(A) The Sui dynasty (A.D. 580-618)
1 Internal situation in the newly unified empire
The last of the northern dynasties, the Northern Chou, had been
brought to an end by Yang Chien: rapid campaigns had made an end of the
remaining petty states, and thus the Sui dynasty had come into power.
China, reunited after 360 years, was again under Chinese rule. This
event brought about a new epoch in the history of the Far East. But the
happenings of 360 years could not be wiped out by a change of dynasty.
The short Sui period can only be described as a period of transition to
unified forms.
In the last resort the union of the various parts of China proceeded
from the north. The north had always, beyond question, been militarily
superior, because its ruling class had consisted of warlike peoples.
Yet it was not a northerner who had united China but a Chinese though,
owing to mixed marriages, he was certainly not entirely unrelated to
the northern peoples. The rule, however, of the actual northern peoples
was at an end. The start of the Sui dynasty, while the Chou still held
the north, was evidence, just like the emergence in the north-east some
thirty years earlier of the Northern Ch'i dynasty, that the Chinese
gentry with their landowning basis had gained the upper hand over the
warrior nomads.
The Chinese gentry had not come unchanged out of that struggle.
Culturally they had taken over many things from the foreigners,
beginning with music and the style of their clothing, in which they had
entirely adopted the northern pattern, and including other elements of
daily life. Among the gentry were now many formerly alien families who
had gradually become entirely Chinese. On the other hand, the
foreigners' feudal outlook had influenced the gentry, so that a sense
of distinctions of rank had developed among them. There were Chinese
families who regarded themselves as superior to the rest, just as had
been the case among the northern peoples, and who married only among
themselves or with the ruling house and not with ordinary families of
the gentry. They paid great attention to their genealogies, had the
state keep records of them and insisted that the dynastic histories
mentioned their families and their main family members. Lists of
prominent gentry families were set up which mentioned the home of each
clan, so that pretenders could easily be detected. The rules of giving
personal names were changed so that it became possible to identify a
person's genealogical position within the family. At the same time the
contempt of the military underwent modification; the gentry were even
ready to take over high military posts, and also to profit by them.
The new Sui empire found itself faced with many difficulties. During
the three and a half centuries of division, north and south had
developed in different ways. They no longer spoke the same language in
everyday life (we distinguish to this day between a Nanking and Peking
“High Chinese", to say nothing of dialects). The social and economic
structures were very different in the two parts of the country. How
could unity be restored in these things?
Then there was the problem of population. The north-eastern plain
had always been thickly populated; it had early come under Toba rule
and had been able to develop further. The region round the old northern
capital Ch'ang-an, on the other hand, had suffered greatly from the
struggles before the Toba period and had never entirely recovered.
Meanwhile, in the south the population had greatly increased in the
region north of Nanking, while the regions south of the Yangtze and the
upper Yangtze valley were more thinly peopled. The real South, i.e. the
modern provinces of Fukien, Kwangtung and Kwangsi, was still
underdeveloped, mainly because of the malaria there. In the matter of
population the north unquestionably remained prominent.
The founder of the Sui dynasty, known by his reign name of Wen Ti
(589-604), came from the west, close to Ch'ang-an. There he and his
following had their extensive domains. Owing to the scanty population
there and the resulting shortage of agricultural labourers, these
properties were very much less productive than the small properties in
the north-east. This state of things was well known in the south, and
it was expected, with good reason, that the government would try to
transfer parts of the population to the north-west, in order to settle
a peasantry round the capital for the support of its greatly increasing
staff of officials, and to satisfy the gentry of the region. This
produced several revolts in the south.
As an old soldier who had long been a subject of the Toba, Wen Ti
had no great understanding of theory: he was a practical man. He was
anti-intellectual and emotionally attached to Buddhism; he opposed
Confucianism for emotional reasons and believed that it could give him
no serviceable officials of the sort he wanted. He demanded from his
officials the same obedience and sense of duty as from his soldiers;
and he was above all thrifty, almost miserly, because he realized that
the finances of his state could only be brought into order by the
greatest exertions. The budget had to be drawn up for the vast
territory of the empire without any possibility of saying in advance
whether the revenues would come in and whether the transport of dues to
the capital would function.
This cautious calculation was entirely justified, but it aroused
great opposition. Both east and south were used to a much better style
of living; yet the gentry of both regions were now required to cut down
their consumption. On top of this they were excluded from the conduct
of political affairs. In the past, under the Northern Ch'i empire in
the north-east and under the Ch'en empire in the south, there had been
thousands of positions at court in which the whole of the gentry could
find accommodation of some kind. Now the central government was far in
the west, and other people were its administrators. In the past the
gentry had a profitable and easily accessible market for their produce
in the neighbouring capital; now the capital was far away, entailing
long-distance transport at heavy risk with little profit.
The dissatisfied circles of the gentry in the north-east and in the
south incited Prince Kuang to rebellion. The prince and his followers
murdered the emperor and set aside the heir-apparent; and Kuang came to
the throne, assuming the name of Yang Ti. His first act was to transfer
the capital back to the east, to Loyang, close to the grain-producing
regions. His second achievement was to order the construction of great
canals, to facilitate the transport of grain to the capital and to
provide a valuable new market for the producers in the north-east and
the south. It was at this time that the first forerunner of the famous
“Imperial Canal” was constructed, the canal that connects the Yangtze
with the Yellow River. Small canals, connecting various streams, had
long been in existence, so that it was possible to travel from north to
south by water, but these canals were not deep enough or broad enough
to take large freight barges. There are records of lighters of 500 and
even 800 tons capacity! These are dimensions unheard of in the West in
those times. In addition to a serviceable canal to the south, Yang Ti
made another that went north almost to the present Peking.
Hand in hand with these successes of the north-eastern and southern
gentry went strong support for Confucianism, and a reorganization of
the Confucian examination system. As a rule, however, the examinations
were circumvented as an unimportant formality; the various governors
were ordered each to send annually to the capital three men with the
required education, for whose quality they were held personally
responsible; merchants and artisans were expressly excluded.
2 Relations with Turks and with Korea
In foreign affairs an extraordinarily fortunate situation for the
Sui dynasty had come into existence. The T'u-chueeh, the Turks, much
the strongest people of the north, had given support now to one and now
to another of the northern kingdoms, and this, together with their many
armed incursions, had made them the dominant political factor in the
north. But in the first year of the Sui period (581) they split into
two sections, so that the Sui had hopes of gaining influence over them.
