Foreigners were closely monitored. They required a licence to trade and were separately domiciled. Tang fascination with all things foreign did not exclude ridiculing them and was often tinged with contempt. Nor could familiarity dull a sense of apprehension. Though constituting an insignificant fraction of the population, non-Han people enjoyed a disproportionate prominence. The danger of the empire capitulating to the foreigners within it sometimes seemed greater than the chances of capitulation to the foreigners without it, and indeed it was. For all these attitudes would play a part in the great cataclysm of the mid-eighth century known as the An Lushan rebellion. The never-to-be-equalled magnificence of Tang Xuanzong’s reign was about to be terminated, and the dynasty plunged into protracted decline, in one of the great upheavals of China’s imperial history.
Much has been written on the An Lushan rebellion yet as much remains unexplained. Xuanzong’s long reign can be seen as building towards the crisis, with different groups within the ruling elite – examination graduates, traditional office-holding families, landholding aristocrats and disgruntled regional interests – vying for ministerial office while advocating policies of sectional convenience. Alternatively the rebellion can be seen as evidence of an ageing emperor losing interest in government and succumbing to faddish delusions and romantic fantasies while still cherish-ing unrealistic ambitions. Economic historians cite numerous contributory causes; and the Standard Histories offer their usual catalogue of unverifiable natural disasters. But insofar as the rebellion was essentially factional and military, with neither the credentials of a peasants’ revolt nor the dynamic of a messianic movement, its immediate causes may be sought within the mutinous armies of the north-east and the troubled mind of their commander, the redoubtable An Lushan.
An Lushan was a half-Sogdian and half-Turk general in the Tang army who rose to prominence in the 740s. Since the late 730s Li Linfu, an aristocrat with an imperious manner and a genius for organisation, had been acting as virtual dictator while the increasingly wuwei emperor dabbled in Daoism and mystical Buddhism. Bringing his tidy mind to bear on the military, Li Linfu had strengthened the frontier armies still further. Some 85 per cent of the empire’s now nearly 600,000 troops were stationed on its borders. Resounding victories over the Tibetans in Qinghai and the Pamirs, and over the Khitan in Manchuria, seemed to justify the vast expense of this mostly professional establishment. But to nullify the challenge to his own ascendancy from those who ‘went out generals and came in chancellors’, Li Linfu began replacing the senior military commanders with generals of non-Han origin. He argued that they made better fighters, and being unacquainted with court intrigue, posed less of a threat to the government. This was especially true of a rough-and-ready soldier like An Lushan, who, though speaking several non-Han languages, was illiterate in Chinese and so theoretically ineligible for civil office.
By 750 all but one of the major commands were held by foreigners. Most of these men were Turks or part-Turk, though it was under a Korean general that the Tang forces were defeated by the Arabs at the Talas River in 751. Conversely, at the other end of the empire, on the borders of Korea and Manchuria, it was as military governor of Pinglu that the Sogdian An Lushan rose to high command. To Pinglu (in Liaoning province) was added the neighbouring command of Fanyang (northern Hebei province) in 745 and of Hedong (northern Shanxi province) in 751. As of 752 one of An Lushan’s relatives held the next two frontier commands, so that ‘the whole northern border from the Ordos to Manchuria was controlled by the Ans’.29
Despite a military record of mixed achievement, An Lushan seems to have enjoyed the devotion of his troops. They were better supplied than their counterparts farther west thanks to the Grand Canal’s north-eastern extension, and they may even have brought a measure of prosperity to the otherwise neglected north-east. He also enjoyed exceptionally close relations with Chang’an. Li Linfu’s imperious manner could be alarming; but An Lushan was careful not to antagonise him while endearing himself to the emperor as a loyal and simple soldier. The histories accuse him of pretence. All courtiers dissimulated, and in playing the bumpkin, An Lushan seems to have been appealing to a new and more playful constituency at court.
For in 745 the sixty-year-old Tang Xuanzong had allowed his attention to stray from contemplation of the Daoist ineffable to admire the porcelain perfection and fashionably fulsome figure of one whose beauty was rivalled only by her vivacity. This was the famous Yang Guifei, and the emperor was instantly smitten. She had previously been the consort of one of his sons, so was probably no more than half his age, and through her influence over the emperor, she soon came to dominate the court. Under her patronage, a distant cousin, Yang Guozhong, emerged as Li Linfu’s main rival, and on the latter’s death in 752 as his ministerial successor. The Yangs were now all-powerful.
At first An Lushan ingratiated himself with them. Though the records for the period would be largely destroyed in subsequent upheavals, and though the portrayal of An Lushan in the Standard Histories is highly suspect, he seemingly basked in imperial favour. Yang Guifei reportedly adopted him as her son, and in a grotesque performance consecrated this move by having the now portly and fifty-something general dressed in baby clothes and given a bath. This might appear preposterous but for the fact that the emperor went one better, designating An Lushan a duke and then a prince, a title never previously accorded to any but imperial progeny. Had Tang Xuanzong not already fathered fifty-nine sons, one might suspect that An Lushan was being groomed for the succession. Lands, offices and exemptions were showered upon him and he could do no wrong. In 754, and despite his illiteracy, a chief ministership looked likely. Instead, he was given an additional command as commissioner for the imperial stables and the great stud farms in Gansu. As well as more manpower than anyone else in the empire, An Lushan now controlled the vital supply of cavalry mounts.
