T’OUNG PAO 74 T’oungAnthony Pao 102-1-3 DeBlasi (2016) 74-120 www.brill.com/tpao International Journal of Chinese Studies/Revue Internationale de Sinologie Court and Region in Medieval China: The Case of Tang Bianzhou* Anthony DeBlasi (University at Albany) Abstract Although Bianzhou (modern Kaifeng) is well known as the imperial capital of the Northern Song dynasty, its history prior to the tenth century reveals much about the political fortunes of the Tang dynasty, especially after the An Lushan rebellion. A careful analysis of the backgrounds of the Military Commissioners appointed to govern the region indicates that following an initial period of instability, the Tang court was able to maintain control over this strategically vital transportation hub late into the ninth century and to repeatedly appoint commissioners who had passed the civil-service examinations. This experience helps explain the continuing optimism of Tang elites about the dynasty’s prospects and made Bianzhou itself an important example for the educated elite of why civil values were essential to good government and the survival of the Tang dynasty. Résumé Si Bianzhou (actuel Kaifeng) est bien connu comme capitale impériale des Song du Nord, son histoire avant le Xe siècle nous en apprend beaucoup sur le destin politique des Tang, particulièrement après la rébellion de An Lushan. L’analyse minutieuse du parcours des commissaires militaires successivement nommés à la tête de la région révèle qu’après une période initiale d’instabilité, la cour des Tang a été en mesure jusque tard dans le IXe siècle de maintenir son contrôle sur ce qui était un nœud stratégique de communications et d’y poster l’un après l’autre des commissaires passés par la voie des examens civils. L’expérience contribue à expliquer l’optimisme persistant des élites des Tang concernant l’avenir du régime, le cas de Bianzhou étant à leurs yeux un exemple important des raisons pour lesquelles les valeurs civiles * The author would like to express gratitude to Charles Hartman, Robert Hymes, and Anna M. Shields for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. His thanks also to the two anonymous readers of the journal for useful suggestions. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2016 T’oungDOI: Pao 10.1163/15685322-10213P04 102-1-3 (2016) 74-120 ISSN 0082-5433 (print version) ISSN 1568-5322 (online version)Downloaded TPAO from Brill.com10/01/2021 02:24:58PM via free access Court and Region in Medieval China 75 demeuraient essentielles à la qualité du gouvernement et à la survie de la dynastie. Keywords Bianzhou, civil officials, examinations, jiedushi, Kaifeng, Military Commissioners, Tang dynasty. Better known to history as Kaifeng 開封, Bianzhou’s 汴州 experience during the Tang has generally been relegated to the status of after- thought. Its status as the imperial capital of the subsequent Song dy- nasty and the relative abundance of source materials for later periods have channeled most scholarly attention to Bianzhou’s later history.1 The level of detail preserved in accounts of the city during the Song pe- riod has established it as a central case in the development of such va- ried fields as economic history, social history, and late medieval urban history.2 Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons for examining Bian- zhou’s history during the Tang period. As it turns out, the events in Bian- zhou between the mid-eighth and early tenth centuries provide a clear window into the larger dynamics that drove both the fate of the Tang dynasty itself and the development of this one city. There are certainly many aspects of Bianzhou’s history during the Tang dynasty that would justify our attention, but my goal here is to illustrate the surprising longevity of the Tang court’s ability to control af- fairs in this strategically crucial region. Making this case requires answe- ring two questions. First, how did the relationship between Bianzhou and central authority develop during the last century and a half of Tang rule?3 Second, how did that development relate to elite conceptions 1) One of the best accounts of the city during the Song is Zhou Baozhu’s 周寶珠 magisterial work Songdai Dongjing yanjiu 宋代東京研究 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 1992). 2) See, for example, Heng Chye Kiang, Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1999). We are indebted to Meng Yuanlao’s 孟元老 reminiscence Dongjing menghua lu 東京夢華錄 for much of the detail that enables us to reconstruct life in the Northern Song capital. 