The emperor Hsüan-tsung, longest-reigning of all the T'ang monarchs, was an immensely capable ruler, who restored his dynasty to a new peak of power after decades of usurpation, weakened authority and corruption. To the Chinese living through the troubled and disturbed decades which followed his abdication, his reign represented a golden age of departed glories, an era of good government, peace and prosperity, equally successful at home and abroad. Yet his reign ended in tragedy, and in disasters largely resulting from his own actions and policies which almost destroyed the dynasty. To the historians who wrote the record of his reign in the late 750s he was a tragic hero, whose reign had begun in splendour, but who had later been led astray by ambition and hubris into overstraining his empire's administration and resources, and who then completed its ruin by withdrawal from active participation in its government.

All were agreed, however, that he was a ruler out of the ordinary, who left his indelible print upon the history of his times. He was, moreover, a man of many parts, a skilled musician, a poet, a good calligrapher, patron of many artists and writers. He was also deeply versed in Taoist philosophy, of which he became a major patron, and – in spite of his early measures against the Buddhist establishment – later became deeply involved in Esoteric Buddhism. As a person he seems to have enjoyed deep friendship with his brothers and family members, and even the formal records of his reign portray a man of great personal warmth, close attachment to his advisers, directness and passion.

This volume is the first of two devoted to the Sui and T'ang dynasties (581–907). It is designed to provide the reader with a narrative account of this complex period, during which China underwent far-reaching changes in political institutions, in her relations with the neighbouring countries, in social organization, in the economy and in every sphere of intellectual, religious and artistic life. The broader issues in institutions, social and economic change and in intellectual developments are dealt with in detail in Volume 4 which also contains a bibliography for both volumes.

A glance at this bibliography will show that a wealth of modern scholarship has been devoted to the T'ang. Chinese scholars have been attracted to the period as one of the high points of Chinese political power and influence, and as one of extraordinary achievements in every field of culture and the arts. Japanese scholars have been drawn to the Sui and T'ang not simply because of the intrinsic interest of the period, but also because it was during these dynasties that Japan was most deeply influenced by Chinese institutions. Consequently Japanese scholars have had a deep and instinctive understanding of Sui and T'ang China which provided so much of the fabric of their own state structure, laws and institutions, art, literature and even of their written language. Western scholars too have long been fascinated by the period – the first full scale political history of the T'ang in a European language was completed by Father Antoine Gaubil SJ in 1753 – and in recent decades have begun to make their own distinctive contribution to the understanding of T'ang China.

The future T'ai-tsung, Li Shih-min, the second son of Kao-tsu, was born in the year 600 in Wu-kung county in modern Shensi. His mother was a member of an extremely powerful clan, the Tou. Her elder sister was the consort of Yang Kuang, the future Sui emperor Yang-ti. Their clan, which like the Sui and T'ang imperial houses was of partially alien origin (their original surname was Ho-tou-ling), continued to be very influential throughout the early T'ang, producing two empresses, six consorts of royal princes, eight husbands of royal princesses, and a great number of officials of the highest ranks. T'ai-tsung's mother had been brought up at the court of her uncle, the emperor Wu-ti of the Northern Chou (whose younger sister was her mother), where Li Yüan is said to have won her hand in an archery contest. She died in 614.

During his childhood Li Shih-min was, of course, simply a son of a nobleman, and thus would not have received any special preparation as a potential ruler. He certainly received the upper-class Confucian education typical of the time: later, as emperor he proved to be well versed in classical and historical learning and was a calligrapher of note. The Li clan, bearer of a strong northern tradition, was naturally Buddhist, and several of Kao-tsu's sons bore Buddhist childhood names. But, as with most noblemen of mixed Chinese and Turkish blood, the emphasis of T'ai-tsung's early education was upon the martial arts – particularly archery and horsemanship.

In 617 Li Yüan (566–635), the Duke of T'ang and one of the most powerful Sui generals, joined the scores of rebels who had arisen in the waning years of the Sui dynasty. His armies marched on the Sui capital, overwhelmed its defences, and took the city. There, six months later, he founded a new dynasty which was to endure for almost three centuries, and would rank alongside the Han as one of China's two golden ages of empire. As Li Yüan went on to impose firm central authority throughout the country, he was fortunate in being the heir to the great achievements of the Sui, who, barely three decades before, had brought centuries of disunion to an end. The institutions of his new dynasty were established on the solid foundations left by his predecessors.

