Chinese History for White People - Tang Dynasty

Normally, the first Emperor in a Dynasty is the most powerful and influential. Dynastic revolution by definition means all the other nobles and their influence has been brushed aside, allowing you to appoint nearly every office and pass sweeping reforms as you see fit. But Li Yuan was fairly inconsequential. The real power behind the throne was his son, Li Shimin.

It is difficult to fully describe how absurd the accomplishments of Li Shimin are. Were it not robustly attested by historical record, you would think him not only fiction, but Mary-Sue fan-fiction power fantasy wish fulfillment. But reality is not beholden to a sense of literary realism. Forged in war as an undefeated heavy cavalry officer, notoriously deadly with a bow, brought deep and insightful policy changes that rank him among the best of all of China's Emperors, wrote¹ many of the best poems of Tang Dynasty, and was popular with the entire court, facing little intrigue except from his brother and sons. His only flaw was his sickly health and short lifespan². His full list of titles as a Prince reads as “Minister of Defense, Minister of Education, General of Hebei, General of Hedong, General of Longxi, Governor of Sichuan, Governor of Shaanxi, Governor of Ningxia, Governor of Gansu, Chief of Capital Police, Medal of Honor Recipient, and Heaven Sent General”. This lattermost title was invented specifically for him, as no award existed in Chinese history equal to his merit, and gave him the unprecedented privilege of being able to select and recruit every single position in the entire military chain of command without consulting the Emperor.

What did he do to deserve such a title? Once Yang Guang was assassinated, many factions amassed armies to take the throne—all far more competent than the Sui. At the age of 22³ Li Shimin defeated an army of 100k with only 3,500 heavy cavalry, and managed to capture the entirety of enemy command alive. This single pivotal battle resulted in the conquest/reunification of the entire northern half of China. In a later battle, he defeated 10k cavalry with only 200 cavalry of his own. In a later campaign, he would fight 8 battles in a single day. He is considered a military genius comparable⁴ to Han Xin and Huo Qubing, not once making a tactical mistake⁵ or a failed campaign. In every battle, he fought on the front line. Repeatedly, he fell from his horse as it was shot dead⁶, and continued to fight and win on foot. What was his brilliant strategy? He relied a lot on attrition warfare, drawing enemies into pursuits and stretching them thin, or harassing them enough to keep them in formation for hours before commencing the battle in full. He also frequently baited opponents with very small forces. He also targeted command directly, often simply breaking directly through enemy lines with heavy cavalry to capture them and demand surrender or cause a rout. Li Shimin is recorded as wondering why nobody else ever did this, as his battle plan seemed to work every time for him.

Despite all this, Li Shimin was not the crown prince. That would be his older brother, who was crowned before Li Shimin fought in the reunification war, and it's not appropriate to depose a crown prince without a very good reason. And Li Shimin was never enough of a dick to fabricate one against his brother. Problem was, 100% of the military was directly loyal to the Heaven Sent General. There basically was no balance of power at all for the Emperor-to-be. The crown prince would then fabricate scandals or attempt to assassinate those loyal to Li Shimin to gain a foothold, but this only urged the military to pressure Li Shimin to take the throne. Revolt was unavoidable, and with reluctance Li Shimin put an arrow through his brother's heart himself, then forced his father to abdicate. As per protocol, all of his brother's children were executed, and the deceased crown prince demoted to commoner, but Li Shimin posthumously restore his brother's rank as Prince, and made Wei Zheng⁷—the scholar who urged his brother to rebellion—the Chancellor.

Li Shimin then proceeded to build the indisputably greatest utopia the world had seen to this point in history. At the fall of Sui dynasty, there were only 2 million households (approximately 15 million persons) on the census remaining in China. It is said you could walk 100km without seeing a human being. To put in perspective how low a population that is for China, Qin dynasty from 800 years ago had approximately 30 million population, and their main problem was depopulation from the Warring States Era. By the end of Li Shiming's reign, the census counted over 8 million households, with over 1.2 million foreign immigrants.

Li Shimin accomplished this despite nearly every year of his 29 year reign suffering from both droughts and locusts. When his father took the throne, the price of rice had hyperinflated⁸ to 1000 silver coins per liter; only 4 years into Li Shimin's reign, the price had fallen to 5 coins⁹ per liter. The historical record low before that point had been 10 coins per liter, and later in his reign he'd get it down to 2 coins per liter in the provinces where it was most abundant.

How did he do it? Li Shimin had a three pronged approach. Keeping Sui's reforms, adding relocation incentives, and tax relief. He preserved Sui's innovative bureaucratic structure, including listening heavily to the scholars and advisors who had earned their positions. Li Shimin also kept and expanded on the Equal-Field system, such that provincial governments would keep a stock of free, publicly available oxen and seeds to help newly of-age farmers establish themselves. This version of Equal Fields was so successful and popular that it would be retained and expanded upon by every dynasty hereafter for the next 1000 years. To give you an idea of how huge this was¹⁰—during the golden age of Han where they had more money than they could count—landlords would take up to 50% of a harvest as rent (on top of the 1/15 standard tax rate). Secondly, Li Shimin was a strong believer in ruling by incentive rather than force, and he needed to consolidate the population into the best farmland, so he offered exemption¹¹ from the draft if you relocated your family to a government plot (and no penalty if you work unclaimed land). Third, he set taxes to 1/40 for the entirety of his reign, completely eliminated the tax on salt¹², and a 100% tax exemption for merchants¹³. From a revenue approach, this was bonkers! But the tax relief greatly helped the people recover from the disasters of Yang Guang's rule and perpetual drought. Li Shimin even used his own money to buy back the freedom of those who signed themselves into indentured servitude during the famines.

