TANG DYNASTY

Tang dynasty: translation

(618–906)

After the fall of China’s powerful Han Dynasty in 220 C.E., the empire fell apart, and for some 350 years China experienced a rapid succession of short-lived rulers, including some non-Chinese peoples who invaded the country from the north and the west. Finally in 589, the Sui dynasty succeeded in reunifying the empire, though the Sui administration rapidly became overextended and in 618 was ousted by the northern Tang dynasty. The Tang dynasty went on to rule China for nearly three centuries. The first half of the Tang dynasty was a period of political stability, of military expansion particularly to the north and west, and of economic growth with the reopening of trade routes to the west. It was also a period of creative accomplishment in the arts, most notably in figure painting, porcelain (with the introduction of new cobalt blue glazes), silver and gold ornaments, and especially in poetry.

The Tang capital was in the northern city of Changan, located near modern-day Xi’an. At the height of Tang power, during the reign of Emperor Xuangzong (712–756), Changan was a walled city 30 miles square that was home to 1 million people. Governing an empire that stretched for 1,000 miles from the Great Wall to the southern island of Hainan and with a population of some 50 million souls, the government bureaucracy working in the capital and in the provinces was immense. Changan stood at the end of the great caravan route known as the Silk Road, through which the Tang dynasty formed close ties with India and Persia, and foreign influences in the form of music and exotic goods poured into the capital from the West. In addition, students, Buddhist monks, and diplomatic representatives from Korea and Japan commonly stayed in the capital for extended periods. Both Buddhism and Taoism remained important spiritual forces in Tang China among both the elite and the common people. But Confucianism also experienced a resurgence as a philosophy of social and political organization in the empire.More than any other court in the world, Changan was truly a cosmopolitan center.

In order to find talented individuals to staff its huge administrative bureaucracy, and to conform to the Confucian ideal of government by the meritorious, the Tang emperors reinstituted the civil service examinations that had begun under the Han rulers centuries earlier. The Tang government instituted five examinations, each conferring a different degree, but the most competitive and prestigious of the examinations was thejinshi(chin-shihor “presented scholar”) exam, so-called because the degree pronounced one suitable for presentation before the emperor. Only about 1 percent of the candidates tested passed this test. This exam had three parts: One tested the candidate’s rote knowledge of one of the Confucian classics, one required him to write an essay on a contemporary problem, and the third required him to compose a poem and a piece of rhymed prose after being assigned a topic and a particular rhyme scheme. It would be a mistake to assume that the civil service system opened government service to the humble classes: In practice, only wealthier families would have generally had the means to provide their sons with the education needed to succeed on the exams. But some scholars from outside the circle of the wealthy were able to make lives for themselves within the bureaucracy. And since poetic talent was a major criterion for the degree of “presented scholar,”many of the most admired poets of Tang China (including WANG WEI, LI HE, and YUAN ZHEN) consequently earned their living as government employees.

At court, the emperor or any member of the imperial family might set a topic for courtiers, who would have to respond with a poem. Typically the poems would then be assessed and one of them judged to be of highest quality. In imitation of the emperor, officials in the provinces also sponsored poetic competitions, and even patronized literary salons for poets, many of whom thrived under these provincial governors. But the importance of poetry as a conventional medium of social exchange in everyday life, perhaps as an outgrowth of its importance on the civil service examinations, distinguishes Tang China from almost every other civilization in world history (with the possible exception of HEIAN Japan, which modeled itself largely on Tang China). Poems might be written upon meeting an old friend, or taking leave of one who is being sent to a post in the provinces. A courtier or other bureaucrat might write a poem and leave it for a friend who was not at home when the poet called, or might write a cheerful poem about a homecoming. Collections of the works of major Tang poets are full of incidental poems concerning incidents of the poet’s public and private life. Probably for this reason, many of the major Tang poets are known to subsequent generations by their personalities, in particular the exuberant Taoist LI BAI and his friend, the socially conscious Confucian poet DU FU.

The form of Chinese poetry as refined by the poets of the high Tang was fairly prescriptive. The language of these poems is spare and understated and often deliberately ambiguous. The form called “recent style” or “regulated verse” was regulated by length restrictions on both the entire poem (the poems were four or eight lines) and on the individual lines (which were to be of either five or seven syllables). The verses followed a pattern that rhymed every even line of the text, and a pattern of parallelism of word order in the middle couplets. In addition, there were untranslatable alternating patterns in the tones of the Chinese words. Toward the end of the Tang period another kind of poetry appeared, a kind of free verse set to music, perhaps influenced in part by foreign elements entering the capital. Some of these poems were sung to accompany dramatic productions (an early development on the road to the later creation of opera). The poems were also sung or read in the tea houses that began to appear in Tang China at the end of the eighth century.

By the mid-eighth century, military leaders guarding the frontiers of the empire began to grow in power and influence while the central government weakened. In 755 a general from the northeast named Al Lu-shan moved on the capital, capturing the city of Changan and forcing the emperor to flee. Although Al Lu-shan died two years later, the rebellion continued for some time. The rebellion is immortalized in some of the verses of Du Fu and Li Bai, as well as in the court poet BO JUYI’s “Song of Unending Sorrow,” a narrative poem telling the story of the emperor’s flight with his concubine. After the rebellion, the administrative structure of the empire began to crumble. There were internal power struggles, a falling off of tax revenues as provincial governors kept much of what was collected to finance their own armies, and foreign trade diminished. Ultimately a series of peasant revolts beginning in 860 brought about the collapse of the Tang dynasty. But the cultural and artistic legacy of the period remains, especially in the verse of its major poets, particularly Du Fu, Li Bai,Wang Wei, Li He, Bo Juyi, Yuan Zhen, HAN SHAN, DU MU, HAN YU, and LI SHANGYIN.

■ Idema,Wilt, and Lloyd Haft.A Guide to Chinese Literature. Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies, 74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985.

■ McMullen, David.State and Scholars in T’ang China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

■ Owen, Stephen, ed.Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York: Norton, 1996.

■ ———.The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High Tang. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980.