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The Emperor & the Consort
Xuanzong began as the lead actor in two
bloody palace coups. He was instrumental in the restoration of his
father, the Ruizong Emperor in 710 after the luckless Zhongzong, on the
throne a second time, was allegedly poisoned by agents of his scheming
Empress. He was similarly central to the thwarting of a new conspiracy
in 713. In both cases, Chinese chroniclers present these attempted
coups as the last gasps of Empress Wu’s perverse age in which women
held sway. Ruizong had had enough by this point, and conceded the
throne to his son — Xuanzong’s ensuing reign (r. 713-756) would be the
longest of any Tang emperor, and for the first twenty years, proceeded
without an obvious hitch. ... What vigor Xuanzong may have had at the
start of his reign was played out by 737, when he was left inconsolable
by the death of his favorite concubine, Empress Wu’s great -niece —
there was definitely something special about those Wu girls. In his
early fifties and facing the mother of all mid-life crises, he
developed an unhealthy obsession with his daughter-in-law, Yang Yuhuan
(719-756). Married to Xuanzong’s son at fourteen, she was still not yet
twenty when Xuanzong ordered her divorced, briefly declared a nun for
appearance’s sake, and then rebranded as his Precious Consort, Yang Guifei. ...
The relationship between Yang Guifei and her
emperor was famously obsessive. Yang’s hold over Xuanzong turned him
practically monogamous — a dangerous decision in a court riddled with
scheming affines. Xuanzong would not be the last middle-aged man in
history to be bewitched by a girl young enough to be his daughter —
they became avid fans of Sogdian dances and exotic booze, and their
soirées would erupt in loud arguments that would occasionally see Yang
Guifei banished or fleeing the palace, only for a tearful
reconciliation and epic make-up sex. Xuanzong would indulge all her
whims, and happily looked the other way when her desire for fresh
lychees required the abuse of his vital post rider system, tying up
days of imperial dispatches in order to get the treasured fruits to the
capital from the south.
Li Bai (701-762), one of the greatest poets in
Chinese history, was dragged into their orbit against his will. Drafted
into a consultant position at Xuanzong’s academy, Li Bai was summoned
to the palace and made to produce verses on command praising Yang
Guifei’s beauty. Drunk (he was usually drunk), Li Bai came up with
something that praised her garments flowing behind her like a cloud,
the radiant bloom of her face, and the likelihood that she was some
kind of apparition, usually only seen in the Crystal Palace of
fairyland. Everybody liked that one, but Xuanzong badgered the barely
conscious Li Bai for a repeat performance. A reluctant Bai made the
Emperor’s chief eunuch take off his shoes to help [him] think, and then
dashed off the most back-handed of compliments.
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Hers is the charm of the vanished fairy
That broke the heart of the dreamer king ...
Pray, who in the palace of Han
Could be likened unto her
Save the lady Flying Swallow...
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There are some who think that Li Bai’s verse was perfectly benign. “Flying swallow” (feiyan),
as the more well-read of the Tang court might have noticed, was a
reference to Zhao Feiyan, the famously slender beauty of the Han
dynasty. John Wu, in his Four Seasons of Tang Poetry, observes that Yang Yuhuan was as “overjoyed at the praise as a fat lady must be when made to believe she was as light as a “flying swallow,” although such a comment may read modern-day fat-shaming onto a woman who was thought beautiful because she was chubby. In fact, there is even a Chinese proverb, “plump [Yu]huan, slender Fei” (Huan-fei Yan-shou),
that contrasts the two women as two co-existing paragons of beauty.
What really caused problems for Li Bai was his likening of Yang Guifei
to a woman who, while beautiful, was also a notorious kingdom-wrecker.
