The Tang dynasty as the Golden Age of China
Most Chinese regard the Tang dynasty (618–907) as the highpoint of imperial China, both politically and culturally. The empire reached its greatest size prior to the Manchu Qing dynasty, becoming the center of an East Asian world linked by religion, script, and many economic and political institutions. Moreover, Tang writers produced the finest poetry in China’s great lyric tradition, which has remained the most prestigious literary genre throughout Chinese history. But like most other dynasties that endured for centuries, this was also an age of transformation. The world at the end of the Tang was quite different from what it had been at the beginning, and the dynasty’s historical importance is a consequence of the changes that took place during that time.
The military conquests and brilliant poetry that Chinese have traditionally celebrated occurred in the first half of the Tang dynasty. The imperial court never recovered from a cataclysmic rebellion in the middle of the eighth century, and within a few decades Chinese statesmen and authors were already writing of a golden age in whose shadow they now dwelled.
Glorification of the Tang’s early achievements in politics and art increased in later dynasties. With all of China or its northern half controlled by non-Chinese peoples for most of the empire’s subsequent history, the Tang became the last great “Chinese” dynasty. This idea (which dismissed the militarily weak Ming dynasty) ignores the fact that the Tang ruling house was—both genealogically and culturally—a product of the frontier “barbarian” culture that dominated northern China in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Tang Ruler as Heavenly Qaghan
The first clear distinction between the Tang international order and its classic Han predecessor was that the Tang ruling house and its closest followers, who made up the elite of the Guanzhong region, had over the preceding centuries intermarried with non-Chinese peoples and adopted many elements of nomadic culture, particularly military skills. While the distant origins of the founding Li family remain unclear, by the sixth century the family consisted of a line of prominent military men who were members of the mixed Chinese-Xianbei-Turkish aristocracy that had dominated northwest China under the Northern Zhou state and the subsequent Sui dynasty. While Tang supporters tried to mask these origins, positing descent from an influential Han family, the Tang empire’s new foreign policy toward the Turkish empire that had reunited the steppes was heavily based on the ruling house’s cultural ties with non-Chinese nomads to the north and west.
This new policy emerged in the reign of the second emperor, Taizong, when the Tang empire abandoned the founder’s policy of appeasing the Turks and set out instead to conquer them. Through a combination of conquest, diplomacy, and the dissemination of Tang culture, Emperor Taizong attempted to extend Chinese power in every direction. However, his only success in foreign policy was to temporarily incorporate the Turks into the Tang through conquest and diplomacy, a policy made possible by his and his advisers’ familiarity with Turkish political and military structures. After briefly avoiding foreign adventures in the name of stabilizing Tang rule, Taizong gradually conceived of a great dual empire that combined mastery of China, embodied in the traditional title of Son of Heaven, with lordship over the Turks, indicated by the new title of Heavenly Qaghan.
Changing one’s genealogy and ethnicity in the Tang dynasty
Genealogy played a role not only in defining status but also ethnicity, including that of the imperial lineage itself. Just as Han Chinese sought status by claiming membership in a prestigious lineage, so non-Han individuals and families could advance socially by asserting a genealogy that would make them Han, and preferably Han with some notable ancestor or family line. The simplest genealogical path was to change one’s surname and those of one’s ancestors, of which the most blatant example was the imperial Li family itself. At least on its female side, and perhaps on the male side as well, the family descended from non-Han people, but it went to great lengths to construct a prestigious Han genealogy and even descent from Laozi.
The practice of changing surnames to reassign ethnic identity for political purposes had figured prominently at least since the Han, when non-Han hostages and surrendered Xiongnu might be given Han surnames. The Tuoba rulers of the Northern Wei adopted the Chinese surname Yuan and granted this as an award to many of their followers. When Emperor Xiaowen of the Wei launched a policy of sinicizing his court, he ordered the Tuoba nobility to take Chinese surnames. The Tang imperial house also granted its surname to nomads who submitted. In Tang times, many leading lineages of non-Han origins sought to efface their tribal roots. […] One Tang genealogy stated that the Dugu clan — a non-Han family that had helped establish the Northern Zhou and whose women had married into imperial families in the Northern Zhou, Sui, and Tang — once had the surname Liu.
