You're Dead to Me - The Tang Dynasty

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Greg Jenner is joined by historian Prof Tineke D’Haeseleer and comedian Evelyn Mok in medieval China to explore the Tang Dynasty. Known as the Golden Age of China, it was the time of China’s Emperor Wu, the only woman to hold power in her own right, and Emperor Xuanzong who became so bored with austerity he came up with a unique way to have fun.A Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You may have also heard my other podcast, Homeschool History,

although that one's mostly for the kids. On this podcast, we take the yin of history and the yang of comedy, and we aim for cosmic harmony, but we'll settle for chuckles. Today, we are sailing up the Yangtze River, or rather the Yangtze River, and along the Grand Canal, our ship laden with wares for the great markets of Tang Dynasty China. And to help me poke around the stalls, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, she's an assistant professor of history at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania and is an expert on foreign relations in pre-modern China. She's also the co-author of a new companion to the global early Middle Ages.

It's Professor Tineke Darshalier. Hello, Tineke. Thank you for joining us. And I'm so sorry for mangling your lovely name. Thanks for having me. And don't worry about the name. I'm quite used to the students doing the same. In Comedy Corner, she's a self-described comedian, writer and cake eater. Aren't we all? You may have seen her hilarious stand-up or heard her comedy podcast, Rice to Meet You, about Asian culture. Raised in Sweden, she's been dubbed the

Swedish Amy Schumer and since moving to the UK has made it onto the BBC New Talent Hotlist. And if that wasn't enough, she was even in the recent Spider-Man movie. It's Evelyn Mock. Hi, Evelyn, welcome. Hi, Greg. Thanks for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. Evelyn, obviously you're here doing a podcast about Chinese history, but in terms of the Swedish education system, did you do lots of history at school? Did you enjoy it? I mean, I think I did. I don't remember much. I'm terrible at history. That's why I keep repeating all the mistakes I've ever made. So it just goes in circles and circles. I did not do well in school, Greg, is what I'm trying to say. So I'm very nervous.

But hopefully my fart jokes will make up for it. Absolutely. We love a fart joke here. And don't worry, we're going to have lots of opportunities to impress. And I'm guessing you didn't do much Chinese history at school. No. And my parents didn't tell me any because they just wanted to forget. No, I'm kidding. I'm very unfamiliar with Chinese history, but I'm very

excited to have Tineke fill my head with a bunch of history. Absolutely. Okay, so today we have a Belgian professor in America, a Swedish comedian in England, and we're talking about medieval China. So we are really earning some podcast air miles. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you might know about today's subject. And I think it's safe to say that for most British people and Irish people and perhaps even Americans listening, the word Tang is most anonymous with Tangfastics.

I mean, we all love the Haribo. But Tang Dynasty China? Eh, maybe less so. But you might know more than you realise. You may have seen the historical blockbuster House of Flying Daggers, great film. If you like poetry, you may have read the works of Du Fu and Li Bai, two of the greats of the medieval period. If you're a feminist history fan, and who isn't, you may have heard of Emperor Wu, better known as Empress Wu. She was the first and only woman to rule China in her own right. We should also talk about the fact that China in the Tang Dynasty was known as the Golden Age of China. So let's go mining for

gold. What can we find out? Professor Tineke, when we talk about the Tang Dynasty, where and when are we talking in Chinese history? Am I right in thinking we're going back to the early 600s? Yes, we are indeed in the early 600s. The Tang is founded in 618 and it lasts until about 907. The territory that they control fluctuates throughout the history. Think about modern China and then chop off a few bits. Take away everything that's northeast of Beijing, take away Inner Mongolia, take away Tibet and Qinghai province. Control of the south is Pachi. So they do control Canton and it stretches into Hanoi.

So northern Vietnam is a port they control as well. The big thing I think that people need to bear in mind is that the capital was not in Beijing. That was in Xi'an or as it was then known, Chang'an. capital was not in Beijing. That was in Xi'an, or as it was then known, Chang'an. And for those of you who visited, you may have walked on the walls of Xi'an. Those date from the Ming dynasty, from a later dynasty. But during the Tang dynasty, it was about seven times larger. Well, I'm from Canton. So I just realized I'm pretty Chinese. So how did the Tang come to power?

Because you say they arrive in the early 600s, but presumably they've taken over from some other dynasty. Have they inherited a successful dynasty or have they arrived and everything's on fire and it's an absolute disaster? So they take over power from a previous dynasty, which had done the heavy lifting. The Sui dynasty had reunified the empire in 589 after some 300 plus years of division. The second Sui emperor really overstretches what he can do.

One of the things he tries to do is conquer a kingdom in the northeast named Goguryeo. North Korea nowadays is a bit obnoxious. 1300 years ago in that same space was an equally obnoxious kingdom, at least according to the Sui Emperor. So he was trying to put an end to that with three different expeditions he sent out, very, very large with probably about 300,000 troops. They failed. And of course, if you send that many people out, it takes a bit of a hit on the treasury and people were rebelling against that. So the Tang was using the rebellions that were breaking out against the Sui rule to try and rise to power

themselves. They used a sort of the sneaky old system of going, right, we'll exploit a war and we'll rise to power by getting the people angry, upset. That sounds familiar. Well, they were within their rights to do so because as a Chinese subject, if your emperor was unable to keep the peace, there was actually a sense that they had squandered the mandate of heaven. As rebellions broke out because people were going hungry or you were press ganging them into crazy building projects, in his case, that would include building this massive canal to fight this war in Korea. If you were doing all of those crazy things, then the people would automatically do something about this.

