Tang Dynasty & New China

The Tang dynasty (–) of ancient China witnessed many advancements in Chinese .. Adshead, S. A. M. (), T'ang China: The Rise of the East in World History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN (hardback). Barrett .
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In the Chinese author Duan Chengshi provided detailed description about the slave trade , ivory trade, and ambergris trade in a country called Bobali, which historians point to the possibility of being Berbera in Somalia. From this time period, the Arab merchant Shulama once wrote of his admiration for Chinese seafaring junks, but noted that the draft was too deep for them to enter the Euphrates River, which forced them to land small boats for passengers and cargo.

Chinese geographers such as Jia Dan wrote accurate descriptions of places far abroad. In his work written between and C. By the s C. At the Battle of Talas in C. Soon afterward, the An Shi Rebellion - C. It left the dynasty weakened, the Tang never regained its glory days of the seventh and eighth century. The Tang were eventually driven out of Central Asia and imperial China did not regain ground in that region until the Mongol led regime during the Yuan Dynasty.

Another legacy of the An Shi rebellion were the gradual rise of regional military governors jiedushi which slowly came to challenge the power of the central government. The Tang government relied on these governors and their armies for protection and to suppress locals that would take up arms against the government. In return, the central government would acknowledge the rights of these governors to maintain their army, collect taxes and even to pass on their title.

With the central government collapsing in authority over the various regions of the empire, it was recorded in C. Then in C. Near the end of the Tang Dynasty, regional military governors took advantage of their increasing power and began to function more like independent regimes. At the same time, natural causes such as droughts and famine in addition to internal corruptions and incompetent emperors contributed to the rise of a series of rebellions. The Huang Chao rebellion of the ninth century, which resulted in the destruction of both Chang'an and Luoyang took over 10 years to suppress.

Although the rebellion was defeated by the Tang, it never really recovered from that crucial blow. A certain Zhu Wen originally a salt smuggler who had served under the rebel Huang had later surrendered to Tang forces, his military merit in betraying and defeating Huang's forces meant rapid military promotions for him. In , after almost years in power, the dynasty was ended when this military governor, Zhu Wen known soon after as Taizu of Later Liang , deposed the last emperor of Tang and took the throne for himself. Although cast in a negative light by many for usurping power from the Tang, Zhu Wen turned out to be a skilled administrator.

He was also responsible for the building of a large sea-wall, along with new walls and roads for the burgeoning city of Hangzhou, which would later become the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. Liu Xu C. This was edited into another history labelled Xin Tang shu, the New Book of Tang in order to distinguish it, which was a work by the historian Ouyang Xiu and Song Qi of the Song Dynasty between the years and Both of them were based upon earlier annals, yet those are now lost.

Both of them also rank among the Twenty-Four Histories of China. One of the surviving sources of the Jiu Tang shu , primarily covering up to C. The Tang period was again placed into the enormous universal history text of the Zizhi Tongjian , edited, compiled, and completed in by a team of scholars under the Song Dynasty Chancellor Sima Guang This historical text, written with 3 million Chinese characters in volumes, covered the history of China from the beginning of the Warring States B.

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Chang'an — Luoyang Buddhism, Taoism , Confucianism. Contents 1 Establishment 2 Culture and Society 2. Xia Dynasty — B. Shang Dynasty — B. Zhou Dynasty — B. Spring and Autumn Period. Qin Dynasty B.


  • Administrative divisions of the Tang dynasty;
  • Founding of the dynasty.
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Han Dynasty B. Three Kingdoms — C.

Science and technology of the Tang dynasty - Wikipedia

Jin Dynasty — C. Sui Dynasty — C. Tang Dynasty — C. Liao Dynasty — C. Song Dynasty — C. Yuan Dynasty — C. The rebel army, , strong, started out from Jicheng and then quickly and easily moved through Hebei and Shanxi, massacring the population of Kaifeng before moving towards the then capital Chang'an in Shaanxi. They captured the capital and Emperor Xuanzong fled towards Sichuan. An Lushan then proclaimed the foundation of his new Greater Yan dynasty.