By the end of his reign, it's estimated Tang dynasty income of the average peasant was higher than that of modern day China (2005-era), and such a person could easily afford the same clothes and food as the Emperor himself were it not forbidden by law¹⁴. Over half the world's major cities at that time could be found in China. You could travel 1000km without bringing food, since you could always reliably find a restaurant or inn, and tourism actually became a thing for ordinary people. Fixing the economy also fixed the crime rate. People left their houses to travel for months at a time leaving their doors unlocked, and you could leave your cattle or horses in a field unsupervised. On average, in the entire nation, only 29 people were put to death each year. In the 6th year of Li Shimin's reign, 200 men were scheduled to be executed, and he decreed a stay of execution for 1 year so they could put their affairs in order so long as they promised to return for their execution. All 200 of them did in fact return.

Technological advances of the era include China's famous translucent porcelain, woodblock printing, clockwork escapement, standardized architectural building codes, as well as waterproof and fireproof creams and varnishes, and compressed gas cylinders. Medical advances include an illustrated botanical manual, dental amalgam made of tin and silver, treating goiter with animal thyroid extracts¹⁵, and linking diabetes to sugar intake.

But to really clench the title of golden age utopia, you need to get involved in every possible foreign war¹⁶. Li Shimin fought basically every single terrestrial neighbor China had, and absolutely dominated all of them. He was acknowledged as The Heavenly Khan by the nomadic steppes tribes. All of the defeated nations (including Korea) became vassals, paying tribute to Tang every year. Tang reserved the right to choose their King or Chieftan for them, and those Kings were even required to come to the Imperial Palace and dance for the Emperor. They were so thoroughly defeated, that China would have peace¹⁷ within its borders for 150 years, though the economic dominance had as much or more to do with that. The peace and stability restored the Silk Road, where much of the military was sent to escort merchants as a way to transition them towards peacetime.

Li Shimin was also known for loving his wife and kids. A lot of the historical documents we have from him are sickeningly sweet love letters¹⁸ to his children as he was out managing his foreign wars. Ironically, this would result in the only blemish on his reign. He insisted on treating his children equally, which meant he gave the entirety of his inheritance and all of his love to all his children but the crown prince¹⁹—since his inheritance was the throne itself. But this resulted in the other sons having more wealth and power and, seemingly, favour—more or less the exact situation Li Shimin's brother had found himself in. One of the more powerful sons went into open rebellion, and had to be put to death. The crown prince himself tried—and failed—to usurp Li Shimin, and thus was deposed—but investigation revealed it was his brother who put him up to it, and both had to be exiled—because even when they tried to kill him, Li Shimin just didn't have the heart to kill his sons unless the law forced him to. The crown passed to his youngest son, Li Zhi, even though Li Shimin had his doubts about his competence.

Without Li Shimin, China would have walked the path of Rome. After the wars of the Three Kingdom’s era and the chaos of the Invasion of the Five Barbarians, China had been broken apart for far longer than it had ever been united. Without such a mindblowingly unrealistic power fantasy protagonist, China might very well have settled into a bunch of separate small states ruled by a central Confucian religion just like Europe. What Li Shimin accomplished was not inevitable²⁰—indeed, defied inevitability. He is proof that one man can in fact change the course of history.

It was during Li Shimin's reign that the status of women also reached its peak prior to the CCP²¹. Women were allowed to divorce, own businesses, hold civil and military office (though it was still uncommon for them to receive education), dress the same as men (including going topless!), and the streets were safe enough they could travel without escort. Li Shimin was particularly fussy about marrying off his daughters, and his sister was a front line general who participated in front-line combat. His wife, Queen Zhangsun Wuji, shared considerable responsibility at court.

When Li Shimin passed, his harem was moved to a nunnery. When the 21-year-old Emperor Li Zhi visited the nunnery to pay respects to his late father, he found one of Li Shimin's low-ranking consorts particularly striking, and Queen Wang invited²² her to the harem as competition against Li Zhi's current favorite Concubine Xiao. The new consort's name was Wu Zetian.

Wu quickly became Li Zhi's favorite, and bore him two sons and a daughter. But the daughter was found strangled to death in her crib, leading Wu to accuse Queen Wang of murdering the child out of jealousy²³. In combination with Wang being childless, and that Wu had managed to build a political coalition of ministers in support of her, both Wang and Xiao were arrested. When they neared their release date, now Empress Wu had the authority to order their execution.