And so the Tang ruler, the first emperor, felt that, okay, you lost your chance. The mandate of heaven is now passing to me. That explains so much in Chinese culture and the harshness of chinese culture and like the harshness of my parents if you can't do this thing then you've lost your chance now go and be a doctor i feel like i'm discovering so much about myself this is kind of like therapy now when this the tongue then finally comes to power you know they're only one of many contenders the tongue was then the one that won out after many many years of fighting they were kind of lucky i guess in a way that they had the backing of actually the eastern

turks who were to the north of the country so they had an external influencer let's call it the tongue seemed to be the better one so they were backing them they also the time also gave them the best deal it seems what was the deal money grain oh yeah you know the usual money it's a good deal i mean we will give you money interesting interesting never heard of that before so the tang come to power in a bit of a coup they establish control and they solve a lot of the issues. They restore the civil service exams. That's important. They reinstate the militia system. They fortify the frontiers. They standardize the currency. They bring in the death penalty for forgery, which suggests that people were doing a lot of forgeries, presumably a lot of dodgy cash being handed around. And they were like, don't do that anymore or we will kill you. Well, we're still carrying on that tradition, let's be honest. There are a lot of things you can get in Chinatown that aren't necessarily real,

but very cheap and look very good. Almost like the real thing. This other thing as well, the economy is in the red and they have to go and bring it back into black and they introduced the equal field system. Evelyn, do you want to guess what that is? Everybody the same amount of land it's not a bad guess or everybody has to feel the same thing but you'll have to play baseball tinica what's the equal field system evelyn you're doing really great because the equal field system means indeed that everyone gets a

parcel of land that's the same but it's graded according to your gender. So every man gets, between the ages of 17 and 59, 13 and a third acres, or in Chinese, 100 mo of land to cultivate. If you're a woman, you get a third. As a widow, the head of household, you get half. Because you've had a penis inside of you. Yes. But there are also all kinds of tax breaks you can get. And so what is happening and what we know from documents from tax registers is that a lot of locations you'll see a high proportion of women registered as head of household because they get the lower amount of land, but it's going to be tax-free or they don't have to pay as many taxes. So people will find their ways around the system.

Everyone pays two to 3% of tax. And so that makes it really easy to calculate. You know, you've got so many people in a prefecture or a county. The problem is that not all areas have the good quality of land that you can use for cultivation. In a society where agriculture is everything, you like food, right? Professional cake eater, we've heard. Exactly. So you know how important grain is, right? Yes, it makes cake. Yeah. Try and imagine if you have a society where your income is based on the production of grain,

because that is your number one tax income. So that's why the equal field system is so important. We think that in the North, it's pretty established. The South is a different story. Why not the South? The North is flat, has alluvial plains of the Yellow River. The south has the Yangtze River and has a lot of hills. It's very hard to measure a surface on a hill. Yeah, farming uphill sounds hard. That's why they invented the rice paddy, right?

Yeah. Is that why we like rice so much? Yeah, and it's from this period that rice becomes the primary staple crop in China. It is already in the South. The big divide in terms of food between North and South has always been rice and grain.

So rice in the South, south of the Huai River. The Tang is a period when, due to events, the population shifts to the South. And so with it shifts the balance of the diet as well to the South. How come the population shifted? Well, there is a massive rebellion in 755. A lot of people end up relocating away, especially the elite. So until 755, the empire is running really nicely.

Everything's going great. There's a fantastic emperor on the throne. He really messes up at some point. One of the generals on the frontier rises in rebellion. He takes his 90,000 troops that he has sitting in the area around present-day Beijing, and then some of the spares he has in the other military governments that he controls, marches on the capital, claiming to act on the orders of the emperor to depose the then chief minister. Now, at that time, the defense system of the empire is pretty much like a donut. It's very firm on the outside, but there's nothing on the inside to stop him.

It's just jam. It's just jam. Loads of jam. Yeah, and it's very bloody as well. There's nothing or no one to stop him, really. It literally is quite bloody. There's loads of people dead. Resistance arises against him, but a lot of the elite move away from the area in the wake of a rebellion that lasts about eight years. The area where his rebellion started in much of the Northeast remains completely out of control of the emperors in the second half of the Tang Dynasty. What you really see shifting is that the economic center moves south. This is basically the plot to every historical drama that I've seen from China or from Korea.

It's always like an emperor, either a minister rises up or there's a secret rebellion. I love the idea that they defended the outside but not the inside. It feels like a rookie error. It's like, we'll put all our troops on the edge of the empire and we'll leave the center completely undefended. That won't fail. That happens in the mid-700s.

But before we get that, we do get a fascinating woman ruling China, the only woman ever to rule China, Emperor Wu. She wasn't an empress. She was basically the king. And we're going to probably do another episode about her because she's so interesting. We'll probably come back. But Tinika, what are the headlines that Evelyn needs to know? What's so interesting about Wu? She actually interrupts the nice sequence of Tang Dynasty emperors in 690 by proclaiming her own dynasty. And she's like, okay, I'm done with the Tang. We just got to call this the Zhou. I'm going to be the emperor.