At first both sections of the Turks had entered into alliance with
China, but this was not a sufficient safeguard for the Sui, for one of
the Turkish khans was surrounded by Toba who had fled from the vanished
state of the Northern Chou, and who now tried to induce the Turks to
undertake a campaign for the reconquest of North China. The leader of
this agitation was a princess of the Yue-wen family, the ruling family
of the Northern Chou. The Chinese fought the Turks several times; but
much more effective results were gained by their diplomatic missions,
which incited the eastern against the western Turks and vice versa, and
also incited the Turks against the Toba clique. In the end one of the
sections of Turks accepted Chinese overlordship, and some tribes of the
other section were brought over to the Chinese side; also, fresh
disunion was sown among the Turks.
Under the emperor Yang Ti, P'ei Chue carried this policy further. He
induced the Toeloes tribes to attack the T'u-yue-hun, and then himself
attacked the latter, so destroying their power. The T'u-yue-hun were a
people living in the extreme north of Tibet, under a ruling class
apparently of Hsien-pi origin; the people were largely Tibetan. The
purpose of the conquest of the T'u-yue-hun was to safeguard access to
Central Asia. An effective Turkestan policy was, however, impossible so
long as the Turks were still a formidable power. Accordingly, the
intrigues that aimed at keeping the two sections of Turks apart were
continued. In 615 came a decisive counter-attack from the Turks. Their
khan, Shih-pi, made a surprise assault on the emperor himself, with all
his following, in the Ordos region, and succeeded in surrounding them.
They were in just the same desperate situation as when, eight centuries
earlier, the Chinese emperor had been beleaguered by Mao Tun. But the
Chinese again saved themselves by a trick. The young Chinese commander,
Li Shih-min, succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that large
reinforcements were on the way; a Chinese princess who was with the
Turks spread the rumour that the Turks were to be attacked by another
tribe—and Shih-pi raised the siege, although the Chinese had been
entirely defeated.
In the Sui period the Chinese were faced with a further problem.
Korea or, rather, the most important of the three states in Korea, had
generally been on friendly terms with the southern state during the
period of China's division, and for this reason had been more or less
protected from its North Chinese neighbours. After the unification of
China, Korea had reason for seeking an alliance with the Turks, in
order to secure a new counterweight against China.
A Turco-Korean alliance would have meant for China a sort of
encirclement that might have grave consequences. The alliance might be
extended to Japan, who had certain interests in Korea. Accordingly the
Chinese determined to attack Korea, though at the same time
negotiations were set on foot. The fighting, which lasted throughout
the Sui period, involved technical difficulties, as it called for
combined land and sea attacks; in general it brought little success.
3 Reasons for collapse
The continual warfare entailed great expense, and so did the
intrigues, because they depended for their success on bribery. Still
more expensive were the great canal works. In addition to this, the
emperor Yang Ti, unlike his father, was very extravagant. He built
enormous palaces and undertook long journeys throughout the empire with
an immense following. All this wrecked the prosperity which his father
had built up and had tried to safeguard. The only productive
expenditure was that on the canals, and they could not begin to pay in
so short a period. The emperor's continual journeys were due, no doubt,
in part simply to the pursuit of pleasure, though they were probably
intended at the same time to hinder risings and to give the emperor
direct control over every part of the country. But the empire was too
large and too complex for its administration to be possible in the
midst of journeying.
[Illustration: Map 5: The T'ang realm (about A.D. 750)]
The whole of the chancellery had to accompany the emperor, and all
the transport necessary for the feeding of the emperor and his
government had continually to be diverted to wherever he happened to be
staying. All this produced disorder and unrest. The gentry, who at
first had so strongly supported the emperor and had been able to obtain
anything they wanted from him, now began to desert him and set up
pretenders. From 615 onward, after the defeat at the hands of the
Turks, risings broke out everywhere. The emperor had to establish his
government in the south, where he felt safer. There, however, in 618,
he was assassinated by conspirators led by Toba of the Yue-wen family.
Everywhere now independent governments sprang up, and for five years
China was split up into countless petty states.
(B) The T'ang dynasty (A.D. 618-906)
1 Reforms and decentralization
The hero of the Turkish siege, Li Shih-min, had allied himself with
the Turks in 615-16. There were special reasons for his ability to do
this. In his family it had been a regular custom to marry women
belonging to Toba families, so that he naturally enjoyed the confidence
of the Toba party among the Turks. There are various theories as to the
origin of his family, the Li. The family itself claimed to be descended
from the ruling family of the Western Liang. It is doubtful whether
that family was purely Chinese, and in any case Li Shih-min's descent
from it is a matter of doubt. It is possible that his family was a
sinified Toba family, or at least came from a Toba region. However this
may be, Li Shih-min continued the policy which had been pursued since
the beginning of the Sui dynasty by the members of the deposed Toba
ruling family of the Northern Chou—the policy of collaboration with
the Turks in the effort to remove the Sui.
The nominal leadership in the rising that now began lay in the hands
of Li Shih-min's father, Li Yuean; in practice Li Shih-min saw to
everything. At the end of 617 he was outside the first capital of the
Sui, Ch'ang-an, with a Turkish army that had come to his aid on the
strength of the treaty of alliance. After capturing Ch'ang-an he
installed a puppet emperor there, a grandson of Yang Ti. In 618 the
puppet was dethroned and Li Yuean, the father, was made emperor, in the
T'ang dynasty. Internal fighting went on until 623, and only then was
the whole empire brought under the rule of the T'ang.
Great reforms then began. A new land law aimed at equalizing
ownership, so that as far as possible all peasants should own the same
amount of land and the formation of large estates be prevented. The law
aimed also at protecting the peasants from the loss of their land. The
law was, however, nothing but a modification of the Toba land law (
chuen-t'ien), and it was hoped that now it would provide a sound and
solid economic foundation for the empire. From the first, however,
members of the gentry who were connected with the imperial house were
given a privileged position; then officials were excluded from the
prohibition of leasing, so that there continued to be tenant farmers in
addition to the independent peasants. Moreover, the temples enjoyed
special treatment, and were also exempted from taxation. All these
exceptions brought grist to the mills of the gentry, and so did the
failure to carry into effect many of the provisions of the law. Before
long a new gentry had been formed, consisting of the old gentry
together with those who had directly aided the emperor's ascent to the
throne. From the beginning of the eighth century there were repeated
complaints that peasants were “disappearing”. They were entering the
service of the gentry as tenant farmers or farm workers, and owing to
the privileged position of the gentry in regard to taxation, the
revenue sank in proportion as the number of independent peasants
decreased. One of the reasons for the flight of farmers may have been
the corvee laws connected with the “equal land” system: small families
were much less affected by the corvee obligation than larger families
with many sons. It may be, therefore, that large families or at least
sons of the sons in large families moved away in order to escape these
obligations. In order to prevent irregularities, the T'ang renewed the
old “pao-chia” system, as a part of a general reform of the
administration in 624. In this system groups of five families were
collectively responsible for the payment of taxes, the corvee, for
crimes committed by individuals within one group, and for loans from
state agencies. Such a system is attested for pre-Christian times
already; it was re-activated in the eleventh century and again from
time to time, down to the present.
