The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (57 page)

Just as the short-lived
Qin Dynasty of the third century
BCE
laid the groundwork for the prosperity of the
Han Dynasty, so the
Sui Dynasty anticipated the flowering of Chinese culture under the Tang. In both cases, the earlier dynasty brought a variety of disparate power centers under the rule of a single emperor who imposed order on a diverse population spread across a vast territory. The transitions from one ruling house to the other were not seamless, but the continuities were strong, and the Tang debt to Sui initiatives was considerable, especially for their massive investment in the canal system and their embellishment of
Luoyang, at the junction of the
Grand Canal and the Yellow River. Despite their conspicuous failures against the kingdom of
Goguryeo on the Korean Peninsula, the sheer size of the Sui armies attested to China’s military might, which, coupled with a vigorous diplomacy, ensured a period of unrivaled prosperity and expansion during the Tang’s first century, not only in Central Asia but also on the Korean Peninsula and in northern Vietnam.

In 618,
Li Yuan, duke of Tang, captured the Sui capital of
Yangzhou on the Grand Canal near its junction with the Yangzi, and soon thereafter he became the first Tang emperor, known to history as
Tang Gaozu. A soldier by profession, Gaozu had a keen administrative sense and he restored political and economic stability to the empire by improving education, reinstating the examination system for government officials, minting a uniform coinage, and enacting new, less punitive laws. By the end of the seventh century Chinese arms had restored peace to China proper, defeated the Eastern and Western Turks to extend Chinese rule from
Mongolia to the
Amu Darya in
Turkmenistan, and made the revived capital at Chang’an probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world. With a population of perhaps one million, Chang’an attracted merchants, envoys, and monks from
Japan and Korea, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, India, the caliphates, and the Byzantine Empire. Surrounded by tributaries of the
Wei River, itself a tributary of the Yellow River, Chang’an was served by
five canals on which came bulk shipments of silk and rice from the Yangzi-Huai area and, from closer by, timber for the city’s prodigious construction needs. Chang’an’s situation was complicated by the canals’ tendency to flood, low water in the Wei River, and the
Sanmen Rapids, a treacherous bottleneck on the Yellow River that could be circumvented only by portaging grain and other cargoes overland from Luoyang for about 130 kilometers before loading it back on boats for the final push up the Yellow and Wei Rivers. Chang’an’s closest rivals in size were Luoyang, which served as the dynasty’s eastern capital from the middle of the seventh century, and Yangzhou, which became a major port for ships from the south.

Toward the end of his reign, Gaozu’s successor
Tang Taizong resumed the Sui emperors’ efforts to extend Chinese influence onto the Korean Peninsula. Goguryeo had erected massive fortifications along the western bank of the Liao River against a possible Tang attack, but Taizong became increasingly preoccupied with the prospect of bringing the peninsula under his control. His opportunity came when a coup deposed the king of Goguryeo, nominally a Chinese vassal, and the usurper severed the overland route from China to its ally, the kingdom of
Silla. In 644, Taizong dispatched more than forty thousand troops to the mouth of the Daedong (Taedong) River below
Pyeongyang. The sources reveal little about the outcome of this amphibious expedition, which was supposed to act in concert with an army marching overland from the north, but the invasion as a whole failed and Taizong canceled plans for a new campaign shortly before his death. In 655, his successor,
Tang Gaozong, attacked Goguryeo again, this time to avenge an attack on the Khitan, a
Mongol-speaking Manchurian tribe that had submitted to the Tang. As before, the conflict involved the three Korean kingdoms, with Silla seeking the Chinese as allies against Baekje, who were supported by the Japanese.

