LIKE A BREATH OF SPRING

They swore to wipe out the nomads, no thought for themselves, Five thousand in sable and brocade, gone to barbarian dust. Pity them – these bones by the shores of the Uncertain River – to those who dream in spring chambers, they are still men!²²

In his ‘Song of Longxi’ (Longxi being a remote outpost in western Gansu) Chen Dao, a ninth-century poet, highlighted the human cost of an extended empire by juxtaposing the frontier’s cruel oblivion and the homeland’s fond recollections. Poetry, like remonstration, could be a form of protest; and since poets were products of the Confucian education system, extravagant military adventures often came in for criticism in their verses.

No dynasty was graced by so many poets, or such famous ones, as the Tang. Around 50,000 poems survive from the Tang period, and of its over 1,400 known poets at least two – Li Bo (701–62) and Dou Fu (712–70) – are generally considered to be, in their different ways, without peer. Li Bo, ‘a Mozart of words’ and ‘the Chinese Byron’, was the more versatile.²³ Probably in 751, the year in which Tang armies were defeated by both the Nanzhao kingdom in Yunnan and the Arabs and Tibetans on the Talas River in Ferghana, he composed a lament called ‘Fighting South of the Ramparts’. In it, an old campaigner describes how he and his comrades crossed the Tian Shan and watered their horses in ‘Parthian seas’, how they fought on the northern border last year and are fighting in Xinjiang this. The enemy never has anything to lose, ‘the fighting and marching never stop’; swords clash, riderless horses ‘neigh piteously’, and men die; crows peck at their guts and festoon the withered trees with their entrails;

Captains and soldiers are smeared on the bushes and grass:

The General schemed in vain.

Know therefore that the sword is a cursed thing

Which the wise man uses only if he must.²⁴

Poetry exposes contemporary sentiments and activities that elude the plodding official histories. But it travels badly. Apart from the difficulties of translation and the challenge of conveying things like rhyme, tonal rhythm and wordplay, China’s poetry expects more of the reader than that of most other traditions. Poets wrote to engage one another, not to reach out across the land and down the ages to a vague and indeterminate general public. Since composition was a vital part of the Confucian curriculum and especially of thejinshi examination, all well-educated persons aspiring to high office were poets of a sort and could appreciate virtuosity among their peers. It was ‘a companionable art for private and social use’ by an initiated, discerning and allusion-conscious elite. Moreover, its speciality lay in conveying not just the imagery that survives the rough handling of translation but the poet’s state of mind and the subtle flickering of his emotions. According to one authority, ‘learning to be a good reader of Chinese poetry is an art as fine as being a good poet’ (a dictum that has sometimes been supposed valid when applied to Chinese history and the historian).²⁵

Inland waterways provided imperial China with its main arteries of trade and communication. The Grand Canal, a series of channels linking the Yangzi delta with the Yellow River and Beijing, is still very much in use. It was cut by the Sui emperor Yangdi (604–17) but has been constantly realigned and widened. Paddle-powered shipping (with anything from two to twenty paddle-wheels) was developed during the Song dynasty in the twelfth century. And from this period dates the great Qingming scroll depicting frantic riverside commerce.

Nanjing on the Yangzi was first adopted as the capital of an all-China empire by the founding Ming Hongwu emperor (r. 1368–98). Its massive walls and monumental gateways long remained the most extensive urban fortifications in China.

The Great Wall as seen today in the vicinity of Beijing (below) was constructed under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Earlier walls of pounded earth (hangtu) had anticipated sections of it. But the familiar curtain of stone and brick, liberally dotted with towers, dates from the sixteenth century when, under the Wanli emperor, plans like the above were produced to record the deployment of troops along it.

It was probably blue-white glazed qingbai ware that Marco Polo called porcelain in the thirteenth century. It was ‘exported all over the world’, he reported. By the seventeenth century the kilns of the porcelain capital of Jingdezhen (Jiangxi) had discovered an even greater foreign demand for decorated blue-and-white china, like this Ming (c.1630) vase.

Silk scroll entitled ‘Bird’s-Eye View of the Capital’ by Xu Yang, 1767. First adopted as the capital of all China by the Mongol Yuan dynasty, Beijing retained its primacy thoughout most of the Ming period and all of the Qing. The painting was designed to illustrate a poem of the same name written by the Qing Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-96).