Yet the system of land equalization soon broke down and was
abolished officially around A.D. 780. But the classification of
citizens into different classes, first legalized under the Toba, was
retained and even more refined.
As early as in the Han period there had been a dual
administration—the civil and, independent of it, the military
administration. One and the same area would belong to a particular
administrative prefecture (chuen) and at the same time to a
particular military prefecture (chou). This dual organization
had persisted during the Toba period and, at first, remained unchanged
in the beginning of the T'ang.
The backbone of the military power in the seventh century was the
militia, some six hundred units of an average of a thousand men,
recruited from the general farming population for short-term service:
one month in five in the areas close to the capital. These men formed a
part of the emperor's guards and were under the command of members of
the Shensi gentry. This system which had its direct parallels in the
Han time and evolved out of a Toba system, broke down when short
offensive wars were no longer fought. Other imperial guards were
staffed with young sons of the gentry who were stationed in the most
delicate parts of the palaces. The emperor T'ai-tsung had his personal
bodyguard, a part of his own army of conquest, consisting of his former
bondsmen (pu-ch'ue). The ranks of the Army of conquest were
later filled by descendants of the original soldiers and by orphans.
In the provinces, the armies of the military prefectures gradually
lost their importance when wars became longer and militiamen proved
insufficient. Many of the soldiers here were convicts and exiles. It is
interesting to note that the title of the commander of these armies,
tu-tu, in the fourth century meant a commander in the church-Taoist
organization; it was used by the Toba and from the seventh century on
became widely accepted as title among the Uighurs, Tibetans, Sogdians,
Turks and Khotanese.
When the prefectural armies and the militia forces weakened, special
regional armies were created (from 678 on); this institution had
existed among the Toba, but they had greatly reduced these armies after
500. The commanders of these new T'ang armies soon became more
important than the civil administrators, because they commanded a
number of districts making up a whole province. This assured a better
functioning of the military machine, but put the governors-general in a
position to pursue a policy of their own, even against the central
government. In addition to this, the financial administration of their
commands was put under them, whereas in the past it had been in the
hands of the civil administration of the various provinces. The civil
administration was also reorganized (see the table on pages 83-84).
Towards the end of the T'ang period the state secretariat was set up
in two parts: it was in possession of all information about the
economic and political affairs of the empire, and it made the actual
decisions. Moreover, a number of technical departments had been
created—in all, a system that might compare favourably with European
systems of the eighteenth century. At the end of the T'ang period there
was added to this system a section for economic affairs, working quite
independently of it and directly under the emperor; it was staffed
entirely with economic or financial experts, while for the staffing of
the other departments no special qualification was demanded besides the
passing of the state examinations. In addition to these, at the end of
the T'ang period a new department was in preparation, a sort of Privy
Council, a mainly military organization, probably intended to control
the generals (section 3 of the table on page 83), just as the state
secretariat controlled the civil officials. The Privy Council became
more and more important in the tenth century and especially in the
Mongol epoch. Its absence in the early T'ang period gave the military
governors much too great freedom, ultimately with baneful results.
At first, however, the reforms of A.D. 624 worked well. The
administration showed energy, and taxes flowed in. In the middle of the
eighth century the annual budget of the state included the following
items: over a million tons of grain for the consumption of the capital
and the palace and for salaries of civil and military officials;
twenty-seven million pieces of textiles, also for the consumption of
capital and palace and army, and for supplementary purchases of grain;
two million strings of money (a string nominally held a thousand copper
coins) for salaries and for the army. This was much more than the state
budget of the Han period. The population of the empire had also
increased; it seems to have amounted to some fifty millions. In the
capital a large staff of officials had been created to meet all
administrative needs. The capital grew enormously, at times containing
two million people. Great numbers of young members of the gentry
streamed into the capital for the examinations held under the Confucian
system.
The crowding of people into the capital and the accumulation of
resources there promoted a rich cultural life. We know of many poets of
that period whose poems were real masterpieces; and artists whose works
were admired centuries later. These poets and artists were the pioneers
of the flourishing culture of the later T'ang period. Hand in hand with
this went luxury and refinement of manners. For those who retired from
the bustle of the capital to work on their estates and to enjoy the
society of their friends, there was time to occupy themselves with
Taoism and Buddhism, especially meditative Buddhism. Everyone, of
course, was Confucian, as was fitting for a member of the gentry, but
Confucianism was so taken for granted that it was not discussed. It was
the basis of morality for the gentry, but held no problems. It no
longer contained anything of interest.
Conditions had been much the same once before, at the court of the
Han emperors, but with one great difference: at that time everything of
importance took place in the capital; now, in addition to the actual
capital, Ch'ang-an, there was the second capital, Loyang, in no way
inferior to the other in importance; and the great towns in the south
also played their part as commercial and cultural centres that had
developed in the 360 years of division between north and south. There
the local gentry gathered to lead a cultivated life, though not quite
in the grand style of the capital. If an official was transferred to
the Yangtze, it no longer amounted to a punishment as in the past; he
would not meet only uneducated people, but a society resembling that of
the capital. The institution of governors-general further promoted this
decentralization: the governor-general surrounded himself with a little
court of his own, drawn from the local gentry and the local
intelligentsia. This placed the whole edifice of the empire on a much
broader foundation, with lasting results.
2 Turkish policy
The foreign policy of this first period of the T'ang, lasting until
about 690, was mainly concerned with the Turks and Turkestan. There
were still two Turkish realms in the Far East, both of considerable
strength but in keen rivalry with each other. The T'ang had come into
power with the aid of the eastern Turks, but they admitted the leader
of the western Turks to their court; he had been at Ch'ang-an in the
time of the Sui. He was murdered, however, by Chinese at the
instigation of the eastern Turks. The next khan of the eastern Turks
nevertheless turned against the T'ang, and gave his support to a still
surviving pretender to the throne representing the Sui dynasty; the
khan contended that the old alliance of the eastern Turks had been with
the Sui and not with the T'ang. The T'ang therefore tried to come to
terms once more with the western Turks, who had been affronted by the
assassination; but the negotiations came to nothing in face of an
approach made by the eastern Turks to the western, and of the distrust
of the Chinese with which all the Turks were filled. About 624 there
were strong Turkish invasions, carried right up to the capital.
