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AN LUSHAN REBELLION

Death toll: 36 million missing

Rank: 13

Type: military uprising

Broad dividing line: the frontier military vs. the central government

Time frame: 755–63

Location: China

Who usually gets the most blame: An Lushan mostly, but also the dotty and infatuated Emperor Xuanzong

CHINA UNDER THE TANG DYNASTY REACHED FARTHER WEST THAN AT ANYTIME before or since. This Chinese expansion coincided with the eruption of Arab empire builders all across the Middle East, leading to history’s only battle between Chinese and Arab armies, at the Talas River in central Asia in 751.

Somewhere in the rugged borderland between these expanding cultures, probably near Bukhara in Turkistan, An Lushan was born around 703. His mother was descended from an important Turkic clan. His father, probably a soldier of Sogdian descent (medieval kin to the Pashtuns who dominate Afghanistan today), died when Lushan was young. His mother remarried into the family of a prominent nomadic warlord.

When rival tribesmen assassinated the khan of that particular batch of Turks in 716, the An clan found itself on the wrong side of tribal intrigues and fled eastward, into the outlying provinces of the Chinese Empire, where it came under the protection of a friendly Turkish warlord. For a while, young Lushan lived at the edge of the law, until he was caught stealing sheep. Sentenced to death, the twenty-year-old thief tried to bargain with Governor Zhang Shougui even as the executioner raised the club to bash his skull in. “Does the great lord wish to destroy the barbarians?” he asked. “Why kill a brave warrior?” Seeing his point, the governor put An to use as a scout.

On the Way Up

In 733, when the Tang emperor transferred Governor Zhang to the northeast to replace a commander who had been defeated and killed by the Khitan (the local barbarians),^a An Lushan followed. He proved adept at the fast cavalry raids that characterized frontier warfare. Although short-tempered and impetuous when dealing with subordinates, An was always good-natured and quite likeable when dealing with superiors. He rose through the ranks, becoming Zhang’s lieutenant and eventually his adopted son. Even so, An was going from stout, to stocky, to morbidly obese, and Zhang frequently chewed him out in public over it. Then, in 736, while Zhang was visiting the capital, An had to deal with an attack by the Khitan and Hsi (the other local barbarians) on his own and was badly defeated. When Zhang returned from the capital fuming, he sentenced An to death, but realizing this might not go over well, he expelled An from the army instead. Within a year, however, An was reinstated.¹

In 742, the emperor gave An his own frontier province to defend. He kept a steady stream of tribute flowing from his frontier command back to the capital—camels, dogs, falcons, horses, and, best of all, bags of heads taken from Khitan chieftains. Some accused him of collecting these heads from enemy leaders he had lured into negotiations under a truce before springing a trap on them. But results mattered, and the emperor gave him two additional provinces to protect, making a solid fiefdom of three territories in the northeast, near the Great Wall. More would be added later.²

An Lushan became a frequent and welcome visitor at the palace in Chang’an, where he played the fat buffoon for the amusement of the courtiers. He became a special favorite of the emperor’s favorite young concubine, Yang Guifei. She even pretended to adopt him as a son in a mock ceremony where the monstrously obese An was presented to his new mom in a diaper. Rumors swirled that Lushan and Guifei were lovers, but she has been remembered across time as one of the four great beauties of Chinese history, while he couldn’t even walk without draping his arms over servants who held up his enormous bulk, so . . . ick.³

Based on the fabled love between the emperor and his lady, and the continued high regard the emperor felt for An, historians consider an affair unlikely. Yang Guifei had originally been married to one of the emperor’s sons (but not one of the sons who shows up later in this story), until the infatuated seventy-year-old emperor dissolved the marriage and stashed Yang in a nunnery for a couple of years to restore her lost virginity. The romance of Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei became the stuff of legends.