The eunuch who had been humiliated by being made to remove Li Bai’s
shoes soon convinced Yang Guifei that the poem had been a high-handed
insult, and she blocked Li Bai’s further promotion at the capital. (BHC, 144-6)
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Meanwhile,
both Yang Guifei and the Emperor Xuanzong became friendly with a giant
Sogdian-Turk warrior known to the Chinese as An Lushan — the surname
pointing to his Sogdian origins, while Lushan is liable to have been a
Chinese attempt at Roxshan. Even across 1200 intervening years, Roxshan
seems to have been one of the most charming men in Chinese history:
ever ready to impress the court with some trinket or curiosity from the
edges of the empire, always at hand at public occasions with tall
stories of military daring and hard-won victories. ... He was a hit
with Lady Yang, who doted on him to the extent that she officially
adopted him as her own son, an act leading to a bizarre palace skit in
which Roxshan was paraded as a giant infant in a diaper. But Roxshan
was already living on borrowed time. By 751, even as he was playing the
fool by dressing up as a baby in the palace, he was already planning a
revolution, not out of any desire to betray his imperial patron, but
because he rightly feared that the knives would be out for him after
Xuanzong’s death. A large part of Roxshan’s humor, it seemed, relied
upon facetious bluster and making others the butt of his jokes, and the
heir apparent was sure to avenge himself as soon as he was crowned.
Roxshan hand-picked a personal honor guard of 8000 soldiers from the
armies of defeated enemies, and honed them into a force that was loyal
only to him. ...
Roxshan’s forces amassed in the northeast and
swept up the Yellow River, taking both Luoyang and Chang’an. Xuanzong
and his court were forced to flee westwards towards Sichuan, where they
hoped to regroup with reinforcements coming home from the Western
Regions. When food turned out to be in short supply at Mawei station,
just 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) outside modern Xi’an, [Yang Guifei’s
cousin, Prime Minister] Yang Guozhong
got the blame. He did, after all, hold up to forty government
positions, none of which he seemed to be much good at, and some
suspected that he was planning to hand Xuanzong over to Tibetan
emissaries on the road to Sichuan. With tempers frayed and egos
bruised, the troops mutinied, refusing to go on until the imperial
party was flensed of the hated Yang family.
Xuanzong had gone from being the ruler of the
civilized world, sun-king of the height of the Tang dynasty, to being
an old man nearing 70, feebly protesting as his chancellor was struck
down, along with the chancellor’s son and several cousins. The coup
against the Yang family was complete, although one still remained. The
soldiers came for Yang Guifei herself, and Xuanzong tearfully,
impotently handed her over to his eunuch servant to be strangled.
The whole sorry affair would be celebrated by one of China’s greatest poets, Bai Juyi, in his Song of Everlasting Sorrow:
But one hundred li west of the capital gates
The six divisions halted and left him with no choice
Struggling she of the moth eyebrows died among the horses
Her ornate headdress fell to the ground, and none took it up
the kingfisher, the gold sparrow and the jade hair clasp
But his Majesty covered his face and said nothing.
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It was the end of
Xuanzong’s reign. A broken man, he abdicated in Sichuan and left his
son Suzong (r. 756-762) to clear up the rebellion. ... But in order to
secure the vital reinforcements to retake Chang’an, he formed an
alliance with Bayanchur Khan, the leader of a confederation of nomad tribes called the United Peoples (Uy-ghur).
... Inheriting a domain roughly equivalent to the Xiongnu steppes of
old, the Uyghurs were in the process of turning away from life on the
steppes with a new, permanent citadel in Mongolia that was fast
becoming a city to rival China’s best. But they retained plenty of
horsemen, becoming a vital, if expensive, factor in the retaking of
Chang-an and the suppression of the rebellion. Thereafter, the Uyghurs
would become much like many a previous nomad ally in Chinese history,
valued greatly for their aid in times of trouble, but fiendishly
difficult to get rid of without extensive gifts of valuable silk. (BHC, 147-9)
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“A Song of Unending Sorrow”
Bai Juyi (772-846)
During
the half century following the An Lu-shan Rebellion and the execution
of Yang the Prized Consort, her legend took shape, embellished time and
again in prose anecdotes and in poems. Such accounts sometimes drew
stern lessons about the consequences of failure to pay attention to
business, and sometimes lamented the sadness of broken love. The story
reached its first full expression in Bo Ju-yi’s (772-846) long ballad
“Song of Lasting Pain,” and in Chen Hong’s prose account written to
accompany it. Comparison between these two versions of the story gives
a good sense of the very different forces at work in shaping poetic
narrative and prose narrative. (Anthology of Chinese
Literature, 442)
As time and events passed, all joy
had gone from [Xuan-zong] and only sadness came. Every day of spring or
night of winter, when the lotuses in the ponds opened in summer or when
the palace ash trees shed their leaves in autumn, the performers of the
Pear Garden Academy would produce notes on their jade flageolets; and
if he heard one note of “Coats of Feathers, Rainbow Skirts,” His
Majesty’s face would lose its cheer, and all those around him would sob
and sigh. For three years there was this one thing on his mind, and his
longing never subsided. His soul sought her out in dream, but she was
so far away he could not reach her.
