by John Keay
By 750 all but one of the major commands were held by foreigners. Most of these men were Turks or part-Turk, though it was under a Korean general that the Tang forces were defeated by the Arabs at the Talas River in 751. Conversely, at the other end of the empire, on the borders of Korea and Manchuria, it was as military governor of Pinglu that the Sogdian An Lushan rose to high command. To Pinglu (in Liaoning province) was added the neighbouring command of Fanyang (northern Hebei province) in 745 and of Hedong (northern Shanxi province) in 751. As of 752 one of An Lushan’s relatives held the next two frontier commands, so that ‘the whole northern border from the Ordos to Manchuria was controlled by the Ans’.29
Despite a military record of mixed achievement, An Lushan seems to have enjoyed the devotion of his troops. They were better supplied than their counterparts farther west thanks to the Grand Canal’s north-eastern extension, and they may even have brought a measure of prosperity to the otherwise neglected north-east. He also enjoyed exceptionally close relations with Chang’an. Li Linfu’s imperious manner could be alarming; but An Lushan was careful not to antagonise him while endearing himself to the emperor as a loyal and simple soldier. The histories accuse him of pretence. All courtiers dissimulated, and in playing the bumpkin, An Lushan seems to have been appealing to a new and more playful constituency at court.
For in 745 the sixty-year-old Tang Xuanzong had allowed his attention to stray from contemplation of the Daoist ineffable to admire the porcelain perfection and fashionably fulsome figure of one whose beauty was rivalled only by her vivacity. This was the famous Yang Guifei, and the emperor was instantly smitten. She had previously been the consort of one of his sons, so was probably no more than half his age, and through her influence over the emperor, she soon came to dominate the court. Under her patronage, a distant cousin, Yang Guozhong, emerged as Li Linfu’s main rival, and on the latter’s death in 752 as his ministerial successor. The Yangs were now all-powerful.
At first An Lushan ingratiated himself with them. Though the records for the period would be largely destroyed in subsequent upheavals, and though the portrayal of An Lushan in the Standard Histories is highly suspect, he seemingly basked in imperial favour. Yang Guifei reportedly adopted him as her son, and in a grotesque performance consecrated this move by having the now portly and fifty-something general dressed in baby clothes and given a bath. This might appear preposterous but for the fact that the emperor went one better, designating An Lushan a duke and then a prince, a title never previously accorded to any but imperial progeny. Had Tang Xuanzong not already fathered fifty-nine sons, one might suspect that An Lushan was being groomed for the succession. Lands, offices and exemptions were showered upon him and he could do no wrong. In 754, and despite his illiteracy, a chief ministership looked likely. Instead, he was given an additional command as commissioner for the imperial stables and the great stud farms in Gansu. As well as more manpower than anyone else in the empire, An Lushan now controlled the vital supply of cavalry mounts.
The sources hint at an incestuous liaison between the general and his adoptive mother, the lovely Yang Guifei; it was probably just another attempt to smear his memory. But as between the general and the other Yang – chief minister Yang Guozhong – relations plummeted. Each saw the other as the only serious threat to his supremacy and intrigued against him. When in 754 An Lushan returned to his command in Hebei, Yang Guofang purged the general’s agents at court, dismissed potential supporters and floated rumours of rebellion. An Lushan, fearing for his safety, travelled east by boat and never once stepped ashore.
Yet his sudden metamorphosis from palace pet to avenging pariah remains hard to explain. His actions of 755 can be construed either as careful preparation for revolt or as desperate responses to the increasingly ominous reports coming from Chang’an. Spies from the capital sent to investigate him were stalled or bribed, requests for his attendance at court rebuffed or ignored. When in late 755 he declined even to perform obeisance before an imperial envoy, it was tantamount to a declaration of war. In similar circumstances, a Han general imbued with the Confucian ethos would either have answered the summons and accepted the consequences or have availed himself of the privilege of suicide. An Lushan, the son of a Sogdian, did neither. Claiming that he had been ordered to rid the empire of the far-from-popular Yang Guozhong, he marched forth at the head of his formidable army.
