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Li Bo, the most renowned Tang poet and one of the greatest ever to write in the Chinese language, wrote in 751 of the seemingly endless succession of wars:
The beacons are always alight, fighting and marching never stop.
Men die in the field, slashing sword to sword;
The horses of the conquered neigh piteously to Heaven.
Crows and hawks peck for human guts,
Carry them in their beaks and hang them on the branches of withered trees.
Captains and soldiers are smeared on the bushes and grass;
The General schemed in vain.
Know therefore that the sword is a cursed thing which the wise man uses only if he must.2
The Uighur and Tibetan Empires
Between 600 and 751, when the Tang Empire was at its height, the Turkic-speaking Uighurs° and the Tibetans built large rival states astride the caravan routes of Inner Asia. The power of the former centered on the basin of the Tarim River, a largely desert area north of Tibet that formed a vital link on the Silk Road. The Tibetan empire at its peak stretched well beyond modern Tibet into northeastern India and southwestern China, as well as the Tarim Basin. The contest between these states and the Tang for control of the land routes and nomadic peoples west of China reached a standoff by the end of the period. Mutually beneficial trade required diplomatic accommodation more than political unity. By the mid-800s all three empires were experiencing political decay and military decline. The problems of one aggravated those of the others, since governmental collapse allowed soldiers, criminals, and freebooters to roam without hindrance into neighboring territories.
Centralization and integration being most extensively developed in Tang territory, the impact fell most heavily there. Nothing remained of Tang power but pretense by the early 800s, the period reflected in the original romance of Ying-ying described at the start of this chapter. In the provinces military governors suppressed the rebellion of General An Lushan°, a commander of Sogdian (Central Asian) and Turkic origin, which raged from 755 to 763, and then seized power for themselves.
The flexibility and self-sufficiency of the nomadic lifestyle enabled the peoples of the steppe to survive the social disorder and agricultural losses better than the farming populations. However, the caravan cities that made use of the nomads and their animals for overland trade, and that lay at the heart of the Uighur state in the Tarim Basin, had as much to lose as China itself. Eventually, the urban and agricultural economies of Inner Asia and China recovered. In the short term, however, the debilitating contest for power with the Inner Asian states prompted a strong cultural backlash, particularly in China, where disillusionment with northern neighbors combined with social and economic anxieties to fuel an antiforeign movement.
The original homeland of the Turks lay in the northern part of modern Mongolia. After the fall of the Han Empire, Turkic peoples began moving south and west, through Mongolia, then west to Central Asia, on the long migration that
Uighur (WEE-ger) An Lushan (ahn loo-shahn) brought them, after many centuries, to what is today modern Turkey (see Chapter 9). In 552 a unified Turkic state had emerged, only to split internally a century later. It was this fissure that allowed the Tang Empire under Li Shimin to establish control over the Tarim Basin. Yet within a century, a new Turkic group, the Uighurs, had taken much of Inner Asia.
Under the Uighurs, caravan cities like Kashgar and Khotan (see Map 11.1) displayed a literate culture with strong ties to both the Islamic world and China. The Uighurs excelled as merchants and as scribes able to transact business in many languages. They adapted the syllabic script of the Sogdians, an Iranian people who lived to the west of them in Central Asia, to writing Turkic. Literacy made possible several innovations in Uighur government, such as changing from a tax paid in kind (with products or services) to a money tax and, later, the minting of coins. Their flourishing urban culture exhibited a cosmopolitan enthusiasm for Buddhist teachings, religious art derived from northern India, and a mixture of East Asian and Islamic tastes in dress.
Unified Uighur power collapsed after half a century, leaving only Tibet as a rival to the Tang in Inner Asia. A large, stable empire critically positioned where China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia meet, Tibet experienced a variety of cultural influences. In the seventh century Chinese Buddhists on pilgrimage to India advanced contacts between India and Tibet. The Tibetans derived their alphabet from India, as well as a variety of artistic and architectural styles. India and China both contributed to Tibetan knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, divination, farming, and milling of grain. Islam and the monarchical traditions of Iran and Rome became familiar through Central Asian trading connections. The Tibetan royal family favored Greek medicine transmitted through Iran.