It happened then that a wizard came
from Shu; and knowing that His Majesty was brooding so much on Yang the
Prized Consort, he said that he possessed the skills of Li the Young
Lord, the wizard who had summoned the soul of Lady Li for Emperor Wu of
the Han. Xuan-zong was very pleased, and ordered him to bring her
spirit. The wizard then used all his skills to find her, but could not.
He was also able to send his spirit on journeys by riding vapors; he
went up into the precincts of Heaven and sank down into the vaults of
the Earth looking for her; but he did not meet her. And then again he
went to the margins and the encircling wastelands, high and low, to the
easternmost extreme of Heaven and the Ocean, where he strode across
Fang-hu.
He saw there the highest of the
mountains of the Undying, with many mansions and towers; at the end of
the western verandah there was a deepest doorway facing east; the gate
was shut, and there was written “The Garden of Tai-zhen, Jade Consort.”
... Then he saw a person with a bonnet of golden lotuses, wearing a
lavender chiffon, with pendants of red jade hanging from her sash and
phoenix slippers, and sever or eight persons in attendance on her. She
greeted the wizard and asked, “Is the Emperor well?” Then she asked
what had happened since the fourteenth year of the Tian-bao Reign. When
he finished speaking, she grew wistful and gestured to her servant to
get a golden hairpin and inlaid box, each of which she broke in parts.
She gave one part of each to the envoy, saying, “Express my gratitude
to the Emperor and present him these objects as mementos of our former
love.”
The wizard received her words and
these objects of surety; he was ready to go, but one could see in his
face that something was troubling him. The Jade Consort insisted that
he tell her what was the matter. Then he knelt down before her and
said, “Please tell me something that happened back then, something of
which no one else knew, so that I can offer to His Majesty as proof.
Otherwise I am afraid that with the inlaid box and the golden hairpin I
will be accused of the same kind of trickery that Xin Yuan-ping
practiced on Emperor Wen of the Han.” The Jade Consort drew back lost
in thought, as if there were something she were recalling with
fondness. Then very slowly she said, “Back in the tenth year of the
Tian-bao Reign, I was attending on His Majesty, who had gone to the
palace on Mount Li to escape the heat. ... We then made a secret vow to
one another, a wish that we could be husband and wife in every
lifetime. When we stopped speaking, we held hands, and each of us was
sobbing. Only the Emperor knows of this.”
Then she said sadly, “Because of this
one thought so much in my mind, I will be able to live on here no
longer. I will descend again to the world below and our future destiny
will take shape. Whether in Heaven or in the world of mortal men, it is
certain that we will meet again and form our bond of love as before.” (Anthology of Chinese
Literature, 450-1)
In
winter of the first year of the Yuan-he Reign, the twelfth month
(February 807), Bo Ju-yi of Tai-yuan left his position as Diarist in
the Imperial Library to be the sheriff of Chou County. I, Chen Hong,
and Wang Zhi-fu of Lang-ya had our homes in this town; and on our days
off we would go together visiting sites of the Undying and Buddhist
temples. Our discussion touched on this story, and we were all moved to
sighs. Zhi-fu lifted his winecup to Bo Ju-yi and said, “Unless such an
event finds an extraordinary talent who can adorn it with colors, even
something so rare will fade away with time and no longer be known in
the world. Bo Ju-yi is deeply familiar with poetry and has strong
sentiments. Why doesn’t he write a song on the topic.” At this Bo Ju-yi
made the “Song of Lasting Pain.” It is my supposition that he was not
only moved by the event, but he also wanted to offer warning about such
creatures that can so enthrall a man, to block the phases by which
troubles come, and to leave this for the future. When the song was
finished, he had me write a prose account for it. Of those things not
known to the general public, I, not being a survivor of the Kai-yuan,
have no way to know. For those things known to the general public, the
“Annals of the Reign of Xuan-zong” are extant. This is merely an
account for the “Song of Lasting Pain.” (Anthology of Chinese
Literature, 452)
When An Lu-shan did the Whirl,
he bewildered the ruler’s eyes;
even when troops crossed the Yellow River,
it was doubted that he had rebelled.
