How could a 400 pound commoner of Turkish-Persian descent rise up to become one of the most powerful men in Tang China? Well, first off, they say no one could dance the Sogdian whirl like him!
It was the story that would shake the empire-- and like a row of dominoes, kingdoms would fall one after another...
How this came about is one of the most re-told of all Tang dynasty tales. It was during the second-half of the Emperor Xuanzong’s reign (r. 712-756) that all the trouble started. Xuanzong’s court which saw the very apogee of the “Golden Tang” was a time of great refinement and luxury not unlike that of Emperor Huizong’s several centuries later. While Xuanzong started off his rule as an exemplary Confucian leader, he would later fall utterly under the spell of his beautiful concubine, Yang Guifei, Toward the end he was spending more and more time with her-- “playing polo, participating in concerts with her Pear Garden Orchestra, commissioning paintings and collecting antiques”-- then in ruling the empire (which was afterall his main job!)
Lady Yang’s presence at court was enormous, and truly she was the femme fatale and great arbiter of taste of her day. Under her influence “the plump look” was in a great vogue, as well as a hairstyle known as “just fallen off the horse look”-- the hairstyle having come about one day when Lady Yang’s elaborate coiffure had become disheveled after tumbling from her horse. Looking particularly alluring, she caused yet another small sensation at Court as all the other court ladies tried to emulate her hairstyle without having to go through all the trouble of falling off their horses.
With her “hundred charms,” she was said to be as intelligent as she was beautiful, and her extravagant tastes for wine, lychee fruits, beautiful bird feathers, cosmetics, aromatics, and clothes were legendary.
She also had exotic taste in men, for she was to fall completelyunder the spell of a powerful general of famously foreign descent known as An Lushan (or, Rokhshan, “the bright”).
It’s hard to imagine a more sure recipe for imperial disaster.
An’s father was probably a Sogdian whose clan had been ages ago incorporated into the Eastern Turkish Empire which had then been incorporated briefly into the Chinese Empire during the early Tang. His mother was said to be a Turkish aristocrat. During the early years of the great Tang expansion, foreign men were welcomed into the Chinese army, and An quickly found himself rising into the upper levels of the military when, as a brilliant general, he was “discovered” by the Emperor’s favorite.
Lady Yang heaped all kinds of riches and rewards on him, and not surprisingly some speculate that they were lovers. The Emperor increasingly handed over power to An until he came to possess control of three of the ten regional military garrison posts thereby making him the most powerful man in the empire.
In 755, An marched on the capital, and capturing it, proclaimed himself Emperor. His life in danger, the Tang Emperor, meanwhile, had escaped along with his Lady Yang and those troops loyal to him. Headed for sanctuary in Sichuan, his generals, furious at the situation demanded the Lady Yang (whom they felt had caused all the trouble) be handed over for instant strangulation which is precisely what happened-- right there on the Long Road to Shu.
How do it come to that? Well, the seeds of the rebellion had been sown already far to the West.
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In Part 7, I described the NHK teams travels into the heart of music-- to the famed oasis city of Kucha on the Northern Route of the Silk Road. Well, there is even a more-northerly route. The Northern Route splits into two routes at Hami-- one following the southern edge of the Tianshan Mountains and the other following the northern edge. This area north of the Heavenly Mountains is the land of the Khazak and other nomadic peoples. And while big skies and gorgeous open grasslands dominate the photography, it is important to keep in mind that this seemingly insignificant northern region was to play a huge role in Chinese history-- for it was this road that led to the coveted heavenly horses of Ferghana (See NHK Part 1).
Along for the ride of this segment of the trip is famous Japanese author, Shiba Ryotaro. Having studied Manchurian in University, he has a great interest in nomadic people; particularly those who dwelled on the fringes of the great Empires of China. Shiba talks about the romance of "eternally unchanging nomadic life." A statement which while certainly "problematic," still contains within it the essential fact that for 3000 years, an uneasy balance of power continued, whereby with the steppe people posing a constant threat, China wavered between using trade and war to deal with them.
And, horses-- secured along this northern road-- were absolutely essential to this.
This area-- not far from valley of the legendary heavenly horses-- was the site of one of the most significant battles in Chinese history.
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This morning, I was re-listening to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time show on the Battle of Thermopylae. (I think this is without a doubt one of his best shows).
Braggs tells us, "There are certain events in history which are often thought of as crucial," and goes on to explore the way in which historians from Herodotus onward have considered the Battle of Thermopylae as the "defining clash between East and West."
