Tang Dynasty

The Tang Dynasty is widely regarded as a high point of Chinese civilisation and a golden age of cosmopolitan culture, prosperity, and imperial power.

It was founded in 618 CE by Li Yuan (Emperor Gaozu), a Sui official and aristocrat who seized control amid the collapse of the Sui dynasty, but the empire was truly consolidated and elevated by his son, Emperor Taizong, one of the most admired rulers in Chinese history, whose reign became a model of effective and benevolent government. Inheriting and refining the centralising institutions of the Sui, the Tang built a sophisticated and powerful state administered by a professional bureaucracy increasingly recruited through the imperial civil service examinations, which tested mastery of the Confucian classics and opened government service, in principle, to talent. Under early and middle Tang rulers the empire expanded dramatically, projecting power deep into Central Asia, dominating the Silk Road trade routes, and exerting cultural and political influence over Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. The capital, Chang'an, grew into the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the world, home to a million or more people and to merchants, pilgrims, and envoys of many faiths and nations, including Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims. This period saw an extraordinary flourishing of culture, especially poetry, which reached its zenith in the works of masters such as Li Bai and Du Fu, alongside advances in painting, ceramics, printing, and technology, while Buddhism attained great influence before later facing official suppression. The dynasty also produced the only woman to rule China in her own right as emperor, Wu Zetian. The Tang reached its cultural peak under Emperor Xuanzong in the early eighth century, but his reign ended in catastrophe with the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), a devastating civil war that killed millions and permanently weakened central authority. In its long aftermath the dynasty struggled against powerful regional military governors, court intrigues, eunuch domination, and fiscal decline. A series of major rebellions, especially the Huang Chao uprising, shattered the enfeebled state in the late ninth century, and in 907 the last Tang emperor was deposed, ushering in the fragmented era of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.

Key figures