When Yang the Prized Consort did the Whirl,
she befuddled the ruler’s heart;
when she was left dead at Ma-wei Station,
he yearned for her ever more.
(Anthology of Chinese
Literature, 458)
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Suppressing the Rebellion
& its Aftermath
 The violence of the rebellion and its suppression destroyed
the cities that lay in the rebel’s path and wrecked the equal-field system.
During the years it took the court to put the rebels down, the government had
neither the manpower nor the funds to carry out the triannual land and
population surveys the equal-field system demanded. The number of registered
households in the Tang Empire dropped from nine million in 755 to two million
in 760 — not because the population diminished but because the system of
household registration was not enforced. After the rebellion, the tax base of
the empire shrank to less than one-third of what it had been.
 The
rebellion forced the emperor to share power with the military governors who
ruled both the frontier provinces and those in the interior. These newly
empowered governors commanded their own armies, which they funded from the tax
revenues of the areas they governed. In 763, at the end of the rebellion, the court
named four rebel generals to serve as the military governors of Hebei, one of the richest provinces in China’s
heartland. When these newly appointed military governors seceded by refusing to
pay taxes, the center lost over one-quarter of the empire’s population and the
tax revenues they produced. Hebei and Henan were the first
areas to drop off, but over the next century and a half, as more and more
provinces followed suit, the Tang succumbed to a diminution it was powerless to
combat. (Open Empire, 207)
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Raising Revenues
The Salt Monopoly
The desperate court appointed special commissioners
for taxation, whose task was to raise revenues in any way possible.
They tried selling offices, speculating with the money supply, and
taxing trade; they soon found that the salt monopoly could produce the
highest revenues with the least manpower. Salt was produced in only a
few areas, either along the
coast or in Sichuan,
where salty brine could be mined. In both places, saltwater was poured into
large pans where it was allowed to evaporate. As long as the state maintained
direct control over the area of production, it could buy up all the salt
produced there and sell it to merchants. The populace at large could then buy
the salt, a crucial element in their diet. The merchants
who distributed the salt all over the empire were responsible for collecting
the salt tax for the state. This was a genuine and lucrative innovation. In
779, the salt monopoly produced half the central government’s revenues. (Open Empire,
207-208)
The only things that are certain in life are
death ... and [twice-a-year] taxes! |
The state continued to collect the tax on agricultural
production but it was forced to develop a new method of taxation. In 780, it
launched the two-tax system, a twice-yearly collection of taxes in summer and
autumn, as the replacement for the defunct equal-field system. Each province
was assigned a quota, which the military governors paid to the center, and then
local government officials distributed the tax burden among the local
population as they saw fit. (Open Empire,
208)
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The Twice-a-Year Tax
Yang Yan’s Memorial
The way to handle all government expenses and
tax
collections is first to calculate the amount needed and then to
allocate
the tax among the people. Thus the income of the state would be
governed according to its expenses. All households should be registered
in their places of actual residence, without regard to whether they
are native households or non-native. All persons should be graded
according to their wealth, without regard to whether they are fully
adult or only half adult. Those who do not have a permanent residence
and do business as traveling merchants should be taxed in whatever
prefecture or subprefecture they are located at the rate of
one-thirtieth [of their capital holdings]. It is estimated that the
amount taken from them will be the same as that paid by those having
fixed domicile, so that they could not expect to gain from chance
avoidance of the tax. The tax paid by residents should be collected
twice a year, during the summer and autumn. All practices that cause
annoyance to the people should be corrected. The separate land and
labor tax, and all miscellaneous labor services, should be abolished,
and yet the count of the able-bodied adults should still be kept. (Sources of Chinese Tradition,
555)
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When the Tang dynasty developed the new
two-tax system and the salt monopoly in response to the rebellion ... the direct
bond between the central government and the producer was snapped. The
government no longer maintained any records concerning the landholdings or
output of any individual cultivator. ... The central government’s withdrawal from
direct management of the economy after 755 marks a major turning point in
Chinese history. Before the rebellion, despite some evasion, the central
government knew how much land everyone had and who worked it. After the
rebellion, the central authorities lacked those records and were forced to rely
on locally powerful families to collect taxes for them. They were permanently
weakened as a result. (Open Empire, 221-222)
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