China's investment in China is so huge that it is considered by some as a form colonialism. To enable the port to reach into Africa new railways are being built. However this grandiose project has an unhelpful precedent. In the s Mao Zedong invested in a railway in Tanzania. The 1,mile railway now lies in a decayed state with the grand Dar Es Salaam station falling into decay. The larger scale Chinese investment into not just Tanzania but also surrounding countries heralds an ambitious move to open up Africa to trade.

Early signs are showing that the investment is welcomed and may well bring much needed prosperity to the whole region. It is wrong to 'personalize' the rebellion too much in terms of a drama among personalities at court. The reality was that Tang control was overstretched and the border regions could only be controlled by devolving power to strong military leaders.

Emperor Xuanzong's court in his later years had become corrupt and supine. A shrewd and pragmatic leader like An Lushan had the energy that the court had been lacking. However the rebellion did not create a new strong dynasty. Emperor Xuanzong's fleeing escort mutinied and killed Yang Guozhong and demanded that Yang Guifei should be killed.

List of emperors of the Tang dynasty

He had no choice but to see his beloved strangled. With the aid of loyal generals Guo Ziyi and Li Guangbi, Suzong launched a counter-attack which took a grueling eight years to end the revolt. Eventually a truce was drawn up between the two sides. The Tang dynasty never fully recovered from the revolt. The disruption to agriculture and displacement of people caused a break down in administration. Some claim that 36 million died, but this figure reflects the impossibility of carrying out an accurate census across a ravaged country, many fled south. Local warlords were able to build their own areas of control.

The episode reveals the fragility of power of the late Tang dynasty. After the tumult of the An Lushan rebellion, Xuanzong's son Suzong eventually restored peace, with aid from foreign mercenaries but only to see a new power, the Tibetans , invade and sack Chang'an.

In some stability was established under Dezong Suzong's son but the centralized power of the early Tang rulers was never reinstated. The majority of the unrest was in northern China; in the Yangzi valley and further south peace was preserved, this period marked the shift to the south of Chinese culture, areas in the north became depopulated with cities left in ruins while in the south new towns and cities were built. Buddhism was the religion of the Tang emperors; it was a period of carving of huge numbers of Buddhas in such places as Dunhuang , Gansu; the Longmen Caves and the Yungang Grottoes.

Towards the end of the dynasty Buddhism had become very powerful and rich, it was then fiercely persecuted by Emperor Wuzong and never again achieved the same dominance. Nationalism was resurgent with foreigners: Turks, Jews , Muslims, Christians, Parthians dispossessed and some murdered. The state turned back to Confucianism as the ruling doctrine, and central control was lost with local fiefdoms emerging particularly in the north.

Natural disasters took their toll too, a series of droughts in Shandong and Henan led to peasant rebellions. The remnants of Tang administration resorted to high levels of taxation and confiscation of land. At one stage a 'Green shoots tax' was instigated, so farmers had to pay a tax on crops as they germinated long before harvest. Misrule and dominance by court eunuchs , encroachment of Arab armies from the west, and rebellions all led to the breakdown of the empire into smaller 'fiefdoms'. Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Chinasage is a new web resource, pages will be added, enhanced and re-formatted regularly.

We would be most grateful if you can help improve this page. Please visit our secure contact page to leave any comment. Citation information for this page: Tang Emperors and Empress. Tang dynasty woman horse rider in Sansuci pottery. Copyright Richard Wingfield, October Imperial Names The names of Chinese Emperors is a common cause of confusion because they were so many of them.

British Library, Shelfmark Or. Men enjoyed the presence of assertive, active women. There were some prominent court women after the era of Empress Wu , such as Yang Guifei — , who had Emperor Xuanzong appoint many of her relatives and cronies to important ministerial and martial positions. During the earlier Northern and Southern dynasties — , and perhaps even earlier, the drinking of tea Camellia sinensis became popular in southern China.