While I realize that there are probably a million reasons why a million historians would tell me differently, I cannot help but feel that it was really the Battle of Talas that served as the defining clash between East and West (West meaning the Arab empire, which was the great Western superpower of the late Tang).
I've already written about both the reasons behind the Battle of Talas as well as the effects of the stunning defeat of the Chinese here. For our purposes here, it was, in effect the last nail in the coffin of the Tang dynasty.
Indeed, it was only 4 years later that An Lushan would lead his stunning coup d'etat. Known as the An Lushan’s Rebellion (755-764), it only lasted nine years. After An was assassinated in 757, the Tang Dynasty was restored, but its greatness would never again match what it had been before the rebellion that rocked the dynasty.
For not only did the rebellion and political shakeup devastate the military strength and cultural vibrancy of the Tang, but the foreign-led rebellion led to an increasingly strong suspicion and crackdown on all things foreign-- from merchants to monks. Compared with the stability and extroversion which characterized the early to mid-Tang, the later Tang was increasingly chaotic with much of the political power held in the hands of the Palace Eunuchs. Warlordism became rampant, not to be outdone by the growing menace of Steppe peoples.
A huge power vacuum was created along the cities and kingdoms of the Silk Road I have been writing about-- from Dunhuang and Gaochang to Kucha and Khotan, it was during the immediate aftermath of the An Lushan Rebellion-- when the Tang moved its army out of the Western outposts and back to the capital, that the Turkic Uighurs moved in.
Interestingly, rather than pushing the Indo-European speaking peoples out, they probably mixed in and incorporated those peoples into their dynasty. Before turning to Islam, they incorporated many aspects of Sogdian culture into their own, including converting to Manichaeism in a way similar to the way Persian culture was actively incorporated into the Abassid dynasty of Baghdad.
It was also the time of my dream-- when the Tibetan army, too, rode East to attack the Chinese capital in the wake of the Rebellion. It was truly the end of the glorious Tang.
Recently,Kate Merkel-Hess was writing at China Beat about the 5 top historical events that don't get the attention they deserve. Topping the list at No. 1 was the An Lushan Rebellion. She explains:
Led by the rogue general, An Lushan, the civil war that riled the Tang Dynasty from 755 to 763 caused death by violence and famine of over ten million people. But the An Lushan Rebellion is not on this list because of its high death toll. The rebellion also destabilized the Tang political regime and the aristocratic clans who supported it, reshaping a system that relied heavily on pedigree for advancement. Histories of China’s imperial exam system often note that it existed (in some form, though off-and-on) beginning in the Han. But until the An Lushan Rebellion, hereditary position mattered more than merit.
The rebellion was-- without a doubt, a defining point in history. Or, in the words of Melvyn Bragg, it was "crucial."
For, just as Kate Merkel-Hess writes, the overthrow of the Tang was to be followed by another nearly a half century of political fragmentation, in a time now known as the Period of Five Dynasties (907-960), named after the five royal houses which came to hold power in the north around the capital. In the south and west, power was divided roughly among ten autonomous kingdoms, centered around the old Tang military regions.
In this state of political chaos, to be able to rise up within the military and wrest power away from all other kings and warlords was one thing, but keeping power long enough to reunite the empire, thereby creating a new and stable dynasty was quite another matter indeed. The First Song Emperor Taizu was successfully able to do this by deliberately subordinating the overwhelming power of the military to that of the central government.
How did he do that?
Well, he-- brilliantly-- invested that political power into the hands of a new class of non-military and non-aristocratic (and therefore non-threatening) scholar-officials who were called upon to run the empire. These scholar-officials, the shi, known in the West as “mandarins,” became the new elite, and it was their scholar’s brush which would dominant at Court for nearly a thousand years to come.
You may say, "Well, I am not much impressed by meritocracies." Well, what was so revolutionary about all this was not just that the system was based on merit (though this was stunningly unique in and of itself as Europe wouldn't see anything similar until well into modern times), but rather that education and individual artistic cultivation came to be given the highest priority-- above political power, money or commerce. To be educated and artistically cultivated were characteristics that money could not buy. And this focus on education was something that came straight from the top.
And, keeping their dramatic rise to power in mind, it should come as no surprise to learn that a new elite art created by this very same scholar’s brush would also come to reign supreme; for not only was the brush the same, but precisely all the materials used by the shi to draft their official documents-- that is, brush, ink, inkstone, and paper or silk-- were those very same utencils used to create the fine arts of the Song Dynasty: calligraphy and landscape painting.
Lady Yang, of course, lives on in Japan.
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