by John Keay
The emperor in question was Tang Dezong (Daizong’s successor, r. 779–805); and he did indeed attempt to ‘sweep clear Hebei’. But he succeeded no better than his predecessors. In fact this second Tang assault on the north-east in the 780s merely confirmed the feudatory tendency there. The military governors now declared themselves ‘kings’ and named their dynasties Qi, Zhao, Wei and Jin in accordance with ‘Warring States’ practice. In 805 an imperial emissary to Youzhou in the north of Hebei found its governor-king suitably deferential but otherwise the antithesis of a bureaucratic official. He wore ‘a red turban round his head [and was dressed] in black boots and pantaloons, with a sword hanging from his belt to his left and a bow and a quiver of arrows to his right’.4 Court formalities were curtailed in the north-east; martial values held sway.
Tang loyalists in Chang’an may also have endorsed the example of the ‘Warring States’ period. For a dynasty as reduced as the later Tang, the long-lasting suzerainty of the enfeebled Later (Eastern) Zhou (c. 770–250 BC) provided a face-saving precedent, plus the prospect of a nigh-indefinite tenure. Certainly, if one may judge by the frequency with which it was rejected, ‘the idea that China had passed into an age of fragmented sovereignty like the feudalism of the Later Zhou was commonplace in the late eighth century’.5 Du You, a neo-legalist much enamoured of Shang Yang’s ‘totalitarian’ reorganisation of the Qin state in the fourth century BC, compiled a compendious history of government institutions in which he argued strongly against any abrogation of central power: feudal kingdoms might suit their feudal superiors, he noted, but directly ruled commanderies benefited the people. Similarly, in the early ninth century, Han Yü, an immodest and outspoken reformer whose polemics and literary revivalism anticipated the neo-Confucianism of the Song dynasty (960–1226), rejected both military rule and feudal fragmentation; they were undesirable expedients, alien to Han tradition (in both its ethnic and dynastic sense) and symptomatic of a creeping ‘barbarisation’.
With the north-east virtually lost and the loyalties of Sichuan’s governors far from certain, the axis of the empire slewed on to a north-west to south-east bearing that roughly followed the line of the Grand Canal or, farther west, the Han River. At one end, the Chang’an metropolitan area behind the hills that hemmed in the Wei valley in Shaanxi provided the Tang with a strong and hallowed base; but it was not self-supporting and, being vulnerable to attack from outside (as by the Tibetans), required a concentration of forces, plus Uighur amity. At the other end of the axis the lower Yangzi yielded the bumper crops and revenues on which the regime would depend. Tang survival therefore rested on control of this critical axis. By force of arms the separatist spirit was here ruthlessly stifled, while carefully positioned garrisons along the canal kept the north-eastern governor-kings at bay.
For all of which, reliable troops and dependable revenues were essential. To reduce the danger of military governors creating their own fiefs, the Tang endeavoured to replace them with civilian administrators or regulate them through supervision by palace eunuchs. The civilian administrators were not an immediate success. Steeped in the tactics of the Confucian ‘Spring and Autumn’ Annals, one bookish bureaucrat resurrected the ancient bullock-drawn chariot as a deterrent against An Lushan’s veteran cavalry; it was like sending triremes against dreadnoughts. As late as 821 another civilian governor caused consternation in northern Hebei by arriving in a sedan chair and then desecrating An Lushan’s tomb, pocketing military funds and allowing his followers to ridicule the pantalooned troopers as illiterate rebels. ‘He did not understand the customs of the country,’ says the Standard History of the Tang. In the end ‘the people of Qi [this being the “kingdom’s” assumed name] could restrain their anger no more . . . They rebelled en masse, and imprisoned [Governor] Zhang Hongjing’.6
But the policy of restoring civilian rule did enjoy some success, especially when backed by a credible military threat. In a third and last Tang offensive against the rebels, the forceful Tang Xianzong (r. 805–20) came nearest to re-establishing central authority with a series of military interventions in Sichuan, Zhejiang, Hebei and Shandong. As a result, by 820 all except three north-eastern provinces were under governors appointed or endorsed by Chang’an. Yet Xianzong’s success was deceptive. Governors might renege or, as in the case of the tactless Zhang Hongjing, be removed by their own troops. Despite valiant attempts at recentralisation, the effect of Tang Xianzong’s interventions was merely to regularise decentralisation.
