, and the Turgesh's as a whole, power over Transoxiana. This turn of events signaled a renewed interest by the Chinese into the region. And when the Turgesh confederation began to come apart at the seams after Sulu's downfall and murder in 738, someone had the bright idea to ask for Chinese assistance against their enemies, a request with which the Tang court was all too happy to comply. Twitchit writes, quote,

A general political settlement in the area was reached, and the kings of Fargana, Tashkent, and Kish were invested with Chinese titles. A Chinese attempt to impose a new Khagan upon the western Turks with control over the Turkish led to renewed trouble, but in 744, another punitive expedition finally crushed the Turkish and re-established Chinese authority in the Ili Valley and the Tomak area. By 750, this had become a powerful Chinese base. It was from this position, in fact, that the Chinese will shortly make their last great push westward and come into direct confrontation with the ascendant Abbasid Arabs. But that will have to wait until our next episode.

We're going to turn now back far closer to home for the Tang Dynasty, to the northeastern border regions of Mongolia and Manchuria. In what is now Mongolia, the eastern Turks were rapidly approaching their own downfall. It had begun with the death of the great Kapagan Khan in 716, which had thrown the already shaky Turkic confederation into further instability and chaos. Into that political void stepped Bilge Kagan and his younger brother

and brilliant military strategist Kul Tegin, who had personally elevated his brother and simultaneously proclaimed himself as the Turkic Shad, or Commander-in-Chief, or perhaps Warlord. If either of these names ring a bell, it's because we detailed their exploits back in episode 84, when we quoted from their inscription to Eternity in the Orkhon River Valley of Mongolia, known as the Orkhon Inscription. I'll let Kultigin tell his side of this past century or so once again. Quote, discord between nobles and people. They brought the old realm of the Turkic people to dissolution, and brought destruction onto its lawful kaiyans. The sons of the nobles became the bondsmen of the

Chinese people. Their unsullied daughters became its slaves. The Turkic nobles gave up their Turkic names, and bearing the Chinese names of Chinese nobility, they obeyed the Chinese emperor, and served him for fifty years. For him, they waged war in the east toward the sun's rising, as far as Bakli Kagan. In the west, they made expeditions as far as Taimirkapig. For the Chinese emperor, they conquered kingdoms and power. The whole of the common Turkic people thus said, I have been a nation of its own kingdom. Where now is my kingdom? For whom do I win the kingdoms? said they. I have been a people that had its own Kayan. Where is my Kayan? Which Kayan do I Suffice it to say, between the two of them, the brothers Bilge-Kagan and Kultigin managed to wrest control of the Eastern Turks, not only from their fellow Turkic competitors, but even, or at least to a measure, from Tang Chinese suzerainty.

Interestingly, Bilge had at one point apparently been very close to deciding to settle his people from their nomadic steppe lifestyle that they'd lived as for thousands upon thousands of years, and instead construct a massive, walled, Chinese-style city from which to rule. It's interesting to think what might have come to pass if he had carried this plan out. What might the ramifications been on Eurasian and world history if the proto-Mongolian hordes had become sedentary societies centuries before the likes of Genghis Khan was born? Nevertheless, in spite of that fun little what-if, Bilge was dissuaded from his city-building idea by a lieutenant who argued that doing so would rob their people of their single greatest strength that they possessed against the likes of the Chinese or the Persians, which was their unmatchable mobility. This would be a balancing act, prosperity versus mobility, defense versus freedom, that would be raised time and time again by the

Khans of the steppes, Antajengis, Kublai, until at least the 17th century with the establishment of the current Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar. Anyway, so the brothers Bilge and Kultigin both died in the first half of the 730s, Kultigin in 731, and Bilge to poison in 734. Nevertheless, in spite of the bitter tone the Orkhan stele takes about Chinese domination over the past hundred years, the Turks seemed more or less comfortable to remain in the good graces of the Tang sovereign, which is why, when what was about to happen happened, they opted to stay well and truly out of it. The happening I'm talking about we briefly mentioned last time was the joint rebellion of the Khitan and Shi tribes of Manchuria against Tong imperial authority over them,

a rebellion that was simultaneously surprising and completely expected by the Tong authorities. I'll explain. Outwardly, the Yingzhou Protectorate region, what we think of today as Manchuria, north of the Korean peninsula, and within which both the Khitan and the Shi peoples were administrated by the Chinese, seemed extremely stable. When the non-Han tribes that had accepted Tang vassalization back in 714, that political arrangement had been bolstered by a series of political marriages of Chinese princesses. Though again, just like the marriage to the Turkish Khagan in the far west,

