The Tang Survived An Lushan. What Did Survival Cost?

LECTURE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Explain how the shift from rotating farmer-soldiers to professional frontier armies concentrated military power in the hands of military governors such as An Lushan.
2. Trace the course of the rebellion from 755 to 763 and explain why recovery required foreign allies and compromise with rebel commanders.
3. Analyze how provincial autonomy, frontier losses, and eunuch-led palace armies reshaped Tang politics after 763.
4. Explain the fiscal turn to the two-tax system and the salt monopoly, and why less control over land and markets helped commerce grow.
5. Evaluate Han Yu's Confucian revival, the Dunhuang manuscripts as evidence, and popular myths about Yang Guifei and the rebellion's death toll.

Introductory Framing

In the last weeks of 755, An Lushan, the most powerful general on the northeastern frontier, marched south with a veteran army. Within about a month his forces had taken Luoyang, the eastern capital. By the summer of 756 they held Chang'an, and the aging emperor Xuanzong had fled west, losing his chief minister and his favorite consort on the road. The rebellion lasted until 763. The Tang dynasty survived it and lasted almost another century and a half. But the dynasty that survived was a different kind of state.

The central problem of the lecture is the cost of survival. The Tang did not win by crushing the rebels. It recovered its capitals with the help of Uighur cavalry, and it ended the war by pardoning rebel generals and making many of them provincial governors. After 763 the court shared power with military governors, some of whom passed their posts to their sons, and it depended on new taxes on land and salt rather than on the equal-field registers of the early Tang. The rebellion is often told as the end of the Tang golden age. For this lecture it is better understood as a turning point: the moment the Tang gave up the ability to govern China directly in exchange for the ability to go on existing.

Historians have moved the story away from personal blame. Older accounts, and many popular ones today, made Yang Guifei, the emperor's consort, or An Lushan's personal ambition the cause of disaster. Edwin Pulleyblank's study of the rebellion's background placed it in the politics of Xuanzong's court and the frontier. David Graff explains the military system that made a frontier general so powerful. Denis Twitchett's work on Tang finances shows how the state reinvented its revenue after 763, and Nicolas Tackett shows how the capital elite survived until the catastrophe of the late ninth century. The lecture should keep structure and individuals in view together.

I. Frontier Armies and the Making of a Crisis

From Farmer-Soldiers to Professional Armies

The early Tang relied on the fubing militia, farmer-soldiers from registered households who served in rotation. That system worked for short campaigns near home, but it did not suit the long-term defense of a vast frontier against Tibetans, Turks, Khitans, and others. By the early eighth century the court was replacing rotating militia with long-serving professional soldiers, and by 737 it had committed to permanent frontier armies. These were grouped under military governors (jiedushi), regional commanders responsible for large stretches of the frontier. By the 740s roughly half a million soldiers served in these frontier commands.

The new arrangement made sense for defense. It also placed large, experienced armies far from the capital, under commanders who controlled supplies and, increasingly, local administration. The troops near Chang'an were fewer and less experienced. The balance of military power had shifted to the frontier.

An Lushan's Career

An Lushan was born around 703 to a family of Sogdian and Turkic background on the northeastern frontier. He spoke several languages, began his career as an interpreter and trader in frontier markets, and rose through military service. He gained his first independent command in 742, became governor of Fanyang (the region around modern Beijing) in 744, and by 752 held three frontier commands at once, with well over 150,000 troops, making him the most powerful general in the empire. Frontier generals of non-Chinese background were common in these years; the chief minister Li Linfu favored them partly because they were unlikely to become rivals at court.

An Lushan also cultivated the emperor and his consort. After Li Linfu's death in 752, however, An Lushan faced a hostile chief minister, Yang Guozhong, Yang Guifei's cousin, who repeatedly warned Xuanzong that the general planned to rebel. That rivalry helped turn a powerful general's insecurity into open revolt.

Analytical Significance

II. Rebellion and Recovery, 755–763

The Rebel Advance

An Lushan rebelled late in 755, claiming he was acting against Yang Guozhong. His veterans overwhelmed newly raised imperial troops, and Luoyang fell within about a month. Early in 756 he proclaimed himself emperor of a new Yan dynasty. In the summer of 756 the rebels broke through the passes guarding the capital region, and Xuanzong fled toward Sichuan. At the Mawei post station west of Chang'an, the emperor's guards mutinied, killed Yang Guozhong, and demanded Yang Guifei's death; Xuanzong had her put to death. The rebels occupied Chang'an in July 756.

Xuanzong's son took the throne as Suzong at Lingwu, a garrison in the northwest, and Xuanzong accepted retirement. The dynasty now had an emperor, but it lacked an army able to defeat the rebels on its own.