Suddenly, however, for reasons not disclosed by the Chinese sources,
the Turks withdrew, and the T'ang were able to conclude a fairly
honourable peace. This was the time of the maximum power of the eastern
Turks. Shortly afterwards disturbances broke out (627), under the
leadership of Turkish Uighurs and their allies. The Chinese took
advantage of these disturbances, and in a great campaign in 629-30
succeeded in overthrowing the eastern Turks; the khan was taken to the
imperial court in Ch'ang-an, and the Chinese emperor made himself
“Heavenly Khan” of the Turks. In spite of the protest of many of the
ministers, who pointed to the result of the settlement policy of the
Later Han dynasty, the eastern Turks were settled in the bend of the
upper Hwang-ho and placed more or less under the protectorate of two
governors-general. Their leaders were admitted into the Chinese army,
and the sons of their nobles lived at the imperial court. No doubt it
was hoped in this way to turn the Turks into Chinese, as had been done
with the Toba, though for entirely different reasons. More than a
million Turks were settled in this way, and some of them actually
became Chinese later and gained important posts.
In general, however, this in no way broke the power of the Turks.
The great Turkish empire, which extended as far as Byzantium, continued
to exist. The Chinese success had done no more than safeguard the
frontier from a direct menace and frustrate the efforts of the
supporters of the Sui dynasty and the Toba dynasty, who had been living
among the eastern Turks and had built on them. The power of the western
Turks remained a lasting menace to China, especially if they should
succeed in co-operating with the Tibetans. After the annihilation of
the T'u-yue-hun by the Sui at the very beginning of the seventh
century, a new political unit had formed in northern Tibet, the
T'u-fan, who also seem to have had an upper class of Turks and Mongols
and a Tibetan lower class. Just as in the Han period, Chinese policy
was bound to be directed to preventing a union between Turks and
Tibetans. This, together with commercial interests, seems to have been
the political motive of the Chinese Turkestan policy under the T'ang.
3 Conquest of Turkestan and Korea. Summit of power
The Turkestan wars began in 639 with an attack on the city-state of
Kao-ch'ang (Khocho). This state had been on more or less friendly terms
with North China since the Toba period, and it had succeeded again and
again in preserving a certain independence from the Turks. Now,
however, Kao-ch'ang had to submit to the western Turks, whose power was
constantly increasing. China made that submission a pretext for war. By
640 the whole basin of Turkestan was brought under Chinese dominance.
The whole campaign was really directed against the western Turks, to
whom Turkestan had become subject. The western Turks had been crippled
by two internal events, to the advantage of the Chinese: there had been
a tribal rising, and then came the rebellion and the rise of the
Uighurs (640-650). These events belong to Turkish history, and we shall
confine ourselves here to their effects on Chinese history. The Chinese
were able to rely on the Uighurs; above all, they were furnished by the
Toeloes Turks with a large army, with which they turned once more
against Turkestan in 647-48, and now definitely established their rule
there.
The active spirit at the beginning of the T'ang rule had not been
the emperor but his son Li Shih-min, who was not, however, named as
heir to the throne because he was not the eldest son. The result of
this was tension between Li Shih-min and his father and brothers,
especially the heir to the throne. When the brothers learned that Li
Shih-min was claiming the succession, they conspired against him, and
in 626, at the very moment when the western Turks had made a rapid
incursion and were once more threatening the Chinese capital, there
came an armed collision between the brothers, in which Li Shih-min was
the victor. The brothers and their families were exterminated, the
father compelled to abdicate, and Li Shih-min became emperor, assuming
the name T'ai Tsung (627-649). His reign marked the zenith of the power
of China and of the T'ang dynasty. Their inner struggles and the
Chinese penetration of Turkestan had weakened the position of the
Turks; the reorganization of the administration and of the system of
taxation, the improved transport resulting from the canals constructed
under the Sui, and the useful results of the creation of great
administrative areas under strong military control, had brought China
inner stability and in consequence external power and prestige. The
reputation which she then obtained as the most powerful state of the
Far East endured when her inner stability had begun to deteriorate.
Thus in 638 the Sassanid ruler Jedzgerd sent a mission to China asking
for her help against the Arabs. Three further missions came at
intervals of a good many years. The Chinese declined, however, to send
a military expedition to such a distance; they merely conferred on the
ruler the title of a Chinese governor; this was of little help against
the Arabs, and in 675 the last ruler, Peruz, fled to the Chinese court.
The last years of T'ai Tsung's reign were filled with a great war
against Korea, which represented a continuation of the plans of the Sui
emperor Yang Ti. This time Korea came firmly into Chinese possession.
In 661, under T'ai Tsung's son, the Korean fighting was resumed, this
time against Japanese who were defending their interests in Korea. This
was the period of great Japanese enthusiasm for China. The Chinese
system of administration was copied, and Buddhism was adopted, together
with every possible element of Chinese culture. This meant increased
trade with Japan, bringing in large profits to China, and so the Korean
middleman was to be eliminated.
T'ai Tsung's son, Kao Tsung (650-683), merely carried to a
conclusion what had been begun. Externally China's prestige continued
at its zenith. The caravans streamed into China from western and
central Asia, bringing great quantities of luxury goods. At this time,
however, the foreign colonies were not confined to the capital but were
installed in all the important trading ports and inland trade centres.
The whole country was covered by a commercial network; foreign
merchants who had come overland to China met others who had come by
sea. The foreigners set up their own counting-houses and warehouses;
whole quarters of the capital were inhabited entirely by foreigners who
lived as if they were in their own country. They brought with them
their own religions: Manichaeism, Mazdaism, and Nestorian Christianity.
The first Jews came into China, apparently as dealers in fabrics, and
the first Arabian Mohammedans made their appearance. In China the
foreigners bought silkstuffs and collected everything of value that
they could find, especially precious metals. Culturally this influx of
foreigners enriched China; economically, as in earlier periods, it did
not; its disadvantages were only compensated for a time by the very
beneficial results of the trade with Japan, and this benefit did not
last long.
4 The reign of the empress Wu: Buddhism and capitalism
The pressure of the western Turks had been greatly weakened in this
period, especially as their attention had been diverted to the west,
where the advance of Islam and of the Arabs was a new menace for them.
