by John Keay
Yet for none of these is Xuanzang best remembered in China today. Rather is he known almost exclusively in connection with a novel. The novel is called The Journey to the West (or sometimes Monkey or The Monkey King); and a clearly recognisable Xuanzang actually features in it. Written in the sixteenth century but incorporating a variety of earlier narratives, it is a work not just of fiction but of the wildest fantasy, of fable and allegory, humour, tragedy, spectacular nonsense and such profundity that no two commentators can agree about it. Tang Taizong features in it too (he visits the Underworld), as do many other historical figures, including the Buddha. But by Chapter 13, with eighty-seven to follow, the celebrities make way for a small band of human and animal wayfarers. Among them, the eponymous monkey Sun Wugong is prominent and is thought somehow to be related to the monkey-god Hanuman in the Indian Ramayana. ‘Courage and prowess in battle, ability to fly, and the tendency to attack their enemies through their bellies’ have been noted as characteristics common to both.24
Some readers have interpreted the book, which freely incorporates Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist concepts, as an allegory on the convergence of these ‘three schools’ of learning. Others, especially Marxists, have read the wayfarers’ endless encounters with gods and monsters as evidence of class struggle and the triumph of the proletariat. The martial as well as the magical arts are well represented, providing scope for illustrators, a challenge to film-makers and a gift to animators. Today, as ever, this comic derivative from Xuanzang’s often taxing Record of the Western Regions remains perhaps the best-loved work in all Chinese fiction. It is as if, confronted by a wider world beyond its comprehension, the pre-modern mind sought reassurance in exaggeration and fictionalisation. Europeans would do the same. The mysterious John de Mandeville would peddle exotic nonsense that was acceptable as travel literature; and Marco Polo would peddle facts so apparently ‘outlandish’ they were taken as fiction.
9
HIGH TANG
650–755
WANTON, NOT WAYWARD
THOUGH EMPERORS WERE NEITHER SUBJECT TO any form of law nor accountable to anything in the nature of a representative body, they were not therefore beyond all restraint. The Mandate might be forfeited if they abused it; more immediately, ministers could offer objections and criticism. ‘If it is not right, remonstrate,’ Confucius had told one of his office-seeking disciples. In the Confucian scheme of things, strict obedience to one’s betters by no means precluded constructive protest. On the contrary, confronted by injustice, ‘the son cannot but remonstrate with his father’, said the Master, ‘and the minister cannot but remonstrate with his prince’.1
The exercise of absolute power being peculiarly liable to abuse, Confucian tradition required ministers and advisers to be vigilant and to give voice to their misgivings, albeit in allusive language larded with respectful sentiments and laced with historical references. It was not just their right to do so but their moral duty. Serving the emperor meant dissuading him from conduct that might alienate his subjects or otherwise jeopardise his enjoyment of the Mandate. Corrective advice was thus a moral obligation enshrined in the responsibilities of office. Whatever the risks – and they could be fatal – those charged with the role of remonstrance were expected to exercise it. And just as fearless reproof distinguished the greatest ministers, so a receptive disposition was the mark of a truly great emperor.
Tang Taizong’s thirty-two-year reign was notable for the establishment of one of the empire’s longest-lasting dynasties and for a dramatic extension of its frontiers, but no less important – in fact the clearest evidence of the moral rectitude that made these achievements possible – was the forbearance initially shown by the emperor towards his badgering ministers. Of these, not the most powerful but certainly the most persistent was a cantankerous old office-holder with a chequered history called Wei Zheng. Twenty years the emperor’s senior, abstemious, humourless, ultra-cautious, partially blind and infuriatingly doctrinaire, Wei Zheng typified the Confucian bureaucrat. In an age more notable for entrenched privilege, he represented the ideal of high moral and intellectual worth triumphing over hereditary influence; and as such, as a beacon of rectitude, a barrier to indulgence, a stickler for etiquette, and the doughtiest of remonstrants, he would become a model to future generations.
