You're Dead to Me - The Tang Dynasty (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Greg Jenner is joined by historian Prof Tineke D’Haeseleer and comedian Evelyn Mok in medieval China to explore the Tang Dynasty. Known as the Golden Age of China, it was the time of China’s Emperor Wu, the only woman to hold power in her own right, and Emperor Xuanzong who became so bored with austerity he came up with a unique way to have fun.For the full-length verion of this episode, please look further back in the feed.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. Hello, Greg here. Just popping in to say that this is a radio edit of the episode, which means it's a bit shorter and some of the naughty stuff has been removed, so it's a bit more appropriate for family listening. If you want to hear the full-length versions, scroll down to the original episode further back in our feed. Thanks very much. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I was the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And today we are sailing up the Yangtze River and along the Grand Canal, our ship laden with wares for the great markets of Tang Dynasty China. And to help me poke around the stalls, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, she's an assistant professor of history at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania in the USA and is an expert on foreign relations in pre-modern China.

She's one of the co-authors of A New Companion to the Global Early Middle Ages. It's Professor Tineka Daslier. Welcome, Tineka. Thanks for coming. I'm sorry about mangling your lovely name. Thanks for having me. And don't worry about the name. I'm quite used to the students doing the same. In Comedy Corner, she's a self-described comedian, writer and cake eater, aren't we all? You may have seen her hilarious stand-up or heard her comedy podcast, Rice to Meet You, about Asian culture.

Raised in Sweden, she's been dubbed the Swedish Amy Schumer and since moving to the UK has made it onto the BBC New Talent hotlist. It's Evelyn Mock. Hi, Evelyn, welcome. Hi, Greg. Evelyn, obviously you're here doing a podcast about Chinese history, but in terms of the Swedish education system, did you do lots of history at school? Did you enjoy it?

I mean, I think I did. I'm terrible at history. That's why I keep repeating all the mistakes I've ever made. So it just goes in circles and circles. I did not do well in school, Greg, is what I'm trying to say. So I'm very nervous. But I'm very excited to have Tineke fill my head with a bunch of history. Absolutely.

So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you might know about today's subject. And I think it's safe to say that for most British people, the word Tang is most anonymous with Tangfastics. I mean, we all love the Haribo, but Tang Dynasty China, maybe less so. But you might know more than you realise. You may have seen the historical blockbuster House of Flying Daggers. You may have heard of Emperor Wu, better known as Empress Wu.

She was the first and only woman to rule China in her own right. We should also talk about the fact that China in the Tang Dynasty was known as the Golden Age of China. So let's go mining for gold. as the Golden Age of China. So let's go mining for gold. Professor Tynneke, when we talk about the Tang Dynasty, where and when are we talking in Chinese history? The Tang is founded in 618 and it lasts until about 907. The territory that they control fluctuates throughout the history. Think about modern China and then chop off a few bits. The big thing I think that people need to bear in mind is that the capital was not in Beijing. That was in Xi'an, or as it was then known, Chang'an.

So how did the Tang come to power? Because you say they arrive in the early 600s, but presumably they've taken over from some other dynasty. Have they inherited a successful dynasty or have they arrived and everything's on fire and it's an absolute disaster? So they take over power from a previous dynasty, the Sui dynasty. The second Sui emperor really overstretches what he can do. He tries to do is conquer a kingdom in the northeast named Koguryo. He sent out probably about 300,000 troops. They failed.

And of course, if you send that many people out, it takes a bit of a hit on the treasury and people were rebelling against that. So the Tang was using the rebellions that were breaking out against the Sui rule to try and rise to power themselves. Will rise to power by getting the people angry, upset? That sounds familiar. Well, they were within their rights to do so, because as a Chinese subject, if your emperor was unable to keep the peace, there was actually a sense that they had squandered the mandate of heaven. That explains so much the harshness of Chinese culture and the harshness of my parents. If you can't do this thing, then you've lost your chance. Now go and be a doctor. If you can't do this thing, then you've lost your chance.

Now go and be a doctor. When the Tang then finally comes to power, they're only one of many contenders. They were kind of lucky, I guess, in a way that they had the backing of the Eastern Turks who were to the north of the country. The Tang also gave them the best deal, it seems. What was the deal? Money, grain, you know, the usual.