Tea was viewed then as a beverage of tasteful pleasure and with pharmacological purpose as well. The poet Lu Tong — devoted most of his poetry to his love of tea. Earlier, the first recorded use of toilet paper was made in by the scholar-official Yan Zhitui — , [] and in an Arab Muslim traveler commented on how he believed the Tang era Chinese were not careful about cleanliness because they did not wash with water as was his people's habit when going to the bathroom; instead, he said, the Chinese simply used paper to wipe themselves.

In ancient times, the Chinese had outlined the five most basic foodstuffs known as the five grains: In fact, in the Tang Dynasty rice was not only the most important staple in southern China, but had also became popular in the north, which was for a long time the center of China. During the Tang dynasty, wheat replaced the position of millet and became the main staple crop. As a consequence, wheat cake shared a considerable amount in the staple of Tang. Steamed cake was consumed commonly by both civilians and aristocrats.

Like the Rougamo in modern Chinese cuisine, steamed cake was usually stuffed by meat and vegetable. Taiping Guangji recorded a civilian in Chang'an named Zou Luotuo, who was poor and "often push his cart out selling steamed cake. Boiled cake was the staple of the Northern Dynasty, and it kept its popularity in the Tang dynasty. The definition here was very broad, including current day wonton, noodles, and many other kinds of food that soak wheat in water. Consuming boiled cake was treated as an effective and popular way of diet therapy. Pancake was hard to find in China before the Tang.

But in the Tang dynasty pancake started becoming popular. Hu cake, which means foreign cake, was extremely popular in Tang. Restaurants in Tang usually treated Hu cake as an indispensable food in their menu. During the Tang, the many common foodstuffs and cooking ingredients in addition to those already listed were barley, garlic, salt, turnips, soybeans, pears, apricots, peaches, apples, pomegranates, jujubes, rhubarb, hazelnuts, pine nuts, chestnuts, walnuts, yams, taro, etc.

Some foods were also off-limits, as the Tang court encouraged people not to eat beef since the bull was a valuable working animal , and from to Emperor Wenzong of Tang even banned the slaughter of cattle on the grounds of his religious convictions to Buddhism. From the trade overseas and over land, the Chinese acquired peaches from Samarkand , date palms, pistachios, and figs from Greater Iran , pine nuts and ginseng roots from Korea and mangoes from Southeast Asia. Methods of food preservation were important, and practiced throughout China. The common people used simple methods of preservation, such as digging deep ditches and trenches, brining , and salting their foods.

Technology during the Tang period was built also upon the precedents of the past. Previous advancements in clockworks and timekeeping included the mechanical gear systems of Zhang Heng 78— and Ma Jun fl. Its design was improved c. They provided a steelyard balance that allowed seasonal adjustment in the pressure head of the compensating tank and could then control the rate of flow for different lengths of day and night.

There were many other mechanical inventions during the Tang era. Midway up the southern side of the mountain was a dragon…the beast opened its mouth and spit brew into a goblet seated on a large [iron] lotus leaf beneath. If he was slow in draining the cup and returning it to the leaf, the door of a pavilion at the top of the mountain opened and a mechanical wine server, dressed in a cap and gown, emerged with a wooden bat in his hand.

Yet the use of a teasing mechanical puppet in this wine-serving device wasn't exactly a novel invention of the Tang, since the use of mechanical puppets in China date back to the Qin dynasty — BC. There are many stories of automatons used in the Tang, including general Yang Wulian's wooden statue of a monk who stretched his hands out to collect contributions; when the amount of coins reached a certain weight, the mechanical figure moved his arms to deposit them in a satchel.

In the realm of structural engineering and technical Chinese architecture , there were also government standard building codes, outlined in the early Tang book of the Yingshan Ling National Building Law. Woodblock printing made the written word available to vastly greater audiences. One of the world's oldest surviving printed documents is a miniature Buddhist dharani sutra unearthed at Xi'an in and dated roughly from to Therefore, there were more lower-class people seen entering the Imperial Examinations and passing them by the later Song dynasty.