In Confucian eyes, even this achievement was tainted by his resorting to eunuch support. To the emperor, eunuchs were indispensable as confidants, emissaries and informants. Their loyalties lay exclusively with their imperial master, and through them he could personally conduct policies of which his ministerial advisers might disapprove. A eunuch-led palace army had stood by the Tang in their dark days of exile in 756 and 763 and constituted the backbone of the imperial troops. Subsequently eunuch overseers were used to spy on military governors, restrain them and, where possible, supersede them as commanders in the field. Some eunuchs had acquired an education; others demonstrated military aptitude; all were credited with a genius for intrigue. But to the exam-empowered bureaucrat as to the office-accustomed aristocrat, eunuchs remained despicable parvenus and whining parasites. Since most were the product of slave-raiding expeditions in the wilder parts of Fujian and Guangxi, to a cultural purist like Han Yü they represented another ‘barbarising’ element as insidious as the unruly Uighurs and the never-poor Persians.
The rivalries within the administration itself were as acute as those within the empire at large – between civilians and the military, aristocrats and bureaucrats, the palace and the court, Buddhists and Confucianists. Han Yü is perhaps best known for an 819 diatribe against Buddhism and Daoism; it was censured at the time, but in 843 Tang Wuzong (r. 840–46) introduced a draconian proscription of Buddhism from which the Buddhist establishment never entirely recovered. The visit of the Japanese monk Ennin happened to coincide with this episode, and he suspected it had been triggered by a Confucianist vendetta against a pro-Buddhist eunuch. No rivalry was more intense than that between the palace eunuchs and all those who, on whatever grounds, deemed themselves courtiers as of right.
Though soon reversed, the 843–48 crackdown on the Buddhist establishment may have occasioned as much misery as the Cultural Revolution. Thousands of monasteries are said to have been destroyed and as many as 250,000 monks and nuns defrocked, some being injured or killed in the process. Ennin portrays Tang Wuzong as a Daoist fanatic and notes that the Buddhists were not the only ones to suffer; Manichaeans, Nestorian Christians and Zoroastrians were also subject to censure. But as he admits, the motivation was as much economic as ideological. The dissolution of the monasteries brought the confiscation of their buildings, the repossession of their extensive landed estates, the return of their inmates and dependants to the tax and labour pool and, most important of all, the melting down of their vast accumulations of gold, silver and copper statuary to underpin the fragile currency.7
Raising and provisioning armies, maintaining garrisons and paying off the Uighurs – or deflecting their exodus when in 840 the Uighur qaghanate was expelled from Mongolia by the Kyrgyz – placed a heavy strain on the imperial exchequer. In later Tang’s interminable struggle to reclaim the empire, revenue was both a requisite and an objective. At the height of the An Lushan rebellion, when practically no tax receipts were reaching Chang’an, a proposal had been adopted for reintroducing the defunct salt and iron monopoly. Iron’s inclusion was a nod to the Han dynasty precedent and was only spasmodically regulated; but salt was commandeered. A hefty tax was imposed on it and a special commission set up to collect the tax and enforce the monopoly. Since the salt panning and mining areas were comparatively easy to oversee, it proved an instant success. By the 770s half of the empire’s revenue was coming from salt. The monopoly principle was extended to other commodities, most notably liquor and then tea, a crop grown
largely in hilly areas like Fujian and Sichuan. It had been popular since the mid-seventh century and was now much in demand by Uighurs and Tibetans as well. Based in Yangzhou in the south, the Monopolies Commission was staffed by a new class of commercial experts and grew into a financial agency that rivalled the regular bureaucracy as an avenue for professional advancement. It also spawned a thriving nexus of licensed merchant-distributors, plus another of unlicensed merchant-smugglers.
