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The SUI, TANG and SONG DYNASTIES
During the Sui dynasty, great public works were created, including the building of a "grand canal" system -- which brought the north and south closer together and made them more economically interdependent. Prosperity returned to China. But, after little more than two decades, Sui rule came crashing down. Hostility toward the Sui had arisen among those who had been driven too hard on public works projects. Also the Sui dynasty had ruined itself economically and militarily with its wars against Korea, and with flooding and famine came rebellion. China became embroiled in another civil war, with military leaders from various provinces fighting for supremacy.
In 618 the civil war ended, with the Duke of Tang, Li Yuan, as the victor. He reunited China, became known as Emperor Gao-zu and began what became known as the Tang Dynasty. After he died, his sons fought over who would inherit his rule. And the winner was Taizong, who ruled to the middle of the century and led China in a return to prosperity and what would be called a golden age.
Taizong's son and heir, Gaozong, was weak, and rule in China descended again into conflict and murder. This began when Gaozong's concubine, Wu Zetian, managed to get the emperor to promote her in place of his wife. Wu Zetian used the traditional way of getting rid of rivals: she had the former empress and other rivals murdered. Wu Zetian became Empress Wu, and she exiled, murdered and drove to suicide elder ministers.
Emperor Gaozong suffered a stroke in his eleventh year of rule, became enfeebled and a mere figurehead. Empress Wu more firmly established her power. She murdered members of the Tang family whom she saw as possible rivals, and she elevated the standings of members of her own family. Working with informers, she instituted a reign of terror. She purged Confucian scholars and other opponents. But she also built a political base by satisfying public needs and by raising in rank those bureaucrats who supported her. She remained devoted to Buddhism. She surrounded herself with holy men and monks and ordered a Buddhist temple for every prefecture.
In her old age, empress Wu lost control at court, and in 705 officials at court forced her to resign in favor of a member of the Tang family. This was a man named Zhongzong, who ruled until his death in 710 -- his wife, Empress Wei, suspected of having poisoned him. Empress Wei tried to rule as had Empress Wu. She sold offices and Buddhist monkhoods, and she was behind other corruption at court. Arbitrarily she seized lands. She created opponents whom she failed to exterminate, and they ousted her from power, which led to the enthronement in 712 of a new Tang emperor: Xuanzong.
Xuanzong came to power at the age of 28 and was to remain in power forty-four years. He was active and courageous, and during his reign, prosperity increased. But in his later years he became increasingly absorbed in Taoist spirituality and uninterested in rule. After 745 he fell under the spell of his son's wife, Yang Guifei, a Taoist priestess. Yang Guifei grew in influence. Xuanzong ignored the economy. Had China been a democracy Xuanzong would have been voted out office. Instead, China went into another decline.
In 751, Islamic armies defeated the Chinese in central Asia, cutting China's route to India and the West. The Muslims replaced the Chinese as the dominant influence along the Silk Road, and tribal nations on China's borders grew in power. In 755 An Lushan, a general of Turkish origin and a close friend Yang Guifei, overthrew the old emperor, Xuanzong, and China descended into chaos once again. The son of Xuanzong ascended the throne, but power remained among regional military governors -- warlords.
In 825 a reckless teenager, Jingzong, inherited the throne and filled the court with incompetent persons. Exasperated court eunuchs had him assassinated. At court, eunuch power had again filled the vacuum of monarchical weakness. Eunuchs chose who would become emperor, and in 840 they chose Wuzong, the fifth son of a previous emperor, Muzong. And while doing so the eunuchs murdered two rivals to the throne and the mothers of these contenders.
Wuzong, was an ardent Taoist, and he closed Buddhist shrines and temples, returned Buddhist monks and nuns to lay life and confiscated millions of acres of arable land for state use. Buddhism in China survived but never recovered, while Buddhism's rival, Confucianism, enjoyed a renewed intellectual life.
In 907 a military governor, Zhu Wen, usurped the throne and founded the Liang dynasty, one of a succession of five short-lived dynasties in the next half-century, while China fragmented into as many as ten regional states. Organized bandits roamed about, pillaging and extorting. North of China, the Liao kingdom - a kingdom of herdsmen and semi-agricultural people of various ethnicities - overran a portion of China in the far north, including the capital city, Beijing.
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Copyright © 2009 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.