China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty, by Mark Edward Lewis; Harvard University Press, 2009, 368 pages, US$35.

Established after four centuries of division in 618, the Tang dynasty has been regarded by most Chinese as the political and cultural highpoint of imperial China. Between the civil war that led to its founding, the An Lushan rebellion of 756 in the mid-Tang, and the end of the dynasty in 907, China changed in ways that would shape the remainder of Chinese history.

In China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty, part of the magisterial six-volume History of Imperial China, Mark Edward Lewis charts the vicissitudes and changes between “medieval” and “early modern” China with aplomb. A concise and accessible overview of the Tang dynasty, the book is written with clarity and succinctness. It is a must for anyone who wishes to fathom the complexities that give rise to those movements and shifts in history that inspire awe in the true sense of the word: from the magnificence of Tang poetry to the dread of manmade ecological disasters due to deforestation and water mismanagement that led to soil erosion and subsequent food shortages. History, one could argue, often repeats the same patterns because human nature leads us to make the same mistakes, but history also enables us to learn of the deeds of the past and perchance become, as my kinsman Jacob Burckhardt put it, not shrewder the next time, but wiser for ever.

The Late Tang brings to conclusion Stephen Owen’s overview of […]