In assessing their prospects for a Korean campaign, the Chinese had probably not considered the possibility of intervention by the Japanese, who viewed the proceedings on the Korean Peninsula with mixed feelings. Chinese mores had begun to permeate Japanese court society at the end of the sixth century, when they were introduced by Korean traders and migrants. Buddhism was
officially recognized in Japan in 587, but at the same time the court embraced Confucian ethical and legal teachings and the promotion of government officials on the basis of merit. The Japanese also absorbed
Chinese literary tastes and artistic styles, and Chinese city and temple layouts became models for their own. Emulous though it was of the Middle Kingdom, the Yamato court had a formal alliance with Baekje, whose
Prince Pung had lived in Japan for two decades. In 663, a Japanese fleet sailed in support of Prince Pung’s claim to the throne, only to be destroyed by a Tang force at the
battle of the Geum River. They lost four hundred ships and “
King Pungjang of Baekje with a number of others embarked in a ship and fled to [Goguryeo].” Three years later, Goguryeo was weakened by a succession crisis and, seizing the initiative, the Chinese defeated the kingdom in a land campaign two years after that. At a tactical level, China’s Korean campaign of the 660s succeeded when previous efforts had failed because their alliance with Silla enabled the Chinese to launch an amphibious campaign across the Yellow Sea, and once established on the lower peninsula they were able to fight Goguryeo on two fronts. The southern front was probably easier and less costly to maintain by sea than were the forward bases in Liaodong and northern Goguryeo, which could be reached only by long overland marches.

Flush with victory, the Chinese divided the entire peninsula into commanderies, effectively reducing their ally, Silla, to the same status as Goguryeo and Baekje. But they failed to keep a grip on the peninsula due to the Koreans’ collective resistance coupled with severe problems at home. Within a decade, Silla quickly gobbled up Baekje and Goguryeo and forced the Chinese to withdraw to Liaodong. Survivors of Goguryeo’s ruling dynasty established the
state of Balhae (Parhae in Chinese), which straddled the
Yalu River and served as a buffer between Silla, China, and the Khitan from 710 to 934. On the domestic front, Gaozong’s campaigns had been costly and the end of hostilities coincided with
droughts and famines that led to massive internal migration to avoid taxation and seek out better land. Further straining the imperial treasury were the swelling bureaucracy and lavish building programs, especially in Luoyang, which Gaozong had formally designated as a second capital, a move that foreshadowed the decline of
Chang’an and the northwest provinces. The Chinese were simultaneously engaged in a prolonged struggle with the kingdom of
Tibet and tribes of both the Eastern and Western Turks. In the 690s, the Tibetans defeated a Tang army only three hundred kilometers from Chang’an, the Eastern Turks descended on
Gansu Province, and
Hebei Province was invaded by the same Khitan whose invasion by Goguryeo had prompted the Tang intervention on the Korean Peninsula.

These varied threats were contained by the start of the new century, and in 712
China enthroned one of its greatest monarchs,
Tang Xuanzong. Although his half-century reign ended in calamity, it was under the “Brilliant Monarch” that Tang China reached the apogee of its imperial reach. With China at peace with her continental neighbors, one of Xuanzong’s first priorities was to restore the primacy of Chang’an over Luoyang, where the court had relocated for a total of twenty-three years between 657 and 705. Integral to this project was the
renewal of the canal system and
improvements to navigation on the Yellow River—most notably by reducing the portage around the
Sanmen Rapids to only eight kilometers—to ensure that tax rice originating in the lower Yangzi valley could reach the capital efficiently and reliably. In the seventh century Taizong had allowed tax grain to be converted to silk and copper cash to reduce the cost of transporting imperial taxes to Chang’an (which was borne by the prefectural governments), but rice remained the principal form of payment, and stockpiles provided the court with a hedge against famine in the event of drought, flood, or war.

China was also resurgent in Central Asia where rulers from
Tashkent,
Samarkand, and Bukhara requested help against Muslim armies encroaching from the south. Emperor Tang Xuanzong granted honorific titles of nobility to rulers in the Pamirs, Kashmir, and the Kabul River valley. In connection with this, the Pallava king
Narasimhavarman II sent an envoy to China with the monk
Vajrabodhi in acknowledgment of which the Tang emperor recognized him as leader of the “Southern Army Which Cherishes Virtue.” The Tang Dynasty was at its peak when it suffered defeats on its western, northern, and southern borders. In 751,
Gao Xianzhi, architect of much of China’s success in Central Asia, executed the king of Tashkent for failing to defer to the imperial throne. To avenge his father, the late king’s son enlisted the help of
Turks and an army from the newly declared
Abbasid Caliphate and in July their combined forces routed Gao at the Talas River near the border between
Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan. The same year an army from the newly emerged
kingdom of Nanzhao destroyed a Tang army of eighty thousand. This was especially galling because Nanzhao, which
occupied the strategic region where the Red River flows closest to the Yangzi, was a creation of the Tang. Humiliating as the losses in
Central Asia and Nanzhao were, most decisive was that of a Tang army under
An Lushan, a military governor in eastern
Manchuria who launched an unprovoked
attack on the Khitan.