Only five years later, in 660, Li Zhi had a stroke. He survived, but was not in a condition to rule, so he gave Wu Zetian unprecedented²⁴ official authority to rule in his stead. And she did for 23 years until his death. Then her son Li Xian took the throne, but within a year Wu deposed him and crowned the younger son Li Dan. Wu Zetian nonetheless continued to rule as dowager Empress in all matters of substance, and in 690AD, she deposed Li Dan and at the age of 67 crowned herself Emperor²⁵ and founder of the new Wu-Zhou Dynasty. This was significant, as unlike a Dowager Empress, she did not have to make the political alliances that complicated Han Dynasty in order to hold power—and her decrees could not be challenged through her sons or otherwise limited by custom. She would rule another 15 years until her death in 705AD. After which Li Xian would take the throne again, but he only lasted 5 years before being usurped by Li Dan and Princess Taiping. These brothers would be the only men in Chinese history to be Emperor twice.

Wu Zetian's rule was prosperous and successful. She's known for massively expanding the percentage of personnel acquired through the national exam system, to balance new blood against conservative factions in court who are horrified at the idea of a woman ruling. She expanded the subject matter in the exam, as the Sui iteration had too much emphasis on memorizing Confucian philosophies²⁶. She added a national exam for military office as well. The top 50 scores would be granted an interview with the Emperor directly. All positions granted by the exam period would be subject to a trial period of 1 year before appointments became official, and provincial magistrates would be measured by how much spare grain they amassed and how many people emigrated from their province. The expanded meritocracy led to unprecedented dissolution of class barriers, as you could no longer tell by looking whether someone was noble born or a former slave holding great office.

Wu Zetian also oversaw one of the highest population growth rates in dynastic history at a steady 0.7% her entire reign. She carried out a reasonably successful military campaign in Tibet, and is also remembered for her excellent calligraphy. Her youngest daughter, Princess Taiping, was also enormously influential at court²⁷, and when Wu Zetian's Chancellor Shangguan Wan’er's tomb was excavated in 2013, the secret love letters buried with her confirmed she was in a lesbian relationship with Princess Taiping.

However, Wu Zetian's rule was also very bloody. Her hands were hardly clean as she rose through the ranks of harem politics, and even as regent, she faced tedious opposition due to her gender. Once she deposed Li Dan and declared the Wu Dynasty, most of the Li family started conspiring against her, and she made heavy handed use of the secret police, tortured confessions²⁸, and executions in this matter. She allowed anonymous reports of treason with no penalty for false accusation, and the secret police themselves became rather ambitious in shaping court. Contemporary historians were able to praise her accomplishments while also accounting for the atmosphere of terror she created, killing many loyal subjects on baseless accusations by the real conspirators.

The historians of later dynasties were not so kind. They portray her with wild stories of sexual deviancy, such as demanding cunnilingus from all court officials, and exaggerating the extent and motives behind the violence and torture. While Wu Zeitan herself was buried alongside Li Zhi as his Queen (and specifically not as an Emperor herself), the rest of the Wu family's tombs (including Princess Taiping) were desecrated by Imperial decree. She is also criticized of holding power by making her son's and their claim to the throne weak—which set the stage for the apocalypse to come.

Li Dan ruled under his little sister Princess Taiping's thumb, and he was largely ignored while Taiping held court. Yet the crown prince Li Longji did not bow to her influence, so she had astrologers tell Li Dan that he would soon loose the imperial throne—hoping this would prompt him to suspect Li Longji of plotting a coup. This backfired—Li Dan accepted fate and abdicated to Li Longji peacefully. And Li Longji then engaged Taiping in a power struggle, which she lost and was forced to commit suicide.

Under Li Longji²⁹, China reaches it's apex. Some of this was momentum from the brilliance of Li Shimin and Wu Zetian, but he was a very good ruler in his own right. China's population had now climbed to 53 million³⁰ (9 million households)—but this meant the land allotment of the Equal-Field system had fallen to just 1.5acre/man. China's territory was larger than it would ever be, reaching from Goguryeo in the east to Bukhara³¹ in the west, and in the south from Ha Tinh, Vietnam to the Angara River³² in the north. Yet despite this reach, Tang had only 1/3rd the amount of viable³³ farmland of modern China. Longji's solution was forming the National Guard in which men could become exempt from both taxes and draft by relocating—with full compensation for their families in housing and food—to the frontier and becoming permanent border guard militia. This had the added benefit that the professional army didn't have to march across vast swaths of territory to counter every skirmish or potential invasion—not that anyone tried.

To make land pressure matters worse, Wu Zetian had given extensive land to Buddhist monasteries, which were exempt from taxation and whose land did not return to the government. And the political intrigue conflicts of the past generation had resulted in buying the alliance of nobles with gifts of land ownership, with over 140 noble landlords with over 10,000 serfs each. It wasn't politically viable just to immediately turn around and seize these assets, so Longji outlawed the collection of rent from peasants. Instead, the government collected taxes from the serfs as normal, and paid the nobles a stipend out of those taxes. The Buddhists were becoming a significant problem however, as their whole “abandon all duties to your family and nation to live in a commune that is supposedly ascetic but actually hoards tremendous wealth, gold, and free manpower” was undermining the fabric of Chinese society³⁴. Longji banned the construction of new Buddhist temples or statues, production of new copies of Buddhist scripture, forbid government officials from associating with monks, and put a cap on how many monks could be in the county. This was the first of many conflicts China would have with Buddhism.