The catastrophic decline in the registration of households as a result of the An Lushan rebellion boded ill for the restoration of the old system of taxation based on population and landholdings. By way of replacement, therefore, in 780 a ‘two-tax system’ was introduced. ‘Generally considered one of the major events in Chinese economic history’, its ‘two-tax’ dimension was in fact incidental; it simply meant that, to spread receipts, it was levied in some areas at one time of the year, in others at another, and in most at both, in effect splitting the levy between late spring and harvest time. Not revolutionary either was the quota system whereby central government negotiated each province’s tax liability with the local authorities and took no further part in its collection. The novelty lay in its assessment, which was to be graduated according to wealth and assets rather than the number of household members, calculated partly in cash (though collected mainly in kind), and apportioned in accordance with prevailing local practice. In other words it recognised the inconsistencies that had developed before and since the rebellion, and ‘in giving up any pretence at uniformity . . . tacitly accepted existing tax inequalities’.8
The inequalities were between one district and another and between the tax-collector and the taxpayer. Since grain prices plummeted in the early ninth century, all who were assessed in cash but paid in grain found their liability soaring by the year; unable to meet the demand, peasants either deserted, leaving their peers to make good their contributions, or gravitated into paid labour; either way, their holdings were swallowed up by large estates. Meanwhile the system afforded the provincial authorities numerous opportunities to reapportion, manipulate or simply withhold receipts due to the central government. Tang Xianzong attempted to redress this situation, breaking up existing provinces and negotiating quotas direct with the smaller prefectures. But the cost of his military adventures was never covered, and any reduction in the military establishment by his successors invited mutiny.
Resistance mounted as soon as Tang Xianzong died in 820. Agrarian and military uprisings, mysterious acts of terrorism and organised smuggling by large gangs were commonplace by mid-century. The smugglers, waterborne as well as land-based, were heavily armed and infested those very regions on which the government was most dependent – the Yangzi and the south. In 856, in a sudden spate of disturbances, the south ‘was transformed almost overnight from one of the most stable regions into one of the most volatile’.9 Three years later a bandit group in Zhejiang beat off attempts at suppression – the region had been starved of troops to preclude the provincial intransigence that characterised the north-east – and, attracting support from other gangs, vagrant peasants and aggrieved officials, soon fielded a well-organised army of some thirty thousand. To defeat it, a crack general had to be summoned back from Vietnam, and forces sent from the north, including the first Uighur cavalry ever to serve south of the Yangzi.
This was followed in the 860s by a succession of army mutinies triggered by the demand for troops to oppose the Nanzhao forces in Vietnam. In 868 a battalion stationed in Guizhou broke ranks and marched north, heading for home in Henan. Again the revolt snowballed and was put down only after the dispatch of more troops from the north, many of them this time Turks. Their commander, himself a Turk, was rewarded with the Tang family name of Li; his son, Li Keyong, would emerge as a major contender during the last days of the Tang, and his grandson would found one of the many post-Tang dynasties.
The great all-China upheaval that finally undermined Tang authority owed something to both these prior insurgencies. It began in the 870s among bandit gangs on the western borders of Shandong. Joined by its eventual leader, a minor official from Shandong called Huang Chao, the revolt spread west to threaten Luoyang and then south to the middle Yangzi. Mutinies among the imperial troops and dissension among their commanders played into the rebels’ hands; provincial capitals were sacked; the administration collapsed throughout much of central China. A major Tang victory in 878 only spurred Huang Chao into one of the most outrageous peregrinations in history. Back in Shandong at the time, he led his men south to the Yangzi delta, crossed Zhejiang into the mountains of Fujian, and then trekked through some of the most difficult terrain in the country to Fuzhou and Guangzhou (Canton), both of which port cities he sacked. It was said that 120,000 were massacred in Guangzhou, over half the city’s population. Reports reaching the Persian Gulf told of Arab, Persian and Indian merchants suffering disproportionately.