Under Li Shimin, cautious friendliness had prevailed between China and Tibet. A Tang princess, called Kongjo by the Tibetans, came to Tibet in 634 to marry the Tibetan king and cement an alliance. She brought Ma-hayana Buddhism, which combined with the native religion to create a distinctive form of Buddhism. Tibet sent ambassadors and students to the Tang imperial capital. Regular contact and Buddhist influences consolidated the Tang-Tibet relationship for a time. The Tibetan kings encouraged Buddhist religious establishments and prided themselves on being cultural intermediaries between India and China.
Tibet also excelled at war. Horses and armor, techniques borrowed from the Turks, raised Tibetan forces to a level that startled even the Tang. By the late 600s the Tang emperor and the Tibetan king were rivals for religious
Upheavals and
Repression,
750-879
Women of Turfan Grinding Flour Women throughout Inner and East Asia were critical to all facets of economic life. In the Turkic areas of Central and Inner Asia, women commonly headed households, owned property, and managed businesses. These small figurines, made to be placed in tombs, portray women of Turfan—an Inner Asian area crossed by the Silk Road—performing tasks in the preparation of wheat flour. (Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous District Museum)
Leadership and political dominance in Inner Asia, and Tibetan power reached into what are now Qinghai°, Sichuan", and Xinjiang" provinces in China. War weariness affected both empires after 751, however.
In the 800s a new king in Tibet decided to follow the Tang lead and eliminate the political and social influence of the monasteries (see below). He was assassinated by Buddhist monks, and control of the Tibetan royal family passed into the hands of religious leaders. In the centuries that followed down to modern times, monastic domination isolated Tibet from surrounding regions.
The Tang elites came to see Buddhism as undermining the Con-fucian idea of the family as the model for the state. The Confu-cian scholar Han Yu (768-824) spoke powerfully for a return to traditional Confucian practices. In “Memorial on the Bone of Buddha” written to the emperor in 819 on the occasion of ceremonies to receive a bone of the Buddha in the imperial palace, he scornfully disparages the Buddha and his followers:
Now Buddha was a man of the barbarians who did not speak the language of China and wore clothes of a different fashion. His sayings did not concern the ways of our ancient kings, nor did his manner of dress conform to their laws. He understood neither the duties that bind sovereign and subject nor the affections of father and son. If he were still alive today and came to our court by order of his ruler, Your Majesty might condescend to receive him, but. . . he would then be escorted to the borders of the state, dismissed, and not allowed to delude the masses. How then, when he has long been dead, could his rotten bones, the foul and unlucky remains of his body, be rightly admitted to the palace? Confucius said, “Respect spiritual beings, while keeping at a distance from them.”13
Buddhism was also attacked for encouraging women in politics. Wu Zhao", a woman who had married into the imperial family, seized control of the government in 690 and declared herself emperor. She
Wu Zhao (woo jow)
Removed due to copyright permissions restrictions.
Buddhist Cave Painting at Dunhuang Hundreds of caves dating to the period when Buddhism enjoyed popularity and government favor in China surv've in Gansu prov'nce, which was beyond the reach of the Tang rulers when they turned against Buddhism. This cave, dated to the year 538/9, contains elaborate wall decorations narrating the life of the Buddha and depicting scenes from the Western Paradise, where devotees of the Pure Land sect of Buddhism hoped to be reborn.
(NHK Publishing Co. Photographer: Seigo Otsuka)
Based her legitimacy on claiming to be a bodhisattva, an enlightened soul who had chosen to remain on earth to lead others to salvation. She also favored Buddhists and Daoists over Confucianists in her court and government.
Later Confucian writers expressed contempt for Wu Zhao and other powerful women, such as the concubine Yang Guifei°. Bo Zhuyi°, in his poem “Everlasting Remorse,” lamented the influence of women at the Tang court, which had caused “the hearts of fathers and mothers everywhere not to value the birth of boys, but the birth of girls.”4 Confucian elites heaped every possible charge on prominent women who offended them, accusing Emperor Wu of grotesque tortures and murders, including tossing the dismembered but still living bodies of enemies into wine vats and cauldrons. They blamed
Yang Guifei (yahng gway-fay) Bo Zhuyi (baw joo-ee)
Yang Guifei for the outbreak of the An Lushan rebellion in 755.