Primary Evidence: A Poet in the Occupied Capital

Du Fu wrote this poem while trapped in rebel-held Chang'an. The first line sets the ruin of the state against the land, which goes on regardless. The middle lines turn to what the war did to ordinary relationships: families cut off, news worth more than gold. The poem is not a report on troop movements, but it is evidence of how the crisis felt to an educated man separated from his family, and it explains why later readers treated Du Fu as the poet-historian of the rebellion.

Recovery Required Help and Compromise

The Tang recovered with outside help. Uighur cavalry, allies from the steppe, helped Tang generals such as Guo Ziyi retake Chang'an and Luoyang in 757, and the Uighurs plundered Luoyang as part of their reward. For years afterward the Uighurs sold horses to the Tang at high prices in exchange for huge quantities of silk, a burden that drained the treasury. Meanwhile the rebel leadership destroyed itself. An Lushan was murdered by his son early in 757; his general Shi Siming later killed that son and was in turn killed by his own son, Shi Chaoyi. The rebellion ended in 763 when Shi Chaoyi's commanders abandoned him.

The ending was a bargain. The court pardoned leading rebel commanders and gave many of them provincial commands in Hebei, the very region where the rebellion had begun. The war was over, but the forces that had fought it remained in place.

Analytical Significance

III. A Divided Empire: Provinces, Frontiers, and Palace Armies

Governors Who Acted Like Local Rulers

After 763 military governors spread across the interior as well as the frontier. Most provinces remained loyal and sent revenue to the court, but several in the northeast, especially in Hebei, acted almost like independent states. Their governors kept their own armies, appointed their own officials, retained most of their tax revenue, and often passed their posts to sons or to officers chosen by the troops. The court tried to reassert control, and a major rebellion by the northeastern governors from 781 to 786 even forced Emperor Dezong to flee Chang'an in 783. Emperor Xianzong (r. 805–820) had more success, bringing most provinces back under central direction by about 819, but the Hebei provinces regained their autonomy after his death.

Frontier Losses

The rebellion also weakened Tang power abroad. Troops pulled back from the frontiers to fight the rebels left the northwest open. In 763 Tibetan forces briefly occupied and looted Chang'an, and over the following decades they took the Gansu corridor, including Dunhuang, which remained under Tibetan rule from the 780s until 848. Tang garrisons in Central Asia were cut off. New regional powers, the Tibetan empire, the Uighurs, and Nanzhao in the southwest, gained ground at Tang expense.

Palace Armies and Eunuchs

To protect themselves from provincial generals, emperors built up palace armies stationed near the capital. The most important, the Shence ("Divine Strategy") armies, came under the command of palace eunuchs, men who served inside the palace and were personally close to the emperor. By the early ninth century these armies had become the largest force near the capital, by some counts about 100,000 men. The solution created a new problem. Eunuch commanders gained great influence over the court, including over the choice of emperors. In 835, in the so-called Sweet Dew incident, Emperor Wenzong and his ministers tried to destroy the eunuchs' power; the plot failed, and the eunuch-led troops killed several chief ministers and many officials. The court had replaced dependence on one set of military factions with dependence on another.

Analytical Significance

IV. Paying for Survival: The Two-Tax System, Salt, and Commerce

The End of Equal-Field Taxation

The early Tang tax system, described in Lecture 2, assumed that the state could register households and allocate land. By the mid-eighth century that assumption had already weakened, and the rebellion destroyed it. Registers were lost, people had fled, and large areas no longer reported to the court. In 780, under Emperor Dezong, the chief minister Yang Yan introduced the two-tax system. It taxed households according to the land and property they actually held, collected in two installments, in summer and autumn, and assessed in money. Provinces were given quotas to deliver. The state had stopped trying to control who held land and began simply to tax what people owned.

Salt Becomes the State's Best Revenue

The court also found revenue it could collect without relying on the provinces. In 758 it established a state monopoly on salt, and under the finance official Liu Yan the Salt Commission, based at Yangzhou near the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yangzi, turned it into a major source of cash. Because the state controlled production and added a heavy charge to the price, everyone who bought salt paid the tax indirectly. By about 780 salt supplied a major part of the central government's revenue. The monopoly also tied the court's finances to the south, where much of the salt was produced and where the canal carried goods north.

Commerce Expands

Less government control over land and markets helped commerce grow. The official market rules of the early Tang, which limited trade to designated markets under supervision, gradually broke down. Markets appeared outside the old wards and in rural towns, merchants used silver and forms of credit, and in the early ninth century the court and merchants used "flying money," paper certificates that let merchants move funds without carrying heavy coin. The Yangzi region prospered, and Yangzhou became one of the richest cities in the empire. The long shift of China's population and wealth toward the south, often described in later periods, was already well under way.