On the other hand, from 650 onward the Tibetans gained immensely in
power, and pushed from the south into the Tarim basin. In 678 they
inflicted a heavy defeat on the Chinese, and it cost the T'ang decades
of diplomatic effort before they attained, in 699, their aim of
breaking up the Tibetans' realm and destroying their power. In the last
year of Kao Tsung's reign, 683, came the first of the wars of
liberation of the northern Turks, known until then as the western
Turks, against the Chinese. And with the end of Kao Tsung's reign began
the decline of the T'ang regime. Most of the historians attribute it to
a woman, the later empress Wu. She had been a concubine of T'ai Tsung,
and after his death had become a Buddhist nun—a frequent custom of the
time—until Kao Tsung fell in love with her and made her a concubine of
his own. In the end he actually divorced the empress and made the
concubine empress (655). She gained more and more influence, being
placed on a par with the emperor and soon entirely eliminating him in
practice; in 680 she removed the rightful heir to the throne and put
her own son in his place; after Kao Tsung's death in 683 she became
regent for her son. Soon afterward she dethroned him in favour of his
twenty-two-year-old brother; in 690 she deposed him too and made
herself empress in the “Chou dynasty” (690-701). This officially ended
the T'ang dynasty.
Matters, however, were not so simple as this might suggest. For
otherwise on the empress's deposition there would not have been a mass
of supporters moving heaven and earth to treat the new empress Wei
(705-712) in the same fashion. There is every reason to suppose that
behind the empress Wu there was a group opposing the ruling clique. In
spite of everything, the T'ang government clique was very pro-Turkish,
and many Turks and members of Toba families had government posts and,
above all, important military commands. No campaign of that period was
undertaken without Turkish auxiliaries. The fear seems to have been
felt in some quarters that this T'ang group might pursue a military
policy hostile to the gentry. The T'ang group had its roots mainly in
western China; thus the eastern Chinese gentry were inclined to be
hostile to it. The first act of the empress Wu had been to transfer the
capital to Loyang in the east. Thus, she tried to rely upon the
co-operation of the eastern gentry which since the Northern Chou and
Sui dynasties had been out of power. While the western gentry brought
their children into government positions by claiming family privileges
(a son of a high official had the right to a certain position without
having passed the regular examinations), the sons of the eastern gentry
had to pass through the examinations. Thus, there were differences in
education and outlook between both groups which continued long after
the death of the empress. In addition, the eastern gentry, who
supported the empress Wu and later the empress Wei, were closely
associated with the foreign merchants of western Asia and the Buddhist
Church to which they adhered. In gratitude for help from the Buddhists,
the empress Wu endowed them with enormous sums of money, and tried to
make Buddhism a sort of state religion. A similar development had taken
place in the Toba and also in the Sui period. Like these earlier
rulers, the empress Wu seems to have aimed at combining spiritual
leadership with her position as ruler of the empire.
In this epoch Buddhism helped to create the first beginnings of
large-scale capitalism. In connection with the growing foreign trade,
the monasteries grew in importance as repositories of capital; the
temples bought more and more land, became more and more wealthy, and so
gained increasing influence over economic affairs. They accumulated
large quantities of metal, which they stored in the form of bronze
figures of Buddha, and with these stocks they exercised controlling
influence over the money market. There is a constant succession of
records of the total weight of the bronze figures, as an indication of
the money value they represented. It is interesting to observe that
temples and monasteries acquired also shops and had rental income from
them. They further operated many mills, as did the owners of private
estates (now called “chuang“) and thus controlled the price of
flour, and polished rice.
The cultural influence of Buddhism found expression in new and
improved translations of countless texts, and in the passage of
pilgrims along the caravan routes, helped by the merchants, as far as
western Asia and India, like the famous Hsuean-tsang. Translations were
made not only from Indian or other languages into Chinese, but also,
for instance, from Chinese into the Uighur and other Turkish tongues,
and into Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese.
The attitude of the Turks can only be understood when we realize
that the background of events during the time of empress Wu was formed
by the activities of groups of the eastern Chinese gentry. The northern
Turks, who since 630 had been under Chinese overlordship, had fought
many wars of liberation against the Chinese; and through the conquest
of neighbouring Turks they had gradually become once more, in the
decade-and-a-half after the death of Kao Tsung, a great Turkish realm.
In 698 the Turkish khan, at the height of his power, demanded a Chinese
prince for his daughter—not, as had been usual in the past, a princess
for his son. His intention, no doubt, was to conquer China with the
prince's aid, to remove the empress Wu, and to restore the T'ang
dynasty—but under Turkish overlordship! Thus, when the empress Wu sent
a member of her own family, the khan rejected him and demanded the
restoration of the deposed T'ang emperor. To enforce this demand, he
embarked on a great campaign against China. In this the Turks must have
been able to rely on the support of a strong group inside China, for
before the Turkish attack became dangerous the empress Wu recalled the
deposed emperor, at first as “heir to the throne”; thus she yielded to
the khan's principal demand.
In spite of this, the Turkish attacks did not cease. After a series
of imbroglios within the country in which a group under the leadership
of the powerful Ts'ui gentry family had liquidated the supporters of
the empress Wu shortly before her death, a T'ang prince finally
succeeded in killing empress Wei and her clique. At first, his father
ascended the throne, but was soon persuaded to abdicate in favour of
his son, now called emperor Hsueang Tsung (713-755), just as the first
ruler of the T'ang dynasty had done. The practice of abdicating—in
contradiction with the Chinese concept of the ruler as son of Heaven
and the duties of a son towards his father—seems to have impressed
Japan where similar steps later became quite common. With Hsuean Tsung
there began now a period of forty-five years, which the Chinese
describe as the second blossoming of T'ang culture, a period that
became famous especially for its painting and literature.
5 Second blossoming of T'ang culture
The T'ang literature shows the co-operation of many favourable
factors. The ancient Chinese classical style of official reports and
decrees which the Toba had already revived, now led to the clear prose
style of the essayists, of whom Han Yue (768-825) and Liu Tsung-yuean
(747-796) call for special mention. But entirely new forms of sentences
make their appearance in prose writing, with new pictures and similes
brought from India through the medium of the Buddhist translations.
Poetry was also enriched by the simple songs that spread in the north
under Turkish influence, and by southern influences. The great poets of
the T'ang period adopted the rules of form laid down by the poetic art
of the south in the fifth century; but while at that time the writing
of poetry was a learned pastime, precious and formalistic, the T'ang
poets brought to it genuine feeling. Widespread fame came to Li T'ai-po
(701-762) and Tu Fu (712-770); in China two poets almost equal to these
two in popularity were Po Chue-i (772-846) and Yuean Chen (779-831),
who in their works kept as close as possible to the vernacular.
New forms of poetry rarely made their appearance in the T'ang
period, but the existing forms were brought to the highest perfection.