Things Go Wrong

In 751, An Lushan led his army and Hsi allies against the Khitan, but after a long, dusty journey, the Hsi chieftain demanded a rest, so An had him killed. The Hsi contingent deserted, and on the way out, they warned the Khitan that the Chinese were coming. When the exhausted Chinese pressed on, they stumbled into a Khitan ambush and were slaughtered. An Lushan barely escaped with his battered army. Upon returning to camp, he executed several surviving officers, while others fled to the hills to wait for his anger to cool.⁴

When the emperor’s chief minister died in 752, he was succeeded by a cousin of Yang Guifei, Yang Guozhong, who immediately began to blame all of the problems of the empire on his predecessor. An Lushan, tarnished by his friendship with the previous minister, quickly got on the bad side of Minister Yang, who whispered rumors into the emperor’s ear. Emperor Xuanzong sent a trusted eunuch out to spy on An, but a healthy bribe made sure the emperor got a glowing report on the loyalty of his general. Even so, the emperor felt that An’s loyalty should be examined at close hand, and he summoned him back to court. An Lushan suspected that if he left his army and returned to the capital, he would be stripped of his authority at the very least, and possibly imprisoned, exiled, or killed. An thanked the emperor for the invitation, but said he wasn’t felling well. Then the emperor gave a bride to An’s son, along with an order for An Lushan to return and attend the wedding. An refused and, realizing that he was running out of excuses, rebelled. He issued a flimsy cover story that the emperor had secretly begged him to get rid of the prime minister, and in December 755 he set out for the capital with an army of 100,000, traveling by night, eating at daybreak.⁵

Suffering an irritating skin disease and nearly blind, An Lushan had lost whatever good humor he may have once had. He was prone to unreasonable rages during which he would have subordinates dismembered.⁶ After he pulled his army away from the border, his old territories rose in counter-revolt behind him, but that didn’t matter. All he cared about was reaching the capital. To keep his soldiers loyal, he allowed a quick rape, looting, and slaughter in each captured city, but always pressed on. In January, An’s army crossed the icy Yellow River and captured the secondary capital at Luoyang, where he proclaimed himself emperor.⁷

The main imperial army of 80,000 was gathering at Tongguan Pass, but An’s arrival drove its forward units back in disorder. Then the rebel advance stalled before the pass. The armies waited, but this delay gave palace eunuchs in Chang’an enough time to plot against the imperial generals. Maybe they had a good reason to plot, maybe they didn’t. Who knows? I mean, they’re palace eunuchs; plotting is what they do best. Regardless of the reason, they convinced Emperor Xuanzong to have his generals executed.

Finally, in July, after a huge battle of horsemen and archers, the imperial army was defeated and the pass lay open. Emperor Xuanzong fled the capital on a highway choked by desperate and demoralized imperial soldiers who were looking for a scapegoat. The prime minister, Yang Guozhong, was dragged from his wagon and stomped to death. Then the soldiers stopped the emperor’s caravan and demanded the death of the concubine, Yang Guifei, whom they suspected of being An Lushan’s accomplice and lover. Xuanzong reluctantly allowed it, and imperial soldiers hauled her away. She was strangled and dumped in a ditch, while the emperor continued on his way.⁸

The Next Generation

The flight of the emperor was as good as an abdication in the eyes of his ambitious third son, Suzong, who then declared himself emperor. Ex-emperor Xuanzong spent the rest of his life in closely guarded retirement.

After the rebels took the capital of Chang’an, An Lushan began to consolidate his power, but he had made far too many enemies within his own entourage to survive much longer. One of his advisers, having been flogged in punishment for some offense, conspired with An Lushan’s son, An Qingxu. They approached An Lushan’s favorite eunuch, whom Lushan had personally castrated many years earlier in a fit of anger. This eunuch stabbed An Lushan in his sleep with his own sword, but it took a lot of messy effort to cut through all of the layers of fat. An Lushan screamed and struggled, but eventually succumbed. He was buried under his tent, and the army was told he died of illness.⁹

Within a few months, an imperial counterattack recaptured the capital on behalf of the new emperor, Suzong.¹⁰ As the rebels fell back, An Qingxu was deposed by his lieutenant Shi Siming. An Qingxu was quickly put on trial for the murder of his father and strangled. Shi continued the rebellion for several years, followed by his son, and so on, until the last of his family was caught and killed.

In the end, the Tang dynasty survived only by bringing in outsiders like the Tibetans and Uighurs to fight their battles for them, for a price. China had to cede its western territories—the desert colonies in the Tarim Basin—to its new allies. The days when Chinese garrisons maintained direct control over the road to the west would not return for hundreds of years.

Poets’ War

The An Lushan Rebellion stands high in the cultural history of China because two of their greatest poets lived and wrote during this time. This gives us an interesting glimpse into the Chinese attitude toward war. It is much more pacifistic than, for example, Beowulf, which was written about the same time in England.