Serious historians dismiss the stories about Wu Zhao as stereotypical characterizations of “evil” rulers. Eunuchs (castrated palace servants) charged by historians with controlling Chang’an and the Tang court and publicly executing rival bureaucrats represent a similar stereotype. In fact Wu seems to have ruled effectively and was not deposed until 705, when extreme old age (eighty-plus) incapacitated her. Nevertheless, traditional Chinese historians commonly describe unorthodox rulers and all-powerful women as evil, and the truth about Wu will never be known.
Even Chinese gentry living in safe and prosperous localities associated Buddhism with social ills. People who worried about “barbarians” ruining their society pointed to Buddhism as evidence of the foreign evil since it had such strong roots in Inner Asia and Tibet. They claimed that eradicating Buddhist influence would restore the ancient values of hierarchy and social harmony. Because Buddhism shunned earthly ties, monks and nuns severed relations with the secular world in search of enlightenment. They paid no taxes, served in no army. They deprived their families of advantageous marriage alliances and denied descendants to their ancestors. The Confucian elites saw all this as threatening to the family, and to the family estates that underlay the Tang economic and political structure.
In 840 (a year of disintegration on many fronts) the government moved to crush the monasteries. An imperial edict of 845 reports the demolition of 4,600 temples and the forcible conversion of 26,500 monks and nuns into ordinary workers. The tax exemption of monasteries had allowed them to purchase land and precious objects and to employ large numbers of serfs. Wealthy believers had given the monasteries large tracts of land, and poor people had flocked to the Buddhist institutions to work as artisans, fieldworkers, cooks, housekeepers, and guards. By the ninth century, hundreds of thousands of people had entered tax-exempt Buddhist institutions. Now an enormous amount of land and 150,000 workers were returned to the tax rolls.
Though some Buddhist cultural centers, such as the cave monasteries at Dunhuang, were protected by local warlords dependent on the favor of Buddhist rulers in Inner Asia, the dissolution of the monasteries was an incalculable loss to China’s cultural heritage. Some sculptures and grottoes survived only in defaced form. Wooden temples and fagades sheltering great stone carvings burned to the ground. Monasteries became legal again in later times, but Buddhism never recovered the social, political, and cultural influence of early Tang times.
... The Tang order succumbed to The End of the Tang ,, .
The very forces that were es-
EmP're, S79-907 sential to its creation and
Maintenance. The campaigns of expansion in the seventh century had left the empire dependent on local military commanders and a complex tax collection system. Such reverses as the Battle of the Talas River in 751, which halted the drive westward into Central Asia, led to military demoralization and underfunding. In 755 An Lushan, a Tang general appointed as regional commander on the northeast frontier, led about 200,000 soldiers in a rebellion that forced the emperor to flee Chang’an and execute his favorite concubine, Yang Guifei, whom some accused of being An Lushan’s lover. Though he was killed by his own son in 757, An Lushan’s rebellion lasted for eight years and resulted in new powers and greater independence for the provincial military governors who helped suppress it. The Uighurs also helped bring the disorder to an end.
Despite continuing prosperity, political disintegration and the elite’s sense of cultural decay created an unsettled environment that encouraged aspiring dictators. A disgruntled member of the gentry, Huang Chao°, led the most devastating uprising between 879 and 881. Despite ruthless and violent domination of the villages he controlled, his rebellion attracted hundreds of thousands of poor farmers and tenants who could not protect themselves from local bosses, who sought escape from oppressive landlords or taxes, or who simply did not know what else to do in the deepening chaos. The new hatred of “barbarians” spurred the rebels to murder thousands of foreign residents in Canton and Beijing".
Local warlords finally wiped out the rebels, using the same violent tactics. But Tang society did not find peace. Refugees, migrant workers, and homeless people became common sights in both city and country. Residents of northern China fled to the southern frontiers as groups from Inner Asia took advantage of the flight of population to move into localities in the north. Though Tang emperors continued to rule in Chang’an until their line was terminated by one of the warlords in 907, they never regained effective power after Huang Chao’s rebellion.
World History
