Tang Dynasty Golden Age
The Tang ruled China for nearly three centuries and made Chang'an the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the world. The dynasty was founded in 618 by a Sui general, Li Yuan, whose second son Li Shimin killed his two brothers at the Xuanwu Gate, forced his father's abdication, and reigned as Taizong — by general agreement one of the ablest rulers in Chinese history, and one who came to the throne by fratricide. The system was inherited from the Sui and made to work: an equal-field allotment of land to peasant households, a militia army that farmed in peacetime, a three-department central government, and an examination system that began to matter. Chang'an held perhaps a million people inside its walls and another million outside, laid out on a grid of walled wards, with a foreign quarter, Nestorian churches, Zoroastrian and Manichaean temples and a Muslim community within a generation of Muhammad. Buddhism reached its Chinese height — Xuanzang's sixteen-year journey to India for scriptures is the source of the novel Journey to the West — and was then persecuted in 845. Poetry from this period, Li Bai and Du Fu above all, is what educated Chinese still memorise. The empire was broken by the An Lushan rebellion from 755, which killed an enormous and disputed number of people, wrecked the census and the tax system, and left the provinces effectively autonomous. The dynasty survived another century and a half without recovering, and fell in 907. The dynasty also produced the only woman to rule China in her own name. Wu Zetian was a concubine of Taizong, then empress to his son, then regent, then emperor of her own dynasty from 690 to 705, and she governed competently for fifteen years while being written up by every later historian as a monster.
- Year: 618 CE
- Category: Culture
