Tang Dynasty China

[Arwen]

Did the destruction of the Tang dynasty start in the first hundred years?

[RThouse]

The An Lushan Rebellion had its roots in the behavior of one of the great emperors of Chinese history, Xuanzong. Until he fell in love with a young concubine named Yang Guifei, he had been a great ruler, and had brought the Tang to its height of prosperity and grandeur. He was so infatuated with Yang that the administration of the government soon fell into decay, which was not made any better by the fact that Yang took advantage of her power to stuff high administrative positions with her corrupt cronies. She also took under her wing a general named An Lushan, who quickly accumulated power. An Lushan eventually decided that he would make a pretty good emperor, and launched his rebellion. The civil war lasted for eight years, and was, for the years 755-763, pretty destructive. The emperor was forced to flee the capital, and on the way, the palace guard, blaming Yang Guifei for all the problems that had beset the dynasty (to be fair, it wasn't all her fault; there were forces of political economy at work that were pretty much beyond anybody's control), strangled her and threw her corpse in a ditch. There is a legend that what actually happened was that the emperor had procured a peasant look-alike who was actually the one killed, but as far as I know, that is only fiction. Anyway, the rebellion pretty much shattered centralized Tang control, and for the remaining 150 years of the dynasty, the country slowly disintegrated.

[TINtin]

Xian, the T'ang capital and at that time the greatest city in all Asia, numbering 1 million inside its walls and another 1 million in the suburbs, welcomed tribute envoys, merchants, and devotees of religions from all parts of Asia and farther west. Not only was this the greatest period of Buddhism in Chinese history, but Islam, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Nestorian Christianity all entered China. At the same time, with the advent of a recentralized empire, the fortunes of Confucianism rose: the civil service examinations reintroduced by the Sui were significantly expanded, and during the reign of the second T'ang emperor, T'ai-tsung (627-49), a wide range of Confucian scholarly projects was undertaken under imperial sponsorship. T'ang power and prestige reached a zenith during the reign of T'ang Hsuan-Tsung (712-56). Chinese lyric poetry reached a high point, and the world's first printed book was produced. Eventually, however, military victories gave way to defeat, notably at the hands of the Arabs in 751; and in 755 the revolt of An Lu-shan, a semibarbarian general in the T'ang employ, transferred considerable power from the central government to military governors in the provinces, dealing the dynasty a blow from which it never fully recovered. The persecution (841-45) of Buddhists was largely an effort to return revenues from tax-free temple lands to the state. The military governors who brought down the T'ang founded five short-lived regimes, which, in turn, were replaced by a new age of prosperity under the Sung (960-1279), the beginning of China's early modern age.