Longji also streamlined government bureaucracy, fired redundant ministers, and cut spending. He banned excavation of jewels, jade, and production of silk brocade to encourage a frugal culture. Paper currency was invented. He had annual inspections of local regions, punished corrupt ministers, and personally wrote the National Exam for entry level civil servants. Longji had said “They are the front-line ministers whose interactions represent the government to its people, and therefore are of the greatest importance.” He mandated every county be required to have a school³⁵. He constructed the first Imperial Library³⁶, with over 50,000 ancient tomes and 20,000 contemporary Tang works. Many of China's greatest poets lived in his time, and to this day the first book most Chinese children learn to read is a compilation of Tang poetry. Over 70 countries (including Byzantium!) sent students to Tang, many of whom would then go on to hold civic office in the Tang government. There were between 4-5 thousand foreign families living in the capital.

This period also saw many agricultural advances³⁷. South Chinese discovered they could get two harvests of rice in a single year. The technique of densely sprouting seeds in the most fertile land, then transplanting hardier plants to different land greatly improved yields as well. The curved axle plow was developed, and hydraulic engineers developed an irrigation system using bamboo tubes carried along a line by waterwheels. Rice fell to 1.5 coins per liter—so low Longji had to put a price floor on grain to protect farmer income.

Li Longji's triumphs of prosperity were so great, that he decided to make a sacrifice on Mount Tai. This ritual meant effectively declaring yourself one of the greatest Emperors in all of history, and had only been performed by Qin Shihuang for uniting China, Liu Che for defeating the Huns, Liu Xiu for defeating Wang Mang and restoring Han Dynasty, and Li Zhi in Li Shimin's honor. To do so and be unworthy would be to humiliate yourself for eternity, if not to provoke the wrath of Heaven for your arrogance and see your entire country wiped out in completely senseless apocalyptic horror. But that's a ridiculous superstition, and Li Longji had legitimately just guided the country to the best it had ever been (or would ever be), so nobody objected.

After that, he figured there was nothing he could possibly do that would ruin his legacy, so he devoted most of his time thereafter to his harem³⁸. In particular, to his favorite Noble Consort Yang Yuhuan³⁹, fourth of the Four Great Beauties—and since pudgy was in fashion, she's known for her voluptuous beauty. Yang was actually married to Li Longji's son, but he ordered her to become a nun—thus breaking the marriage—and then took her for himself. Her wardrobe alone was given a 700 servant staff, and Li Longji used the pony express system—normally reserved for important military messages—to deliver fresh lychees from south China to the capital in Chang'an⁴⁰. Her entire family were given important positions of power, including her brother taking the position of Chancellor. Every year they'd travel to the hot-springs palace in luxurious carriages.

And for the most part, this would have been fine. The treasury was flush and could afford to indulge its Emperor. The problem was peace. Generals needed wars to prove their worth and improve their status, and were more than willing to start some shit on the far frontier where they had authority to “defend” the country without riding months back to the capital for permission⁴¹. They also had the hubris that comes from being an economic and technological superpower that hasn't been at total war in a century. One dumb fuck got a third of the entire army killed (~200k casualties) in a poorly executed and entirely pointless invasion of Cambodia. And naturally, sensing weakness, invaders tried to take back their territory on the western frontier.

To resupply the lost army, Longji had to allow generals to draft and promote their own troops from local populations rather than relying on the Imperial draft to supply them. Normally, troops were mixed so that they were never from one region or ethnicity. Furthermore, only the capital could bestow honors and promotions, so your advancement in the military meant pleasing the capital, not your commanding officer. Li Longji was fully aware the danger of changing these incentives, but he thought it necessary to deal with the looming crisis.

The war in the west required more and more troops and logistics, concentrating half the countries remaining military into the hands of one general. Although Li Longji could change who that general was, this didn't change the fact whoever had command posed a danger to the balance of power. So to maintain the balance, he put the other half of the army in the hands of the man he considered to be the most loyal and most harmless. That man was An Lushan.

An Lushan was an obese⁴² man of Turkish ancestry who had joined the Tang army. He was supposed to be executed for stealing sheep, but like Han Xin, he got out of it by asking his commander why they were executing him when he could be killing barbarians. His commander was so impressed he made him an officer. An Lushan then was slated for execution a second time for ignoring orders and attacking barbarians too aggressively, resulting in defeat, but his commander plead his overzealous case to the Emperor himself, and got him a pardon. For the most part, An Lushan was a buffoon, but if nothing else he was a talented ass-kisser, and eventually it got him the rank of general. At the imperial court, An Lushan gained favour with an ageing Li Longji by being rude as fuck to the Crown Prince, and excusing his behaviour with not being familiar with Chinese culture and customs. He asked Consort Yang to adopt him (even though she was 16 years younger than An Lushan), and the Emperor agreed out of amusement⁴³ and sparing no expense on building him a gilded jade-encrusted palace in the capital.