Money, it's a good deal. I mean, we will give you money. Interesting. So the Tang establish control and they solve a lot of the issues. They restore the civil service exams. They reinstate the militia system. They fortify the frontiers. They standardize the currency. They bring in the death penalty for forgery, which suggests that people were doing a lot of forgery. We're still carrying on that tradition, let's be honest. There are a lot of things you can get in Chinatown that aren't necessarily real, but very cheap and look very good. Almost like the real thing. The economy is in the red and they have to go and bring it back into black. And they

introduced the equal field system. Tineka, what's the equal field system? The equal field system means indeed that everyone gets a parcel of land that's the same, but it's graded according to your gender. So every man gets between the ages of 17 and 59, 13 and a third acres to cultivate. If you're a woman, you get a third. As a widow, the head of household, you get half. But there are also all kinds of tax breaks you can get. And so what is happening and what we know from documents, from tax registers, is that a lot of locations you'll see a high proportion of women registered as head of household because they get the lower amount of land, but it's going to be tax-free.

Or they don't have to pay as many taxes. So people will find their ways around the system. The problem is that not all areas have the good quality of land that you can use for cultivation. In a society where agriculture is everything, you like food, right? Yes. Professional cake eater, we've heard. Exactly. So you know how important grain is, right? Yes. It makes cake.

Yeah. Try and imagine if you have a society where your income is based on the production of grain, because that is your number one tax income. So that's why the equal field system is so important. We think that in the North, it's pretty established. The South is a different story. Why not the South? The North is flat, has alluvial plains of the Yellow River. The South has the Yangtze River and has a lot of hills. It's very hard to measure a surface on a hill. Yeah, farming up hills sounds hard. That's why they invented the rice paddy, right?

Yeah. Is that why we like rice so much? Yeah, and it's from this period that rice becomes the primary staple crop in China. Really? The big divide in terms of food between North and South has always been rice and grain. So rice in the South, South of the Huai River. The Tang is a period when, due to events, the population shifts to the south. And so with it, shifts the balance of the diet as well to the south. How come the population shifted? Well, there is a massive rebellion in 755. One of the generals on the frontier rises in rebellion. He marches on the capital,

claiming to act on the orders of the emperor to depose the then chief minister. Now, at that time, the defence system of the empire is pretty much like a doughnut. Very firm on the outside, but there's nothing on the inside to stop him. It's just jam. It's just jam. Loads of jam. Yeah, and it's very bloody as well. Resistance arises against him, but a lot of the elite move away from the area in the wake of a rebellion that lasts about eight years and the area where his rebellion started in much of the northeast is remains completely out of control of the emperors in the second half of the Tang dynasty this is basically the plot to every historical drama that I've seen from China or from Korea. It's always like an emperor, either a minister rises up or there's a secret rebellion.

That happens in the mid 700s. But before we get that, we do get a fascinating woman ruling China, the only woman ever to rule China. Emperor Wu. She wasn't an emperor. She was basically the king. Tineke, what are the headlines? She actually interrupts the nice sequence of Tang dynasty emperors in 690 by proclaiming her own dynasty. And she's like, okay, I'm done with the Tang. We just got to call this the Zhou. I'm going to be the emperor. So the way she takes power is, do you want the gossipy one or do you want the one we as historians think about? Gossipy one! Gossipy one! So she came into the palace as a concubine of the second emperor of the Tang dynasty.

Goes into the monastery like everyone else upon his death, gets fished out by the third emperor because he fell in love with her. And somehow, through a lot of scheming and manipulation, manages to elevate her to the level of empress. And then after he passed away, decided that she might as well rule through his sons. And then when they were not really amenable, would banish them, eventually she was like, I've had enough of this, I'll do this myself. Yeah, because men are dumb. this. I'll do this myself. Yeah, because men are dumb. And then in 705, by the time she got kind of old, eventually she got deposed in a palace coup.

And the story goes that she heard a lot of noise outside. It was the middle of the night. She got out wearing her nightie. And she was like, what's all this noise? And they were like, oh, you've been deposed. And she was like, okay, went back to bed to sleep. And she just passed away a few months later. Oh my gosh. So Emperor Wu was deposed. The Tang Dynasty came back in. And we do get the golden boy, Xuanzong. Is that right?

Xuanzong. He's this great man. He rules for 43 years. And ironically, for someone ruling the golden age, he's not very bling. He's kind of into austerity. Yes and no. I mean, it's all about PR in the end, right? Right.