Though badly defeated and widely suspected of treasonous intentions, An Lushan was promoted by the emperor. Proving his detractors right in 755, he seized
Hebei and
Henan Provinces and drove south to the Yellow River where he took
Kaifeng and seized control of the
Grand Canal. He went on to capture Luoyang and Chang’an and forced Xuanzong to flee before internecine
strife took its toll on the rebels and imperial forces finally defeated the last of them in 763. Almost immediately, however,
Tibetan forces seized
Chang’an, and although they withdrew the following year, they raided the capital almost annually for more than a decade. It would be a thousand years before the
Qing Dynasty restored Chinese authority to the region that now comprises China’s westernmost Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The contraction of China’s western borders, the disruption to the overland silk road, and the rise of Baghdad led to an unprecedented flowering of trade on the Monsoon Seas, with profound consequences for the traders and states of South and Southeast Asia, as well as for China itself. In the short term, however, such outcomes were far from apparent. Although An Lushan’s rebellion had its greatest impact on northern and northwest China, unrest spread to Guangzhou, where in 758 Persian and Arab merchants unaccountably rioted and decided to “
destroy the warehouses and burn down the dwellings.” The motive for a Tang army’s massacre of “several thousand Persian merchants” at
Yangzhou two years later is likewise unknown, but the upshot was the withdrawal of Persian and Arab merchants from China to
Annamese ports. Nonetheless, within a decade Guangzhou had recovered and the
number of ships calling from overseas rose from only five a year to about forty.

Although the seat of government was restored to Chang’an, the capital was now closer to China’s troubled western borders than to its geographic center. The An Lushan rebellion had
permanently weakened the centralized dynastic authority and a combination of the loss of tax records, widespread redistribution of land, and southward migration to the more tranquil provinces between the Huai and Yangzi Rivers destroyed the old financial structures. The government attempted to introduce reforms and promoted the payment of taxes in cash as well as crops and other goods, but it could not administer the system effectively. This led to widespread corruption, and a growing gap between rich and poor as many people abandoned their land to work as tenant farmers on larger estates and others flocked to Buddhist monasteries.

Since early in the Tang, Confucianists had viewed Buddhism as a twofold threat to the state. It violated Confucian principles of governance by ignoring the precedence of rulers over subjects, and it undermined the state’s economic stability because Buddhist lands, temples, nuns, and monks were exempt from taxation. Tang Taizong and Tang Xuanzong had both banned
illegal ordinations, but by the mid-ninth century conditions were ripe for another government campaign against Buddhist holdings under
Tang Wuzong. This crackdown laicized and returned to secular tax-paying status a quarter million monks and nuns—who had continued to work as farmers, artisans, merchants, investors, and moneylenders—and closed thousands of Buddhist monasteries
and shrines whose statues, ornaments, and other decorations of gold, iron, and copper were melted down and returned to circulation.

These events are known from official histories as well as the more personal eyewitness account of
Ennin, a Buddhist monk “in search of the Law” who in 838 attached himself to a Japanese embassy to the Tang court. Renowned as the greatest teacher of Tendai Buddhism, Ennin authored a fascinating diary of his nearly decadelong sojourn in China, a work celebrated for its vivid portrait of the Chinese Buddhist community at a crucial point in its history but that also offers an intimate view of China’s inland shipping, the maritime trading networks of Northeast Asia, and Tang officialdom. Unfortunately, Ennin writes little about the vessels in which he sailed except to note that the mission was announced with the appointment of an ambassador and subordinate officials including “ship construction officers” who oversaw the building of four ships that together carried about 650 people. After two false starts, the expedition sailed the 475 miles between
Hakata Bay, on northwest
Kyushu, and the China coast north of the Yangzi, where two of the ships grounded in the mudflats and were destroyed by the sea, though not before the crew and tribute goods were rescued and brought to the mainland.