General Introduction

General Introduction The fifty-seven articles and book chapters reprinted in this four-volume set of Critical Readings on Tang China aim to give a broadly representative survey of English-language scholarship on the Tang from the past three generations. The Tang 唐 dynasty, formally founded on 18 June 618 and officially terminated on 5 June 907, was the second great imperium of Chinese history (the first being the Han 漢 dynasty of 202 BCE to 220 CE) and, in the opinion of many people, its three centuries were the cultural and political high point of traditional China. During this time Tang China was the most advanced civilization in the world, as well as being the most extensive territorial empire. At its fullest strength the Tang controlled all of what we think of today as “China proper” and also exercised administrative suzerainty westward over most of central Asia (excepting Tibet), including the Tarim Basin and Taklamakan Desert and across the Pamir range to the Hindu Kush in present-day Afghanistan— domains once known in the West by the romantic names of Dzungaria, Sogdiana, Ferghana, and Transoxiana. To the southeast the Tang empire reached far into what we now know as northern Vietnam, the former Annam. And eastward during these centuries, Tang China was the dominant cultural influence over the newly developing states of Korea and Japan. Immediately preceding the Tang, the Sui 隋 dynasty, established in north China in 581 as successor to the Northern Zhou 北周 (557–581), conquered eight years later the Chen 陳 dynasty (557–589) that was the last of six southern dynasties centered on Jiankang 建康 (present-day Nanjing) after the demise of the Han. The Sui thus became the first dynasty in nearly three centuries to reunite all of China under a single rule. But the Sui did not last, being replaced in 618 by the Tang. Thus the short-lived Sui stands in relationship to the Tang rather like the brief but preparatory Qin 秦 (221–206 BCE) in its relationship to the following and longer-lasting Han. The vast empire of the Tang was administratively organized as a collection of roughly 350 prefectures (zhou 州) or commanderies ( jun 郡) and, under those more than 1200 districts (xian 縣) of roughly county size. There were also higher-level officials, often called “commissioners” (shi 使) with various specific titles and duties of supervision coordinating designated matters of several prefectures or larger areas. On the margins of the empire were military protectorates holding more or less loose control over various “foreign” areas and populations. The chief officials of the far-flung local domains of the empire were centrally appointed by the court and sent out from the capital for © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��9 | doi:��.��63/9789004380�58_00� 2 General Introduction set terms, ideally to be evaluated periodically and then promoted or demoted, as deserved, to posts in other locations, thus diminishing the possibility that any individual official might build up a private sphere of power. Of course the most desirable postings were always those in the capital city of Chang’an 長安 (near present-day Xi’an 西安) or, failing that, in the secondary capital at Luoyang 洛陽. The Tang capital of Chang’an was a walled city comprising approximately thirty square miles that had been built from the ground up with the found- ing of the Sui in the early 580s. It was located southeast of the site of several previous capitals called Chang’an, going back to pre-imperial times. This new city, which the Sui named Daxingcheng 大興城, was laid out on a grid pattern, comprising one hundred and six separate walled neighborhoods as well as a large bureaucratic compound and an even larger palace enclave for the imperial family. When the Tang took it over, they applied to it the historic name Chang’an and would continue to develop it throughout the dynasty. At its height it accommodated a million people within its walls, with another million in the near suburbs—an urban-centered population that would only begin to be approached elsewhere in the world by Baghdad in the mid-ninth century and Córdoba in the tenth—and which included large representations of trad- ers and shopkeepers, monks and divines, musicians and entertainers from all corners and regions of Asia. The “foreign” element, particularly from the wide- spread oasis cities and settlements of central Asia, contributed to Chang’an’s truly cosmopolitan character. The dynasty’s secondary capital of Luoyang, where the court was in resi- dence at various times, was not as large or as exactingly laid out but was only slightly less grand than Chang’an. The other great cities of the realm included especially Jinling 金陵 in the Yangzi delta, which (as Jiankang) had been the capital of a succession of “southern” dynasties during the four centuries between the Han and the Tang, and Yangzhou 揚州 (also called, as of old, Guangling 廣陵), slightly downstream from Jinling and on the opposite shore of the Long River (Changjiang 長江, as the Yangzi was then called). There were also dozens of other cities and hundreds of small towns that constituted the functional map of Tang imperial governance. The greatness and legacy of the Tang can be seen in many areas. In terms of political and institutional history, the forms and practices of administration during the Tang remained (with some alterations) largely the norm for the suc- ceeding millennium of imperial history. A few examples are the civil-service examination for prospective officials, the nationally applicable legal code, establishment of a government bureau for the drafting of an official state history, the system of bureaucratic review and transferral of centrally appointed .

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