He makes a big display of this, cutting down the amount of posts that have been given to people because the treasury is empty. So he can't really be into bling because there isn't any much to be had. So he's actually a very competent administrator initially, creates this big show of austerity by having this edict that people can't go showing off their brocade, which is a very complex weaving technique with silk. He also has a lot of these baubles and special things all put onto a big bonfire to make sure that everyone can see what he's doing. He does, however, by the middle of his reign, he becomes interested in the luxuries. You can imagine that at some point he gets a bit bored with being austere. And Evelyn, do you want to guess how he entertains

himself after being bored? He makes his women dance for him. Oh, dancing is right. But it wasn't the women. He had dancing elephants. Dancing elephants. Well, it's almost the same. Not to put too fine a point to it, but in the Tang period, women being a bit more rounded was a thing of beauty. I would have done so well then. Maybe I would have been in the palace. Oh, my God. And then I could have done an Empress Wu, maybe. Another thing that he did, he was an accomplished musician. He was a drummer and he even had his own band called the Pear Garden Troupe.

He just sounds like a middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis. Zhuanzhong was very chill when it came to the economy. He reduced taxes on the poor, but he was not chill when it came to Buddhism, Tineke. Well, he wasn't so much anti-Buddhism per se as he was pro-Taoism. The other thing was that Emperor Wu used Buddhism quite extensively to legitimize her own rules. So it was also a way for him to push back against her reign. And then a third reason was Buddhism was pretty much a way that a lot of people would try and get tax exemptions. You know, just like you don't tax the church, you didn't do that with Buddhism either

because it's bad karma. That's the first time I've heard Buddhism used in a selfish way. I'm assuming you've never defrauded a charity or a church in order to claim tax exemption. No comment. Tineke, am I right in thinking that he managed to defrock 30,000 fake Buddhist monks?

That's a lot of people going, I'm a monk? Yes. I mean, one of the ways that people became monks was that you would buy the certificate and that would bring money into the treasury. But it was like a false economy, right? Because they've got the money once, but then those people were tax exempt. Emperor Zhang Zhong has reigned for 43 years, but his golden boy status ends with a full-blown scandal. He gets it on with his daughter-in-law. No! It was indeed the wife of his son, but she asked for a divorce, which she got.

And then she became a Taoist priestess, was in the palace for about five years, and only then did she get it on with the emperor. And her ex was happily remarried. But imagine having your ex-wife as your mother-in-law. That would be so awkward. She was not the official empress. She was a concubine, right? And she's called Yang Guifei, is that right? Yeah. So the Chinese title, Guifei, precious consort, and then Yang is her surname. So Yang, the precious consort, or Yang Guifei. They have the most magic love affair. At that point, he just completely stops caring about being a good emperor.

He has this one minister, Lilian Fu, who just runs the show. And there is this general, An Lushan, who is of ethnic Han origin. He's Sogdian Turkish, who sits in the northeast with about 90,000 troops. And this may start to sound familiar because he's the one who will eventually march to the capital and almost bring down the dynasty. Yang Kuefei and Xuanzong, the emperor, they actually get on with this general really well, to the point that they adopt him as their son. Yang Guifei is in the good graces of the emperor. She manages to place a lot of her family members

in high positions. Her brother, Yang Guozhong, becomes the next chief minister. And the brother and An Lushan don't get along at all. And that is part of what triggers the rebellion. So An Lushan, suddenly suddenly he turns against his adopted parents. So An Lushan marches on the capital with, by that time, probably 100,000 plus troops. Everyone freaks out and the emperor is, okay, we have to flee. We have to get away. Of course, he takes his favorite consort with him and her brother. But the soldiers who accompany them are just going, wait a minute, An Lushan is marching against Yang Guozhong, against the chief minister, and he's with us. Can we just get rid of him? And while we're at it, he's only in power because of her.

So they put the emperor into the position where they want to kill Yang Guozhong, the then chief minister, and have Yang Guifei killed as well. And essentially, that is what the emperor says to do. So he is left in the histories as a totally broken man. It's all ended horribly. So that's Emperor Zhang Zong. And we then gradually move forward into the golden years of Tang Dynasty China. And let's talk about material goods, the amazing things coming into the country being manufactured. And let's talk about material goods, the amazing things coming into the country being manufactured. Tineke, what sort of luxurious, beautiful objects might be available for trade, for acquisition in the marketplaces?

So depending on how much money you had, you could get pretty much anything you wanted. Silk was an obvious one, of course, and it's not just a commodity. So the value of a horse or a donkey would be expressed in X number of bolts of silk. Alcohol, ceramics, we're not quite in the time period yet where you have porcelain, but they start to experiment with the sansai technique or the three glaze technique. There's also going to be a lot of food. Obviously, rice and grain are the big ones, but also nuts, honey, peaches, you know, all kinds of fruit, books. Printing is starting to appear very slowly. Then techniques of crafts and arts such as wood carving, fashion, verse, you know, poetry. And that's just inside the empire.