Not until the very end of the T'ang period did there appear the form of
a “free” versification, with lines of no fixed length. This form came
from the indigenous folk-songs of south-western China, and was spread
through the agency of the filles de joie in the tea-houses.
Before long it became the custom to string such songs together in a
continuous series—the first step towards opera. For these song
sequences were sung by way of accompaniment to the theatrical
productions. The Chinese theatre had developed from two sources—from
religious games, bullfights and wrestling, among Turkish and Mongol
peoples, which developed into dancing displays; and from sacrificial
games of South Chinese origin. Thus the Chinese theatre, with its union
with music, should rather be called opera, although it offers a sort of
pantomimic show. What amounted to a court conservatoire trained actors
and musicians as early as in the T'ang period for this court opera.
These actors and musicians were selected from the best-looking
“commoners", but they soon tended to become a special caste with a
legal status just below that of “burghers”.
In plastic art there are fine sculptures in stone and bronze, and we
have also technically excellent fabrics, the finest of lacquer, and
remains of artistic buildings; but the principal achievement of the
T'ang period lies undoubtedly in the field of painting. As in poetry,
in painting there are strong traces of alien influences; even before
the T'ang period, the painter Hsieh Ho laid down the six fundamental
laws of painting, in all probability drawn from Indian practice.
Foreigners were continually brought into China as decorators of
Buddhist temples, since the Chinese could not know at first how the new
gods had to be presented. The Chinese regarded these painters as
craftsmen, but admired their skill and their technique and learned from
them.
The most famous Chinese painter of the T'ang period is Wu
Tao-tz[)u], who was also the painter most strongly influenced by
Central Asian works. As a pious Buddhist he painted pictures for
temples among others. Among the landscape painters, Wang Wei (721-759)
ranks first; he was also a famous poet and aimed at uniting poem and
painting into an integral whole. With him begins the great tradition of
Chinese landscape painting, which attained its zenith later, in the
Sung epoch.
Porcelain had been invented in China long ago. There was as yet none
of the white porcelain that is preferred today; the inside was a
brownish-yellow; but on the whole it was already technically and
artistically of a very high quality. Since porcelain was at first
produced only for the requirements of the court and of high
dignitaries—mostly in state factories—a few centuries later the T'ang
porcelain had become a great rarity. But in the centuries that
followed, porcelain became an important new article of Chinese export.
The Chinese prisoners taken by the Arabs in the great battle of
Samarkand (751), the first clash between the world of Islam and China,
brought to the West the knowledge of Chinese culture, of several
Chinese crafts, of the art of papermaking, and also of porcelain.
The emperor Hsuean Tsung gave active encouragement to all things
artistic. Poets and painters contributed to the elegance of his
magnificent court ceremonial. As time went on he showed less and less
interest in public affairs, and grew increasingly inclined to Taoism
and mysticism in general—an outcome of the fact that the conduct of
matters of state was gradually taken out of his hands. On the whole,
however, Buddhism was pushed into the background in favour of
Confucianism, as a reaction from the unusual privileges that had been
accorded to the Buddhists in the past fifteen years under the empress
Wu.
6 Revolt of a military governor
At the beginning of Hsuean Tsung's reign the capital had been in the
east at Loyang; then it was transferred once more to Ch'ang-an in the
west due to pressure of the western gentry. The emperor soon came under
the influence of the unscrupulous but capable and energetic Li Lin-fu,
a distant relative of the ruler. Li was a virtual dictator at the court
from 736 to 752, who had first advanced in power by helping the
concubine Wu, a relative of the famous empress Wu, and by continually
playing the eastern against the western gentry. After the death of the
concubine Wu, he procured for the emperor a new concubine named Yang,
of a western family. This woman, usually called “Concubine Yang” (Yang
Kui-fei), became the heroine of countless stage-plays and stories and
even films; all the misfortunes that marked the end of Hsuean Tsung's
reign were attributed solely to her. This is incorrect, as she was but
a link in the chain of influences that played upon the emperor.
Naturally she found important official posts for her brothers and all
her relatives; but more important than these was a military governor
named An Lu-shan (703-757). His mother was a Turkish shamaness, his
father, a foreigner probably of Sogdian origin. An Lu-shan succeeded in
gaining favour with the Li clique, which hoped to make use of him for
its own ends. Chinese sources describe him as a prodigy of evil, and it
will be very difficult today to gain a true picture of his personality.
In any case, he was certainly a very capable officer. His rise started
from a victory over the Kitan in 744. He spent some time establishing
relations with the court and then went back to resume operations
against the Kitan. He made so much of the Kitan peril that he was
permitted a larger army than usual, and he had command of 150,000
troops in the neighbourhood of Peking. Meanwhile Li Lin-fu died. He had
sponsored An as a counterbalance against the western gentry. When now,
within the clique of Li Lin-fu, the Yang family tried to seize power,
they turned against An Lu-shan. But he marched against the capital,
Ch'ang-an, with 200,000 men; on his way he conquered Loyang and made
himself emperor (756: Yen dynasty). T'ang troops were sent against him
under the leadership of the Chinese Kuo Tz[)u]-i, a Kitan commander,
and a Turk, Ko-shu Han.
The first two generals had considerable success, but Ko-shu Han,
whose task was to prevent access to the western capital, was quickly
defeated and taken prisoner. The emperor fled betimes, and An Lu-shan
captured Ch'ang-an. The emperor now abdicated; his son, emperor Su
Tsung (756-762), also fled, though not with him into Szechwan, but into
north-western Shensi. There he defended himself against An Lu-shan and
his capable general Shih Ss[)u]-ming (himself a Turk), and sought aid
in Central Asia. A small Arab troop came from the caliph Abu-Jafar, and
also small bands from Turkestan; of more importance was the arrival of
Uighur cavalry in substantial strength. At the end of 757 there was a
great battle in the neighbourhood of the capital, in which An Lu-shan
was defeated by the Uighurs; shortly afterwards he was murdered by one
of his eunuchs. His followers fled; Loyang was captured and looted by
the Uighurs. The victors further received in payment from the T'ang
government 10,000 rolls of silk with a promise of 20,000 rolls a year;
the Uighur khan was given a daughter of the emperor as his wife. An
Lu-shan's general, the Turk Shih Ss[)u]-ming, entered into An Lu-shan's
heritage, and dominated so large a part of eastern China that the
Chinese once more made use of the Uighurs to bring him down. The
commanders in the fighting against Shih Ss[)u]-ming this time were once
more Kuo Tz[)u]-i and the Kitan general, together with P'u-ku Huai-en,
a member of a Toeloes family that had long been living in China. At
first Shih Ss[)u]-ming was victorious, and he won back Loyang, but then
he was murdered by his own son, and only by taking advantage of the
disturbances that now arose were the government troops able to quell
the dangerous rising.