Like the majority of rebel leaders throughout Chinese history who succeeded in founding dynasties of their own, Li Yüan was not a commoner but a nobleman of distinguished lineage. His ancestry can be traced with certainty as far as his grandfather, Li Hu, one of the ‘Eight Pillars of State’ (Pa Kuo-chu), the chief commanders associated with Yü-wen T'ai in the foundation of the Northern Chou state in the 550s. At that time the Li clan was centred on Wu-ch'uan chen, a garrison established by the Toba state of Northern Wei inside the Great Wall near modern Tat'ung, which was also the home of Yü-wen T'ai.

The powerful decentralized provincial order which emerged in China after the middle of the eighth century was a direct result of the An Lu-shan rebellion of 755–63. After the founding itself, the rebellion is without doubt the most significant event in the history of the dynasty. It transformed a centralized, rich, stable and far-flung empire into a struggling, insecure and divided one. It has long been treated by historians as a turning-point in T'ang history; in recent decades it has even been treated as a major turning point in Chinese history as a whole. Yet, there is a striking disparity between the event and its consequences. Although such a major internal upheaval was bound to have grave and far-reaching effects, could what was essentially a military event have brought about the profound changes which differentiate the second half of the dynasty from the first so completely?

In reality, the changed situation of China after An Lu-shan's rising resulted not merely from the rebellion alone, but had its roots in developments long under way. As preceding chapters in this volume have shown, T'ang political institutions had undergone significant modifications since the beginning of the dynasty. These changes already anticipated the emergence of forms of government quite different in character from those of early T'ang. But it is imperative to distinguish these long-term changes from the specific origins of the rebellion itself. There was nothing inevitable about this event, even though when it came, it caused a tremendous disruption and acted as a powerful catalyst.

The sources for eighth and ninth century Chinese history, most of which have been described in the scholarly literature, far outnumber those for earlier periods, and so we can readily imagine what the general quality of life in late T'ang Ch'ang-an must have been. Moreover, the subject of this essay, high politics from 75 5 to about 860, is probably better represented among the documents and in the histories than any other topic. Nevertheless, to the particular frustration of the political historian, there are some basic questions about the late T'ang court that we may never be able to answer satisfactorily owing to the lack of sufficient reliable data. This is not merely a matter of details, or of refinement of interpretation, for the quantity and quality of ninth-century data represent a severe constraint. We must therefore subject the extant Chinese records to the most pains-taking scrutiny, so that their preconceptions and omissions will mislead us as little as possible. That procedure is not unusual in itself, of course, but for some late T'ang topics (such as ninth-century political factionalism, which has suffered from a thousand years of biased interpretation), the lack of substantial new evidence makes it difficult to do more, in honesty, than unravel inherited distortions. Occasionally we can glean bits of information on such difficult questions from the general collections of T'ang poetry and prose, but it should come as no surprise that corroborative material about events which took place so long ago frequently proves thin, or untrustworthy.

In the last quarter of the sixth century, China had been politically fragmented for nearly three hundred years – the longest period of disunion in Chinese history. The Sui dynasty brought this period to an end, swept away much of the institutional detritus that was the legacy of disunion and laid the foundations of a new unified state and society. All later empires were indebted to the Sui's accomplishments, but the immediate beneficiary was the great dynasty of T'ang (618–907) which built on Sui foundations and dominated the culture and politics of all eastern Asia for nearly three hundred years.

The problem before us in this chapter is to assess the accomplishments of the Sui and come to an estimate of the significance of this period in Chinese history. It is not enough to say, as many historians have, that the Sui was like the Ch'in (221–207 BC) in bringing to an end an older order, sweeping away the accumulated rubble of the centuries and building a new kind of empire. This is no doubt true as far as it goes, but only when we consider the vastly greater extent and complexity of China in the sixth century and measure in a tentative way the new forces – the legacy of steppe invaders, of Buddhism and religious Taoism, for example – shall we understand the character of the Sui's accomplishments.

T'ai-tsung's doubts about the ability of his heir apparent, Li Chih, to lead the country effectively proved to be well founded. Chih, T'ai-tsung's ninth son, was the youngest son born to him by the empress Wen-te, née Chang-sun. Born on the thirteenth day of the sixth month of 628, he had been enfeoffed as the Prince of Chin in 633, and had been heir apparent since 643. When he ascended the throne before his father's coffin on the first day of the sixth month of 649, he was still not quite twenty-one years old. He is known to history by his posthumous temple-name of Kao-tsung.

