Historical Significance of the Relationship Concerning Emperor Xuanzong, a Lushan, and Yang Guifei - Essay Example

The historical and literary significance of the relationship concerning Emperor Xuanzong, A Lushan,and Yang Guifei The historical and literary significance of the relationship concerning Emperor Xuanzong An Lushan, and Yang Guifei. Wu lung-chi was the seventh emperor of tang dynasty in china reigning from (712-756).ruling for forty-three years, which was the longest during the Tang dynasty. In the early half of his reign he was industrious and intelligent leader, he was praised for bringing his emperor to a pinnacle of culture and power. Emperor Xuanzong, though, was held responsible for over-trusting An Lushan, Li Linfu andYang Guozhong during his late time in power, with Tang's golden era ending in the Anshi Rebellion. This was clear beginning of the Tang Dynasty's decline (Skaff 223). The An Shi Rebellion (755-763) was a whirling end in the Tang Dynasty’s recognition of foreigners. Subsequent to the Rebellion, it was narrow-minded that culture and rising persecution of foreign and religious communities. For this reason, cultural historians of the Tang allege that this attitudinal change was a reaction to the uprising. In current history, the Rebellion is at all times seen as a demonstration of the threat of the outsider (West 108). The attitudinal move of the Tang is thus seen, as a result, to this sudden manifested unfamiliar threat. This conventional explanation places the social and political as a reason, and assumes that the attitudinal shift was a natural outcome of the disastrous foreigner-led revolution. It has been found that the opposite is true. As is detailed above, the Rebellion was in no way strained along tribal lines, with both sides deeply associated with foreign control in China. The classification of the rebels as representative of the threat of the alien did not come up sensibly out of the actual situation. However, this clarity was produced by a cultural background that defined all the Tang Empire’s conflicts as a war stuck between the barbarians’ people and the Han. The attitudinal move away from cosmopolitanism and towards elimination of the foreigner pre-dated and defined the uprising (West 108). Through research, the development of this artistic shift in popular literature and politics was before the Rebellion. It is evident that the shift towards the elimination of the foreigner began at least three decades earlier to the Rebellion. In paragraph one sentence two the evidence of this shift, demonstrate how this cultural context affected the Tang elites’ perceptive of the Rebellion as it occurred. Both in paragraph one and two support the thesis that the identification of the Rebellion as a foreign incursion was primarily caused by pre-Rebellion cultural shifts relatively to the actual events of the Rebellion. The An Shi Rebellion is named after the two rebel leaders (703-757). Turco-Sogdian frontier general named An Lushan, who revoked Tang and established his own rule in the central and northeastern regions of China (Ye 71). Guifei was born in 719 during the Dynasty of Tang, early in the sovereignty of Emperor Xuanzong. Almost immediately into his reign as rebel emperor, An Lushan was assassinated by his officers and own staff (West 108). The throne was passed to his son whose ruling was marked by military struggles that lead to rescue of west-central china by Tang. One of the generals seized the rebel state until his assassination in 762, where his son could not lead and was defeated by Tang forces and committed suicide. This marked the end of the rebellion. Regardless of the overseas heritage of the two royal families of the radical state, the actual ethnic identity of equal sides was extremely complex. The rebel state had ties with Han Hebei separatists and engaged thousands of Han officials and generals, even as the Tang administration during the Rebellion functioned as a Uyghur vassal. The Tang surrender to foreigners would substantially outlive the Rebellion (Ye 323). The relationship of the three leader’s emperor Xuonzong, An Lushan, and Yang Guifei vied for power and grated power to the wrong individual spelling disaster (West 108). The traditional histories focus exclusively on the political situation, where powerful individuals vied for power, and the granting of power to the wrong individual spelled disaster. Coinciding with the Tang authority submission to foreigners was an increasing detested of the foreigner in China. The most conspicuous examples of this were two massacres perpetrated during the uprising that completely exterminated the foreign-born inhabitants of Fanyang. Following these outbursts of tribal violence, the foreign populations, in specifically the Sogdians, quickly assimilated into Chinese society. The first of these is the flawed assertion that the Tang, prior to the Rebellion, was peaceful and successful. This is a consequence of traditional histories that present dichotomies not only of praise and hold responsible, but also of war and peace. To meet this, traditional historians, dichotomy often presented the time before the uprising ever as a period of peace, stability, and even de-militarization (West 108). This seems to have even impacted the modern-day historical perceptive of the Rebellion, leading to descriptions of the Rebellion as a serious break with little pre-indication. However, the years before the An Shi Rebellion were filled with disastrous frontier wars and invariable threats of rebellion. The decade earlier to the Rebellion saw three ruinous defeats of Tang frontier armies, culminating in the conquer at the Battle of Talas in (751) that ended Chinese rule in Central Asia for a millennium (Aldosari, 134). The olden times of the eighth century show a regular struggle for power in an unstable system, in which the most threats to power were members of the Emperor’s family This suppression was part of a broad and expensive Tang policy to cover up the Li family’s Turkic heritage and policies following an image of Chineseness. The centerpiece was imaginary genealogy. Among the Li family’s claimed ancestors (d. 119 BCE), were Li Guang a Han Dynasty general well-known for his victories against barbarians, and Laozi, the mythical initiator of Daoism (Au 163). Their fictional association to Li Guang allowed the Li clan to place themselves as not just an old Chinese family, but also an old Chinese family with indigenous practices of preventing non-Chinese assault. Their claim of Laozi as an imperial predecessor and their subsequent rise of Daoism over the foreign religion of Buddhism equally allowed for the royal house to place themselves of champions of Chinese culture. The Tang rule clearly felt that they would never truly overcome the racism that existed earlier to their rule, and instead attempted to regard them in the Han self-identity (Kwa 223). These three leaders on the history of Tang china also contributed to emergence multiethnic mix of people among of the Tang frontier. The names of officers reveal to be extremely varied: Sogdian, Korean, Turkic, and even Han names appear among his top advisors of their ruling time. Through these struggles, there was the emergence of merchants in different corners of china, and there was a lot tension between the major leaders in china. The theoretical model was based on four main beliefs. That the Tang state and the Han nation were one and the same. Where Tang boundaries were also seen as of the Han people, despite where they happened to lie (Kwa 223). The second aspect was that these borders were not created by the state but rather were everlasting and natural. The third was the corollary: the simplification of a whole and entire barbarian other, denoted by the term hu. Just as in the Han Self was an identical entity, of a specific and definable geography, culture, and ideology, so the hu also became equal. Works Cited Aldosari, Ali. Middle East, Western Asia, and Northern Africa. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2007. Print. Au, Chung-to. Modernist Aesthetics in Taiwanese Poetry Since the 1950s. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Print. Kwa, Shiamin, and W L. Idema. Mulan: Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend with Related Texts. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co, 2010. Print. Skaff, Jonathan K. Sui-tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power and Connections, 580- 800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. West, Stephen H, and W L. Idema. Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals: Eleven Early Chinese Plays. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 2010. Print. Ye, Lang, Zhenggang Fei, and Tianyou Wang. China: Five Thousand Years of History and Civilization. Kowloon, Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2007. Print. Read More