Less dishonest, and more frequent, was the strategy of claiming descent from a highly prestigious alien lineage, such as the ruling house of the Northern Wei. Most of the Guanzhong and Daibei elites followed this practice. An example was the assertion that the early Tang official Zhangsun Wuji descended from the imperial Tuoba house, when his actual ancestors were the lower-ranked Baba clan. […] In status-conscious Tang society, being a tribal noble was more prestigious than having an ethnic Han pedigree. […] Those who held office in semi-autonomous foreign communities also frequently claimed noble non-Han origins. Given the roles of these men as intermediaries between the Tang state and tribal allies, their non-Han genealogies could have been positively beneficial.
Yet another genealogical strategy was to claim that one’s founding ancestor was an ethnic Han who had been captured by alien tribes or for some other reason carried off to the west. The great Tang poet Li Bo, almost certainly of non-Han origins, invented such a genealogy. The ancestor most often chosen for this purpose was the Han dynasty general Li Ling, who was captured by the Xiongnu in 99 b.c. Descent from Li Ling was usually claimed by relatively unassimilated peoples such as the Uighurs and Kirghiz, who asserted this kin tie to assist them in making political alliances with the Chinese. Thus, both the Tang Emperor Wuzong and an allied Uighur leader claimed shared descent from Li Ling as a foundation for their collaboration. Tang writers explained the occasional appearance of black hair among the Kirghiz, who generally had blond or reddish hair, as being the result of intermarriage between Li Ling’s soldiers and the ancestors of the Kirghiz.
A final genealogical strategy for dealing across ethnic lines was the occasional practice among non-Han leaders of tracing descent from the legendary Yellow Emperor himself — the founding ancestor of the Han Chinese people — or from the ancient Zhou ruling house. Such claims flattered both those who made them and their Tang recipients, who could thus assert a larger realm for their putative ancestor. The Chinese had linked themselves to more distant peoples through a common origin in the ancient sage-kings at least since the late Warring States and early Han mythic geography, the Canon of Mountains and Seas (Shan hai jing).
Legal punishments in the Tang dynasty
The Tang code still embraced the notion that the human and natural worlds were intimately linked and that the natural world was unsettled by criminal actions. Punishment served not only to intimidate the disobedient but also to restore the cosmic balance between yin and yang. To maintain this balance, anyone shown to have falsely accused another person received precisely the punishment that would have befallen the falsely accused. If it was proved that a person had been wrongly exiled, the state made reparation to him by remitting taxes for the number of years he had wrongly suffered. There was no reparation for unjust beatings, which were apparently considered a trivial matter, or for executions. Since the emperor had to personally approve all capital punishment and since imperial error was not recognized by the legal code, there could never be an unjust execution in the eyes of the law.
As part of the theory of balance, repeated natural calamities could lead to general reductions in sentences, and in order to compensate for unknown injustices it was the practice to grant general amnesties on the occasion of a new emperor’s accession, sometimes on the emperor’s birthday, or on other auspicious occasions.
Emperor Xuanzong’s reign
Chinese historians conventionally treat the early decades of Xuanzong’s reign as a high point of the Tang dynasty, a new golden age comparable to that of Taizong. They describe an industrious ruler working together with outstanding ministers to restore effective government after sixty years of rule by women. This was also the age when the greatest poets in Chinese history produced their works. But in his later years, the story goes, the aging emperor fell under the spell of yet another ambitious woman. Leaving the affairs of state to the care of a single unreliable minister, he surrendered himself to the bliss of a late-blossoming passion. The mismanaged government stumbled into a catastrophic military rebellion that led to the death of the beloved concubine, the deposition of the ruler, and the near-collapse of the dynasty.