Luoyang fell to the rebels before the year 755 was out. Hastily summoned armies were defeated while new recruits proved no match for the general’s veteran jian’er and his Manchurian – largely Khitan – auxiliaries. But Chang’an and the Wei valley behind their screening mountains remained under imperial control. In fact they were reinforced by the recall of the frontier armies in Gansu, Xinjiang and Sichuan. Turks, Tibetans, Arabs and others would take advantage of this retraction to dismantle the empire’s entire western extension. Still more ominous was the introduction into core China of these frontier armies under their non-Han commanders, and the concurrent appointment of military governors and defence supremos in the heartland provinces. An Lushan’s challenge to the authority of the central government had set a precedent. It betrayed the weakness of the dynasty, condemned it to invoking the support of military contingents as dangerous as the rebels, and hastened the devolution of power from the capital to the provinces.
The year 756 brought An Lushan’s first reverses. Loyalist forces behind his line of advance nearly regained Hebei and others barred any progress south towards the Yangzi. The general responded by proclaiming his own dynasty. It was to be called the Great Yan, Yan being the age-old name for the north-east, where the rebels enjoyed the widest support. Greatly provoked by this move, in mid-756 the emperor and the impatient Yang Guozhong overruled their commanders to launch a massive counter-attack. It was ambushed and routed. Defeat left the capital undefended. As An Lushan advanced to claim the prize, all who could vacated the great city.
I remember when we first fled the rebels,
Hurrying north over dangerous trails;
Night deepened on Pengya Road,
the moon shone over White-water Hills.
A whole family endlessly trudging,
begging without shame from the people we met:
valley birds sang, a jangle of soft voices;
we didn’t see a single traveller returning . . .30
The poet Dou Fu, along with the heir apparent, the future Tang Suzong, fled north. A Robert Burns to Li Bo’s Byron, Dou Fu was no stranger to disappointment. ‘Caught involuntarily in the machinery of history’, he explored its impact on the common man and showed a greater awareness of life’s intimate tragedies than any contemporary writer. This empathy, along with a daring use of language and compositional techniques, won him little fame in his lifetime but would come to be revered as the essence of a later and more humanitarian Confucianism. Like Burns, Dou Fu drew on his own circumstances to mirror the history of his times. In universalising the apparently inconsequential, both poets furnished an image of the cultural hero as social conscience that posterity would savour.31
Meanwhile the emperor, the lovely Yang Guifei and the dictatorial Yang Guozhong, accompanied by attendants and a cavalry escort, fled towards Sichuan. The Yangs originated from there; the mountain trail through the Qinling, a successor of ‘Stone Cattle Road’, would discourage pursuit; and preparations had already been made for receiving the imperial entourage in Chengdu. Two weeks out, at a place called Mawei, they ran into a party of Tibetan envoys. The Tibetans wanted food, but Yang Guozhong’s dealings with them roused the suspicions of the imperial escort. Accused of treachery, Yang Guozhong was manhandled and murdered on the spot along with members of his family.
The emperor was unharmed in the fracas, as was Yang Guifei. But presumably to eradicate all hated Yangs, the troops now demanded that the emperor have her executed too. Powerless to protect his beloved, the emperor, it is said, concurred. Yang Guifei herself requested only that, instead of execution, she be stran
gled with a length of silk, whereupon the emperor’s trusted eunuch performed the deed. Thus did Yang Guifei pass to the spirit world with her beauty intact, there to be eventually reunited, in countless verses, plays, paintings, songs and novellas, with the emperor who so loved her. Romance transcends history. To ask why she had to die, or why the emperor, however old and powerless, failed the basic test of a hero in not dying with her, not even defending her, is beside the point. The emperor’s loss and his lover’s devotion were tragedy enough.
Broken-hearted, the great Tang Xuanzong continued on to Chengdu, to exile and to imminent abdication. He lived another five years, so outlasting An Lushan and witnessing the Tang restoration. In neither is he said to have taken the remotest interest.