So we've talked about trade. Let's talk about eunuchs. Evelyn, have you ever heard of eunuchs in Chinese culture? I know that they exist, but I haven't heard of their purpose. But I guess they're there to sing beautifully, is it? Yeah, the castrato. Yeah, the idea of the high voice. Yeah, that's certainly how they, in 18th century Europe, they were superstar celebrities because they could sing incredibly beautifully. But in Tang China, they're more bureaucrats or palace servants. Yeah, I think it's best to see them as a palace service for the emperor. You needed to remove their manhood so that they wouldn't rise up to fight him. Is that

kind of the idea? Yes, exactly. I mean, think about it. You have an emperor who's got a beautiful harem full of women, and he wants them all to himself. Oh dear. Yeah. And yet he wants them to be safe and well cared for. And women cannot do all of those tasks, right? No, they can't. So you make sure that you have men to do that, but not too manly men.

So you make sure that they're not too manly. It's not done as a punishment. Most people who became eunuchs did so voluntarily, or at least their family volunteered them. No one's volunteering, surely. Yes, I'll have that, please. Thank you very much. Some people would do it because you had access to the emperor, and you had access to riches, and you had access to social status that you may otherwise not have had. Also, they could get married and they could adopt children. So they could continue a family line. A eunuch, they had quite a bad reputation, Tineke. They were believed to be venal and sneaky and self-serving. Is that fair?

Yeah. So the issue is that they suffer from whatever the eunuch equivalent would be of misogyny. The people writing the history are their rivals. And they go, well, here are our competitors for the attention of the emperor. That's number one. Number two is that they really do have that monopoly position of giving access to the emperor. So they determine what kind of information goes in and out to the emperor, and they can manipulate.

They determine what kind of information goes in and out to the emperor, and they can manipulate. And then the other thing is that because they provide the emperor's household with all the goods they need, they can really abuse that power. The eunuchs go to the markets, and they wave their credentials around. I work for the emperor. Give me this stuff. It looks nice. We'll pay you later. And then payment comes or doesn't come, or you're expected as a merchant to give them a really good cut. So they just create for themselves also that bad reputation. Some of them are really genuinely good administrators. Some of them are really good military commanders. It's a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the reputation is deserved. But they're not the only bad ones, because there's also a bureaucrat called Wang Ou.

He is a civil service functionary who has just basically hoovered up a huge amount of cash somehow. How has he done that? Yeah, so Wang Oh is the pronunciation. Yeah, Greg, it's Wang Oh. Sorry. Normally, as a civil official, you would be posted in a different location every three years or thereabouts to prevent you from growing too attached to the location, to build up a network that you could exploit for corruption. With the declining imperial power in the late 8th and then into the 9th century, which is when

Wang Ou lived, that is no longer happening as frequently. So he really becomes entrenched in the South and of all places, also in Canton, where all of the rich stuff is coming in. So he's just creaming it off and sending the profits to his family up north. He's actually richer than the public treasury at some point. Wow. Corruption in government. Who would have thought it? Tang China is trading and dealing with Japan, with Eastern Turkey, protectors of Annam, with Tibet. There's a back and forth, there's an exchange of ideas, but things could get a bit fraught as well. Everywhere you have these big cultural exchanges, you'll also find a backlash. There's a lot of

people who use racialized language and slurs against foreigners in the tongue, send all the foreigners home. They don't have any business here. They come and learn all our state secrets. Don't give them any of the books that we have. Just deal with them at the border. The other thing that also a lot of people are against is Buddhism as a foreign faith. For instance, shaving your head is something you didn't do as a proper Chinese person, but you have to as a Buddhist monk. You have to keep your body intact, which is why it's a problem to become a eunuch. I don't know quite how they solve that one. Let's talk very quickly about Tang poetry. Evelyn, have you ever read any medieval poetry from China? I've read Li Po. I did a poetry anthology about him in high school and very much enjoy him. Is he Tang? He is. He's the party animal. Yeah, he gets

drunk all the time. He just talks about how drunk he is. So I'm not very sure about his poetry. His poetry is definitely out there as one of the great ones. Yeah, it's really, really good. And then the other poet that's very well known is Dufu, who was a college dropout. He failed his civil service exams and, like Kanye, then became a great artist. He wrote some of his most famous poems from jail. And they're quite emotive and they're quite sad and melancholic about him getting old and his hair going grey and stuff. It's quite different to the party animal stuff. But this is an era of Chinese

