China: An Introduction to the Tang Dynasty (618-906)

This dynamic, affluent, liberal, and culturally diverse environment produced a great efflorescence of culture unparalleled in Chinese history. Buddhism, originally imported from India, thrived to such an extent that China itself became a major center of Buddhist learning, attracting students and pilgrims from other countries. In East Asia, Chinese, rather than Sanskrit, became the language of Chinese Buddhist texts that served to transmit Chinese culture, ideas, and philosophy abroad. Significantly, Buddhist influence also resulted in the compilation of huge encyclopedias of knowledge during the Tang, preserving much earlier Chinese cultural material for posterity, and inspiring advances in mathematics and the applied sciences such as engineering and medicine. The Tang was also an age of great figure painters, whose religious frescoes filled caves along the Silk Road through central Asia, and covered the walls of royal tombs. New styles of ceramics, bold and colorful with variegated glazes, embraced Indian, Persian, and Greek forms.

The most magnificent urban center in the world at the time, the capital of Tang China, Chang’an (literally “Everlasting Peace”), was a walled city built in alignment with the stars to symbolize its role as the world in miniature. The city witnessed the most splendid cultural achievements during the eighth century. As home to the most accomplished artists and thinkers of the day, it played much the same role as Florence did in fifteenth-century Europe. Just as it was witness to the height of Tang culture in the eighth century, it also was destined to be the focal point of the dynasty’s decline: when a rogue general decided to rebel in 756, not only was the emperor sent tem- porarily into exile, but the artists, poets, and priests of the city also fled. Although the political structure of the Tang remained in place for another 150 years (until 907), the city and state, with resources scattered, were weakened. Pretenders to the throne began to emerge, warlords began to consolidate authority, and nomadic peoples on the northern and western borders of the country also competed for political power. But it was a gentle decline: overall the three hundred years of the Tang were marked by impressive advances in all aspects of art, science, and philosophy.

Above all, poetry flourished during the Tang, and indeed the Chinese think of Tang poetry as the greatest of all literary achievements. Tang poets like Du Fu, Li Bo, Wang Wei, and Bo Juyi created works of art that powerfully explored the relationships between sounds, images, and philosophy. Tang poets aimed to capture the fleeting and profound, influencing Chinese writers until the present day. Together with the surviving examples of painting and sculpture, Tang poetry manifests a Chinese inner vision and view of the world and cosmos in a way that more abstract scholarly works did not; these creative works express what might otherwise remain theoretical or ethereal into palpable, understandable, and immediate terms.

By the early tenth century, the Tang ruling house fell, and a period of chaos ensued. China was divided into at least fifteen different independent political regimes, and peoples on the border areas set up their own states. The cultural glory of Tang was eclipsed, surviving only among tiny warring states. However in the year 960, another unified empire arose, the Song.