10
RECONFIGURING THE EMPIRE
755–1005
LOW TANG
SEEN IN THE ESSENTIALLY DYNASTIC TERMS preferred by the traditional histories, little was changed by the An Lushan rebellion of late 755. An Lushan himself was murdered by his son in early 757. Later in the same year, with Uighur help, Chang’an was recaptured by Tang Suzong, Xuanzong’s designated heir (r. 756–62). Although An Lushan’s Great Yan dynasty soldiered on through four would-be emperors – himself, his son, a general and the general’s son – none lasted more than a couple of years and all bar one were murdered by their successors. The exception was the last who, though probably murdered, had no successor; for when in 763 this man’s severed head was presented to the Tang emperor in Chang’an, the Great Yan dynasty petered out; a record of four assassinations in eight years invited no further candidates; evidently the Great Yan were not great enough for the Mandate. Instead of imperial supremacy, An Lushan’s still-rebellious generals and governors set their sights on provincial autonomy.
Meanwhile the Tang, having reclaimed their capital, steadily clawed back the core of their empire. Under a succession of mostly competent emperors the dynasty would continue to occupy the throne as the sovereign power and source of all legitimacy for another 150 years. Just five generations of Tang ‘ancestors’ (the shared ‘-zong’ element in their posthumous names means ‘ancestor’) had reigned before the rebellion; seven would reign after it. Unlike the Former to Later Han succession, the Tang succession was unbroken, comparatively orderly and rarely challenged. In terms of scholars, poets and artists, the second half of the dynasty was as illustrious as the first. Jikaku Daishi, the Japanese pilgrim better known as Ennin, who travelled widely in China in the early 840s, found the roads secure, government effective and Buddhist devotion ubiquitous. The level of economic activity was especially impressive, with barge convoys laden with grain, salt, charcoal, coal and timber plying the rivers and canals. Commercial and cultural contacts with central Asia were maintained via the Uighurs, whose fluctuating domains fingered west from Mongolia to Xinjiang and Ferghana. Nor did losing control of the Western Regions eliminate a Chinese presence there; in Turfan and Hami, garrison colonists stayed on to farm and serve under non-Han rulers as influential minorities. Meanwhile tribute-bearing missions continued to beat a path to Chang’an, and the empire’s maritime trade flourished as never before.
But change there was, indeed a transformation, not just in terms of the empire’s size but of the exercise of power within it. Despite some military successes, the Tang were unable either to extinguish the rebellion or to reassert firm control over their own hastily summoned forces. When in 763 hostilities were suspended, it was the result of a stalemate brought on by mutual exhaustion and compromise. The rebels were mollified by generous amnesties in which they were confirmed in the provincial and prefectural commands they had usurped, while some loyalist generals who had marched against the rebels expected, and exacted, similar recognition. In either case, the beneficiaries would often ignore imperial directives, contest attempts to unify the command of their forces, and show other signs of independence. The Tang restoration was thus offset by a much-diminished authority throughout the remaining empire. Supremacy had become contingent on concessions to the provinces and exploiting the rivalries of their mostly military governors.
Allies proved an equally mixed blessing. Assorted Turks and even an Arab contingent had joined the Tang forces against the rebels. But it was the Uighurs whose expert cavalry enabled the Tang to stem the tide of defeat, and Uighurs did not come cheap. A painful equality of status as well as massive subventions in cash and trade goods, plus an imperial bride, had to be extended to their qaghan, whose horsemen might still, as in Luoyang in 762, sack an imperial capital when so inclined. In his Zizhi Tongjian Sima Guang puts the dead in Luoyang at tens of thousands and says the fires burned for several weeks. Elsewhere it was an army from Pinglu province (Shandong and part of Liaoning) which ran riot. Sent south to put down one of many unrelated rebellions and mutinies along the Yangzi, the supposedly loyalist forces from Pinglu plundered Yangzhou, the great commercial centre that had been Sui Yangdi’s southern capital; among those reportedly massacred were several thousand foreign merchants.
More predictably, old adversaries from outside the frontier weighed in as challengers within it. In the extreme south-west the kingdom of Nanzhao, a composite state of indigenous non-Han peoples that had adopted Han principles of government while fiercely resisting Han intervention, expanded rapidly. From its lakeside capital at Dali, Nanzhao occupied most of modern Yunnan and in 763 established a second capital at what would become the city of Kunming. The site, well protected by more lakes and Yunnan’s deep riverine gorges, was chosen ‘both for its strategic location and its ability to support a large population’.1 As Tang weakness became apparent, Nanzhao’s forces penetrated north of the Yangzi into southern Sichuan, south-west into the Burmese states and south-east to the present-day Lao and Vietnamese borders.
