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FANG LA REBELLION

Death toll: 2 million¹

Rank: 37

Type: peasant revolt

Broad dividing line: Song dynasty vs. rebels

Time frame: 1120–22

Location: China

Who usually gets the most blame: Chu Mien

Another damn: Chinese peasant revolt

LIKE NERO AND HITLER, EMPEROR HUIZONG OF CHINA WAS AN ARTIST, except that Huizong was a rather good one. His art still hangs in museums around the world. He savored the finer things in life—poetry, birdsong, scented palaces with lacquered furniture, gardens of fine stones, rare flowers, and fountains. To please him, his ministers scoured the country seizing the most splendid objects for the emperor’s enjoyment. They plundered tombs and broke into wealthy villas to search for hidden treasure. One very greedy procurement officer, Chu Mien, was especially bad at squeezing the populace, and his agents seized a grove of lacquer trees that belonged to Fang La.

Fang La lived in the town of Muzhou in the coastal province of Zhejiang. Noted for his generosity, Fang La was the community leader of the local Vegetarian Demon Worshippers, which is what the Chinese called the Manichaeans.

Founded by the prophet Mani in Persia in the third century CE, Manichaeism is an extinct religion that believed in an eternal conflict between the forces of good and evil. Christianity probably lifted the whole notion of heaven and hell from them, this being neither Jewish nor Greco-Roman, but very Manichaean. Because Manichaeans believed that good and evil were equally strong and evenly balanced, their enemies accused them of playing both sides of the street and worshipping the devil. The Persian authorities threw Mani in jail for the rest of his life after he came up with this religion. Despite persecution, Mani’s teachings spread along the caravan routes throughout Asia and into China.

The indigenous religions of China tend to fall into two traditions. Confucianism (based on the teachings of Confucius) is a code of social behavior, while Taoism (based on the teachings of Lao-Tzu) is a mystical cosmology that tries to explain the universe. Both originated in China’s semi-mythical past of the fifth century BCE. Neither religion expects their followers to follow one faith to the exclusion of all others, and it has been said that traditional (pre-Communist) Chinese were Confucianist in public and Taoist in private.² Buddhism, the other common religion of China, originated in India (also in the fifth century BCE), but easily adapted and attached itself to the native Chinese culture without much fuss.

Emperor Huizong was not only a patron of the arts but also a devout Taoist and one of the few Chinese emperors to go out of his way to outlaw Buddhism, which he considered an unhealthy foreign influence. The emperor had also been trying to eradicate Manichaeism for the same reason. Chinese officials discouraged several practices associated with this Persian religion, such as vegetarianism and the wearing of white. When Fang La was shaken down by Chu Mien, he found a deep well of Manichaean resentment to tap and a religious network that could be used to organize and plan a revolt.

The rebels succeeded at first with hit-and-run tactics against the local militia, but then veteran troops from the frontier arrived under the eunuch general Tong Guan. These professional soldiers easily beat Fang La’s army in several open battles, so the rebels retreated to caves where they resisted all assaults. To deflate popular support for the rebels, Tong Guan renounced the government’s authority to seize property on a whim. Finally, in May 1121, a local woman led the imperial troops into the caves, and they captured Fang and his family. The rebellion continued for a couple of years after this, but the imperial forces eventually mopped up the remaining resistance.

Unfortunately, pulling troops off the frontier had fatally weakened the empire, and Jurchen barbarians from Manchuria broke through the Great Wall to overrun north China. The Song dynasty retreated and regrouped in the south, only half as big as it was when the dynasty began.³