The sources hint at an incestuous liaison between the general and his adoptive mother, the lovely Yang Guifei; it was probably just another attempt to smear his memory. But as between the general and the other Yang – chief minister Yang Guozhong – relations plummeted. Each saw the other as the only serious threat to his supremacy and intrigued against him. When in 754 An Lushan returned to his command in Hebei, Yang Guofang purged the general’s agents at court, dismissed potential supporters and floated rumours of rebellion. An Lushan, fearing for his safety, travelled east by boat and never once stepped ashore.
Yet his sudden metamorphosis from palace pet to avenging pariah remains hard to explain. His actions of 755 can be construed either as careful preparation for revolt or as desperate responses to the increasingly ominous reports coming from Chang’an. Spies from the capital sent to investigate him were stalled or bribed, requests for his attendance at court rebuffed or ignored. When in late 755 he declined even to perform obeisance before an imperial envoy, it was tantamount to a declaration of war. In similar circumstances, a Han general imbued with the Confucian ethos would either have answered the summons and accepted the consequences or have availed himself of the privilege of suicide. An Lushan, the son of a Sogdian, did neither. Claiming that he had been ordered to rid the empire of the far-from-popular Yang Guozhong, he marched forth at the head of his formidable army.
Luoyang fell to the rebels before the year 755 was out. Hastily summoned armies were defeated while new recruits proved no match for the general’s veteran jian’er and his Manchurian – largely Khitan – auxiliaries. But Chang’an and the Wei valley behind their screening mountains remained under imperial control. In fact they were reinforced by the recall of the frontier armies in Gansu, Xinjiang and Sichuan. Turks, Tibetans, Arabs and others would take advantage of this retraction to dismantle the empire’s entire western extension. Still more ominous was the introduction into core China of these frontier armies under their non-Han commanders, and the concurrent appointment of military governors and defence supremos in the heartland provinces. An Lushan’s challenge to the authority of the central government had set a precedent. It betrayed the weakness of the dynasty, condemned it to invoking the support of military contingents as dangerous as the rebels, and hastened the devolution of power from the capital to the provinces.
The year 756 brought An Lushan’s first reverses. Loyalist forces behind his line of advance nearly regained Hebei and others barred any progress south towards the Yangzi. The general responded by proclaiming his own dynasty. It was to be called the Great Yan, Yan being the age-old name for the north-east, where the rebels enjoyed the widest support. Greatly provoked by this move, in mid-756 the emperor and the impatient Yang Guozhong overruled their commanders to launch a massive counter-attack. It was ambushed and routed. Defeat left the capital undefended. As An Lushan advanced to claim the prize, all who could vacated the great city.
I remember when we first fled the rebels,
Hurrying north over dangerous trails;
Night deepened on Pengya Road,
the moon shone over White-water Hills.
A whole family endlessly trudging,
begging without shame from the people we met:
valley birds sang, a jangle of soft voices;
we didn’t see a single traveller returning . . .30
The poet Dou Fu, along with the heir apparent, the future Tang Suzong, fled north. A Robert Burns to Li Bo’s Byron, Dou Fu was no stranger to disappointment. ‘Caught involuntarily in the machinery of history’, he explored its impact on the common man and showed a greater awareness of life’s intimate tragedies than any contemporary writer. This empathy, along with a daring use of language and compositional techniques, won him little fame in his lifetime but would come to be revered as the essence of a later and more humanitarian Confucianism. Like Burns, Dou Fu drew on his own circumstances to mirror the history of his times. In universalising the apparently inconsequential, both poets furnished an image of the cultural hero as social conscience that posterity would savour.31
Meanwhile the emperor, the lovely Yang Guifei and the dictatorial Yang Guozhong, accompanied by attendants and a cavalry escort, fled towards Sichuan. The Yangs originated from there; the mountain trail through the Qinling, a successor of ‘Stone Cattle Road’, would discourage pursuit; and preparations had already been made for receiving the imperial entourage in Chengdu. Two weeks out, at a place called Mawei, they ran into a party of Tibetan envoys. The Tibetans wanted food, but Yang Guozhong’s dealings with them roused the suspicions of the imperial escort. Accused of treachery, Yang Guozhong was manhandled and murdered on the spot along with members of his family.
The emperor was unharmed in the fracas, as was Yang Guifei. But presumably to eradicate all hated Yangs, the troops now demanded that the emperor have her executed too. Powerless to protect his beloved, the emperor, it is said, concurred. Yang Guifei herself requested only that, instead of execution, she be strangled with a length of silk, whereupon the emperor’s trusted eunuch performed the deed. Thus did Yang Guifei pass to the spirit world with her beauty intact, there to be eventually reunited, in countless verses, plays, paintings, songs and novellas, with the emperor who so loved her. Romance transcends history. To ask why she had to die, or why the emperor, however old and powerless, failed the basic test of a hero in not dying with her, not even defending her, is beside the point. The emperor’s loss and his lover’s devotion were tragedy enough.
Broken-hearted, the great Tang Xuanzong continued on to Chengdu, to exile and to imminent abdication. He lived another five years, so outlasting An Lushan and witnessing the Tang restoration. In neither is he said to have taken the remotest interest.