After Wei Zheng’s death in 643, the emperor revered him as ‘a sturdy bamboo touched by frost’, the reference being to his crusty temperament as much as his age. In Monkey, the sixteenth-century novel based on Xuanzang’s travels, Wei Zheng is portrayed as a vigilant martinet who gets to guard the door of Taizong’s bedchamber. Indeed, his effigy is said to play this role still at the entrances to some Taiwanese temples.2 But in the People’s Republic of China there would be no place for a figure so closely associated with legitimate protest. Ostensibly for republishing a standard eleventh-century biography of Wei Zheng, in 1966 Lu Dingyi, the then minister of culture, member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and director of its Propaganda Department, was disgraced and removed from office. ‘It is now clear’, intoned the People’s Daily, ‘that Lu Dingyi’s concoction “The Biography of Wei Zheng” was a poisonous shaft directed at Chairman Mao, the red sun in our hearts; it was a manifesto for stirring up a counter-revolutionary restoration.’3 According to the newspaper, the relationship between Wei Zheng and Tang Taizong had been a sham; both ruthlessly exploited the peasants; they differed only as to the means; their altercations were therefore irrelevant, and publicising them could only be mischievous.
This was a bit unfair on Wei Zheng, who had often cited the welfare of the people when endeavouring to restrain his headstrong emperor. But such niceties went unnoticed in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The perils that attended the reissue of an eleventh-century text typified the constraints under which historical scholarship in the twentieth century long laboured. Criticism, admonition and reproof, though obligatory in a minister of the emperor’s ‘feudal regime’, could be revisionist heresy in a minister of the People’s Republic.
In reality Tang Taizong often ignored Wei Zheng’s criticisms. He particularly resented the bureaucrat’s insistence on frugality, fiscal restraint and the avoidance of war; wuwei (‘inaction’) was not in his nature. Their relationship eventually deteriorated and in the late 630s, as the emperor assumed the offensive against the Eastern Turks in Xinjiang, Wei Zheng lost some of his influence. Yet he kept his official rank, most of his offices and the emperor’s avowed esteem. It was a tribute to them both.
It also helps explain why Tang Taizong, despite deposing his father, murdering his brothers and waging a disastrous war on Koguryo, would receive highly favourable treatment from Wei Zheng’s Confucian colleagues and successors when they came to compile the Standard History of his reign. According to one of them, Tang Taizong’s reign rated as a halcyon age. His subjects basked amid plenty in as peaceful a realm as the conventional hyperbole reserved for such eulogies could depict.
Merchants travelling in the wilderness were never again robbed by bandits. The prisons were usually empty. Horses and cows roamed the open country. Gates went unlocked. Repeatedly there were abundant harvests and the price of grain fell to three or four copper cash per peck. Travelling [even to the extremities of the country] . . . no one had to carry provisions but could obtain them on the way . . . There has been nothing like this since antiquity.4
Nor was this generous assessment without substance. Tang Taizong faced less opposition and therefore had less need of prisons than either of the Sui emperors or his father; and harvests do seem to have been plentiful. The granaries filled, famine relief was available, and destitution-driven banditry declined, making travel less hazardous. While the economy was recovering, labour-intensive projects were shelved. Like Sui Wendi, Taizong pruned back the root and branch of the administration, reorganised the provinces and took special care in the selection of office-holders; for ready reference, he claimed to have had the names and records of all candidates
for office painted on sheets of paper that were pasted to the walls of his chambers, like Post-its. He reorganised the fubing militias, embarked on a new legal codification that was again supposed to be more lenient and rational than its predecessors, and endeavoured to curb the social influence exercised by a coterie of powerful clans whose pedigrees eclipsed that of the Tang’s Li clan.