I'm going to editorialize a bit here, because I think a dry history is going to miss what's going on. Longji believed An Lushan to be too witless to be deceptive, too incompetent to pose a threat, and too invested in the royal family to be disloyal. He was the perfect pawn to balance the scales. Every time the general in the west (now commanded by Geshu Han) needed more power, Longji would raise An's power in the north by an equal measure. When An Lushan requested more for whatever reason, Longji would raise Geshu's forces as well.

Yet all history records—and all a typical minister at the time would observe—is that Longji was heaping more honors and rewards on an incompetent, crude, obese, foreign-born jester than were bestowed to an actual war hero. The ministers got their position through meritocracy, and An's very existence was an affront to their sense of justice; all they could assume was favoritism and corruption. They didn't understand—because it wasn't their job to understand—that being an incompetent jester was the reason Longji gave An such power. But those who hated An found it very easy to find allies willing to work against him—even illegally if necessary.

The courtiers—particularly those in the Yang family who recently found themselves in power—probably understood what Longji was doing. But they thought he should have trusted them with this power instead, and saw An as simply a rival diabolical ass-kissing manipulator who had duped the Emperor. Anyone at their level, they assumed, had to be as much of a career sociopath as they were, and even if An was just an honest oaf, there was nothing to be gained for them in that assumption. So they accused An of plotting treason on a weekly basis, with no evidence whatsoever besides⁴⁴ the fact he held too much power. They tried to generate corruption scandals⁴⁵ to remove An, but none of it stuck.

Eventually, the war in the west ended. Geshu and An were both called home to surrender their command and divide up their armies. But Geshu had a stroke on his journey home (he survived), and An couldn't be sure if that was true or just a cover story for why Geshu was suddenly out of the picture. Meanwhile, the Yang family thought it would be a great idea to secretly arrest and execute An's friends and allies, so if the Emperor did decide to imprison him, he'd have nobody to help him wriggle out of it as they pushed for execution. An's son managed to get a message out to his father of the extrajudicial executions, and this spooked the hell out of him. Ambitious military officers now loyal to An made it very clear⁴⁶ he'd die Han Xin's death the moment he entered the city gates. An was likely completely out of his depth, but he had no choice.

So An went to the capital. With his entire army at his back⁴⁷. He claimed he was under imperial orders, so each city opened their gates and let him through. All the ministers cried that An Lushan had indeed finally rebelled, but they'd been crying wolf for far too long for Longji to take them seriously. It's not until there was only one city between An Lushan and the capital that Longji realized he's about to die. He sent Geshu out to fight An, hoping they'd take each other out, but Geshu was swiftly defeated. So Longji executed An's family and secretly fled the capital along with the Yang family. But along the way, the imperial guard turned on them and blamed the Yang family for provoking An Lushan. Longji permitted the execution of the entire Yang family, but begged them to spare Noble Consort Yang. They were unmoved, and her forced suicide was immortalized in tragic poetry. She was buried beside the road without a coffin.

Li Longji's crown prince, Li Heng, decided he could not flee the capital in cowardice, and instead went to Lingwu to take command of a force to retake the capital. Once there, the army forsook the cowardly Emperor and insisted Li Heng take his father's throne. Meanwhile Li Longji was giving orders from his new seat of power—and was quite surprised when news reaching him of his son's usurpation. He wasn't ready to retire, but realistically he had already lost his authority, so he accepted it and sent the crown and his minister to Li Heng. But he hoped he could still exert his influence as Dowager Emperor, and continued to issue orders throughout the war, complicating the Tang efforts to end the rebellion. He spent the rest of his miserable life in severe depression. He'd lost his love, his crown, his wealth, his palace, his legacy, and any chance of redemption.

Meanwhile, the one city between An Lushan and the capital was Suiyang. There, the local magistrate⁴⁸ Zhang Xun shut the gates and prepared his 6,800 soldiers for a siege against An Lushan's 130,000 man army. Within 16 days, Suiyang had inflicted 20,000 casualties. An Lushan considered abandoning his rebellion altogether and fleeing into exile, but instead temporarily retreated and returned 2 months later with 20,000 reinforcements to replace his losses. The siege continued, and Suiyang continued to hold, but after 4 more months they had exhausted their food, and were down to only 1,600 soldiers. For the next month they ate every horse, every dog, every rat, every insect, every weed and even the bark off the trees, but soon even that was gone.

Zhang Xun ordered his 30 best soldiers to break through the siege and escape, and 26 of them succeeded. There were 2 cities within a day's ride away. There were 2 more cities 2 days away. But it was precisely during this time that Li Heng had taken the throne, yet Li Longji was still issuing orders. Two cities were loyal to Heng, and two loyal to Longji, and if any of them committed their forces to breaking the siege, then the other Emperor's forces would be poised to wipe them out. So all 4 cities refused to send aid—despite there not actually being any conflict in the Imperial family. They offered Commander Nan Jinyun to feast with them however. Enraged, Nan Jiyun bit off his own finger and left it with them, swearing if he survived, he’d make them all pay. Then he rode back to Suiyang to face certain death. One governor offered 3,000 troops to reinforce the town, but it was not enough to end the siege. Only about 1,000 made it back inside the city walls.

