Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  Empress Wu, however, did not always follow this principle herself. Although her administration included many respected scholar-officials, she also appointed a number of her own undistinguished favorites to the court. She had her own secret police, many of them her relatives, who eliminated her enemies in grisly ways. Amazing rumors circulated about the empress's personal life, including tales about the wild sexual adventures she had with two half brothers when she was nearly eighty. Supposedly, the empress took so many aphrodisiacs that she “sprouted new teeth and eyebrows.”20

  In 705, Empress Wu was finally deposed. After seven years of internecine struggle, the Li family returned to the throne, and in 712 the Tang dynasty was restored. The new emperor, called Ming Huang, or Brilliant Monarch, ruled over the most magnificent cultural flowering that China would ever see.

  THE ZENITH OF TANG POWER

  Along with Taizong, Ming Huang is considered one of the Tang dynasty's greatest emperors. Upon ascending the throne, he purged the court of Empress Wu's worst extravagances, abolished capital punishment, and embarked on reforms throughout the empire. His reign was the longest in Tang history, spanning nearly half a century (712-756). Like Taizong, Ming Huang combined military aggression with vigorous foreign diplomacy. Under his rule, China's foreign influence reached its zenith, with non-Chinese peoples from Kashmir to Korea, from Iran to Vietnam, acknowledging Tang overlordship.

  At the center of the vast Tang Empire was the imperial capital Changan, the most populous city on earth at the time, as well as the most cosmopolitan. As much as one-third of the city's population may have been foreign: emissaries from Arabia; merchants from India, Persia, and Syria; monks and students from Korea and Japan; tribal leaders from Nepal, Tibet, and Siberia; artists and performers from Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent.

  Among the Chinese residents of Changan, foreign music, fashions, and flavors were all the rage. The game of polo, almost certainly from Persia, became one of the favorite sports of Tang high society. On special occasions, female musical troupes from central Asia, seated on platforms carried by camels, played strange new instruments such as the pipa (a pear-shaped lute) to the delight of imperial officials. Aristocratic Chinese women wore tight-fitting dresses and shawls in the central Asian style. Other times, they wore loose trousers and rode horseback, in stark contrast to upper-class women of later periods in Chinese history, who could barely walk because of their bound feet.21

  Changan was not just stylish and eclectic. It was a center of learning and high art. Under Ming Huang, literature, painting, historical and aesthetic theory, and especially poetry flourished as never before. The most celebrated poets in Chinese history, including Li Po, Tu Fu, and Wang Wei, lived during this period. In one historian's words, “Ch'ang-an was more than the functioning capital of a great empire: it was a cosmopolis, the greatest city in the world; it was the radiating center of civilization for the whole of Eastern Asia.”22

  Like Taizong, Emperor Ming Huang was famous for his openness to foreigners and tolerance of cultural and religious differences. In 713, Ming Huang received an Arab delegation of ambassadors from the Umayyad caliph Walid seeking China's military cooperation. In violation of Chinese imperial etiquette, the Arabs refused to perform the ceremonial kowtow—a forehead-to-ground prostration—before the emperor. The strangers asserted that Muslims prostrated themselves only to God and would merely bow for a king on earth. Displaying surprising restraint, Ming Huang waived the requirement, declaring, “Court etiquette is not the same in all countries.” (A thousand years later, China's Manchu rulers would make the opposite decision. When the English ambassador Lord Amherst similarly refused to kowtow, he was turned away and the diplomatic mission was ended.) During the Tang Empire's golden age, foreign merchants and missionaries—whether Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Manichaean—worshipped freely at their own temples, without fear of persecution, and sometimes even with imperial military protection.23

  The tolerance of the Tang is all the more striking when compared to the conduct of the two other major empires of the time: the Umayyad caliphate and the Byzantine Empire, both far more religiously dogmatic.