Acutely conscious of his place in history as well as society, he also turned his attention to the historiographical process. Over the previous centuries of the ‘Period of Disunion’, dynasties had come and gone so quickly that the work of compiling Standard Histories for each had fallen behind. To eliminate this backlog, Taizong set up the first Bureau of Historiography with Wei Zheng as one of those at the helm. Dynastic histories – of the Northern Qi, Northern Zhou and Sui, and of the Jin, Liang and Chen from the Six (southern) Dynasties – were soon pouring from the bureau’s massed brushes. Earlier works, such as the Shiji and the Hanshu, had been compiled privately by individuals or families who had received imperial endorsement only in the course of compilation or afterwards. But the new bureau made history-writing an official and ongoing undertaking. Culled from whatever records were available, cross-checked and counter-checked, the work became more formulaic and, as is the way with collaborative endeavours, less revealing.
Simultaneously, the bureau began the collection and editing of materials that could be used as a basis for the history of the Tang. Again the procedure was carefully regulated, with court circulars and reports being distilled into yearly calendars, the calendars into the reign-by-reign ‘veritable records’, and the veritable records into the dynasty’s ‘Standard History’. Theoretically the emperor had no say in the process; objectivity was supposedly paramount. Yet, over the howls of bureaucratic protest, Taizong demanded sight of early drafts and, confounding precedent, bullied his scribes into rewriting the murky events surrounding his accession.
Whether the favourable gloss put on the rest of his reign owes anything to imperial interference is less clear. Extrapolating from the Standard Histories, one twentieth-century admirer would be moved to describe Tang Taizong as ‘the man of destiny to whom no task seemed impossible, the saviour of society, the restorer of unity and peace’ whose personality was ‘so dynamic . . . that he became a legend with posterity [and] has had no equal on the throne of China’.5 Taizong would have settled for this; but he can scarcely have formulated it. The Standard History of his reign was not completed until seven years after his death and that of his dynasty not till very much later. Other reasons prompted the Bureau of Historiography to portray him as a towering figure, most notably the need to diminish the stature of his de facto successor.
Designating Tang Taizong’s successor had run into trouble in the 630s when the bureaucratic establishment had been scandalised by his eldest son and presumed heir rejecting Han etiquette and adopting the ways of his steppe ancestors. The young prince cast aside his girdled gown and clogs in favour of the nomad’s tunic and boots, would speak (and be spoken to) only in a Turkic dialect, and took to living in a tent, cooking on a campfire and ‘slicing himself gobbets of boiled mutton with a sword’.6
No doubt the details were much exaggerated, but it would seem that the heir apparent disdained scholarship, hankered after the outdoor life and took his succession to the Heavenly Qaghanate more seriously than his succession to the Heavenly Mandate.
The situation erupted in 643 when the emperor had some of the prince’s less savoury companions executed. Other sons were then emboldened to enter the fray, and in a series of doubtful plots and counter-plots, the heir apparent was accused of planning fratricide. He was banished to Guizhou, where he died. An alternative candidate was also driven into exile; apparently he was rather too confident a scholar and so less likely to be amenable to remonstrating ministers. The succession was then settled on the ninth of Taizong’s fourteen sons, a compromise candidate who was young enough to be malleable and delicate enough to encourage doubts about his permanence. And there it remained, not without further challenges, nor deep misgivings on the part of Taizong, until the emperor’s death and the elevation of this unlikely contender as Tang Gaozong (r. 649–83).
Tang Gaozong reigned without much impact or conviction. For a weakling who soon became an invalid, his thirty-four-year occupation of the throne was an achievement in itself. He was followed by his sons, Zhongzong and Ruizong, both of whom were enthroned twice, though never for long; their comings and goings are of merely chronological interest and their influence was even less than their father’s. For throughout the half-century from 655 till 705 real power resided elsewhere, in fact in the capable if bloodstained hands of one who might have ranked among China’s most outstanding rulers but for the handicap of gender. This was Wu Zetian, the consort of Gaozong, mother of Zhongzong and Ruizong, and so empress, dowager empress and then, uniquely, for fifteen years (690–705) emperor (sic) in her own right.
