Introduction of China’s Cosmopolitan Empire.doc

Introduction of China’s Cosmopolitan Empire Mark Edward Lewis 1The military conquests and brilliant poetry that Chinese have traditionally celebrated occurred in the first half of the Tang dynasty. The imperial court never recovered from a cataclysmic rebellion in the middle of the eighth century, and within a few decades Chinese statesmen and authors were already writing of a golden age in whose shadow they now dwelled. Glorification of the Tang’s early achievements in politics and art increased in later dynasties. With all of China or its northern half controlled by non-Chinese peoples for most of the empire’s subsequent history, the Tang became the last great “Chinese” dynasty. This idea (which dismissed the militarily weak Ming dynasty) ignores the fact that the Tang ruling house was—both genealogically and culturally—a product of the frontier “barbarian” culture that dominated northern China in the fifth and sixth centuries. 2 For historians, especially in the West, the second half of the Tang is in many ways more interesting than the first. The break marked by the An Lushan rebellion in 756 was a pivotal moment not only in the fortunes of the dynasty but in the entire trajectory of China’s development. The Japanese historian Naito Torajiro argued that the long transition from the Tang to the Song that began in the mid-eighth century marked the shift from “medieval” to “early modern” China. While it is dangerous to impose Western periodization on Chinese history, substantial scholarship since Naito has confirmed his essential hypothesis. The Tang dynasty’s abandonment of key economic, military, and social institutions after the An Lushan rebellion, its reconfiguration of the empire’s cultural geography, the expansion of trade relations with the outside world, and the invention of new artistic forms to deal with this changing world were the initial steps that began to distinguish later imperial China from what had come before. 3 The first element in the transit