  The Umayyad Empire (661-750) was built around Islamic orthodoxy, rejecting all other religions as heresy. Although persecution of non-Muslims was relatively mild under the early Umayyad rulers, in 704-5 the same Caliph Walid just mentioned rounded up the Christian nobles of Armenia and burned them to death in their own churches. Others were crucified or decapitated. A few years later, Caliph Umar II issued the following pronouncement: “O ye who believe! The non-Moslems are nothing but dirt. Allah has created them to be partisans of Satan; most treacherous in regard to all they do; whose whole endeavor in this nether life is useless, though they themselves imagine that they are doing fine work. Upon them rests the curse of Allah, of the Angels and of man collectively.” Non-Muslims were not allowed to hold public office. (By contrast, when the Sassanian prince of Persia, defeated by the Arabs, fled to China in 674, he was welcomed at Changan and made a general of the Imperial Guard.)24

  The Christian Byzantine Empire was even more extreme in its persecution of heretics. In the seventh century, paganism was essentially eradicated, through forced conversions, torture, starvation, and brutal massacres. Anti-Semitism pervaded the empire, and various Byzantine rulers from Heraclius to Leo III ordered the forced baptism of Jews. Under Justinian II (685-695, 705-711), waves of vicious persecutions continued, and members of the rival Armenian Orthodox Church were condemned to death by burning. Justinian's excesses were so egregious—Gibbon claims he let his own mother be scourged by one of his chief advisors—that his nose was cut off after he was deposed, earning him the name Justinian Rhinotmetus, meaning “slit-nose.” By the mid-eighth century, the Byzantine Empire was a shadow of its former self, most of its lands having been conquered by the Arabs.

  The rise of the great religious empires of Christendom and Islam—along with the costs of their monotheistic zeal—will be discussed in Part Two. For now, however, suffice it to say that the largest powers of Europe and the Middle East from 600 to 800 were organized around their respective orthodoxies, “each secure in the conviction that unbelievers could offer nothing of importance to followers of the true faith.” The rigidity of these societies contrasted sharply with the far “looser-textured” and less dogmatic Tang dynasty, in which “China attained perhaps the most vigorous and variegated cultural efflorescence of her long history.”25

  Unlike virtually every other Chinese dynasty, the Tang rulers took a keen interest in contemporaneous empires and sought to inform themselves about daily life in foreign cities. Tang imperial documents include surprisingly detailed descriptions of Byzantium, called Fu Lin by the Chinese:

  Fu Lin is the ancient [Roman Empire]. It is situated on the Western Sea. To the south-east it borders Persia, to the northeast is the territory of the Western Turks. The land is very populous, and there are many towns. The walls of the capital are of dressed stone, and more than 100,000 families reside in the city. There is a gate 200 feet high, entirely covered with bronze [the Golden Gate]. In the imperial palace there is a human figure of gold decorated with glass and crystal, gold, ivory, and rare woods. The roofs are made of cement, and are flat. In the heat of summer machines worked by water power carry up water to the roof, which is used to refresh the air by falling in showers in front of the windows.

  Twelve ministers assist the King in the government. When the King leaves his palace he is attended by a man carrying a bag, into which any person is free to drop petitions. The men wear their hair cut short and are clothed in embroidered robes which leave the right arm bare. The women wear their hair in the form of a crown. The people of Fu Lin esteem wealth, and they are fond of wine and sweetmeats. On every seventh day [the Christian Sunday] no work is done.

  From this country come byssus, coral, asbestos, and many other curious products. They have very skilled conjurers who can spit fire from their mouths, pour wat
er out of their hands, and drop pearls from their feet. Also, they have skilled physicians who cure certain diseases by extracting worms from the head.

  Similarly, Tang accounts describe Arabia and the origins of Islam as follows:

  [Arabia] was formerly part of Persia. The men have large noses and black beards. They carry silver mounted swords on a silver girdle. They drink no wine and have no music. The women are white and veil the face when they leave the house. There are large halls for worship which can hold several hundreds of persons. Five times daily they worship the god of Heaven. Every seventh day [Friday] their King [the Caliph] seated on high, addresses his subjects, saying: “Those who die in battle will be reborn in Paradise. Those who fight bravely will obtain happiness.” Therefore their men are very valiant soldiers. The land is poor and cannot grow cereals, they hunt and live on meat, and collect honey among the rocks. Their dwellings are formed like the hoods of a cart [tents]. They have grapes which are sometimes as big as a hen's egg.