Not only is this traditional account based on misogynistic moral judgments and the self-flattery of the literati, but a two-part division of Xuanzong’s reign is not the most analytically useful. A more appropriate framework would divide the reign into three segments. The first period, from his accession in 712 until roughly 720, saw considerable continuity both in personnel and policies with the reign of Empress Wu. The next period, between 720 and 736, was marked by the resurgence at court of the great families of Guanzhong and the first appearance of specialist commissioners with extra-bureaucratic appointments and staff. In the final period, between 736 and the outbreak of the An Lushan rebellion in 756—apart from the conventionally cited withdrawal of the emperor into private life, the control of the court by two successive ministers, and the rise of factionalism—the army became fully professionalized, military governors obtained high official appointments, and the Tang dynasty increasingly shifted into a defensive foreign policy.
The Tang dynasty: women
The Tang dynasty is often depicted as a golden age for Chinese women, a period of relative autonomy and power prior to their subjugation under the Neo-Confucianism of the Song dynasty, with its emphasis on widow chastity, widow suicide, strengthening of the patriline, and the new fashion of foot-binding.
This generalization is true only in part, because the Tang was also the period when the commercial market in women became a prominent part of city life and when that market was transferred to the household in the form of concubines. Both of these developments were part of a process that would reduce the status of Chinese women.
Women in power during the Tang dynasty
The image of the Tang as an age of unprecedented female prominence arises in large part from the domination that Empress Wu, her daughter the Taiping Princess, and Empress Wei exerted over the empire for more than half a century. But this high point of female political power in imperial China was merely the culmination of a long process that began with the fall of the Han. The nomad warriors who occupied north China after the Han brought with them the greater equality of men and women that characterized nomadic societies. As described in the sixth century by Yan Zhitui, women in northern cities handled legal disputes, associated with the politically powerful, and entered government offices to submit petitions and complaints on behalf of their male kin. Although the Northern Wei imposed rules to limit the power of dowager empresses at court, these directives could not stop such women from controlling the court for decades in the late fifth and early sixth centuries.
Emperors’ wives often acted as political advisers to their husbands, and this pattern continued after the Sui dynasty reunified China in 589. The Sui founder’s wife was his inseparable companion and his most trusted political adviser. The couple were described as the “two sages,” and the emperor continued to follow his wife’s judgment in political matters despite a falling out after the empress had one of his favorite concubines murdered. It was the empress, not the emperor, who ultimately determined that the succession would pass to her favorite son, Yang Guang. Like his father, Emperor Yang looked to his wife as his primary confidante throughout his life. She played a major role in introducing him to southern culture and shaping, for better or worse, the southward orientation of his policies. The Tang founder was politically assisted not only by his wife but also by a daughter, the Pingyang Princess, who fought in the campaigns of conquest. Emperor Taizong likewise managed state affairs with the help of the Empress Zhangsun. Thus, the power of Tang empresses from the second half of the seventh century simply continued a northern tradition in which women actively participated in the affairs of the realm.
Empress Wu Zetian
Empress Wu had begun to dominate the court by the mid-650s, and from the time of her husband’s death in 683 until her deposition in 705 she reigned as the empress dowager and empress of her own dynasty. Despite the length and importance of this period, we have little reliable or useful documentation about her activities, apart from a few inscriptions and a handful of Buddhist texts. This deficiency stems from the fact that Wu Zhao was a woman. All the records of the period were composed and edited by men who were not only her political enemies but who regarded her entire career as a perversion of nature. Even modern historians, fully aware of the unreliability of the documentary record, still cannot escape this polemical web of enmity. The venerable Cambridge History of China, after pointing out the bias of the record, accepts unchallenged Wu’s supposed murder of her own child in a plot to supplant a rival, her mutilation of the people she supposedly executed (already a cliché about female rulers in her own day), her sexual liaisons with leading supporters (another hoary cliché), her superstitious nature and manipulation by necromantic frauds (a tendency conventionally attributed to all women), and many other such slanders.