Analytical Significance

V. Han Yu, Dunhuang, and the Road to 960

Han Yu's Call to Return to the Classics

The crisis also changed how educated men thought about the state and its values. Han Yu (768–824) argued that scholars should return to the Confucian classics, write in the plain prose of antiquity, and support a strong, moral imperial center. He saw Buddhism and Daoism as rivals to the Confucian social order. In 819, when Emperor Xianzong had a relic believed to be a finger bone of the Buddha brought from the Famen Temple into the palace, Han Yu submitted a memorial against it.

Han Yu defines Buddhism as foreign through language, clothing, and family relationships, and he measures it against the "former kings" of Confucian tradition. The argument nearly cost him his life. The furious emperor exiled him to Chaozhou in the far south, though he returned to office after Xianzong's death. His view was more extreme than most in his day, but it pointed toward the Confucian revival that became central to Song thought, and it helps explain the atmosphere in which the suppression of 845 took place.

What Dunhuang Preserved

Most sources for the late Tang were written at court. A remarkable exception survived at Dunhuang, the oasis at the western end of the Gansu corridor. In 1900 a Daoist caretaker, Wang Yuanlu, found a sealed chamber, now called Cave 17 or the Library Cave, packed with manuscripts and paintings. Aurel Stein took a large collection to London in 1907, and Paul Pelliot took another to Paris in 1908; other parts went to Beijing, St. Petersburg, and Japan. The documents, now numbering in the tens of thousands of items, include Buddhist scriptures, contracts, household registers, school exercises, letters, and the world's earliest dated printed book, a copy of the Diamond Sutra from 868. Scholars still debate when and why the cave was sealed, sometime around the early eleventh century. These records let historians reconstruct family life, work, schooling, worship, and local government far from the capital.

From Huang Chao to the Song

After 860 banditry and rebellion spread, driven by famine, heavy taxes, and weakened local control. The largest rising, led by the failed examination candidate and salt smuggler Huang Chao, swept through much of the empire, sacking Guangzhou in 879, Luoyang in 880, and Chang'an in early 881. Arab writers claimed that 120,000 or more foreign merchants died at Guangzhou; historians treat such figures as inflated, though the violence was real. Huang Chao was driven from Chang'an in 883 and died in 884, but power had moved to regional military leaders. One of them, Zhu Wen, a former Huang Chao lieutenant, ended the Tang in 907. For the next half-century five short-lived dynasties followed one another in the north while ten kingdoms divided the south, until the Song dynasty, founded in 960, began a new bid to reunify China.

Analytical Significance

Closing Synthesis

An Lushan's rebellion came out of a defense system that concentrated professional armies under frontier governors. The Tang survived it by relying on Uighur allies and by making peace with rebel commanders, and it paid for survival with autonomous provinces, frontier losses, and eunuch-led palace armies. It rebuilt its finances by taxing actual wealth and selling salt, and those changes helped commerce and the south grow. The state that emerged was weaker as a direct ruler but still able to govern much of China for another century, until the rebellions of the late ninth century destroyed what remained of central power.

The central historiographical shift is from blame to structure. Traditional and popular accounts treated the rebellion as the result of a ruler's infatuation and a general's treachery, and they sometimes treated census losses as a death toll. Pulleyblank, Graff, Twitchett, and Tackett have shown the military, fiscal, and social systems behind the story, and the Dunhuang documents have let historians see the late Tang from below. The individuals still matter, but they acted inside systems that made certain outcomes likely.

For the lecture, the most important distinction is between the survival of a dynasty and the survival of a way of governing. The Tang dynasty survived 755; the early Tang model of registered households, equal fields, and rotating soldiers did not. The question to leave open is whether the late Tang's compromises were a failure or a creative adaptation, and what the Song would take from them when it began to rebuild a unified state.

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan (1955). The classic study of court factions, frontier policy, and An Lushan's rise. Still the best starting point for causes.

David A. Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300–900 (2002). Explains the shift from militia to professional frontier armies and the campaigns of 755–763 with close attention to numbers and logistics.

Denis Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T'ang Dynasty (1963). The foundational account of the two-tax system, the salt monopoly, and the late Tang fiscal state.

Nicolas Tackett, The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy (2014). Shows how capital elites survived the rebellion and why the Huang Chao era, not 755, destroyed them.

Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T'ang Search for Unity (1986). Places Han Yu's writings, including the memorial of 819, in the political and intellectual world of the late Tang.

Stephen Owen, trans., The Poetry of Du Fu (2016). A complete, open-access translation with notes. Useful for choosing poems on the rebellion and its human costs.

Rong Xinjiang, Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang (English trans. 2013). A clear guide to the Library Cave's discovery, dispersal, and value as evidence.

Mark Edward Lewis, China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (2009). Its later chapters connect the rebellion to changes in cities, commerce, and the south.