Zhang Xun knew they were doomed. But every day they held gave the Tang Emperors another day to prepare their forces and defeat the jester king. So he took his concubine, slit her throat, and commanded his soldiers to eat. One by one, he went through every member of his family. And then the citizens began to volunteer. First the women, because they could not fight. Then the elderly. Then the children. Zhang Xun knew these people by name. One by one, they gave their lives—believing that if their sacrifice would let Tang prevail, then China would return to the utopia it had been only a few short years ago. By the end of the siege—which lasted in total 8 months—Zhang Xun and Nan Jinyun were captured and killed when they refused to join An Lushan. Two weeks after the fall of Suiyang, Li Longji yielded the throne to Li Heng.

The summary blurb on wikipedia has become something of a meme among cruel westerners. An Lushan took 120,000 deaths total. Suiyang lost 9,400 soldiers. 20,000-30,000 civilians eaten. There were only 400 military and 600 civilian survivors. Those survivors built temples and monuments to honor Zhang Xun, whose brilliant leadership was able to inflict such damage to the rebels.

And yet, this was only the beginning. The civil war continued for 8 years. At its end, the census count had dropped from 53 million people to 17 million (3 million households). Of course, many of these had simply fallen off the census, particularly among far reaching provinces, but the most conservative estimate of the death toll was still 13 million. This, 50 years prior to the invention of gunpowder, and another 2 centuries away from the first firearm. To put that into perspective, World War I ranged between 15 to 22 million total deaths on both sides of the war, including civilian deaths from famine. It is quite possible the An Lushan rebellion is second only to World War II as the deadliest conflict in human history.

How did it get this bad? For starters, An Lushan's army⁴⁹ did not have the state mechanism to draw taxes to pay his soldiers. So he paid them in pillage⁵⁰. When he needed conscripts, he'd burn the fields supplying a city he recently captured so that the only way to survive was to join his army and pillage his enemies. Once they started losing the war, defecting warlords (including Goguryeo) tried to prove their loyalty to the Tang by massacring foreigners and presenting their pillage as tribute.

The Tang didn't do much better. Li Heng had needed reinforcements after Geshu's defeat. He struck a deal with the Uyghur Khan, marrying his daughter to him and granting him the right to pillage the capital once it was retaken. Li Heng's crown prince, Li Chu, bowed and begged the Khan to pillage An Lushan's capital at Luoyang instead, since pillaging their own capital before the war was over would mean everyone would resist being liberated. The Khan agreed, but it was a hell of a thing for an Emperor to have to sacrifice his own people to pay off a warlord.

This was far from Tang's only dysfunction. Li Heng's brother didn't accept his usurpation as legitimate, and seceded. His rebellion was quickly put down, but it diverted Tang's attention south when they needed to confront An Lushan in the north. Meanwhile, Li Longji kept issuing orders as Dowager Emperor, confusing the battle plan. As the Tang neared victory over the rebels, intrigue set in against their own, and one of the more competent generals was accused of planning to rebel. After a failed assassination plot, he actually did rebel, successfully holding south China for quite some time. This distraction allowed the rebels to gain back Luoyang, among other territory they had lost—prolonging the war. In reality, the An Lushan Rebellion might be better understood as 4 simultaneous civil wars, and some historians refer to this conflict instead as the Tianbao Chaos.

Li Heng would die of age and illness 13 days after his father—regretting his father's miserable fate—and leaving Li Chu⁵¹ to see the war's end. And at the war's end, he lacked the courage to tell the existing warlords to stand down and return to an Imperial military system—lest he shatter the fragile peace and prolong an already apocalyptic war. Tang would last another 144 years, technically. But much like late Han Dynasty, it had turned into a mess of fiefdoms held by independent warlords, who didn’t actually have to answer to the Empror. And the postwar recovery served only to keep pace with slow inevitable decay⁵² into hereditary warlords, corruption, and infighting.

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1. Still not considered as smart as Zhuge Liang, but undeniably, he was a very clever man.

2. He died at the ripe old age of 51, but still managed to outlive all his friends. He is recorded as weeping openly each and every time news was brought to him as each one passed. The imperial physicians told him his health would be in peril if he kept becoming so upset in old age, and he said if he couldn’t cry in front of them, then he’d shut himself in his room and cry.

3. By Chinese reckoning. He was actually 20 by western standards.

4. Mao Zedong named him the greatest military leader in Chinese history. Notably, he was the only noble-born figure Mao would praise.

5. He did suffer one defeat. He had malaria at the time, so he gave his battle plan to his generals, who ignored the battle plan and got themselves captured. Korean historians (the only ones consulted on Wikipedia’s page) also tried to pain a pyrrhic victory when Goguryeo fel, but this doesn’t match the meticulous Tang military records (which I read—they were very dry) which recorded in exhaustive detail the tribute received, the cities abandoned by the Goguryeo to be annexed and taxed by the Tang. Nor did Tang suffer any economic impact or significant casualties one would expect from a pyrrhic victory. They did temporarily withdraw due to an early winter, but this didn’t change the outcome—except that the conquest wasn’t officially over until the next Emperor.