both the words Chinese and princess must be said while making giant finger quotations in the air. But the tribal leaders believed that they were, and so everyone was happy. For the time being, at least. The stability of the region was further bolstered by the formation of the stable state of Parhe in eastern Manchuria, which I'll talk about more later. It might sound strange that the formation of a militarily powerful and dynastically stable state would actually increase the stability of Chinese domination over the region, but think of it this way. The loose tribal steppe confederations that typically made up these groups of people was like trying to negotiate with a pile of dry sand. Sure, you might reach a deal with one of the tribes within the confederation,

but there was no way of knowing whether or not the other individual grains would slip from that grip and reject the decision. A more centralized, powerful state led by a leader with a greater measure of control actually meant for the Tang court's interests someone with whom they could actually work with and deal, with some semblance of assurance that any deal that was reached would have sticking power. We might similarly compare the modern situation in Iraq or Afghanistan and their respectively difficult dealings with the U.S. America is interested in building these regions back into cohesive states, because then they are singular entities to be negotiated and worked with as a whole,

rather than letting the whole region collapse into atomized tribal configurations that would require infinitely more work to produce any positive results. All of these internal details were even further bolstered by the fact that the Chinese army's presence in the regions was just absolutely massive. No fewer than 10 whole armies occupied the region since the devastating Khitan invasion of China proper back in 696. These were, in line with this era's tendency to establish massive military authority into the hands of very few commanders, all ultimately at the disposal of the military governor of Fanyang, who held personal and near-absolute control over just a ridiculous number of troops.

For instance, under his personal command alone, were more than 91,000 men. Now, that's not one of the ten armies in the region, mind you. That's just his personal command force. We're going to get back to the military governorship of the Fanyang region, because he is going to be so, so important in the episodes to come. But first, back to the Khitan and the Xi. All these outward signs of stability, peace, love, and understanding, however, mask what was really going on underneath the surface of the placid exterior of Yingzhou Protectorate. Like so many other regions outside of a centralized control system, and comprised of fluid societies of tribal peoples, trying to

effectively parse out who was who and who did what was, well, it's messy at best. For instance, I've been repeatedly referring to the rebellion we're about to discuss as a joint operation between the Khitan and the Shi peoples, as though they were just two entirely separate political entities. But the truth is far less concrete than that. In fact, according to Xu Elena Qian, in her University of Helsinki dissertation paper titled Historical Development of the Pre-Dynastic Khitan, she says that they seem to have actually stemmed

from the same historical group, which is likely the Xianbei. She writes that the name Khitan stems from the homophonic phrase Xi Dan, which she translates as meaning in effect of or among the Shi people. Regardless, within the Khitan tribes, a series of rapid deaths among their kings, four in less than eight years in fact, gave way to the rise of a war chief named Ketuyu.

Now, Ketuyu was not the king of the Khitan, merely a minister at its court, but then again, we're all now well aware of how powerful ministers can be when their kings are weak, aren't we? And so it was with Ketuyu, who by the 720s was powerful enough that he was able to overthrow several Khitan kings who crossed him. After being insulted by a Chinese official while on a tributary mission to Chang'an, Ketuyu apparently had enough. He killed the then reigning king, who was pro-Chinese, and seized authority for himself. Thus it would be by his directive that the Khitan and the Xi tribes would rise in rebellion against Chinese hegemony

in the year 730, and declare their allegiance to the Turkic Khanate under Bilge, whom they thought would back them. As I already mentioned though, the whole ally with the Turks against the Chinese part of the plan didn't exactly pan out, since Bilge Kagan soundly rebuffed any idea of him rising against Tang authority. He was going to sit this one out, but you could Tang go right ahead and do whatever you want. 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 two to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution, and regicide which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In season three, 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 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. Cotillo did exactly that, which of course provoked the Chinese military into a response against them, though with a curious lack of hustle. Kitu Yu declared his rebellion in 730, but it wouldn't actually be until 732 that Xuanzong's armies actually marched out to do anything about it. The reason for that delay is actually rather surprising. Typically we'd think, and traditional historians have insisted for centuries, that this would have been a David and Goliath battle shaping up. This is the Tang