The Chinese of the Tang era were also very interested in the benefits of officially classifying all of the medicines used in pharmacology. In , Emperor Gaozong of Tang r. In the realm of cartography , there were further advances beyond the map-makers of the Han dynasty. When the Tang chancellor Pei Ju — was working for the Sui dynasty as a Commercial Commissioner in , he created a well-known gridded map with a graduated scale in the tradition of Pei Xiu — Despite this, the earliest extant terrain maps of China come from the ancient State of Qin ; maps from the 4th century BC that were excavated in Chinese scientists of the Tang period employed complex chemical formulas for an array of different purposes, often found through experiments of alchemy.

These included a waterproof and dust-repelling cream or varnish for clothes and weapons, fireproof cement for glass and porcelain wares, a waterproof cream applied to silk clothes of underwater divers , a cream designated for polishing bronze mirrors, and many other useful formulas. Ever since the Han dynasty BC — AD , the Chinese had drilled deep boreholes to transport natural gas from bamboo pipelines to stoves where cast iron evaporation pans boiled brine to extract salt.

The inventor Ding Huan fl.

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This was edited into another history labelled the New Book of Tang in order to distinguish it, which was a work by the Song historians Ouyang Xiu — , Song Qi — , et al. Both of them were based upon earlier annals, yet those are now lost. One of the surviving sources of the Old Book of Tang , primarily covering up to , is the Tongdian , which Du You presented to the emperor in The Tang period was again placed into the enormous universal history text of the Zizhi Tongjian , edited, compiled, and completed in by a team of scholars under the Song dynasty Chancellor Sima Guang — This historical text, written with 3 million Chinese characters in volumes, covered the history of China from the beginning of the Warring States BC until the beginning of the Song dynasty From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For other uses, see Tang dynasty disambiguation. Tang dynasty under Wuzhou rule , c. Chang'an — and — Luoyang — and — Chinese coin Chinese cash. Chinese historiography Timeline of Chinese history Dynasties in Chinese history Linguistic history Art history Economic history Education history Science and technology history Legal history Media history Military history Naval history.

Timeline of the Tang dynasty. Transition from Sui to Tang. Administrative divisions of the Tang dynasty. Imperial examination in Chinese mythology. Military history of China before , Naval history of China , and Jimi system. Imperial Guards Tang dynasty. Protectorate General to Pacify the East. A gilt Buddhist reliquary with decorations of armored guards, from Silla, 7th-century. A Tang period gilt -silver jar, shaped in the style of northern nomad 's leather bag [] decorated with a horse dancing with a cup of wine in its mouth, as the horses of Emperor Xuanzong were trained to do. Chinese literature and Tang poetry.

Religion in China and Chinese philosophy. Details of the rubbing of the Nestorian scriptural pillar.

Church of the East and its largest extent during the Middle Ages. Beauties Wearing Flowers by Zhou Fang , 8th century. Science and technology of the Tang dynasty. History of science and technology in China , List of Chinese inventions , and List of Chinese discoveries. Woodblock printing , Playing cards , and Chinese playing cards. See also medieval demography. In the 17th year of the period Cheng-kuan [ C. T'ai-tsung [the then ruling emperor] favored them with a message under his imperial seal and graciously granted presents of silk.

Since the Ta-shih [the Arabs] had conquered these countries they sent their commander-in-chief, Mo-i [Mo'awiya ], to besiege their capital city; by means of an agreement they obtained friendly relations, and asked to be allowed to pay every year tribute of gold and silk; in the sequel they became subject to Ta-shih. In the second year of the period Ch'ien-feng [ C. In the first year of the period Ta-tsu [ C. In the first month of the seventh year of the period K'ai-yuan [ C. A few months after, he further sent ta-te-seng ["priests of great virtue"] to our court with tribute.

Journal of world-systems research. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Tibet Past and Present rpr. Retrieved July 17, The historical status of Tibet. King's Crown Press, Columbia University. Olimat 27 August The crossroads of civilizations: The Arab Conquests in Central Asia.

The Royal Asiatic Society. A History of Chinese Muslim Vol.

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