She just roguely, like she's just a person. She's not even related to them in any way. She is. So the way she takes power is, do you want the gossipy one or do you want the one we as historians think about? Gossipy one! G gossipy one gossipy one so she came into the palace as a concubine of the previous emperor of taito the second emperor of the tang dynasty goes into the monastery like everyone else upon his death gets fished out by the third emperor because he fell in love with her and somehow through a lot of scheming and manipulation, manages to elevate her to the level of empress. So she is married to him officially. So she got her training wheels that way,

got a taste for power, and then after he passed away, decided that she might as well rule through his sons. And then when they were not really amenable, would banish them, eventually she was like, I've had enough of this. I'll do this myself. Yeah, because men are dumb.

Hey, not all of us. Hashtag not all men. Okay. Not all men, although most men. Yeah. And then in 705, by the time she got kind of old, eventually she got deposed in a palace coup. And the story goes that, you know, she heard a lot of noise outside. It was the middle of the night.

She got out wearing her nightie. And she was like, what's all this noise? And they were like, oh, you've been deposed. And she was like, okay, went back to bed to sleep. And she just passed away a few months later. Oh my gosh. The only thing we need to know about Wu also is that there's a story about cats. Yes.

Actually, I went back into the sources to give you the translation. This is before the emperor has died. The ex-emperors and the previous concubine are locked up in a separate courtyard where he cannot really see them. It's like a postbox where food gets shoved through, I think, and that's where he can see them. And so he's starting to regret his decision about doing that. So when Empress Wu gets wind of this, she's acting quickly. And so he's starting to regret his decision about doing that. So when Empress Wu gets wind of this, she's acting quickly. And so when she hears about this, she was extremely angry and sent someone to beat each of them a hundred strokes, cut off their hands and feet, and throw them in a vat of alcohol with the words,

let the bones of those two wenches soak till they're drunk. They died after several days and were beheaded. Lady Xiao cursed and sweared, That woman Wu is a monster. I vow in my next lives to be a cat and Wu shall be a mouse and life after life I shall bite her throat. From that point on, cats were no longer kept in the palace.

I love that. That's amazing. She sounds lovely Empress Wu Wow that's nice Was it the ankle slicing Or the murder that you enjoyed most Evelyn Yeah I like all of it

It's very creative She probably could have been a great screenwriter In our time So there we go The plot of Cats the movie Should have been that I mean instead of the sort of weird James Corden stuff

They should have just gone like Ankle slicing And people being chucked in vats of alcohol and then cats being banned from the palace that would be more fun i mean obviously that tells us that emperor woo uh she had her own line of trash talk and as did her enemies so let's talk trash talk evelyn what's your favorite modern day insult that we can say on radio 4? You scallywag. That's adorable. That's not an insult. That's really charming. Tinika, what would be a Tang style insult we might enjoy? If someone's got smelly armpits, you would actually say that they smell like a fox, sort of fox stench. But it's actually got a double meaning because the word fox in Chinese, it's also the same sound as the word for barbarian or Central Asian person. So there's

immediately, you smell like a foreigner attached to it. There's another one, Tinika from the Tang, about the head of a dragon. That's the nice one. So there was this banquet where two kingdoms were trying to vie for the attention of the emperor. And one of them is sort of a bit of an upstart from Southern Korea, Silla. They win out and the prime minister sends a thank you note to the Tang and says, okay, let me now tell you about these people who were trying to upset the whole way that we've been doing things for hundreds of years now, because they're new. They don't know what's happening here, really. And so what he tells them is like, they're the back end of a cow, but they strive to be the head of a dragon.

So Emperor Wu was deposed, the Tang Dynasty came back in, and we do get that emperor, you've already mentioned, Tinika, the kind of the golden boy, Xuanzong, is that right? Xuanzong. He's called the Golden Emperor. He's this great man. He rules for 43 years. And ironically, for someone ruling the Golden Age, he's not very bling. He's kind of into austerity. Yes and no. I mean, it's all about PR in the end, right? Right. So he starts off, he makes a big display of this, cutting down the amount of posts that have been given to people because the treasury is empty. So he can't really be into bling because there

isn't any much to be had. So he's actually a very competent administrator initially, creates this big show of austerity by having this edict that people can't go showing off their brocade, which is a very complex weaving technique with silk. But his concubines in the harem are also forbidden from showing off their beautiful brochures, which is really, if you're stuck in the palace all day, pretty much the only thing you're going to be doing. He also has a lot of these baubles and special things all put onto a big bonfire to make sure that everyone can see what he's doing. He does, however, by the middle of his reign start to lose the interest in being, I don't know, who was the austerity guy in the UK again? George Osborne. Yeah. Yeah. So he sort of, he loses a bit of that drive. He lets

go a little bit of that. He becomes interested in the luxuries. You can imagine that at some point he gets a bit bored with being austere. And Evelyn, do you want to guess how he entertains himself after being bored? He makes his women dance for him with their brooches. Oh, dancing is right, but it wasn't the women. He had dancing elephants. Dancing elephants. Yeah. Well, it's almost the same. Not to put too fine a point to it, but in the Tang period, women being a bit more rounded was a thing of beauty I would have done so well then maybe I would have been in the palace you would have caught the eye of the emperor I'm sure oh my god and then I could have done an empress Wu maybe you could

have risen you could have ruled born in the wrong time another thing that he did he was an accomplished musician do you want to guess what his instrument was? Oh, we have a Chinese instrument that if you've guys seen Kung Fu Hustle, that the two guys play and the arrows come out of. Was it that one? It wasn't that one. That would have been fun. He was a drummer. He was really into his drumming. And he even had his own band called the Pear Garden Troupe.