history where in terms of literature, it's a real blossoming time, isn't it? I just wanted to ask also about the road network, because Yang Guifei, who we've mentioned already, she's really, really keen on the fruit like cheese. Her lover, the emperor, had them shipped in for her directly from 800 miles away. That's a real show of love, but also that's a real risk because they can turn up mouldy and horrible if they don't get there fast. So that is proof, therefore, that there's a really amazing transport system, a postal network that can deliver fresh fruit. You can get different speeds of delivery as well. So just like us with special delivery, first class and second class. Yes, essentially the postal network is amazing, always making sure that fresh horses are available

to communicate very quickly across the entire empire. Let's talk hygiene in the Tang Dynasty. So what do we know in terms of how most people clean themselves and also what they smelled of? Again, whatever money can buy, all sorts of aromatic. You can make little puri bags and put that in your clothes to make them smell nice. And you can carry that on your person, of course. And then in terms of bathing, as a Tang official, you'd get once every 10 days off to do the full bath and full hair and everything. But hands and face would be washed quite regularly. For the bathtub, you would have little soap beads or soap beans, actually.

Buddhists were actually pretty good about washing. They have descriptions in their monastic rules about washing and bathing. It seems that Taoists were a little bit less into bathing because they felt that it was something that might encourage disease by exposing your skin to potential pathogens, maybe. Evelyn, do you want to guess what one custom was for New Year's Day in terms of washing? Is it that we don't wash? No. Would it be maybe that everybody washes together? That's a nice guess.

As like a celebration. On New Year's Day, people would wash their armpits with their own urine. I think I prefer your one, to be honest. We could combine them, wash each other's armpits with each other's urine. That could be lovely. So, Tineke, we've heard about the Great Tang Dynasty, the Golden Period, and it ends in the 900s because presumably something's gone wrong. So what goes wrong? I would really put it at about 878 when there's a massive rebellion that started by someone named Huang Chao. And in contrast to the An Lushan Rebellion,

this one is much more deadly. So there's no one around to write lovely poetry and ballads about it. For another few decades until 907, the dynasty limps along, but really emperors are not capable of controlling the empire very much. You get contending military governors trying to fight over who gets to take over, and eventually one of them decides in 907, it's me, and that's the end of the Tang dynasty. Very inglorious end in many ways. The nuance window! very inglorious end in many ways. Time for our expert, Dr. Tineke, to give us the nuance window where Evelyn and I go quiet for a couple of minutes and we listen to what we need to hear about Tang Dynasty China. You're going to tell us, Tineke, about how we know these things.

I would like to take a moment and talk about the time capsule, which has given us important insights in daily life in the Tang dynasty. This one is located in Tunhuang in the northwest of the Tang Empire and present-day Xinjiang Autonomous Uyghur region. It was the place where the so-called Silk Road split into a northern and a southern route around the Tarim Basin. In the cliffside there was a Buddhist temple complex of some 500 caves that were man-made. Sometime shortly after the year 1000, a niche of the side of one of these caves was closed off for unknown reasons. But inside the niche were thousands upon thousands of texts, perfectly preserved thanks to the dry desert climate, and they were handwritten but also printed documents. They were not discovered until the year 1900. This was also the time when Western imperialist

powers were contending with the Qing Empire for power in Central Asia. And so Western explorers showed up, and when they learned about the texts in the cave, they began to buy them. For instance, one noteworthy figure is Paul Pelliot, a French philologist and sinologist. For instance, one noteworthy figure is Paul Pelliot, a French philologist and sinologist. Apparently, he worked at the rate of approximately one text per minute, quickly judging if they were material they already had in the collection, or if they were a new language or a new script unknown to him. Through these texts, we have access to a very different view of the Tang. Here we see the daily life, with contracts, receipts, phrasebooks for foreign languages, loads of material on Buddhism, and that also includes spells and medical cures. It gives us also a different view of literature, for instance, ballads and popular stories and little ditties that

you don't find anywhere else. The content of the library is so rich that you can dedicate an entire career to it. It actually is now a field of study in its own right, Tunhuang Studies. The contents of the library was distributed across the globe, with major deposits in London, career to it. It actually is now a field of study in its own right, Tunhuang studies. The contents of the library was distributed across the globe with major deposits in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo, for instance. But digitization is coming to the rescue with the International Tunhuang Project, allowing researchers access for free to the documents. And did you know that nowadays you can actually sponsor a document on the International Tungkhang Project website to bring more of these wonderful texts to the internet? And I think that really is a great way to go full circle from Tang Dynasty China to the present.

Excellent stuff. Well, thank you so much. I'm afraid that's all we have time for. Before we go, I'd like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner, the tremendous Professor Tineke Darselier from Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania, and in Comedy Corner, the effervescent Evelyn Mock. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we hitch a ride on the Imperial Postal System to find another fascinating era of history. But for now, I'm off to go and order some light cheese.

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