3) There is a substantial scholarly literature on the imperial court’s level of control in the wider empire. See, for example, Hino Kaisaburō 日野開三郎, Shina chūsei no gunbatsu: Tōdai hanchin no seiritsu to seisui 支那中世の軍閥——唐代藩鎮の成立と盛衰, rpt. in Hino Kaisaburō, Tōyōshi gakuron shū 東洋史学論集 (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1980), Vol.1:21- 171; Charles Peterson, “The Restoration Completed: Emperor Hsien-tsung and the Provinces,” in Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett, ed., Perspectives on the Tang (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), 151-92; Ōzawa Masaaki 大沢正昭, “Tō-matsu no hanchin to chūō ken- T’oung Pao 102-1-3 (2016) 74-120 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 02:24:58PM via free access 76 Anthony DeBlasi of the balance between civil and martial values? The answers to these questions suggest the way that material conditions and concrete events take on broader significance in the context of cultural crisis of the kind experienced by the Tang after 755. The analysis that follows relies on the sorting of Military Commissioners who held authority in Bianzhou into two broad categories: those closely associated with civil avenues of ad- vancement and those tied to military experience. This heuristic device necessarily simplifies a complex set of associations. Civil officials cer- tainly held military appointments during the Tang, and some who held coveted spots as Grand Counselors at court had risen to prominence via their service in military units. A general analysis of the relationship between the two broad areas of government action traditionally labeled wen 文 (civil) and wu 武 (martial), is beyond the scope of this essay. The goal here is more focused. It is to examine the confluence between court authority, appointment mechanisms, and the rhetorical framing that educated elites employed to interpret events in a region seen as vital to national interests. Of course, conditions varied across the empire, so Bianzhou was not strictly “representative” of all regions, but the richness of the sources for its history and its practical importance for the dynasty make it an ex- ceptional window into the political history of the second half of the Tang dynasty. There is, however, a danger in pursuing a study of the role of a single place in the larger national history—it is possible to lose sight of the local significance of events in a specific locality. In the case of Bianzhou, whose history is well documented and unique in some im- portant ways, there is a temptation to blur the distinction between the vector of its own development (i.e., its growing national prominence) and the trajectory of Tang decline. To avoid distorting the narrative of Bianzhou’s significance, I embed the history discussed here within a matrix of factors that include local and national geography, ryoku: Toku-sō Ken-sō chō o chūshin to shite” 唐末の藩鎮と中央権力——徳宗・憲宗 朝を中心として, Tōyōshi kenkyū 32 (1973): 141-6; Zhang Guogang 張國剛, Tangdai fanzhen yanjiu 唐代藩鎮研究 (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1987); Cheong Byungjun 鄭炳 俊, “Tōdai no kansatsu shochi shi ni tsuite: hanchin taisei no ichi kōsatsu” 唐代の観察処 置使について——藩鎮体制の一考察, Shirin 77 (1994): 706-36; and Shi Yuntao 石雲濤, Tangdai mufu zhidu yanjiu 唐代幕府制度研究 (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chu- banshe, 2003). T’oung Pao 102-1-3 (2016) 74-120 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 02:24:58PM via free access Court and Region in Medieval China 77 national politics, military administration, local social realities, and the interpretations of events by the Tang elite. These factors reveal what challenges the court faced in governing the territory, why it pursued control of the region so diligently, and how the results of that effort fed into a preexisting narrative of dynastic legitimacy among Tang officials. Simply put, the hard-won success of the court in reasserting control over Bianzhou in the second decade of the ninth century transformed Bianzhou into a proof-case that Tang officials could cite when they lauded their colleagues and defended the dynasty. The Geography of Bianzhou After the Yellow River emerges from the valley separating the Taihang and Qingling mountain ranges, it proceeds east into the North China plain. Bianzhou sat close to the point at which the river made its gra- dual turn north and proceeded toward its outlet into the Bohai. The region governed from Bianzhou is therefore a broad, flat one. Located at the Western extension of the North China macroregion identified by G. William Skinner, its agrarian economy produced a reasonable va- riety of crops.4 While Bianzhou’s status as an administrative center in a macroregional core would have produced moderate prosperity and local significance, another geographical fact gave Bianzhou national si- gnificance: it sat near the confluence of two vital waterways, the Yellow 4) G. William Skinner, “Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1977), 213. See also his map on p. 15 locating Kaifeng in the North China macroregion. For the basic geogra- phic qualities of the region, see Cheng Minsheng 程民生, Songdai diyu jingji 宋代地域經 濟 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 1992), 14.The variety of crops possible is clear from later gazetteers: see Kangxi Kaifeng fuzhi 康熙開封府志 15.1a-5b.