Vicissitude and Change

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.

One of the ways in which China’s Cosmopolitan Empire differs from standard histories is that rather than exploring the era from a simple chronological perspective, with its vanishing point set towards the end of the period under consideration or modern times, Lewis transects the Tang dynasty from a series of key viewpoints that cover the geopolitical, social and cultural aspects of the era. Each of the nine chapters retraces the whole of the dynasty, thus allowing a more full-bodied picture to emerge by gradual accretion without over-egging the discussion when exploring a particular topic.

Traditionally, the Tang dynasty is divided by metonymy into the four seasons, with the early and high Tang represented as its spring and summer, and the mid and late Tang as its autumn and winter. The cusp that acts as midpoint to the whole dynasty is the An Lushan rebellion of 756, which happened to coincide with the middle of the dynasty; between the founding of the dynasty in 618 and its formal replacement in 907 by the short-lived Five Dynasties period before the inauguration of the Song in 960. As Lewis points out, “the second half of the Tang is in many ways more interesting than the first”, especially to Western historians who followed the lead of the Japanese historian Naito Torajiro, who first argued that the An Lushan rebellion was an important watershed.

In the introduction Lewis identifies four areas that played a major role in the emergence of China from the feudal system:

the abandonment of key economic, military, and social institutions after the An Lushan rebellion, its reconfiguration of the empire’s cultural geography, the expansion of trade relations with the outside world, and the invention of new artistic forms to deal with this changing world.”

The first three chapters of China’s Cosmopolitan Empire explore the geopolitical theme: surveying the shift of power from the northern to the southern central plane; the consolidation and expansion of the Tang empire that at its most extensive point, before the An Lushan rebellion, reached from Sassanid Persia in the west to the Korean peninsula in the east, and as far south as modern Vietnam; and the tensions between centralised authority and regional autonomy, a recurring theme in Chinese history. Apart from giving an overview of the Tang military system and legal code along the way, these initial chapters also raise the role of deforestation, soil erosion, and the competition for water use, between transportation via the extensive canal system developed during the Tang, and irrigation. Lewis also discusses how such manmade environmental changes led to rising tensions and shifts in power not only from a political standpoint, but also from the economic and demographic perspective, notably the steady opening up of the south and its emergence as the more populated and prosperous centre of China.

Chapters four, five and six focus on the shifting social reality of the Tang dynasty, covering aspects of urban life, rural society, and the increasing interaction with and presence of non-Chinese people from the border areas and beyond. Although traditional Chinese society has always given lip service to a hierarchical structure that places scholar-officials at the top followed by farmers and agricultural workers, with trade and commerce people as the lowest rank, the increased commercialisation of agriculture and accumulation of wealth by the merchant class during the Tang dynasty brought about an ever-widening gap between the ideology of social order and reality. Nonetheless, the ideals of maintaining social harmony via such a structure had a strong pull on many. Failing to maintain even nominal employment in the state bureaucratic system, China’s greatest poet, Du Fu, turned to running a small farm before the An Lushan rebellion set him adrift to a life of wandering in an attempt to find gainful employment and prove his loyalty to the Tang court.

The last three chapters cover the cultural aspects of the Tang dynasty. In the chapter on kinship, Lewis explores the greater freedom and power that women enjoyed during the Tang before their “subjugation under the Neo-Confucianism of the Song dynasty” that was to last until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, and the role of the demise of the “super-elite” families in the shift from the “medieval” style of office-holding dominated by blood lineage to the early modern or late imperial model, in which merit via the examination system began to play a greater part. Chapter eight explores how the Tang dynasty “marked the highpoint of institutional Daoism and Buddhism in imperial China, both in social influence and intellectual prestige”, and the role of the philosophical revival of Confucianism in the ninth century helps account for its dominance in the dynasties that followed.

These chapters also overview the close ties between religion and the development of printing during the Tang, the earliest woodblock printed text found to date being a Buddhist charm that was printed sometime between 705 and 751. By the end of the Tang, printing had laid the foundation of “many of the changes in the economy, technology, and intellectual life that defined late imperial China”.

The last chapter of China’s Cosmopolitan Empire explores the role of writing during the Tang, “the literary dynasty par excellence in Chinese history”. Lewis not only charts the key figures of the literary world such as Wang Wei, Du Fu and Li Bo, but also explores the role of poet-monks and the changing image of the poet that during the Tang became increasingly linked to the idea of a lifelong vocation and a profession, albeit one of idealised poverty and suffering. Apart from the pervasive role of poetry during the Tang (which became a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to belong to the cultured strata of society to such an extent that one needs to imagine what it would be like if all the e-mails going to and fro today were couched in poetic garb), the rise of romantic fiction and critical essays also played a major role in shifting the centre of gravity away from the courts in favour of the urban culture and centres that Lewis exposes so clearly as the defining feature of the Tang. If there is one area missing from the last chapter on writing, it is an overview of the extent of literacy during the dynasty, especially given the importance of the copying of Buddhist sutras as in itself a means of gaining salvation.

In concluding, Lewis draws attention to the over-arching changes that took place in Tang China, especially after the weakening of imperial power brought about by the An Lushan rebellion. By the end of the dynasty, changes related to geographic mobility, the rise of a multiplicity of local regimes, the diversification of occupations and prominence of the merchant class, along with the demographic dominance of southern China that would increase over the rest of Chinese history, mark the Tang dynasty as a watershed in the history of Asia. China’s relations and interactions with the outside world during the Tang brought about elements that would permanently transform the lives of the Chinese. Buddhism in particular, which had been introduced from India in the third century, became such a central part of society that it made Tang China the centre for the dissemination of Buddhism to other lands, attracting a steady stream of pilgrims from Japan and elsewhere. The movement of large numbers of foreign people into some of the northern and western areas, including people converted to the new Islamic religion, marks the Tang dynasty as a time in which China was “expanding outward while simultaneously drawing in large numbers of foreign peoples and their cultures. It was the most open, cosmopolitan period of Chinese history.”

Given the present-day rise of China as a world player, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire is a timely book that re-affirms the role that an open, true exchange and interaction between diverse people has in bringing about a time of cultural renaissance and flowering.

Information on Olivier Burckhardt’s current writing projects can be found on his website, www.obfuchai.com.