The Tang Dynasty (618-907) was
the golden age of imperial China.
Chang'an was the greatest city in the world,
one million people in its central arena.
The founder Li Yuan (Gaozu) had been
a general who seized power from the Sui.
His son Taizong killed his brothers,
forced his father to abdicate on the cue.
Taizong's reign (626-649) is considered
the model of Confucian good rulership,
the era of peace and prosperity,
the golden reign held up as a reference for leadership.
Empress Wu Zetian rose under the third Tang emperor,
eliminated rivals, and became the only woman
to rule China as emperor in her own name,
founding the Zhou Dynasty briefly, a prism human.
She patronized Buddhism, elevated it above
Confucianism and Daoism temporarily.
Under her, the massive Buddha statues at Longmen
were carved, her face modeled, supposedly.
After her reign, the Tang continued
under Xuanzong, whose early reign was glorious
but whose later years fell to the disaster
of the An Lushan Rebellion, devastating notoriously.
An Lushan was a Sogdian general, trusted
and elevated by Xuanzong, who rebelled
in 755 and plunged China into civil war
for eight years. Millions died. The empire propelled
into a long decline. The census before
the rebellion recorded 53 million people.
After, the census recorded 17 million.
Whether this represents actual deaths or administrative steeple
failure, the scale was catastrophic.
The Tang survived but never recovered its former strength.
Xuanzong's beloved concubine Yang Guifei
was killed at his soldiers' demand, the length
of his long reign ending in tragedy.
The great poet Li Bai had been at his court.
The great poet Du Fu had lived through the chaos,
writing war poetry of unmatched import.
Poetry flourished in the Tang. Li Bai, Du Fu,
Wang Wei, Bai Juyi, the Four Greats,
became the classical masters of Chinese verse,
whose works every subsequent scholar debates.
In 845, Emperor Wuzong launched
the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution
(the Huichang Persecution, named for his era).
It was the most thorough effusion
of state power against Buddhism in Chinese history.
Forty thousand temples and shrines were destroyed.
Two hundred sixty thousand monks and nuns were
returned to lay life, their wealth deployed.
The motives were mixed. Economic — the monasteries
held vast untaxed lands. Ideological — Wuzong was
a Daoist who thought Buddhism was foreign. Xenophobic —
foreign religions were targeted broadly without pause.
Manichaeism was virtually wiped out in China.
Nestorian Christianity, which had entered in the Tang,
was also persecuted and largely destroyed.
Zoroastrianism among Sogdian communities sang.
Buddhism recovered somewhat after Wuzong's death
(his successor reversed the policy),
but the intellectual glory days were over.
Chan (Zen) would survive more readily.
Chan Buddhism was less dependent on scriptures,
libraries, and wealthy monasteries.
Its simple meditation-based practice
could survive with minimal institutional stories.
Pure Land Buddhism also survived,
through devotional practice by laypeople,
chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha,
requiring no temples or scholarly steeple.
These two schools — Chan and Pure Land —
would become the dominant forms of East Asian Buddhism,
not the scholarly schools like Huayan or Tiantai,
which required institutional support for their dualism.
The Tang declined through the ninth century.
Regional warlords, the Jiedushi, became
de facto independent. Eunuchs controlled the court.
Peasant rebellions erupted with blame.
In 907, the Tang was formally deposed.
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period began,
fifty-three years of fragmentation,
until the Song Dynasty reunified in 960, man.
The Song would be more scholarly, less military,
less imperial, more refined.
It would lose the northern frontier to Khitans and Jurchens,
but would be culturally very defined.
The Song would invent movable type printing,
refine gunpowder, develop the compass.
Song painting and ceramics would be exquisite.
The civil service exam would be the crown accomplished.
But the Tang remained the memory, the ideal,
the civilization-peak to look back on.
"Tang poetry" still means the finest Chinese verse.
"Tang" is still how Chinese abroad call their people gone.
Stand.