In 879 Huang Chao turned north again. Anticipating the long marches of the Taiping rebels in 1851–53 and of the communists in 1934–35, he looped west through Guizhou before regaining the middle Yangzi. There was method in these meanderings: like Mao Zedong, Huang Chao was turning tactical retreat into political triumph. The government had interpreted his southern excursion as a retreat; indeed, in the course of his thirty months on the move (as against Mao’s thirteen), Huang Chao repeatedly sought a favourable amnesty. But the failure of these negotiations obliged and emboldened him to raise his sights. Once he was back across the Yangzi, Chang’an became the goal; court, eunuchs and the dynasty itself were now the target. Dissidents of some calibre began to flock to his standard and disillusioned Tang commanders to stand aside. Effecting an almost miraculous escape from the rich Yangzi delta, in 880 the footsore rebels homed in on Luoyang. They took it almost unopposed, such was the imperial disarray. Then, after nearly three years and 4,800 kilometres (3,000 miles) on the march, they stormed into the Wei valley to capture Chang’an.
Tang Xizong (r. 873–88), like most of the last Tang emperors, owed his throne to the eunuchs. Emulating his great ancestor Tang Xuanzong, he and they fled into Sichuan. In early 881 Huang Chao entered the city in triumph and at first put on a brave display of founding his own dynasty. But his troops proved uncontrollable. Not for the first time the world’s greatest city was sacked and its palaces torched. Citoyens joined in the carnage, streets ran with blood. ‘The Lament of Lady Chin’, a long poem by Wei Zhuang, who himself fell foul of the rebels but later rose to prominence in Sichuan, paints a Goya-esque scene of devastation, rape, butchery and cannibalism. Suppressed by the poet himself, the poem in question was thought lost until no less then fourteen copies of it were found among Aurel Stein’s treasure trove from Dunhuang in the early twentieth century. Evidently it had struck a chord at the time.
The last Tang emperors, their names in Pinyin sounding an alphabetic cadenza (Yizong, Xizong, Zhaozong, Zhaoxuan), were paraded as puppets and died as pawns in the war games of their would-be successors. It was a repeat of the last days of Han; the imperial entourage was carted from one place of exile to the next; Chang’an changed hands half a dozen times, its spoils depreciating with each takeover; the eunuchs were massacred; the tenth century dawned on another period of chronic disunion.
FIVE DYNASTIES OR TEN KINGDOMS
The Tang theoretically staggered on until 907, from which date the Standard Histories grudgingly recognise a Later Liang dynasty. Later Liang (907–23) was the creation of one of rebel Huang Chao’s erstwhile lieutenants. A scruple-free tyrant, he disciplined his troops by having them tattooed (it made defectors easier to identify) and by executing any who survived defeat or whose commanders were killed in battle. Despite such incentives to victory, the Later Liang managed only sixteen sanguinary years before being toppled by the Turk general Li Keyong, he whose father had helped the Tang in the 860s.
Trading on the legitimacy implied by the Tang emperor having awarded them his Li surname, this new dynasty (923–37) also called themselves
Tang and claimed to be restoring Tang rule; they did resume the Tang struggle with its north-eastern governor-kings in Hebei and enjoyed some success there. But they too soon succumbed and were followed in quick succession by three other dynastic founders, the first two Turk and all three in fact successors of the Hebei governor-kings. Each adopted a dynastic name (Jin, Han, Zhou) that will be familiar. To avoid confusion, all the houses in this cluster of post-Tang northern dynasties are generally prefixed with a ‘Later’; and the resulting sequence of ‘Five Dynasties’ (Later Liang, Later Tang, Later Jin, Later Han, Later Zhou) gives its name to the whole period.
Traditionally dated 907–60, the ‘Five Dynasties’ period ended when the last of the five gave way to a sixth, the long-lasting Song. The Song would reunite most of the empire, and their accession is usually taken to mark the beginning of a dazzling new age. But reunification was not completed till 979. Until then the Song conformed to patterns of rule set during the Five Dynasties period. The early, or Northern, Song dynasts are therefore best considered in that context, any other ‘making it very difficult for us to understand the power structure of the Wudai [“Five Dynasties”] as well as that of the Song’.10