Li Po was an enthusiastic drinker and drifter, an alchemist and Taoist mystic, who lived a lucky life full of ups and downs. In his mid-fifties when the war began, he was considered the greatest poet of his era. He attached himself to Prince Lin, sixteenth son of the emperor, but in 756, the prince was accused of plotting to establish an independent kingdom and was executed. Li Po was tossed into prison, but an old soldier he had helped thirty years before had now risen to high command in the loyalist army. This commander released Li and employed him as his secretary. Soon, however, the charges were restored, and Li Po was exiled to the southern barbarian province of Yelang. He dawdled and visited with friends along the way, so even after three years, he had still not arrived at his destination. Then a general amnesty arrived, so Li turned around and went back home to east China. While staying at a relative’s house, he died. Legend has it that while drinking wine in a boat on the river, he tried to grab the moon’s reflection on the surface and tumbled in, which is probably the poet’s equivalent of dying bravely in battle.¹¹

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;

The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,

While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,

Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.

So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,

And the generals have accomplished nothing.

Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms

Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.

—Li Po, “Nefarious War” ¹²

Younger than Li Po by eleven years, Tu Fu had a cloud of bad luck following him around. After failing the exams necessary for a career in the civil service, he wandered and eventually befriended Li, acquiring a reputation as a promising poet. Returning to the court, he married and tried for five years to get a job with the government. Just as he landed a minor position, An Lushan attacked, and Tu Fu fled the capital only to be captured by bandits. After escaping them, he wandered ragged and hungry, eventually connecting again with the exiled court. He secured a minor job as a censor, but his hardships caused the deaths of some of his children by hunger and illness. After losing this job, he resumed wandering aimlessly. He too is said to have died drinking on a boat, by overindulgence after a ten-day fast.¹³

The war-chariots rattle,

The war-horses whinny;

To each man a bow and a quiver at his belt.

Father, mother, son, wife, stare at them going,

Till dust shall have buried the bridge at Hsien-yang.

We trot with them and cry and catch at their long sleeves,

But the sound of our crying goes up to the clouds;

For every time a bystander asks the men a question,

The men can only answer us that they have to go.

—Tu Fu, “A Song of War-Chariots” ¹⁴

Bai Juyi belonged to the next generation of poets, born a few years after the war had ended, but his epic Song of Everlasting Sorrow told of the tragic love between Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei. After her death, the emperor is said to have moped around, and then hired a medium to summon her spirit. They reminisce over old times, and Xuanzong is really, really sorry about tossing her to angry soldiers. Finally they agree that they are destined to reunite on the other side.

Bai Juyi says it better than I do, however. He did not consider this his best work, but it became very popular among romantic young girls.¹⁵

The king has sought the darkness of his hands,

Veiling the eyes that looked for help in vain,

And as he turns to gaze upon the slain,

His tears, her blood, are mingled on the sands

—Bai Juyi, “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” ¹⁶

Numbers

The census taken in China in the year 754 recorded a population of 52,880,488. After ten years of civil war, the census of 764 found only 16,900,000 people in China.

What happened to 36 million people? Is a loss of two-thirds in one decade even possible? Perhaps. Peasants often lived at the very edge of starvation, so the slightest disruption could cause a massive die-off, particularly if they depended on large irrigation systems. As we saw with the Xin dynasty and the Three Kingdoms, this was not the only population collapse in Chinese history, and many authorities quote these numbers with a minimum of doubt. On the other hand, these numbers could also represent a decline in the central government’s ability to find every taxpayer rather than an actual population collapse.¹⁷

More convincing, though less dramatically precise, is the count of households. In the seven counts before An Lushan’s Rebellion, the census repeatedly found between 8 and 9 million households, and then, in the seven counts following the rebellion, the census consistently found no more than 4 million. Even a century after the revolt, in 845, the Chinese civil service could find only 4,955,151 taxpaying households, a long drop from the 9,069,154 households recorded in 755.¹⁸ This indicates that the actual population collapse may have been closer to one-half, or 26 million. For the sake of ranking, however, I’m being conservative and cutting this in half, counting only 13 million dead in the An Lushan Rebellion. Even so, it still ranks among the twenty deadliest multicides in human history.