Isn't that lovely? He just sounds like a middle-aged man going through like a midlife crisis like dancing elephants the pear garden what was it true the pear garden troop yeah evelyn if you were the emperor would you have the dancing elephants or what animal would you have dance for you oh i think dancing dogs are really funny and also very creepy at the same time a dog on hind legs is just like it always reminds me of that a part in animal farm at the end where the pigs start walking on two legs it's just very creepy when dogs do that too but at the same time they do it so unstably that it's very cute it's like a toddler walking

so i'm entertained by it and terrified of it at the same time i love the idea of dancing dogs terrifying you and entertaining you you're the emperor you can do anything you want you're like i want to be scared i want to be tantalized i want to be kept on my toes isn't that the constant state of an emperor really he's enjoying his, but then also there's always this threat of being overthrown. Zhuanzhong was very chill when it came to the economy. He reduced taxes on the poor. He then introduced dancing elephants, as we've all done at some point in our lives. But he was not chill when it came to Buddhism, Tineke. Well, he wasn't so much anti-Buddhism per se as he was pro-Taoism, because he had a personal connection with the Taoist

religion. The other thing was that Emperor Wu used Buddhism quite extensively to legitimize her own rules. So it was also a way for him to push back against her reign. And then a third reason was Buddhism was pretty much a way that a lot of people would try and get tax exemptions. You know, just like you don't tax the church, you didn't do that with Buddhism either because it's bad karma. And so if you found a way to declare yourself part of the Buddhist church, then you could get a tax exemption. That's the first time I've heard Buddhism used in a selfish way. I'm assuming you've never defrauded a charity or a church

in order to claim tax exemption? No comment. I'm assuming you've never defrauded a charity or a church in order to claim tax exemption? No comment. Tineke, am I right in thinking that he managed to defrock 30,000 fake Buddhist monks? That's a lot of people going, I'm a monk? Yes. I mean, one of the ways that people became monks was that you would buy the certificate and that would bring money into the treasury. But it was like a false economy, right? Because they've got the money once, but then those people were tax exempt.

Emperor Zhang Zhong has reigned for 43 years, but his golden boy status ends with a full blown scandal. Evelyn, do you want to guess what he does? Is it sexual? Oh, yeah. Does he get it on with one of the elephants? His favourite elephant. You're definitely going to Buddhist hell if you do that, surely. Not quite an elephant.

Tineke, am I right in thinking he gets it on with his daughter-in-law? No. Kind of. It's okay, because it was indeed the wife of his son, but she asked for a divorce, which she got. And then she became a Taoist priestess, was in the palace for about five years, and only then did she get it on with the emperor. And her ex was happily remarried. But imagine having your ex-wife as your mother-in-law. That would be so awkward. She was not the official empress she was a concubine

right but she was the precious consort so the highest ranked concubine swenzong was completely smitten by her and she's called yang guifei is that right yeah so the chinese title guifei precious consort um and then yang is her surname so yang the precious consort or yang guifei they have the most magic love affair at that, he just completely stops caring about being a good emperor. He has this one minister, Lilian Fu, who just runs the show. And there is this general, An Lushan, who is of ethnic Han origin. He's Sogdian Turkish, who sits in the northeast with about 90,000 troops. And this may start to sound familiar, because he's the one who will eventually march to the capital and almost bring down the dynasty now how are they connected right

yang kui fei and swenzong the emperor they actually get on with this general really well to the point that they adopt him as their son wow he's a middle-aged man, right? They don't just get along, though. There is a pretty interesting moment where the emperor walks in to find his lover, Yang Guifei. I don't want to judge, but she... Is she breastfeeding him? Oh, nearly. Yeah, she's wrapping him in an adult nappy and bathing him. Oh my god, they're fetishists? I mean, it's hard to know, isn't it?

But this is a funny adult man being bathed by a woman who's younger than him this is great or at least that's what the histories say but again it's one of these stories where there's a woman involved so how much of this is the gossip yang kuei fei is in the good graces of the emperor she manages to place a lot of her family members in high positions her brother yang guo, becomes the next chief minister. And the brother and An Lushan don't get along at all. And that is part of what triggers the rebellion. So An Lushan goes from being someone who's adopted, treated as a baby, and then suddenly he turns against his adopted parents and he leads the donut rebellion. And how does this end,

Tineke? What's the big dramatic finale? This is where things get really, really sad. So, An Lushan marches on the capital with, by that time, probably 100,000 plus troops. Everyone freaks out, and the emperor is, okay, we have to flee. We have to get away. Of course, he takes his favourite consort with him and her brother, and they all flee on the way to Sichuan. But the soldiers who accompany them are just going, wait a minute, An Lushan is marching against Yang Guozhong, against the chief minister, and he's with us. So why would we take him along if he is part of the problem? Can we just get rid of him? And while we're at it, he's only in power because of her. So they put the emperor into the position where they want to kill Yang Guozhong, the then chief minister, and have Yang Guifei killed as well. And essentially, that is what the emperor says to do.