Daoism in the Tang dynasty
The Tang was also a period of major developments in the patronage of Daoism. Links between Daoism and the Tang imperial house had been forged before the dynasty was established. Emperor Yang of the Sui honored the Shangqing Daoist master Wang Yuanzhi (528–635) as a “teacher of emperors and kings.” But when the emperor ignored Wang’s advice against moving the Sui capital to Jiangdu on the Yangzi, Wang secretly transmitted Daoist “registers” (indicating high spiritual standing) to the Tang founder, Li Yuan. This assured him of Daoist support for his subsequent founding of the Tang. His son Li Shimin (Emperor Taizong) subsequently honored Wang Yuanzhi in a special imperial decree and also sponsored the writing of calligraphic extracts from Lingbao scriptures by leading court officials.
This Daoist support led the early emperors to decide, in response to a suggestion by Wang Yuanzhi, to recognize Laozi as the ruling family’s ultimate ancestor. Laozi was the putative author of the Canon of the Way and Its Power (Dao de jing), and, since the Han, a recognized divinity who received sacrifice from the state. The Tang emperors’ focus on the divinized Laozi began with reports of his miraculous appearances in 617 and 618 to proclaim that the Tang would rule the empire. In 620 Emperor Gaozu pronounced Laozi to be the “sage ancestor” of the Tang imperial house and gave this title to the Louguan Monastery just south of the capital, which had been a historical center for the worship of Laozi. The descent of the imperial line from Laozi was affirmed by Emperor Taizong, and Daoism was declared the highest religion of the realm in 625 and again in 637. While earlier rulers in the north and south had sought legitimation from Daoist masters, the Tang rulers claimed something more: divine support as their inalienable birthright.
Female Daoists during the Tang dynasty
In Daoism, as in many other aspects of society, the Tang dynasty was an age of unparalleled opportunity and achievement for elite women. According to Du [Guangting (850–933)], his primary purpose was to record women saints neglected by other sources, to show their contributions to various religious lineages (above all his own Shangqing tradition), and to demonstrate the multiplicity of paths to the Way. Less explicit but clear is his desire to incorporate local cults (often devoted to women) into Daoism and to dramatize Daoism’s superiority to Buddhism, a theme in several of the women’s lives.
The most distinctively feminine aspect of Du’s biographies was his account of early life leading to religious practice. He wrote of childhood tensions between filial duty and a precocious religious vocation, sometimes featuring early displays of magical powers or the hidden performance of good works. A central theme was the marriage crisis, where the imperative to wed conflicted with an aspiration toward self-perfection through religious devotion. Some women avoided marriage by becoming hermits or wanderers, while others entered a Daoist convent. Concubines of deceased emperors or nobles were often forced to move to a convent, and female children were sometimes given to convents by their parents to save them from illness or starvation. For many women Daoists, entry into a convent was a way to pursue education and a literary career.
Consecration as a Daoist nun to evade an unwanted marriage or to provide a career outside the household also figured among women of the imperial family. The Taiping Princess temporarily became a Daoist nun to avoid a forced marriage to the king of Turfan, but the ordination of other princesses had a more religious aspect. The most celebrated was the ordination of two daughters of Emperor Ruizong in 711. This ceremony was celebrated at fabulous expense to the state, and each princess was given her own new monastery with easy access to the palace. In total, around a dozen Tang princesses were ordained, allowing them to escape the court but continue to participate in politics. They traveled extensively, devoted themselves to art and literature, and, according to hostile Confucian sources, led lives of sexual license and self-indulgence. Being ordained as a Daoist nun could also serve to purge the taint of a previous imperial marriage, as in the case of Yang Guifei, whose ordination was an intermediate step between the end of her marriage to a prince and her entry into the emperor’s harem.
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