In spite of the systematic efforts which were made to prepare him for the throne – the appointment of carefully selected tutors and preceptors and the composition of imperial injunctions to guide his behaviour – he proved to be a well-meaning but ineffectual and indecisive ruler.

At the beginning of his reign the new emperor conscientiously attempted to emulate the style of government which his father had practised so successfully. He diligently practised economy, eschewed the hunt and lavish court entertainments, and sought the frank remonstrances and counsel of his court advisers. But T'ai-tsung's highly personal style of leadership demanded qualities and a sheer force of personality which Kao-tsung did not possess. The emperor's ineffectiveness, at least later in his reign, was in part due to recurrent illness, which brought on in-capacitating attacks of dizziness and impaired vision.

FISCAL PROBLEMS, RURAL UNREST AND POPULAR REBELLION

It was only after 884, at the very end of the dynasty, that the T'ang dynastic house finally abandoned its attempt to control all of China proper, and until then it never really lost its sovereignty over any part, however little actual authority it had in some areas. Even in the most obdurately independent provinces, T'ang titles were inevitably adopted, and formal court appointment to office was usually sought. Thus the T'ang continued to maintain a presence even in places it could not govern. But its frequent and costly efforts to reassert authority in ‘rebellious’ areas, the inescapable need to defend the empire from foreign invasions, and the maintenance of a large bureaucracy even after the central government's effective administrative power had been severely diminished, all put serious pressures on the resources actually at the dynasty's command. Those pressures led to a series of cumulative developments, each more serious and complex than the last: from 780 to 820 an increasing tax burden was loaded upon the peasantry, to support campaigns to restore dynastic unity; from 820 to 860 a growing pattern of disorder and local banditry emerged; from 860 to 875 broadly supported garrison insurrections broke out, coupled with a serious attempt to form an independent regional state in the lower Yangtze valley; from 875 to 884 a popular rebellion of immense proportions arose. The rebels captured the T'ang capital and held it for more than two years.

THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION (684–90)

The fourth T'ang emperor, who ascended the throne as Chung-tsung in the twelfth month of 683, was only the third son of Kao-tsung and the empress Wu. Since his chances for the succession had always seemed remote, he had been prepared neither by upbringing nor by his brief three years as heir apparent for his new dignity, and it was probably for this reason that his father's will had provided for the continuing political influence of the experienced empress Wu. Her intervention, strictly speaking, was to be permitted only ‘where matters could not be decided’, but she lost no time in showing that an honoured but impotent retirement as empress dowager was far from her mind. The first sign of this was her contravention of the will's provision that Chung-tsung should succeed immediately ‘in front of the coffin’; and in delaying the coronation a full week, she revealed both her own ambition, and the fact that she felt certain misgivings about her son's suitability. Too little is known of the character of the new emperor to make judgments on the validity of his mother's suspicions, but it is clear even at this stage of his career, that he had inherited at least one of his father's weaknesses, and had fallen under the domination of his own wife, the empress Wei. Within a month of his accession, he promoted her father, Wei Hsüan-chen, to the rank of chief minister.

The Renaissance, 1450–1530

Part of the charm of Renaissance writers is their firm conviction that they were living in a ‘golden age’. Their world was bigger and better than anything in the past and, they sometimes reflected, the heroes of antiquity would have been miserable failures as Renaissance men, even as Renaissance soldiers. ‘We must confesse’, wrote Sir Roger Williams, an English general of the later sixteenth century, ‘Alexander, Caesar, Scipio, and Haniball, to be the worthiest and famoust warriers that euer were; notwithstanding, assure your selfe, …they would neuer haue…conquered Countries so easilie, had they been fortified as Germanie, France, and the Low Countries, with others, haue been since their daies.’ We may smile at this characteristic Renaissance hyperbole, but in the field of warfare at least it was fully justified: the military realities of the sixteenth century were indeed far more complex and far more daunting than those of the Classical (or any previous) Age.

European warfare was transformed between 1450 and 1530 by a number of basic changes. First came the improved fortifications of which Sir Roger Williams wrote, linked to the introduction of powerful new artillery. An entirely new type of defensive fortification appeared in Italy in the later fifteenth century: the trace italienne, a circuit of low, thick walls punctuated by quadrilateral bastions. The development of large siege-cannon – made of cast-iron from the 1380s and of bronze from the 1420s – rendered the high, thin walls of the Middle Ages quite indefensible.