  In the Sui period … a man [Mohammed] of the western peoples (hu), a Persian subject, was guarding flocks in the mountains near Medina. A Lion-man [The Archangel Gabriel] said to him: “To the west of this mountain, in a cave there is a sword and a black stone [the black stone of Ka'aba] with white lettering. Whoever obtains these two objects will reign over mankind.” The man went to the place and found everything as he had been told…Afterwards the [Arabs] became very powerful. They destroyed Persia, defeated the King of Fu Lin, invaded northern India, attacked Samarkand and Tashkent. From the south-western sea their empire reached to the western borders of our territory.26

  Whatever their imprecisions or caricatures, these accounts of Byzantium and Islam reflect the spirit of confident curiosity, as well as the effort to gain an understanding of foreign cultures, characteristic of the Tang. While these accounts may sound unsophisticated to the modern reader, they display far more knowledge about the outside world than, for example, the records of the Manchu Qing emperors, who ruled a thousand years later (1644-1912). Despite world advances in communication and technology, the Qing emperors were stunningly—almost willfully—ignorant about the rising European powers, whom they preferred to lump all together as “barbarians that send tribute.” In an imperial text from the mid-eighteenth century, the following confusions can be found:

  Italy presented tribute to China in 1667 (it was actually Holland), and the Pope came to do so in 1725 [not the case].

  France is the same as Portugal.

  Sweden is a dependency of Holland.

  The Spanish in the Philippines are the Portuguese who took Malacca and Macau.

  Sweden and England are shortened names for Holland.

  As late as 1818, the powerful empires of Britain, Russia, and France—then on the verge of taking over China—were listed in Qing imperial records as Chinese “vassal states” alongside Kelantan, Trengganu, and other tiny kingdoms on the Malay peninsula. Indeed, some historians cite the Qing rulers’ profound ignorance of the West as a factor contributing to China's inability to resist European domination.27

  Was Tang China in its golden age world dominant—a hyperpower of the same magnitude as Achaemenid Persia or ancient Rome? What makes this question difficult is the fact that seventh- and eighth-century China was surrounded by kingdoms and tribal alliances much smaller than itself yet strong enough to pose serious military threats—indeed, strong enough even to defeat Tang forces when the latter were deployed at less than full strength, as was almost always the case in an empire so vast. In 678, a Tang army of some 180,000 was beaten by Tibetans at Lake Koko Nor in a contest for control of western lands. In 751, a much smaller Tang army lost the battle of Talas to the Abbasid caliphate near modern-day Samarkand—although the battle was probably no more than a border skirmish and the Arab troops far outnumbered the Tang contingent.

  Complicating matters further is the frequently deployed Tang strategy of subduing rival kingdoms through shrewd diplomacy backed by the threat of force rather than by bloody conquest. This strategy was enormously successful, but it left the Tang vulnerable, its dominion dependent on the loyalty of foreign kings and subjects who were often held in contempt by the Chinese and who reciprocated these sentiments with undisguised hostility toward China.

  Despite this vulnerability, the global preeminence of Tang China is hardly open to serious doubt. Indeed, the extent to which the Tang towered over its contemporaries is breathtaking. Consider the “great powers” of post-Roman Europe. The mighty Frankish Empire was arguably the greatest Western European power in the eighth and ninth centuries, boasting perhaps five to ten million subjects under the rule of the celebrated Charlemagne. Ming Huang ruled sixty million. At roughly the same time, the Byzantine Empire probably had a population of no more than ten to thirteen million. Even the Umayyad caliphate of the Middle East—by far the most populous and powerful empire after Tang China—ruled at most thirty-six million subjects. Taken altogether, the Tang army of roughly 500,000 to 750,000 professional soldiers dwarfed the Umayyad forces. In short, Tang China in its heyday starkly surpassed all other powers of the world in population, wealth, and total military might.28

  THE TWILIGHT OF THE TANG AND

  THE RISE OF INTOLERANCE

  As with the ancient Roman and Persian empires, the very tolerance that was indispensable to the extraordinary reach and influence of the Tang Empire also sowed the seeds of its decline. Ironically, the fall of the Tang can be traced to an attack by a foreigner who was allowed too much power. And once the Tang Empire began to decline, intolerance set in.