Throughout the remainder of the eighth century Nanzhao accepted Tibetan rather than Chinese suzerainty. Its forces may even have fought with the Tibetans in their sustained offensive against the Tang. The ninth century brought a return to Tang suzerainty, but in the 860s Nanzhao broke away again and resumed its offensive, first in Sichuan and then in the south-east. Pushing down the Red River (Songkhoi), it made common cause with Tang’s ever-rebellious subjects in Vietnam and briefly overran that province. A Tang general restored Chinese rule in Vietnam in 864, but with the empire then disintegrating, the Vietnamese were emboldened to launch another bid for independence. This time it succeeded. By 939 northern Vietnam had set up the first of its own imperial dynasties and the province was lost to China. Though, like Korea, the now-named ‘Annam’ would acknowledge nominal Chinese suzerainty when hard pressed (as, for instance, by the French in the nineteenth century), only in the direst of times (as, for instance, under Mongol rule) would it form part of the Celestial Empire. Nanzhao, likewise, would retain its hard-won identity until overrun by the Mongols and would reassert it thereafter whenever opportunity offered.
Nanzhao had merely nibbled at the Tang frontiers. The Tibetans bit deep. Thrusting into Xinjiang, Gansu and Shaanxi as rapidly as the Tang armies were withdrawn to oppose An Lushan, Tibetan forces were soon within striking distance of Chang’an itself. In 763 they actually took the city and ransacked it. Tang Daizong’s reign (762–79) thus began with another ignominious flight from the capital. Though regained in 764, Chang’an continued under constant threat from the Tibetans until the end of the eighth century. The Gansu corridor and the imperial horse-breeding pastures in Shaanxi and Ningxia were in Tibetan hands; and in 791, despite Uighur support, the last remaining Chinese garrisons in the Western Regions surrendered to the Tibetans. Though the new ‘Tibetan empire’ proved short-lived, it was troubles within Tibet itself and pressure from the Uighurs and the Arabs which terminated it rather than any Tang resurgence. The aftermath of the An Lushan rebellion thus marked ‘the end of Chinese administration in Eastern Turkestan [Xinjiang] for almost a thousand years’.2 Though it scarcely deprived the Tang of much in the way of population or revenue, it severed nearly half of its erstwhile territo
ry and put a stop to Chinese intervention in central Asia.
In the north, the defence of the long Mongolian frontier against Kyrgyz and Khitan encroachment was effectively subcontracted to the expensive Uighurs and, in the north-east, to the unruly successors of An Lushan’s Great Yan dynasty. The rebellion had started in northern Hebei, and there, as in neighbouring parts of Shanxi, Henan and Shandong, the spirit of resistance proved impossible to quell. In fact, for the next four and a half centuries, from 755 until the advent of the Mongols, the north-eastern provinces (including what is now Beijing) would constitute a zone of autonomous rule shading into rival empire. Over it the Tang and their successors might claim suzerainty but had little effective control.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, An Lushan’s generals in the north-east had been confirmed as provincial governors; this implied legitimacy but scarcely restrained their independent tendencies. They would remit no taxes to Chang’an except when Tang recognition was deemed desirable and then only in the form of tribute; they would usually nominate or select their own successors; and they would rarely respond to imperial appeals for military support. There is evidence that separatism here accorded with regional grievances nursed since the defeat of the north-east’s Northern Qi by the north-west’s Northern Zhou in the late sixth century. Military rule may even have been popular insofar as the withholding of central revenues may have reduced the tax burden on the cultivator.
With a fine sense of history, these military rulers in the north-east harked back to the pre-imperial ‘Warring States’ period. They favoured the loose vassalage that had then been on offer from the Later (Eastern) Zhou kings in Luoyang; and as of old, they vied for the conjectural status of the sovereign power’s ba (‘hegemon’ or ‘protector’). The north-east’s then name of Yan had been revived by An Lushan; in a similar spirit, his successors would compare Tang demands for their submission with those of the Qin First Emperor when conducting China’s first unification. As one anxious ruler put it in 782, ‘martial, autocratic and possessing the same gifts that enabled Qin Shihuangdi and Han Wudi to exterminate figures of any independence, the Tang emperor intends to sweep clear Hebei and deny to its provinces the hereditary succession of command’.3