So he is left in the histories as a totally broken man. It's all ended horribly. But he still goes down in history as one of the great emperors. And his name is the illustrious Auguste. In Tang China, names were a huge deal. And Evelyn, let's say for argument's sake, tomorrow morning, a new emperor comes to power and they're called Emperor Evelyn. What do you think happens to you? I would kill the emperor. No, I would get killed. I would definitely get killed. Yeah. It's not that bad. It is quite bad.

You wouldn't get killed. You'd get 80 lashes. So beaten with bamboo 80 times for having the emperor's name. Oh, no. Even if there was a single character in your name that was used to spell the emperor's name, you'd still be beaten as well. Yeah. So you could change your name.

That was one way to get around it. They would just legally make you change your name. Okay, that's fine. Yeah. People did that all the time. It was like, oh, new emperor. Okay, change your name. That was one way to get around it. They would just legally make you change your name. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, people did that all the time. It was like, oh, new emperor. Okay, change my name. The problem with Chinese, as you know, Evelyn, probably, is that the words in your name actually are also words in common use. So when a new emperor comes to power, and it's a word that's used quite commonly, this has big consequences, right? So for instance, when the second Tang emperor comes to the throne, his personal name is Shemin, and that Min is the Min of people. Every time you come across the

word people, you need to change it to Zhen, which is another way of saying people. Everyone just stopped writing that character because if you wrote it in a document and someone saw that you'd written part of his name, they were like, well, that's completely disrespectful to the emperor. 80 lashes for you with the bamboo. And so ways around it was not using the word, so leaving a blank, slightly changing it by leaving off the last stroke, or just using a different word. That's why we came to Sweden, because we just exhausted all of the people. You ran out of names. You're like, we're going to have to move country. Just to be safe. If you had a nice emperor, they would actually change their name

if it was a very commonly used character. Because they were like, this is going to be too complex for people. It reminds me of Kylie Minogue and Kylie Jenner having that massive battle about who got to be called Kylie. So that's Emperor Zhang Zong. He rules 43 years. And we then gradually move forward into the golden years of Tang Dynasty China. And let's talk about material goods, the amazing things coming into the country being manufactured. Tinika, what sort of

luxurious, beautiful objects might be available for trade, for acquisition in the marketplaces? So depending on how much money you had, you could get pretty much anything you wanted. Silk was an obvious one, of course, and it's not just a commodity. You have to also see it as something that expresses a value, something that is used to pay for big ticket items. So the value of a horse or a donkey would be expressed in X number of bolts of silk. Alcohol, ceramics, we're not quite in the time period yet where you have porcelain, but they start to experiment with the Sands High technique or the Three Glaze technique. There's also going to be a lot of food, so dried foodstuffs. Obviously, rice and grain are the big ones, but also nuts, honey, peaches, all kinds of fruit, books. Printing is starting to appear

very slowly. If you're looking at the non-tangible objects, then techniques of crafts and arts such as wood carving, fashion, verse, poetry, and that's just inside the empire. So we've talked about trade, we've talked about a bit of bureaucracy, but also let's talk about eunuchs. Evelyn, have you ever heard of eunuchs in Chinese culture? I know that they exist, but I haven't heard of their purpose but I guess they're there to sing beautifully is it? Yeah the castrato yeah the idea of the high voice yeah that's certainly how they in 18th century Europe

they were superstar celebrities because they could sing incredibly beautifully but in Tang China they're more bureaucrats or palace servants? Yeah I think it's best to see them as a palace service for the emperor beautifully but in tang china they're more bureaucrats or palace servants yeah i think it's best to see them as a palace service for the emperor you needed to remove their manhood so that they yes they wouldn't rise up to fight him is that kind of the idea yes exactly i mean think about it you have an emperor who's got a beautiful harem full of women and he wants them all to himself oh dear yeah and yet he wants them to be safe and well cared for and women cannot do all of those tasks right no they can't so you make sure that you have men to do that but not

two manly men so you make sure that they're not too manly. We're all very gingerly just dancing around the fact that these people have been castrated, which means their testicles have been removed. Oh, no, not just the testicles. Is it the full? The Chinese way, at least. So the difficulty with talking about eunuchs for the Tang Dynasty is that we don't have a lot of good information but what we know for a later dynasty is that it was actually the whole lot that went off.

I love that it's the Chinese way the Chinese version of castration is you take the whole thing. At what age does it happen because as a baby you'd be like okay that would be agonizing as a child but maybe you remember it but if it's happening when you're like aware of it and a man or a teenager oh no teenager so it's puberty so it breaks your spirit as well it's not done as a punishment most people who became eunuchs did so voluntary oh dear or at least their family volunteered them no one's volunteering, surely. Yes, I'll have that, please. Thank you very much. Some people would do it because you had access to the emperor and you had access to riches and you had access to social status

that you may otherwise not have had. Also, they could get married and they could adopt children. So they could continue a family line. Eunuchs were in the palace. They were private servants to the emperor. They had quite a bad reputation, Teaneke. They were believed to be venal and sneaky and self-serving. Is that fair? Yeah. So the issue is that they suffer from whatever the eunuch equivalent would be of misogyny. The people writing the history are their rivals. They are the regular bureaucratic