In all this, two things seem interesting and important. To begin
with, An Lu-shan had been a military governor. His rising showed that
while this new office, with its great command of power, was of value in
attacking external enemies, it became dangerous, especially if the
central power was weak, the moment there were no external enemies of
any importance. An Lu-shan's rising was the first of many similar ones
in the later T'ang period. The gentry of eastern China had shown
themselves entirely ready to support An Lu-shan against the government,
because they had hoped to gain advantage as in the past from a realm
with its centre once more in the east. In the second place, the
important part played by aliens in events within China calls for
notice: not only were the rebels An Lu-shan and Shih Ss[)u]-ming
non-Chinese, but so also were most of the generals opposed to them. But
they regarded themselves as Chinese, not as members of another national
group. The Turkish Uighurs brought in to help against them were
fighting actually against Turks, though they regarded those Turks as
Chinese. We must not bring to the circumstances of those times the
present-day notions with regard to national feeling.
7 The role of the Uighurs. Confiscation of the capital of the
monasteries
This rising and its sequels broke the power of the dynasty, and also
of the empire. The extremely sanguinary wars had brought fearful
suffering upon the population. During the years of the rising, no taxes
came in from the greater part of the empire, but great sums had to be
paid to the peoples who had lent aid to the empire. And the looting by
government troops and by the auxiliaries injured the population as much
as the war itself did.
When the emperor Su Tsung died, in 762, Tengri, the khan of the
Uighurs, decided to make himself ruler over China. The events of the
preceding years had shown him that China alone was entirely
defenceless. Part of the court clique supported him, and only by the
intervention of P'u-ku Huai-en, who was related to Tengri by marriage,
was his plan frustrated. Naturally there were countless intrigues
against P'u-ku Huai-en. He entered into alliance with the Tibetan
T'u-fan, and in this way the union of Turks and Tibetans, always feared
by the Chinese, had come into existence. In 763 the Tibetans captured
and burned down the western capital, while P'u-ku Huai-en with the
Uighurs advanced from the north. Undoubtedly this campaign would have
been successful, giving an entirely different turn to China's destiny,
if P'u-ku Huai-en had not died in 765 and the Chinese under Kuo
Tz[)u]-i had not succeeded in breaking up the alliance. The Uighurs now
came over into an alliance with the Chinese, and the two allies fell
upon the Tibetans and robbed them of their booty. China was saved once
more.
Friendship with the Uighurs had to be paid for this time even more
dearly. They crowded into the capital and compelled the Chinese to buy
horses, in payment for which they demanded enormous quantities of
silkstuffs. They behaved in the capital like lords, and expected to be
maintained at the expense of the government. The system of military
governors was adhered to in spite of the country's experience of them,
while the difficult situation throughout the empire, and especially
along the western and northern frontiers, facing the Tibetans and the
more and more powerful Kitan, made it necessary to keep considerable
numbers of soldiers permanently with the colours. This made the
military governors stronger and stronger; ultimately they no longer
remitted any taxes to the central government, but spent them mainly on
their armies. Thus from 750 onward the empire consisted of an impotent
central government and powerful military governors, who handed on their
positions to their sons as a further proof of their independence. When
in 781 the government proposed to interfere with the inheriting of the
posts, there was a great new rising, which in 783 again extended as far
as the capital; in 784 the T'ang government at last succeeded in
overcoming it. A compromise was arrived at between the government and
the governors, but it in no way improved the situation. Life became
more and more difficult for the central government. In 780, the “equal
land” system was finally officially given up and with it a tax system
which was based upon the idea that every citizen had the same amount of
land and, therefore, paid the same amount of taxes. The new system
tried to equalize the tax burden and the corvee obligation, but not the
land. This change may indicate a step towards greater freedom for
private enterprise. Yet it did not benefit the government, as most of
the tax income was retained by the governors and was used for their
armies and their own court.
In the capital, eunuchs ruled in the interests of various cliques.
Several emperors fell victim to them or to the drinking of “elixirs of
long life”.
Abroad, the Chinese lost their dominion over Turkestan, for which
Uighurs and Tibetans competed. There is nothing to gain from any full
description of events at court. The struggle between cliques soon
became a struggle between eunuchs and literati, in much the same way as
at the end of the second Han dynasty. Trade steadily diminished, and
the state became impoverished because no taxes were coming in and great
armies had to be maintained, though they did not even obey the
government.
Events that exerted on the internal situation an influence not to be
belittled were the break-up of the Uighurs (from 832 onward) the
appearance of the Turkish Sha-t'o, and almost at the same time, the
dissolution of the Tibetan empire (from 842). Many other foreigners had
placed themselves under the Uighurs living in China, in order to be
able to do business under the political protection of the Uighur
embassy, but the Uighurs no longer counted, and the T'ang government
decided to seize the capital sums which these foreigners had
accumulated. It was hoped in this way especially to remedy the
financial troubles of the moment, which were partly due to a shortage
of metal for minting. As the trading capital was still placed with the
temples as banks, the government attacked the religion of the Uighurs,
Manichaeism, and also the religions of the other foreigners, Mazdaism,
Nestorianism, and apparently also Islam. In 843 alien religions were
prohibited; aliens were also ordered to dress like Chinese. This gave
them the status of Chinese citizens and no longer of foreigners, so
that Chinese justice had a hold over them. That this law abolishing
foreign religions was aimed solely at the foreigners' capital is shown
by the proceedings at the same time against Buddhism which had long
become a completely Chinese Church. Four thousand, six hundred Buddhist
temples, 40,000 shrines and monasteries were secularized, and all
statues were required to be melted down and delivered to the
government, even those in private possession. Two hundred and sixty
thousand, five hundred monks were to become ordinary citizens once
more. Until then monks had been free of taxation, as had millions of
acres of land belonging to the temples and leased to tenants or some
150,000 temple slaves.