Chinese Empire we're talking about, facing down some rinketing tribe they'd already subdued time and again. Well, to the contrary, however. Xu points out that, thanks in large part to the military overreach during Empress Wu's reign, and of course the long-term crippling financial crisis that faced the empire, militarily speaking, the two forces in the region were roughly equal. Xu writes, Due to several decades of straining the Tang's military capacity beyond reasonable limits and overextending its defense, the Tang faced increasingly serious financial difficulties. Therefore, up to the end of the 7th century, Chinese military power no longer had overwhelming superiority. The Tang and Khitan matched each other in strength. This is why such a sharp

conflict could occur. Actually, the Khitan were superior to the Tang in real military strength, because the Tang's success of crushing the Rebellion of 696 was supported by the Turks and Xi, end quote. Now, just to clarify this point a bit, in terms of overall power, the two states were certainly not at parity. But the Tang armies were by necessity spread across the thousands upon thousands of miles of borderland, guarding against the Turks and the Tibetans and the Arabs, which of course meant that only a fraction of its force could be available to face down the Catan at any point. Meanwhile, the Catan were all massed together in a relatively small area, thus could concentrate the bulk of their

military strength in that one single place. As such, the forces that were there to meet each other were of roughly equal strength, but that does not mean that the two nations were anywhere close as a whole. Nevertheless, when the Chinese armies actually did manage to show up in Yingzhou to deal with the now two-year-old rebellion, they made short work of the Khitan and Shi alliance. A force of 10,000 imperial soldiers subdued the Shi tribe, and they reintegrated as a vassal people once again, leaving the Catan all by their lonesome. But did that stop Ketuyu? Of course it didn't. In the meantime, Ketuyu had managed to flip at least some of the Turkish chieftains to his cause, and they together invaded Tang territory and occupied the Yuguan Pass, a formidable defensive position. From there, they defeated and annihilated the Tang strike force

sent against them. This meant that the Chinese did what they do, which is one of the true markers in the ancient world of the difference between a flash-in-the-pan kingdom and an empire with real staying power. In the face of an embarrassing and crushing defeat, they didn't fold or open negotiations, no. Instead, they simply raised up another army and called in their big guns. In this case, Zhang Shougui, a general who had built a legendary reputation for himself by winning victory after victory against the Tibetans. Even as far away as Manchuria, Ketuyu had still heard that General Zhang was pretty much the ultimate badass, and so did the perfectly rational thing. He ran away. Twitchit writes, quote,

General Zhang, however, wasn't playing around and wasn't about to let Kituyu sneak off to rebuild his forces. Instead, he enticed one of the Khitan sub-commanders, who was hostile enough to Kituyu sneak off to rebuild his forces. Instead, he enticed one of the Kitan sub-commanders, who was hostile enough to Kituyu's rule to be receptive to such an offer, to infiltrate the Kitan warlord's camp and murder him along with his supporters. The turncoat assassin was successful in his mission, and to prove it, he sent the head of Kituyu to the Tang court. But if General Zhang thought that this literal case of cutting the head off of the serpent was going to lead to peace, he had another thing coming. By the end of 735, Ketuyu loyalists overthrew the Khitan king that had been hand-selected by Shen Zong, and rose up in rebellion again.

It is here in 736 that General Zhang's lieutenant, a man named An Lushan, would, against orders, lead the doomed attack on the rebel force that would lead to his death sentence, as we briefly discussed last time. General Zhang, however, managed to get the death sentence commuted to a mere reduction to commander status, and An Lushan was able to stay on within the Northeastern military command. Once Zhang returned to the warfront, he was able to clean up An's mess and deal a crushing blow to the anti-Chinese rebel army. Nevertheless, hostilities would remain an off-again-on-again reality all along the Manchurian borderlands, up through the 740s and beyond. Twitchit writes, quote,

the situation now at last became more peaceful. The Tang defense system was strengthened. Two new armies were set up in Hebei and and another in Pinglu in 743. End quote. The Khitan rebellion would at last be drawn to an end in 743, when both they and the Xi once again sent envoys to Chang'an and negotiated a peace. This was confirmed in 745 with, what else, a marriage of two Chinese princesses to both vassal kings. That peace, however, would prove to not last long at all. Only six months later, the tribal kings killed these Chinese brides and once again declared their rebellion against the Tang authority. And it's here where we, at last, begin to discuss General An Lushan in more depth.