officials and they go, well, here are our competitors for the attention are their rivals. They are the regular bureaucratic officials and they go, well, here are our competitors for the attention of the emperor. How do we write them out of history? Well, we make them look really bad if we can't write them out of history. That's number one. Number two is that they really do have that monopoly position of giving access to the emperor when the emperor decides they're just fed up with ruling. So they determine what kind of information goes in and out to the emperor, and they can manipulate. And then the other thing is that because they provide the emperor's household with all the goods they need, they can really abuse that power. And what happens is the so-called palace marketing system starts to develop. The eunuchs go to the markets in the name of the emperor and they wave

their credentials around. I work for the emperor. Give me this stuff. It looks nice. We'll pay you later. And then payment comes or doesn't come, or you're expected as a merchant to give them a really good cut. So they just create for themselves also that bad reputation. Some of them are really genuinely good administrators. Some of them are really good military commanders because they also have the chief position of commander of the Divine Strategy Army, which is the big army that the Emperor still has under control after the rebellion of An Lushan. It's a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the reputation is deserved. But they're not the only bad ones, because there's also a bureaucrat called Wang Oh. He is a civil service functionary who has just basically hoovered up a huge amount of cash somehow. How has he done that?

Yeah, so Wang Oh is the pronunciation. Yeah, Greg, it's Wang Oh. Sorry. As a civil official, you would be posted in a different location every three years or thereabouts to prevent you from growing too attached to a location, to build up a network that you could exploit for corruption. With the declining imperial power in the late 8th and then into the 9th century, which is when Wang Ou lived, that is no longer happening as frequently. So he really becomes entrenched in the south and of all places, also in Canton, where all of the rich stuff is coming in. So he's just creaming it off and sending the profits to his family up north. He's actually richer than the public treasury at some point. Wow. Corruption in government. Who would have thought it?

Evelyn, if you were emperor, rather than the removal of your courtier's genitals, I'm assuming you wouldn't want that. What would you demand of your servants? Add more genitals. Oh, my word. Just smush them together and be as fertile and horny as you want to be. That is a really interesting policy. I don't know how people add more jams, but I'd love to see it happen. This is where the Taoists fit in.

They have all sorts of techniques you don't even know about. Tang China is trading and dealing with Japan, with Eastern Turkey, protects us of Annam, with Tibet. There's a back and forth, there's an exchange of ideas. But you've said in your notes, Tineke, that actually things could get a bit fraught as well. Everywhere you have these big cultural exchanges, you'll also find a backlash. A lot of people talk about the tongue, oh, it's cosmopolitan, which is a term I always like to shy away from, because how do you define that? Also, if you look more closely, find that there's a lot of people who use racialized language and slurs

against foreigners in the Tang. Send all the foreigners home. They don't have any business here. They come and learn all our state secrets. Don't give them any of the books that we have. Just deal with them at the border. The other thing that also a lot of people are against is Buddhism as a foreign faith. It still was very much felt to be something that did things that were going contrary to Chinese ideas about how you treat the body, how you treat the family. For instance, shaving your head is something you didn't do as a proper Chinese person, but you have to as a Buddhist monk. You have to keep your body intact, which is why it's a problem to become a eunuch. I don't know quite how they solved that one. Also, the idea of monastic life by cutting yourself off from your family is completely

alien to the Chinese. So the foreigners of Buddhism could be easily attacked, and that is something that would happen every now and then. So tensions could really get out of hand. So the Uyghur people, so they lived north of China. I use the term Uyghur instead of Uyghur, which is the one you probably hear more frequently in the news nowadays. I use the term Uyghur instead of Uyghur, which is the one you probably hear more frequently in the news nowadays. This is the pronunciation the Uyghur people themselves prefer. Uyghur is derived from the Chinese pronunciation or the Chinese transcription, and I just like to give the pronunciation that the Uyghur people themselves like. They're in the news now, but back in the 9th century, the Uyghur people had

helped the Tang to re-establish their control over the empire, more or less, after the An Lushan Rebellion. But that gave them a position of power in the negotiation. They also sacked the secondary capital of Luoyang in 757 for three days. And then they really exploited the fact that they had access to horses and the Tang people didn't. And so they asked 40 bolts of silk for a bad horse, for instance. That was the going price, which really was not a good deal. All of that sort of built up and people were like, we really don't like these Uyghur people. There were some measures that people tried to take against them, for instance. Well, if you're an Uyghur, you can't marry a Chinese woman. that people try to take against them, for instance.

Well, you know, if you're an Uyghur, you can't marry a Chinese woman. Uyghur also dominated the usury market. So think about loan sharks. People were like, well, we love all this foreign culture and all these foreign ideas and goods and food, but we don't really like the people necessarily. So there's always that tension. Evelyn, do you know how Buddhism got into Tang China? Buddha?

What, you think he showed up and went, hey! What's up, guys? Want to come with me? I'm not sure. I guess maybe as they went into Nepal, they must have brought it back. Yeah, I mean, you're not far off, actually. It's a particular monk whose name was Zhuanzang, not to be confused with the Emperor Zhuanzhong, who we've already heard about. This is a bit earlier on. This is in the 600s, right at the beginning of the Tang Dynasty. He's a very brilliant man and goes off travelling and returns home with Buddhism. He's like, hey, I've been on a gap year. I went to India. I found some Buddhism. It's pretty good. And the nice thing about him is that he's become a cult icon in Japan as well. He turns up a lot in anime and he was in the TV series Sayuki.