6. One of the only vanity monuments he built was a carving of his six favourite horses that had fallen in battle beneath him.

7. Wei Zheng is known for building a career on opposing and criticising Li Shimin, up to and including Li Shimin’s choice of lunch. He criticised him every day on every item. He antagonised hte Emperor his entire life, and Li Shimin considered killing him on no less than five occasions. But ultimately, Li Shimin considered him an important friend-the only one with the courage to speak so plainly in criticism. Even if it was predictably biased, he considered it a useful perspective to consider.

8. You know, what with the Sui death march, people injuring themselves to dodge the draft, and forced labour taking priority over harvest season.

9. Conveniently for our comparison, 1 Tang Dynasty coin is almost exactly $1 USD as of 2022. And the price of short-grained modern GMO’d mass yield rice today is $5 per pound (at a grocery store). A litre of rice weighs 0.6kg, so roughly a pound. Tang Dynasty achieved modern day rice prices! Although, the Tang Dynasty prices was for wholesale rice, so it’s not quite a fair comparison. But still, impressive!

10. It occurs to me that praise of the Equal-Field system might actually be modern CCP propaganda, as their usual indifference to dynastic politics is compromised on this matter. Still, while you can debate its importance, ox-lending did become an unchallenged and basic policy until the 17th century.

11. For a number of years relative to how far you had to travel. Keep in mind the draft included public works, not just military. Though even for public works drafts, Li Shimin limited the draft to 2/5th of a household, and has the unprecedented policy of actually paying you and feeding you during the draft period—whereas before, you had to spend your own money to eat during your time of unpaid service.

12. If you’re unfamiliar with the origion of the word “salary”, salt was a big fucking deal to ancient commerce.

13. Actively improving and inceitivising the social status of merchants as a big change as well. Historically, all of East Asia shared a cast system—not of bloodline, but of profession, so you could move freely to an extent. Scholars sat at the top, followed by military, then farmers, then artisans, then merchants, then actual outcasts such as beggars, whores, and criminals. Merchants could attain great wealth and power, but their contribution to society was dubious, so they were viewed as grifters by default.

14. Note that Li Shimin was also a famously frugal Emperor and didn’t indulge in many luxuries. But much like how it’s illegal to wear a military or police uniform, certain colours and fabrics were restricted to Imperial personnel. This extended to certain foods as well, though which ones varied by Dynasty. For example, in the Qin Dynasty, beef was solely reserved for the Emperor and sacrifices to the Gods. It was otherwise illegal to kill cattle, whose population needed to be conserved especially in times of famine. Mutton was restricted to lesser nobles, while pork and chicken was permitted to all citizens.

15. A treatment not developed in the west until 1890.

16. For the Sui, this was a horrendously bad decision. And later in Tang Dynasty, this would again be a horrendously bad decision. Perhaps the conquest and tribute might have been necessary to balance the budget after cutting taxes so much. It’s hard to say why it worked out so well for Li Shimin, because again, he’s just a badly-written Mary-Sue fanfic protagonist.

17. Spoiler: It’s actually a really bad thing when an entire civilisation forgets what war is like.

18. “Do you miss daddy? Daddy misses you sooo much he feels like he’s going to die! Wuvvu wuvvu~”

19. Fun fact: although homosexuality had fallen out of fashion since Han Dynasty, this Prince was recorded as having several male lovers.

20. Aside from the 27 new hydraulic engineering projects. That was inevitable, because this is China.

21. No, really. Despite the infanticide and horrendous discrimination in China today, “Women hold up half the sky” is the most decent thing Mao ever did.

22. That’s the official story. But historians believed that Li Zhi had an affair with the 14-year-old Wu Zetian before his father ever died.

23. There’s not enough evidence for historians to say whether this is true, but it was plausible. Yet Wu Zetian’s reign was ruthless enough to lead many to believe she murdered the child herself just to depose the Queen. A third possibility is that the child died of SIDS, and Wu simply turned the tragedy into opportunity.

24. They had to make up a new word to describe her position.

25. Technically, Emperor is not a gendered term in Chinese, but no woman had ever held the title. But she used the exact same word as the men before her, so I’m translating it as Emperor, not Empress.

26. Wu Zetian also greatly elevated the prominence of Buddhism over Confucianism, taking a Buddhist monk as her first consort, and styling herself after the female Buddhia Maitreya. She also had a phrase where she sought immortality, where she brought in various Buddhist mystics who claimed to have lived forever, but eventually, she became disillusioned with their scamming and had them executed.

27. Princess Taiping is also remembered for introducing the infamous Zhang brothers to Wu Zetian, who became her favourite concubines as a duo. They held immense power, but conspired to get many people executed since they knew they’d be extrajudicially executed as soon as Wu Zetian was too old to protect them. Which was precisely what happeneed the moment she was on her death bed.

28. At one point, she had her own son Li Dan investigated on suspicion of usurpation, and the secret police had collected dozens of tortured confessions from his servants. But one servant, An Jinzan—cut hiso wn belly open while declaring the Prince’s innocence. Wu was moved enough by this act taht she called off the investigation, and imeprial physicians even managed to save An’s life!