So let's at least get a little background on the guy, because he's going to be a pretty big deal. An Lushan, in spite of the Chinese-sounding name, was in fact not Chinese at all. He was a half-blood Guktark and Sogdian, who had, like so many of the Tang frontier soldiery, risen to prominence and command specifically because he was a foreigner. The rationale for that all traces back to the longtime favorite policy of the Chinese dynasty du jour, which is called yi yi zhi yi, or rather, use the barbarians to control the barbarians. Why should we waste valuable ethnic Chinese troops when we can just use

sinicized foreigners to do the dirty work for us? It was a policy that would work great, right up until it didn't. Well, anyway, back to An Lushan. By this point, he was in his early 40s, and in spite of his whoopsie back in 736 that had sent him hurtling back down to the bottom of the command chain, his natural practical tactical brilliance on the battlefield ensured that he would climb right back up those ranks in short order. This is marked by the fact that by 740, just four years after his failure had marked him for death in the eyes of the imperial court, he was named the bing ma she, or the cavalry commander of the newly established Pinglu army on the northern frontier. And then in

742, when the Pinglu army was promoted to a military circuit in its own right, rather than as a subsidiary of Zhang Shougui's Fanyang military governorship. At that point, An Lushan was named as its military governor in his own right. This meant that when the Khitan and Xi kings went ahead and killed their Chinese wives and re-entered rebellion in 745, it was Governor An who was assigned to deal with them, and Lushan pulled no punches. In fact, many of the traditional historians, like Sima Guang, actually blame An Lushan's heavy-handedness with the Khitan and Shi as one of the reasons for their rebellion, a change that Xu Elena Tian largely agrees with, writing,

During the period of An Lushan having been a commander on the northeastern frontier, he frequently invaded and attacked the Khitan and Shi in order to curry favor with the Tang court. His crude oppression had evoked hostility and strong opposition from the Khitan and Shi people, end quote. Whether or not it was his oppressive policies that induced the tribes of Manchuria to rebel once again, General An was only too happy to lay the smackdown on them once again, and they were brutally suppressed by the Penglu army. In fact, he would use a tactic that seems to have cropped up on all sides of the great Asian steppelins as a surprisingly effective means of putting down the problematic nomadic tribes. The biggest issue for

settled societies trying to militarily engage horsemen like the Khitan or the Turks was their propensity to move around all the time. Like I said before, with no real cities to capture, and every man, woman, and child capable of riding circles around even your best cavalrymen, what was a settled society to do? One answer was alcohol. You find this happening time and again from the Chinese, the Persians, and you might even say the European colonizers of North America, and later the Americans themselves, in their own dealings with the steppe nomads of the Great American Plains. One thing these nomadic societies tended to lack was a great means of producing their own alcohol. Sure, some of them, like the Mongolians for instance, would eventually work

out a system of fermenting horse milk into an alcoholic beverage called airag, but that tops out at around 2% alcohol by volume. It could sometimes be further produced into a different liquor called arki, that tops out at about 10% ABV. But the point is that, on the whole, alcohol was a rare commodity among the horse riders of the steppes, and even their strongest native spirits were less intoxicating than, say, a typical glass of white wine. Chinese liquor, on the other hand, is famously powerful. Chinese huangjiu, or yellow wine, starts out between 15-20% ABV, and it only goes up from there. The most famous, though, and most widely consumed Chinese liquor is Baijiu, or white liquor, which at the low end runs between 40-45% ABV, greater than most Western spirits, which typically

top out at 40%. And from that starting point, Baijiu can range up into the 50s or even 60s of percents ABV. Seriously, you can almost run a car off of it. So all this alcohol background just to say, when An Lushan decided that he wanted to get the Catan blackout drunk, he had no problem doing so. Not only was the Chinese liquor on offer just ridiculously strong, even by modern western standards, but the people drinking it had all the alcohol tolerance of an 80-pound 16-year-old. Not only that, but An wasn't about to take any chances. By some account,

he also went ahead and spiked the liquor that he was going to use with a narcotic, just to make sure everything went according to his plan. With his drugged wine at the ready, he on several occasions, in fact, invited whole assemblies of Khitan chieftains to feasts under the pretense of burying the hatchet and let's all be friends again and all that. When the tribal chieftains drank, though, and they did tend to drink a lot, so in short order, both the liquor and the drug took hold and they all passed out. Now utterly at his mercy, An Lushan would then call in his soldiers, who proceeded to methodically kill them all and then massacre their tribes. He then sent the tribal chieftains' severed heads to the Tang

