China by John Keay

Author:John Keay
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780465020027
Publisher: Basic Books

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

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