29. I credit the Emperor, but remember he only sets the government agenda. The scholars hired during Wu Zetian’s days were the ones who drafted and executed effective policy.

30. A more thorough, well-funded census discovered an extra 800,000 population still off the books, but Chinese historians estimate another 20 million population were unaccounted for—particularly given how vast the territory had become.

31. Modern day Uzbekistan.

32. North of Lake Baikal.

33. For instance, Xin Jiang (the silk road region) is a global leader in cutton production today, but this was only possible thanks to GMO’d cotton that could thrive in arid climates. Xinjiang was basically only useful as a trade route prior to the 20th century.

34. I’ll note here that Chinese Bhiddism is extremely syncretised with Doaism. Non-clergy will interact with temples more or less the same—making offerings and praying for the Buddha to grant their wish (instead of the Celestial Bureaucracy). Contrary to literally all of their dogma and other sects, Chinese Buddhism has always been extremely materialistic and political—and modern times is no exception. When I studied Buddhism with Professor Noel Pennington in Kyushu University, he claimed that syncretised sects were deliberately promoted by the Imperail government to try and reduce how disruptive abandonment of worldly duty was to society. In as much as it was effective, it resulted in a new faction in Chinese politics that had to be dealt with.

35. Such that the local government must build one if a private school was not already available. But these weren’t free public education—you’d still have to pay tuition at a public institution. Confucius was very adamant taht education should never be free, as people do not treasure that which is freely given, and an attitude that does not value education is ruinous for both individual and society.

36. There were considerable collections of literature prior to this in the imperial family, but they were all private. At most, you might be allowed to make a copy of the work if you paid money and worked for them. There were no public freely available libraries in China until this point, and you still had to be in the Imperial Bureaucracy to use the Imperial Library.

37. Including how to mill wheat into flour. Until this point, China had assumed you eat wheat the same way as rice—by boiling the husks into an unpalatable porridge of poor nutritional value. No historical source actually says this, but I can’t help but think flour was probably introduced through the silk road by middle-eastern immigrants who were horrified by what these people were doing to wheat. Normally, China is centuries ahead on technology, so I found this blindspot particularly amusing.

38. Wikipedia carelessly suggests he had “tens of thousands” of women in his harem. Technically, this is correct, but only 190 of them were concubines. The rest were servants. This was an exceptionally large amount of servants, but not unprecedented.

39. Perhaps better known as “Yang Guifei”, but Fuifei is her rank within the harem, not her name.

40. Although this is recorded as having been done for her sake, modern commentary notes that it’s not as though the Emperor himself didn’t partake, so this is kinda like ordering something for your wife as a gift to yourself.

41. China wasn’t interested in simply making their borders as large as possible. By Li Longji’s time, must like Qin Dynasty before them, they had run out of profitable land to conquer, and what neighbours they had were considered to poor to bother taking over. The infrastructure investment to modernise local technology and defense was not quickly recovered, and without modernisation, the territory couldn’t be more profitable than the obligatory social safety nets and bureaucratic costs promised to China’s people. Unfair teratment is a quick way to foster rebellion, after all.

42. He infamously crushed his warhorse to death trying to ride. Granted, he was in full armour, and horses weren’t bred quite as well as modern times—but still, he never lived this down.

43. Later, Noble Consort Yang would have An Lushan dress in only an infant swaddle and dance his surprisingly nible fat-ass around the court as a joke, claiming she had given birth to a new son. An Lushan seemed to embrace the role of a court jester with enthusiasm. There were rumours she was even having an affair, which Li Longji dismissed—and historians think this is probably just the usual slander when China tries to blame all its problems on a woman. To be fair, this shit was very weird. Wouldn’t you think this was some weird sex thing?

44. The quiet part you don’t say out loud is that it’s because treason is precisely what they would do in An’s position of power. And Li Longji would say that was precisely why he chose An and not them!

45. If An was guilty of petty bribery—and given the Yang family’s naked bias, it’s hard to say if he was—it was likely the sort that everyone was engaged in at high office, but people only wanted to investigate An in particular.

46. Li Longji probably wasn’t going to execute An Lushan, but An had made enough enemies in the capital, they might have murdered him anyways. Either way, his advisors were right that it was a realistic possibility.

47. He had crowned himself the first Emperor of the Yan Dynasty, but that’s more wishful thinking than anything else.

48. Top performing magistrate in the country, in fact!

49. An Lushan himself would only last two years before being disembowelled with an axe in a bathhouse by his most trusted companion, a guy he “accidentally” castrated who nonetheless satyed by his side for decades. His son would only last two years before being murdered by his trusted ally Shi Siming. Shi Siming would only last two years before being murdered by his own son. Who lasted tow years before losing the war.

50. There’s a Chinese saying, “Thieves go through your village like a fork,, bandits like a comb, soldiers like a razor.”

51. Who had been renamed Li Yu for reasons that aren’t clear to me.

52. Their military might, however, remained as strong as ever. Less than a century after the war, Tang invaded and destroyed the Uyghur Khanate that had helped them win.