court as proof of his successes against these barbarians. This, in turn, ensured two outcomes, that An Lushan would be rapidly promoted higher and higher up the imperial ranks, and that the size of the army under his personal command would grow commensurately larger as well. By the year 750, not only had An Lushan developed a trusted personal relationship with the emperor himself, but he had managed to parlay that and his military successes against the Khitan into both an iron certificate that was a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. It stated, with the force of law, that An could not be arrested or executed, excepting in the case of direct treason, which, spoiler alert, he's totally going to do. The other major event for An Lushan in 750 was that he was promoted to

the Prince of Dongping, marking out the first time in the dynasty's history that a non-member of the Li clan had been made a prince, not to mention an outright foreigner receiving such a title. This rendered him the commander of the entire northeastern military command structure, and made him personally the unquestioned leader of probably the largest single army in the whole of Asia at that time, a power that in the episodes to come he will most definitely put to a great and terrible use. But that is for another time. Today, however, we are going to finish out our tour of the imperial borderlands with what was, in effect, a new player on the board. Now, back during the reign of Tang China's second emperor,

Gaozong, in the 660s, the once-mighty North Korean kingdom of Goguryeo had at last been overcome and destroyed, finally finishing the task that had wound up unraveling the entire Sui dynasty and eluded even the grasp of the mighty emperor Taizong. Nature, of course, abhors a vacuum, and so while the western half of Manchuria was conquered and administered by the Tang Chinese, and the majority of the Korean peninsula was then united under the control of the Silla kingdom, the northeasternmost reaches of the area had instead kind of re-coalesced into a new kingdom called Balhae, or in Chinese, Bohai. This had been made possible in large part thanks to the Tang authority being so wrapped up in suppressing those incorrigible Khitan that they took their eye off of former Goguryeo pretty

much completely, and thus it re-emerged in a new form pretty much unchecked by Chinese oversight in the year 698 under its self-proclaimed King Go. Around 705, the Tang court realized that this new entity had emerged as a fait accompli, and instead of trying to oppose it, they gave formal recognition to Baohai in the hopes of securing a potential future ally against further Khitan and Shi aggression. In spite of some level of political tension between Tang China and Baohai, when in an act of worryingly independent thought its king rejected the Chinese reign title and dating system for one of its own, the Chinese court's suspicions were at least partially

allayed by the fact that Baohai representatives nevertheless continued to send tributary missions to Chang'an on an annual basis like a good vassal should. They were further allayed by the fact that in spite of the independent streak of the dating conventions, this new Korean kingdom had based its whole form of government on the Chinese model. Tang-Baohe relations would briefly boil over into conflict, when the Chinese court triggered the suspicion of the Baohe king by appearing to be cobbling together a tribal coalition to counterbalance what the Chinese perceived as their vassal, getting a little too independent for its liking. Tuchet writes, quote, In 726, the Malgal tribe sent envoys to court, and the

Chinese set up a frontier administration in the Amur region, with Chinese officers to advise and to organize a tribal army. Not unnaturally, the Baolhe king viewed these developments with apprehension. In 726, he ordered his brother to lead a preemptive strike against the Amur Valley Malgal to prevent a concerted attack on Baolhe by the Tang from the south and the Malgal from the north. The king's brother, however, protested and said that such a move would be seen by the Chinese as a betrayal of their suzerain. And instead of leading the attack, he fled to the Tang court and sought asylum. Now this royally pissed off the Baolhe king, who sent an envoy to Chang'an demanding that they

either execute his brother themselves, or at the very least they better send him back to Baolhe so that he could do it personally. Behind closed doors, the Tang court basically said, yeah, lol, no, but sent official word back to the king to the effect of, yeah, about that, we actually already exiled him to Central Asia, and it'd be way too much hassle to get him back, but just don't worry about him. In truth, though, the brother had not been exiled,

but instead given an official military commission within the Tang army. And when the king of Balhae learned about this little white lie, he was just done. In 732, he mounted a full-scale naval expedition to attack and raid the major port city of Dengzhou on the Shandong Peninsula jutting into the East China Sea. The naval raid was a striking success, with the Balhe royal army managing to capture and sack the city as well as executing its prefect before withdrawing. In response, Emperor Xuanzong decided it was time to get the band back together, and sent word to Tang China's longtime Korean buddy, Silla, asking its king to join the Chinese