Thus the edict of 843 must not be described as concerned with
religion: it was a measure of compulsion aimed at filling the
government coffers. All the property of foreigners and a large part of
the property of the Buddhist Church came into the hands of the
government. The law was not applied to Taoism, because the ruling
gentry of the time were, as so often before, Confucianist and at the
same time Taoist. As early as 846 there came a reaction: with the new
emperor, Confucians came into power who were at the same time Buddhists
and who now evicted some of the Taoists. From this time one may observe
closer co-operation between Confucianism and Buddhism; not only with
meditative Buddhism (Dhyana) as at the beginning of the T'ang epoch and
earlier, but with the main branch of Buddhism, monastery Buddhism
(Vinaya). From now onward the Buddhist doctrines of transmigration and
retribution, which had been really directed against the gentry and in
favour of the common people, were turned into an instrument serving the
gentry: everyone who was unfortunate in this life must show such
amenability to the government and the gentry that he would have a
chance of a better existence at least in the next life. Thus the
revolutionary Buddhist doctrine of retribution became a reactionary
doctrine that was of great service to the gentry. One of the Buddhist
Confucians in whose works this revised version makes its appearance
most clearly was Niu Seng-yu, who was at once summoned back to court in
846 by the new emperor. Three new large Buddhist sects came into
existence in the T'ang period. One of them, the school of the Pure Land
(Ching-t'u tsung, since 641) required of its mainly lower class
adherents only the permanent invocation of the Buddha Amithabha who
would secure them a place in the “Western Paradise”—a place without
social classes and economic troubles. The cult of Maitreya, which was
always more revolutionary, receded for a while.
8 First successful peasant revolt. Collapse of the empire
The chief sufferers from the continual warfare of the military
governors, the sanguinary struggles between the cliques, and the
universal impoverishment which all this fighting produced, were, of
course, the common people. The Chinese annals are filled with records
of popular risings, but not one of these had attained any wide extent,
for want of organization. In 860 began the first great popular rising,
a revolt caused by famine in the province of Chekiang. Government
troops suppressed it with bloodshed. Further popular risings followed.
In 874 began a great rising in the south of the present province of
Hopei, the chief agrarian region.
The rising was led by a peasant, Wang Hsien-chih, together with
Huang Ch'ao, a salt merchant, who had fallen into poverty and had
joined the hungry peasants, forming a fighting group of his own. It is
important to note that Huang was well educated. It is said that he
failed in the state examination. Huang is not the first merchant who
became rebel. An Lu-shan, too, had been a businessman for a while. It
was pointed out that trade had greatly developed in the T'ang period;
of the lower Yangtze region people it was said that “they were so much
interested in business that they paid no attention to agriculture”. Yet
merchants were subject to many humiliating conditions. They could not
enter the examinations, except by illegal means. In various periods,
from the Han time on, they had to wear special dress. Thus, a law from
c. A.D. 300 required them to wear a white turban on which name and
type of business was written, and to wear one white and one black shoe.
They were subject to various taxes, but were either not allowed to own
land, or were allotted less land than ordinary citizens. Thus they
could not easily invest in land, the safest investment at that time.
Finally, the government occasionally resorted to the method which was
often used in the Near East: when in 782 the emperor ran out of money,
he requested the merchants of the capital to “loan” him a large sum—a
request which in fact was a special tax.
Wang and Huang both proved good organizers of the peasant masses,
and in a short time they had captured the whole of eastern China,
without the military governors being able to do anything against them,
for the provincial troops were more inclined to show sympathy to the
peasant armies than to fight them. The terrified government issued an
order to arm the people of the other parts of the country against the
rebels; naturally this helped the rebels more than the government,
since the peasants thus armed went over to the rebels. Finally Wang was
offered a high office. But Huang urged him not to betray his own
people, and Wang declined the offer. In the end the government, with
the aid of the troops of the Turkish Sha-t'o, defeated Wang and
beheaded him (878). Huang Ch'ao now moved into the south-east and the
south, where in 879 he captured and burned down Canton; according to an
Arab source, over 120,000 foreign merchants lost their lives in
addition to the Chinese. From Canton Huang Ch'ao returned to the north,
laden with loot from that wealthy commercial city. His advance was held
up again by the Sha-t'o troops; he turned away to the lower Yangtze,
and from there marched north again. At the end of 880 he captured the
eastern capital. The emperor fled from the western capital, Ch'ang-an,
into Szechwan, and Huang Ch'ao now captured with ease the western
capital as well, and removed every member of the ruling family on whom
he could lay hands. He then made himself emperor, in a Ch'i dynasty. It
was the first time that a peasant rising had succeeded against the
gentry.
There was still, however, the greatest disorder in the empire. There
were other peasant armies on the move, armies that had deserted their
governors and were fighting for themselves; finally, there were still a
few supporters of the imperial house and, above all, the Turkish
Sha-t'o, who had a competent commander with the sinified name of Li
K'o-yung. The Sha-t'o, who had remained loyal to the government,
revolted the moment the government had been overthrown. They ran the
risk, however, of defeat at the hands of an alien army of the Chinese
government's, commanded by an Uighur, and they therefore fled to the
Tatars. In spite of this, the Chinese entered again into relations with
the Sha-t'o, as without them there could be no possibility of getting
rid of Huang Ch'ao. At the end of 881 Li K'o-yung fell upon the
capital; there was a fearful battle. Huang Ch'ao was able to hold out,
but a further attack was made in 883 and he was defeated and forced to
flee; in 884 he was killed by the Sha-t'o.
This popular rising, which had only been overcome with the aid of
foreign troops, brought the end of the T'ang dynasty. In 885 the T'ang
emperor was able to return to the capital, but the only question now
was whether China should be ruled by the Sha-t'o under Li K'o-yung or
by some other military commander. In a short time Chu Ch'uean-chung, a
former follower of Huang Ch'ao, proved to be the strongest of the
commanders. In 890 open war began between the two leaders. Li K'o-yung
was based on Shansi; Chu Ch'uean-chung had control of the plains in the
east. Meanwhile the governors of Szechwan in the west and Chekiang in
the south-east made themselves independent. Both declared themselves
kings or emperors and set up dynasties of their own (from 895).
Within the capital, the emperor was threatened several times by
revolts, so that he had to flee and place himself in the hands of Li
K'o-yung as the only leader on whose loyalty he could count. Soon after
this, however, the emperor fell into the hands of Chu Ch'uean-chung,
who killed the whole entourage of the emperor, particularly the
eunuchs; after a time he had the emperor himself killed, set a
puppet—as had become customary—on the throne, and at the beginning of
907 took over the rule from him, becoming emperor in the “Later Liang
dynasty”.
That was the end of the T'ang dynasty, at the beginning of which
China had risen to unprecedented power. Its downfall had been brought
about by the military governors, who had built up their power and had
become independent hereditary satraps, exploiting the people for their
own purposes, and by their continual mutual struggles undermining the
economic structure of the empire. In addition to this, the empire had
been weakened first by its foreign trade and then by the dependence on
foreigners, especially Turks, into which it had fallen owing to
internal conditions. A large part of the national income had gone
abroad. Such is the explanation of the great popular risings which
ultimately brought the dynasty to its end.