This c.1755 oil painting of Dawaci, a Mongol dignitary, has been attributed to the Jesuit priest Jean-Denis Attiret. Jesuits attained considerable influence at the Qing court, whose artists readily adopted European ideas of perspective and shading.

Engraving of Mongol army with artillery mounted on camels. In their war (c.1688–97) for control of western Mongolia and Tibet, both the Qing Kangxi emperor and Galdan, his Zunghar Mongol opponent, deployed cannon on camel-back.

The First (Qin) Emperor undertook tours of inspection, a custom revived by all subsequent dynasts whenever conditions permitted. The last (Qing) emperors memorialised their tours in narrative scroll paintings, some of them fifty metres long. Here subjects tender submission in a scene from the 1689 southward tour of the Kangxi emperor (beneath the parasol).

The Qing Qianlong emperor is borne aloft to his ceremonial tent at Jehol for a reception of tribute-bearing envoys in 1794. Among them is a mission from George III led by Lord Macartney (all lace and feathers on the extreme right). Although his was the most elaborate mission ever despatched by the Court of St James, Macartney’s overtures were rebuffed.

Near-lifesize portraits of the Qing emperors in ceremonial dress (this is the Qianlong emperor) betray a high sense of imperial self-awareness. Painted by teams of court artists, they were designed to project an image of imperturbable dignity and unassailable authority.

Tang Xuanzong, whose forty-five-year reign (712–57) witnessed the greatest flowering of Tang poetry, was not therefore unusual in being himself a noted poet. He was also a musician, an actor and a connoisseur of most other arts. His patronage was lavish, poet Li Bo being among the many who benefited from it. ‘High Tang’, a phrase synonymous with Xuanzong’s reign, was as much a ‘golden age’ because of its artistic and cosmopolitan flamboyance as because of the empire’s comparative tranquillity and vast extent.Tang Xuanzong set the tone. But poetry was also indebted to him in another sense. Unusually his reign, and especially its denouement, would provide Chinese culture with perhaps the richest of the many tragic themes derived from history.

All went well at first. For a decade the new reign rivalled Tang Taizong’s utopian early years, and for three more decades it continued to fulfil its promise. An accomplished and likeable twenty-seven-year-old, in 712 Xuanzong had ascended the throne after a chaotic interlude under Tang Zhongzong and Ruizong (the bit-part sons of Gaozong and Wu Zetian) and amid a bloodbath that was mercifully shallow by the standards of the age. Wu Zetian’s generally capable ministers, many of whom had been dispersed in the interim, were recalled to office. The most influential of them, Yao Chong, virtually dictated his own terms of employment with a ten-point programme that included all that was dearest to a Confucian bureaucrat and most conducive to ensuring a wuweiemperor. There were to be no reigns of terror, no military adventures, no legal immunity for imperial favourites, no interference by consorts and their families, nor by eunuchs, no imperial princes in central government office, no expenditure on Buddhist and Daoist endowments, and of course no retribution for remonstrating ministers.

The emperor concurred and, until Yao Chong’s death in 721, he more or less kept to his promise. The administrative irregularities and the bureaucratic proliferation that had characterised Wu Zetian’s rule were reversed; monastery-building was banned and some thirty thousand Buddhist clergy were defrocked as tax-dodgers; court, consorts and eunuchs were kept out of politics; and on the frontier the emperor continued the build-up of Wu Zetian’s garrisons. Reorganised among nine command areas under permanently appointed military governors, and increasingly manned by jian’er (literally ‘sturdy lads’ but in fact long-serving and substantially non-Han career veterans), these garrisons began to resemble professional armies. Meanwhile the emperor pursued a generally conciliatory policy towards his restless neighbours, which was much helped by the death of Qapaghan in 716 and subsequent instability in his Eastern Turk qaghanate.