in teaching these uppity balhay a thing or two about where exactly they sat in the order of things. That's right, once again a Chinese emperor thought it was going to be a good idea to launch a direct invasion against the North Korean kingdom. We all remember how well that went last time, right? Yeah, it only managed to chew through four emperors and an entire dynasty, so this is going to go great. I'll let Professor Twitchett describe what was to come. Quote, plans were made with the king of Silla, who also felt menaced by the rise of its powerful northern neighbor for a concerted attack by Chinese forces and the Silla army. The campaign was a fiasco. The renewed trouble with the Khitan in 733 led to the abandonment of the Chinese

campaign, while the Silla army was caught in snowstorms in the northern mountains of Korea and had to be withdrawn, having lost a part of their own men without ever having encountered Balhae forces. End quote. Great job, guys. Way to learn from history. Fortunately for Xuanzang, and possibly the entire Tang dynasty, cooler heads eventually prevailed at both the imperial and the royal Korean courts. For his part, the king of Balhae eventually realized that of the two potential neighbors to have to share a border with, Tang China or the Turkic Khaganate, deciding to make peace with the devil he knew, instead of the one who would almost certainly make constant raids against his territory the minute he turned his back,

thus, in 735, the hatchet was well and truly buried between Baohai and Tang China. Led by one of the royal princes, a tributary mission to Chang'an that year marked the resumption of normal relations between the two states, which would continue yearly thereafter. Two years later, the aged king of Baohai died and was succeeded by King Mun, largely considered the greatest of its rulers. Under his guiding hand, Baohai cooled its heels and adopted an ever more Chinese style of government,

culture, and even language. Once again from Twitchit, quote, Baolhei became a close copy of Tong China in its institutions and literary culture, much as Silla and Japan had become. It became a part of the Chinese cultural sphere in the East, in which Chinese was the lingua franca

in government and in literature, end quote. Between this normalization of relations with Balhae, along with the Chinese standing relationships with Yamato or Wa-Japan and Silla-Korea, this marked a new kind of foreign relationship for the Chinese empire. These people weren't tribal, nor were they nomadic, so they didn't readily fit into the definition of what a barbarian tribe aching for the civilizing hand of China normally was. In fact, societally, they looked and acted a whole heck of a lot like the Chinese definition of a civilized people.

The Chinese dynasties up to this point quite simply hadn't readily had to encounter or deal with or process, for that matter, too many other civilizations. I mean, they knew that some existed on the far corner of the world, but none of them nearby. They were used to being surrounded on all sides by wildlings. But this was something new and different, and in turn required the development of a new style of foreign policies with these seemingly civilized foreign nations that needed to acknowledge and accept a far greater degree of

gasp, political equality. Who'd have thunk? So that pretty much rounds out our tour of the borderlands surrounding Emperor Shanzong's Tang China in the 740s and up to the year 750. In the Northeast, a strange new kind of foreign relation with the Koreas and the Japanese that was beginning to get the Chinese used to the idea that there was maybe more option on the diplomacy table than just master and vassal. To the north, the ever-problematic horse raiders of the steppe had resulted in a tremendous, and some had even begun to argue at court, dangerous, buildup of military might in the hands of the single person of Governor An Lushan. And to the far west,

a shaky peace with the Tibetan kingdom, and China's intervention in the affairs of the far-flung kingdoms of Transoxiana that would plunge it onto a collision course with the military might of the armies of the Prophet Muhammad in the form of the Abbasid Caliphate. And so next time we'll explore just that, the political tensions between the Chinese and the Arabs that would decide the fate of Central Asia and irrevocably alter the course of Arabic and ultimately Western history, the Battle of Talis. Thank you for listening. Hey everyone, just a quick final word before signing off for the week. The show is coming up on a pretty big milestone and in just two episodes time, which is our 100th show!

Yeah, okay, so it's not technically the 100th, but it's the one with the number 100 in the title, so close enough. As such, I think it might be nice to open up questions or inquiries you might have about, well, basically whatever you'd like regarding Chinese history so far. I've been keeping a list of questions that have been posed to me over the past weeks and months and years, and so do have a bank to draw on already, but I'd be happy to have more. So please drop us a line and pose your question or discussion topic for us to feature on the show. As always, you can reach us via Twitter under the handle at THOCpodcast,

on Facebook at slash thehistoryofchina, or through our website, thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com. And I'll go ahead and throw up a page for you to field your questions on that. While you're doing that, please take the time to give us a rating on iTunes, and potentially join the watchers on the wall, the guardians of the realms of men, the few, the proud, the elite who support the show through PayPal and Patreon. Thanks again so much, and see you next week. 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.