He has a sidekick that is a punching monkey that does Kung Fu. So that's how Buddhism got into China. It actually was already in China longer. He just reinforces it. His story really is about a guy who goes, wait, all the texts are wrong. Let me go and sort this out. Let's talk very quickly about Tang poetry. Evelyn, have you ever read any medieval poetry from China? I've read Li Po. I did a poetry anthology about him in high school and very much enjoy him. Is he Tang? He is. He's the party animal. Yeah, he gets drunk all the time. He just talks about how drunk he is. So I'm not very sure about his poetry. His poetry is definitely out there as one of the great ones. Yeah, it's really, really good. And then the other poet that's very well known is Du Fu, who was a college

dropout. He failed his civil service exams. And like Kanye, then became a great artist. He wrote some of his most famous poems from jail. And they're quite emotive. And they're quite sad and melancholic about him getting old and his hair going gray and stuff. It's quite different to the party animal stuff. But this is an era of Chinese history where, in terms of literature, it's a real blossoming time. I just wanted to ask also about the road network, because China's massive. I mean, there's some really interesting stories,

but my favourite one, there's a really cute little story, and obviously it goes horribly wrong at the end, but Yang Guifei, who we've mentioned already, she of the nappy, she's really, really keen on the fruit like cheese. Her lover, the emperor, had them shipped in for her directly from 800 miles away. That's a real show of love, but also that's a real risk because they can turn up mouldy and horrible if they don't get there fast. So that is proof, therefore, that there's a really amazing transport system, a postal network that can deliver fresh fruit. You can get different speeds of delivery as well. So just like us with special delivery, first class and second class.

Yes. And there are actually special provisions in the Tang law code. If you're a messenger for the emperor and you have stuff in your bag, you know, how many personal items you can take, because of course the extra weight will slow down the postal horse. If you exceed that, how you get punished, it's like very. But essentially, the postal network is amazing, always making sure that fresh horses are available to communicate very quickly across the entire empire. Because you have to make sure that if your capital gets invaded by a rebelling general on one frontier, and you don't have any army nearby, that the army from the other frontier can come as quickly as possible to the rescue, right? Sure. Let's talk hygiene in the Tang dynasty. So what do we know in terms of how most people clean themselves and also what they smelled of? Again, whatever money

can buy, all sorts of aromatics. So whatever smells nice, you can make little potpourri bags and put that in your clothes to make them smell nice. And you can carry that on your person, of course, so you don't have that fox stench armpit smell, right? And then in terms of bathing, as a town official, you'd get once every 10 days off to do the full bath and full hair and everything. But hands and face would be washed quite regularly. For the bathtub, you would have little soap beads or soap beans, actually, possibly made with little soybeans. Buddhists were actually pretty good about washing. They have descriptions in their monastic rules about washing and bathing. It seems that Taoists were a little bit less into bathing because they felt that it was something that might encourage disease by exposing your skin to

potential pathogens, maybe. In terms of dental hygiene, one of the things you could do, and that was highly encouraged, would be chewing on certain kinds of wood. Evelyn, do you want to guess what one custom was for New Year's Day in terms of washing? Is it that we don't wash? No. Would it be maybe that everybody washes together? That's a nice guess as like a celebration on new year's day people would wash their armpits with their own urine i think i prefer your one to be honest we could combine them wash each other's armpits with each

other's urine that could be lovely it probably depends on your state of health and what you were drinking the night before that's true nobody. Nobody would want to use Li Po's urine. So, Tineke, we've heard about the Great Tang Dynasty, the Golden Period, and it ends in the 900s because presumably something's gone wrong. So what goes wrong? I would really put it at about 878 when there's a massive rebellion that started by someone named Huang Chao. And in contrast to the An Lushan Re, this one is much more deadly. So there's no one around

to write lovely poetry and ballads about it. Rebels kill off so many of the elite that eventually, for another few decades until 907, the dynasty limps along. But really, emperors are not capable of controlling the empire very much. You get contending military governors trying to fight over who gets to take over. And eventually one of them decides in 907, it's me. And that's the end of the Tang dynasty. Very inglorious end in many ways. The nuance window! Okay, well, that's pretty much the end of our conversation, which means it's time for our

expert, Dr. Tineke, to give us the nuance window where Evelyn and I go quiet for a couple of minutes and we listen to what we need to hear about Tang Dynasty China. You're going to tell us, Tineke, about how we know these things. I would like to take a moment and talk about the time capsule, which has given us important insights in daily life in the Tang dynasty. This one is located in Tunghuang in the northwest of the Tang empire and present-day Xinjiang autonomous Uyghur region. It was the place where the so-called Silk Road split into a northern and a southern route around the Tarim Basin. In the cliffside there was a Buddhist temple complex of some 500 caves that were man-made. Sometime shortly

after the year 1000, a niche of the side of one of these caves was closed off for unknown reasons. But inside the niche were thousands upon thousands of texts, perfectly preserved thanks to the dry desert climate, and they were handwritten but also printed documents. They were not discovered until the year 1900. This was also the time when Western imperialist powers were contending with the Qing Empire for power in Central Asia, and so Western explorers showed up and when they learned about the texts in the cave, they began to buy them. For instance, one noteworthy figure is Paul Pelliot, a French philologist and sinologist. Apparently he worked at the rate of approximately one text per minute, quickly judging if they were material they already had in the collection, or if they