Imperial revenue returns failed to recover, however; instead expenditure raced ahead, and coinage counterfeiters continued to enjoy a field day. Like Wu Zetian, Xuanzong made a habit of moving between Chang’an and Luoyang. Prior to 736 he changed capital ten times, an average of nearly once every two years. The expense and labour of maintaining twin capitals and shuttling the entire court and government between them was colossal, yet it has been argued that economics actually dictated this erratic behaviour. Evidently Sui Yangdi’s canal system was not performing well enough to keep either of the capitals supplied for long. The court was having to move because its conspicuous consumption rapidly exhausted the sustenance and luxuries available in any one place. A 300-kilometre (185-mile) trail of destitution was worn between the two capitals, and when the emperor processed farther afield, as to Shandong in 725 to perform the ritual sacrifices at Mount Tai, his vast entourage devoured its way across the countryside like a cloud of locusts.

The revenue deficit could be redressed by ensuring that all taxable households were actually taxed. This meant re-registering those families that had decamped, sold out, been exempted or had otherwise disappeared from the rolls, while discouraging any more of the same. Incentives for re-registering were offered (for instance, a six-year moratorium in return for a modest upfront payment), penalties for not registering were promulgated, inspections were conducted, and by 726 the number of registered households had increased significantly to over 7 million. It continued to rise, reaching 8.5 million by 742. At the standard five inmates to a household, this gave an overall population of 42.5 million, but there were undoubtedly many more who remained unregistered. Tax receipts improved, so relieving the strain on the exchequer and encouraging Tang Xuanzong to forsake his early restraint and embark on an ambitious programme of frontier stabilisation at the expense of the Khitan, Tibetans and the nascent kingdom of Nanzhao in Yunnan.

But the reforms were all highly controversial. Resentment came not so much from those who were now officially re-entered in the registers (judging by the uptake, they may actually have been better off) as from those local interests that had been exploiting the previous situation to tax the unregistered on their own account, buy them out or otherwise deprive them of their holdings and the fruits of their labour. Substantial estates had been built up in this way, and naturally the main estate-holders were often the very officials who were supposed to be enforcing registration. When around the year 740 registration was relaxed and, in a new departure, tax quotas were set for each prefecture rather than each household, the bad old ways returned. Estates grew larger and heralded the end ofthe ‘equal-field’ system – that legacy of the Northern Wei whereby each household had been entitled to a lifetime’s tenancy of a fixed area of land. The system had long been open to exploitation. Provisions like that for mulberry plantations to be held as heritable property (otherwise the trees on which silkworms fed would hardly have been worth planting) had been abused. Ever more fields, with or without mulberries, had become heritable, especially on large estates, so reducing the pool of land available for re-allocation. Evidence from Dunhuang suggests that ‘equal-field’ allocations had shrunk to a fraction of the area intended; in a place of such limited cultivable potential, they may never have been large enough to support a numerous household. In effect the system was collapsing and the state was withdrawing from the direct allocation of land just as it was from the direct collection of taxes.

The transport problem was less controversial. Proposals for redressing it were adopted in the 730s, when the canal system was overhauled with new channels being dug and some much-needed maintenance undertaken. Because navigation depended on the rise and fall of water levels in the intervening rivers, convoys of tax grain from the Yangzi could take a year to reach the Yellow River; and the long stopovers en route left cargoes so depleted by pilferage, deterioration and running costs that barges might arrive empty. To rectify this, a relay system was tried with shorter sailings between intermediary holding points. There was also some reorganisation of granaries and some contracting out of barge management. These and other measures had the desired effect. Suppplies reaching Chang’an rocketed; ‘indeed, the reform was so successful that it was not necessary to continue it in full force’.²⁶

As of 736, therefore, the court ceased its Luoyang shuttling and stayed put in Chang’an. The city duly became the undisputed Tang capital. Its grand dimensions as laid out under Sui Wendi had promised the most extensive city in the world; now, as its inhabitants surged towards 2 million, it became much the most populous city in the world. But a greater distinction lay in its cosmopolitanism. Port cities such as Guangzhou in the deep south and Yangzhou in the Yangzi delta hosted large merchant and seafaring communites from Arabia, Persia, India and south-east Asia. But for exoticism nothing could match the great markets and court spectacles of Chang’an. The flow of foreigners was continuous. Traders and tributaries, fugitives and diplomats, hostages and prisoners, missionaries and miracle-workers, performance artists and pleasure-seekers – they poured through the gates from everywhere in Asia. Siberian pelts of sable and ermine sold alongside cloves and nutmeg from eastern Indonesia; pepper and peacock plumes from India were displayed with frankincense and myrrh from the Hadhramaut and coral and glassware from the Mediterranean.

