The East Asian World-System by Eugene N. Anderson

Author:Eugene N. Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030168704
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5.3 High Tang

A short cycle within Tang ended dramatically with seizure of power by the Empress Wu in 683 (Guisso 1979; Lewis 2009; Twitchett and Wechsler 1979). She emerged as the consort of Li Shimin’s successor, the (future) Gaozong (r. 649–683). After he died in 683, she established her own “Zhou Dynasty” (691–705)—another tough, no-nonsense woman shaking up the “patriarchy.”

She reinstated the bureaucratic examination system. Future generations were to tell lurid stories about Empress Wu’s wild sex life, but the stories surely owe more to later Tang propaganda than to reality. (For a gloriously racy summary of this literature, see Fitzgerald 1956; for a curt dismissal, based on modern scholarship, Lewis 2009: 36.) She moved the capital to the more central but more vulnerable Luoyang. It was to move back to Chang’an after her fall. She was an ardent Buddhist, favoring that religion over Daoism.

Meanwhile, the Tibetans reached perhaps the all-time summit of their power, consolidating control over all of what is now Tibet and conquering far into China. Their power declined slowly. Tang was to drive them from most of China by 801 (Guisso 1979; Lewis 2009: 64–66). The Khitan also surfaced as a major power on the north (Guisso 1979: 317–319); they were to rise to glory after Tang fell.

Tang conquered far into Asia. “By the 670s T’ang protectorates had been established up to the borders of Persia, the Chinese had occupied the Tarim and Zungharia, and destroyed Koguryŏ in Korea” (Twitchett 1979: 13). Arabs stopped China by defeating the Chinese army at Talas River, almost in the exact center of Asia, in 751. This set China’s frontier more or less permanently; the border is still just east of that small stream. The boundaries of the East Asian world-system were set in the process of integrating it more tightly with the western part of Eurasia.

In the meantime, Empress Wu was finally displaced in a coup in 705, and soon died. She was succeeded in quick succession by the hapless emperors Zhongzong and Ruizong (r. 705–710, 710–712). Woman power was not dead: the empire was in fact run by Zhongzong’s Empress Wei. She initially took a lover, Wu Sansi, nephew of Empress Wu. He was murdered in 707, Wei herself in 710. The whole period was memorably described as “the calamity of the empresses Wu and Wei” by Song Dynasty historian Yuan Shu (Guisso 1979: 329).

Yet another woman, the princess Taiping, then took the real power, her brother Ruizong being hopelessly weak and sickly. He retired in hopeless illness in 712. The most functional heir of the Li family, Li Longji, took over in 713, blocking a coup by Taiping and her forces. She committed suicide (Twitchett 1979).

Li Longji is known to history as Xuanzong, the Dark or Mysterious Ancestor. A larger-than-life figure, he has attracted a mass of legends. The glory of his reign is still known to every educated Chinese person as the Golden Age of the civilization. At his court were the greatest poets in Chinese history, men such as Li Bai and Du Fu.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.