  The Tang policy of strategic tolerance meant that the empire never tried to impose a Han Chinese identity on its non-Chinese subjects. As a result, no common political, linguistic, or cultural “glue” bound “barbarians” and Chinese together in the sprawling Tang Empire. On the contrary, even in the early eighth century Ming Huang found himself ruling over large numbers of distinct, fiercely independent communities with no loyalty or even goodwill toward their Chinese overlords.

  To maintain order across the empire, Ming Huang had to rely on an ever-larger proportion of foreign forces, particularly Turkic peoples like the Xi and Khitan. The chiefs of these tribes were made military governors who commanded great permanent frontier armies and wielded virtually unchecked power over civil, economic, and military affairs. Between 712 and 733, the Tang established nine such military governorships. The military governors often acted on their own initiative to expand Tang borders. Because successful aggression was rewarded, independent military actions grew more frequent. As a result, loss of central control and military dominance by foreigners grew more pronounced over the course of Ming Huang's reign.

  In one sense, the power and autonomy granted to non-Chinese military commanders reflected the extraordinary success of the Tang effort to cross the divide between the Chinese and the “barbarian” peoples of the steppe. But the vast foreign armies enlisted by the Tang remained just that—foreign armies. When these Turks or Tibetans or Mongolians, led by their ambitious generals, began to feel used and manipulated by the Chinese, they quickly turned on the Tang. In the end, the great Tang dynasty was brought low by foreigners, who never really came to see themselves as part of the Middle Kingdom.

  The fatal blow was the An Lushan Rebellion of 755. In the 740s, at around the age of sixty, Ming Huang fell hopelessly in love with one of his son's consorts, Yang Guifei. In a very short time, Yang Guifei had almost total control over the smitten emperor, and the imperial court was filled with her corrupt relatives and lackeys. It was through Yang Guifei's influence that An Lushan, an obese military man, acquired the power to organize a revolt that would forever change China.

  Historians differ on the precise ethnic origins of An Lushan. According to one source, he was a Turk of the Khitan tribe; according to others, he was Turk-Sogdian. There is a consensus, however, that he was non-Chinese, grossly fat, illiterate, and of vulgar wit. It is also clear that An Lushan was a man of considerable cunnin
g, adept at pleasing his superiors. By 750, he had attained the rank of general and become a court favorite, captivating the fancy of Yang Guifei and entertaining the emperor with his clownish buffoonery.29

  Although others in the imperial family suspected An Lushan's motives, Yang Guifei took him under her protection, even adopting him as her son. As a result, he had the unheard-of privilege of visiting her in the inner palace, which suggests, as many historians have speculated, that the two had an affair. In any case, despite his low birth and alien heritage, An Lushan accumulated extraordinary power. In 754, to the horror of the emperor's relatives, An Lushan was appointed commissioner of the imperial stables, a strategically important post. On the eve of the An Lushan Rebellion, the general had sole military command over three critical northern regions, including modern-day Beijing, Shanxi, and Shandong, with some 200,000 men and 30,000 horses at his disposal.

  Meanwhile, at the court, An Lushan continued to play the self-mocking bumpkin. At one point, rumors that An Lushan was planning a revolt reached the emperor. Summoned before him, An Lushan promptly fell weeping to the emperor's feet, swearing his loyalty and declaring slander by his detractors. The emperor was completely convinced, and lavished An Lushan with new honors.30

  Shortly afterward, in 755, An Lushan rose in rebellion. Both Changan and the eastern capital of Luoyang fell instantly to An Lushan's forces. The emperor and Yang Guifei, along with a few troops, fled ignominiously to Sichuan. The emperor's troops then mutinied, demanding that he kill his consort, whom they blamed for their plight. Left with no choice, the heartbroken emperor ordered his chief eunuch to strangle his beloved concubine. Her corpse was thrown into a ditch, and the crushed emperor himself soon abdicated in favor of his son. It was not until eight years later, in 763, that the An Lushan Rebellion was finally suppressed and the Tang family restored to power.