were a new language or a new script unknown to him. Through these texts we have access to a very different view of the Tang. Here we see the daily life, with contracts, receipts, phrasebooks for foreign languages, loads of material on Buddhism, and that also includes spells and medical cures. It gives us also a different view of literature, for instance, ballads and popular stories and little ditties that you don't find anywhere else. The content of the library is so rich that you can dedicate an entire career to it. It actually is now a field of study in its own right, Tunhuang studies. The contents of the library was distributed across the globe, with major deposits in London, Paris Huang studies. The contents of the library was distributed across the globe, with major deposits in London, Paris, St. Petersburg and Tokyo for instance.

But digitization is coming to the rescue, with the International Tun Huang Project allowing researchers access for free to the documents. Back in the time of the Tang dynasty, as a devout Buddhist, you could commission a copy of the sutra or do it yourself to get good karma to get a better rebirth. Did you know that nowadays you can actually sponsor a document on the International Tungkhang Project website to bring more of these wonderful texts to the internet? I think that really is a great way to go full circle from Tang Dynasty China to the present. Fantastic. Thank you so much. So what do you know now?

China to the present. Fantastic. Thank you so much. So what do you know now? It's time now for the So what do you know now? It's a quickfire quiz where we find out what Evelyn has learned from today's episode. Evelyn, we've been all over Tang China. So let's see what has gone into your brain and let's see what maybe hasn't gone in. Are you feeling confident? No. I'm just nervous about looking Chinese and then getting all the questions wrong about Tang China. I mean, it's a long time ago. You weren't there. So no one's going to be like,

well, you should know this stuff. That's true. We're talking at least, what, 1,200 years ago. So you're going to do great. I believe in you. Okay, here we go with our quiz. Question one. In which century did the Tang Dynasty rise to power?

Oh, the 600. Yeah, 600 is absolutely right. Question two. Who is the only female emperor in Chinese history? Emperor Wu. It was Emperor Wu. Question three. In Tang China, what was it about the spelling of a person's name that made him receive 80 lashes?

of a person's name that made him receive 80 lashes? It was if you had the same Chinese character as the emperor in your name. That's right. Question four. Do you remember the name of the Emperor Zhuanzong's band of musicians? He was a drummer. The Pear Garden Troupe? It was.

Well done. Question five. According to one Tang Dynasty insult, one could strive to be the head of a dragon, but they might end up looking like the... Butt of an ox? A cow, yes. I'll give you that. Question six. Zhuanzang was a travelling monk in the 600s

who helped popularise which religious idea? Buddhism. It was Buddhism. Name one of the most famous poets in Chinese history. Li Po, because he's the one that I know. Li Po, or you could have Du Fu. Question eight. During the Tang, what became the staple food crop of the empire in the south?

Rice. It was rice. Question nine. Who was the bureaucrat who stole enough dosh that he had more money than the entire public treasury? Do you remember? Wang Wu. Wang Er. Wang Er. Wang Er. Wang Er. stole enough dosh that he had more money than the entire public treasury do you remember this for a perfect round this this could be flawless evelyn the amazing tang postal system delivered fresh fruit hundreds of miles for the emperor's beloved concubine yang we fei but which fruit was it like cheese 10 out of 10! 10 out of 10! Yes! 10 out of 10! Has this ever happened before?

It's happened a few times, but it is not easy. It is not. And we have done a really difficult subject here. So you have nailed it. That's amazing. Well done. I hope you've had a laugh and learned lots about Tang China. Did you feel like you'd want to go back there?

Or are you quite comfortable in the 21st century? I would love to go back and take my chances on becoming a concubine. It doesn't always end well. I mean, Yang Guifei did get strangled. So just beware. Yeah, but she had it good before she did. So. All right. Well, listeners, if you've enjoyed our enthusiasm for massive historical empires today, you can also check out the Mughal episode with Dr. Maureen Chida-Rasvi and Sindhu V. Or if you want to know more about emperors behaving badly, you can listen to the Justinian and Theodora episode with Professor Peter Frankopan and Shapiko Sandy. And remember, if you've had a laugh, if you've learned some stuff, please do share it with your friends, leave a review online and make sure to subscribe to

You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss any of our episodes. A huge thank you to our wonderful guests in History Corner. We've had the tremendous Professor Tineke Darsleir from Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. Thank you, Tineke. Thanks for having me. This was so much fun. And in Comedy Corner, we've had the effervescent Evelyn Mock. Cheers, Evelyn. Oh, thank you. This was okay. This was really fun. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we hitch a ride on the Imperial postal system

and find another fascinating era to rummage in instead. But for now, I'm off to go and order me some lychee's. Slash leachee's? Slash leachee? Oh, I don't know. Never mind. Bye! You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

The researcher was Harry Prance. The script was by Emma Neguse, Harry Prance and me. The project manager was Isla Matthews and the edit producer was Cornelius Mendez. Hello, I'm Matthew Side and just before you go, I wanted to tell you about my new podcast. It's called Sideways. Each week, I'll be telling you stories

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