In truth, more than her sex told against Wu Zetian. Being preceded by the revered Tang Taizong would have put any ruler at a disadvantage. Preserving his record of internal peace, maintaining his vastly increased empire and matching his example of responsive government were formidable challenges. Worse still for Wu Zetian’s prospects of posthumous applause, she would be followed – after Zhongzong and Ruizong had made their second curtain calls – by Tang Xuanzong, the dynasty’s roi soleil. Another colossus whose long and mostly glorious reign (715–56) would gild the heights of Tang civilisation, Xuanzong (not to be confused with the pilgrim Xuanzang) would set a dazzling example of humane government, exit the throne as a romantic hero, and be remembered as that rarity among China’s rulers, a popular emperor.
Sandwiched between a legendary paragon and a national treasure, a third contender for best-ever emperor would have been an embarrassment. In comparison with such giants, even a legitimately chosen, Heaven-favoured and decently whiskered descendant of Li Yuan (Tang Gaozu) would have struggled for historical recognition. Indeed Tang Gaozong’s pitiful showing rather proves the point. But Wu Zetian (or Wu Zhao, as she started off in life) enjoyed none of these advantages. As a usurper who eliminated more people called Li (in this case Tang family members) than had Sui Yangdi in response to the Peach-plum prophecy, she could expect no favours from compilers of the Tang dynastic histories. As a woman, a member of that half of humanity relegated to domestic subservience by Confucian orthodoxy and deeply distrusted by every history-conscious bureaucrat, she could count on neither contemporary support nor posterity’s sympathy. And as one who not only manipulated the succession but commandeered the throne and ruled in the most arbitrary and unreceptive of fashions, she was simply beyond the pale of dispassionate scholarship.
The result is a career chronicled exclusively by detractors. With policies excoriated and every disaster magnified, this could still be revealing. But in fact the histories credit the empress with little more than a catalogue of atrocities, scandalous liaisons and diabolical intrigues. ‘From the very first the historical record of her reign has been hostile, biased and curiously fragmentary and incomplete,’ note the contributors to The Cambridge History of China. ‘Less is known of her half century of dominance than of any comparable period of the Tang.’7 It is as if the annalists, denied the Heaven-sent catastrophes that should have attended her rule yet determined to discredit anything of a more positive nature, had had to fall back on personal invective, palace gossip and the always excruciating torments meted out to suspected opponents. The popular discontent to be expected of her lavish expenditure seems barely to have surfaced. Tang loyalists failed to muster other than a spluttering and ineffective resistance. For those bureaucrats who were eliminated or declined to serve, others just as capable were found. And external foes seeking to take advantage of a supposedly gender-impaired empire would be bitterly disappointed.
That Wu Zetian nursed ambitions and skills beyond the ordinary was conceded even by her detractors. Tang Taizong had taken her into his household as a th
irteen-year-old concubine of junior rank, probably to honour her deceased father, who had been ennobled by Tang Gaozu. Her mother, a devout Buddhist, was related to the Sui but commanded no great following. She herself is said to have been ‘beautiful and enticing’.8 Whether or not Taizong was enticed, the future Tang Gaozong was. Their teenage affair may have begun before Taizong’s death and certainly blossomed soon after it, for by 654 she had given birth to at least one son by the now Tang Gaozong. Either way, because of her original selection by Taizong, their relationship counted as incest, a crime that Taizong’s legal code had reinstated as one of ‘the Ten Abominations’. Moreover Gaozong already had an empress, albeit without issue.
But obstacles that would have thwarted most power-seeking maids were as nothing to the ingenious and unscrupulous Wu Zhao. In 654, having given birth to a daughter, she is said to have encouraged Gaozong’s Empress Wang to play with the baby, and then, having suffocated it, to have convinced Gaozong that the empress, as the last in attendance, must be the murderess. Such, at least, is the explanation offered for the demotion and detention of Empress Wang and for the wholesale purge of all who had supported her, including many of the most respected ministers inherited from Tang Taizong’s reign. Within a year Wu Zhao herself was installed as empress with the title Wu Zetian and with her son as heir apparent. Tang Gaozong, possibly fooled but quite likely complicit, seems to have rejoiced in the outcome; the old guard of senior bureaucrats had been removed and replaced by more amenable and less well-connected figures who owed their positions entirely to the new dispensation.