A literary diversion of the time, somewhat like the parlour game of ‘subjects’, involved listing examples, preferably witty ones, under categories such as ‘ambiguities’, ‘irritations’, ‘social clangers’ and so on. One such category included in a composition attributed to a Tang poet called Li Shangyin was ‘anomalies’, or ‘contradictions in terms’. Here one finds the predictable (‘an illiterate teacher’, ‘a sick doctor’) alongside the contentious (‘a grandfather frequenting courtesans’, for instance). More revealing is ‘a teetotal chela’, a chela being the attendant-cum-disciple of a Buddhist monk; boozing and Buddhism were evidently no strangers. But topping the list at number one, the most convincing example of an anomaly in early ninth-century China was ‘a poor Persian’.²⁷Chang’an’s Persians, like their Sogdian colleagues, were never poor. They dealt in money. Come Turk, Tibetan or Arab, the overland trade flourished, and it was Persians who financed it while Sogdians managed it. Indeed, in the markets, Persia’s silver coinage was preferred to the often debased copper cash; it was the dollar of its day.

Rivalled only by poetry and its associated arts of calligraphy and painting, what most interested a Tang connoisseur like Tang Xuanzong were items of alien provenance. In a categorised listing of ‘exotics’, had there been one, horses would probably have come first, followed by heterodoxy. Tang Taizong is said to have been the finest horseman of his generation and Xuanzong a great hunter in his youth. With forebears fresh from the steppe, the Li (Tang) and other northern aristocratic families retained their passion for bloodstock as for archery and hawking. Annually some tens of thousands of mounts had to be supplied for military and ceremonial use from the imperial breeding stations and – or exclusively when these outlying stud farms fell into hostile hands – by purchase at inflated prices from the Turks. At court, the game of polo, another Persian import, won converts, found favour with artists and encouraged a trade in ponies; but more sought after were the famed mounts of Ferghana and central Asia. Swifter and more fiery, they could yet be trained by their exotically attired grooms to perform and amuse. Imitating the tavern temptresses from central Asia who ‘danced in a dress of gauze’ and beguiled the poet Li Bo with laughter ‘like a breath of spring’, the prancing horses might conclude their performance by accepting a drink. Unassisted, the soft equine noses nuzzled brimming goblets of wine, delicately raised them and then drained them in one.

From Sogdiana, Persia and beyond, the flow of novelties never ceased. Cuisine and fabrics, clothing styles and make-up, song and dance were all influenced by the new craze for the exotic. Quaint fauna stalked the imperial menageries. In the bazaars long noses and bushy beards, some fair to auburn, were commonplace. Strange scents and plaintive sounds, especially that of the lute of Kuqa, were savoured for the first time. But nowhere was there as much variety as in the cornucopia of belief systems. Just as Islam was making its first appearance in China, so were Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism (Mazdaism) and even Judaism. Steles commemorate some of these introductions, and adherents of each had their own place of worship granted by the emperor. Conversions were not unknown. Nestorian Christianity would still be flourishing when Franciscans and Dominicans introduced its Latin counterpart in the sixteenth century. The Uighurs in Mongolia, after flirting with Buddhism, adopted the doctrines of Manes en masse; only after settling in Xinjiang as enthusiastic Manichaeans would they convert to Islam and so complete a doctrinal odyssey to rival their geographical drift.

Nor were contacts with India neglected. Monks as well as merchants continued to pass back and forth, bringing new texts, new disciplines and new metaphysical and scientific challenges. Both Tantric Buddhism and the more esoteric doctrines from which developed Chan (or Zen) Buddhism gained adherents under the Tang; Indian mathematics and ayurvedic medicine were closely studied; and the Indian game of chess proved such a success that it was included in the curriculum of the Hanlin academy. Chinese artists delighted in depicting Indian deities and did so in a style that was itself decidedly hybrid. A cross-cultural extreme cited by Edward Schafer, the great connoisseur of Tang connoisseurship, has a Chinese painter using a geisha girl to model a Hindu goddess in a scene illustrating a Buddhist narrative.²⁸