The Tang Dynasty: A Short Guide

When Was the Tang Dynasty?

The Tang dynasty ran from 618 to 907. Chinese sources give the span in exactly those terms — 唐代盛世, the Tang golden age, 618–907 — and both dates at either end are single events rather than slow transitions.

In 618, word reached Chang'an that Emperor Yang of the Sui had been killed at Jiangdu. Li Yuan took the throne, proclaimed the dynasty Tang, changed the era name to Wude, and made Chang'an his capital. The city, until then called Daxing, was renamed. A dynasty that would become the most cosmopolitan in Chinese history began as a succession crisis in a palace.

It ended the same way. In 907, Zhu Wen forced Emperor Ai, the last Tang ruler, to abdicate. The dynasty was abolished and the realm renamed Liang — the Later Liang, first of the Five Dynasties. Three centuries, closed by two acts of force.

The Golden Age

Chinese sources single out two reigns.

The first is Emperor Taizong's. He took the throne in 626 and changed the era name to Zhenguan the following year, and he ruled to 649. The period is remembered as the Governance of Zhenguan — the standard against which later Chinese rulers were measured.

The second is Emperor Xuanzong's, who reigned from 712 to 756. His era is the Flourishing Age of Kaiyuan. It is the Tang of the imagination: the court that patronised the great poets, the decades before the An Lushan rebellion broke the state open in 755.

How Far It Reached

The push west began under Taizong. In his reign the Tang established itself in the Western Regions — the Tarim basin, the Junggar basin and the Ili river valley among them — and Chinese accounts describe the result as authority reaching across the Tianshan over more than fifty city-states.

That is the formulation the sources use, and it is deliberately loose about extent. There is no official figure for the territory the Tang held, and this page gives none. What matters for a reader is the direction: Tang influence ran west, along the same routes the goods did — the roads followed in our article on the Silk Road and the Grand Canal, which meet at Luoyang.

Who Was in It

The Tang is famous for its examination system, and the reason is not that the system existed — earlier dynasties had one — but who it let in.

Its best-known subject was the jinshi. A military examination, the wuju, was added under Wu Zetian.

What made the system consequential was its door. Candidates were admitted without distinguishing gentry from commoner — 不辨士庶 — and were permitted to present their own credentials, 怀牒自进, meaning a man could enter the examinations on his own account, without a great family's recommendation. Over two centuries that broke the old aristocracy's grip on office. By Xuanzong's reign more than half his chancellors had come up through the examinations, and the hereditary clans never recovered their position.

The Tang was not a meritocracy in any modern sense. The dynasty's administrative statutes, the Tang liu dian, barred the sons of merchants and artisans from entering office at all — 皆不得入仕.

Women in the Tang

Women rode. This is not a decorative detail; Henan Museum states it plainly — in the Tang, riding was already very common among women, and women travelling often rode alone.

The museum holds a painted pottery figure of a woman riding in a weimao, the veiled hat that shielded a rider's face, standing 34.5 cm tall. Luoyang and Xizhou, near modern Turpan, each produced one. The two are a pair, facing each other across the length of the corridor between them.

Women of the period went out to see the spring, played polo, and in some cases ran businesses. In the high Tang they wore men's clothing — long robes, trousers, boots — to hunt and to ride.

What the Tang Invented

Woodblock printing was in use by the Tang at the latest. The earliest surviving printed document to carry a dated colophon is a copy of the Diamond Sutra printed in 868, the ninth year of the Xiantong era.

Gunpowder begins with the black powder of the Tang — an accidental product of alchemists' experiments that later became a weapon of war.

And the exports. Changsha ware, a kiln tradition that began in the early Tang and peaked in the middle and late dynasty, travelled by sea in quantity. In 1998 the Belitung wreck was salvaged off the Indonesian island of Belitung with more than 60,000 pieces of Tang ceramics aboard, of which more than 56,000 were Changsha ware. It is the clearest evidence there is that Tang ceramics were already an export trade in the ninth century.

Tang Art

Tang poetry is the golden age of Chinese poetry — the phrase is the standard one. The complete collection, the Quan Tang Shi, was compiled by imperial order under the Kangxi emperor of the Qing, in 900 juan. The counts attached to it differ by source: the Palace Museum gives about 2,300 poets and more than 48,000 poems; Xinhua gives 2,873 poets, 49,403 poems and 1,555 surviving fragments. Whichever figure is used, no other dynasty in China left behind as much.

Painting survives from the Tang in small quantities. The one to know is Yan Liben's handscroll Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy — ink and colour on silk, 38.5 cm high and 129 cm long, painted in 641, showing the emperor receiving the Tibetan minister Gar Tongtsen.

The objects are richer. The Hejiacun hoard, unearthed in Xi'an in October 1970, is described by Shaanxi History Museum as one of the most important archaeological discoveries of Sui–Tang archaeology in the twentieth century. The crypt of Famen Temple, opened in 1987, yielded a gilded silver censer with a gimbal mechanism inside it: however the censer is turned, the incense bowl stays level.

Luoyang, the Eastern Capital

Luoyang is where the objects on this site come from, and for a stretch of the Tang it was where the empire was governed.

In 605, Emperor Yang of the Sui built an eastern capital at Luoyang. In 657, Emperor Gaozong issued the Decree on Establishing the Eastern Capital, making Luoyang a capital alongside Chang'an. In 684 it was renamed Shendu, the Divine Capital. And on the ninth day of the ninth month of 690, Wu Zetian ascended the tower of the Zetian Gate, took the throne in her own name, and changed the dynasty's name from Tang to Zhou.

From 684 to 705 Luoyang was the empire's capital, with Chang'an reduced to a secondary role — and from 690, when Wu Zetian changed the dynasty's name, that court ruled as Zhou rather than Tang. It was the capital again from 904 to 907, when the last Tang emperor was brought here — the city that had watched the dynasty founded in the west now closed its story in the east.

The gate is the one to remember. The Zetian Gate, later renamed the Yingtian Gate, was first built in 605 and had three passages. Wu Zetian's accession and the receptions of foreign envoys were held there.

For the longer history of the city — why it held a capital five times over, and what is left of each — see Luoyang: Capital to Thirteen Dynasties.

See the Tang in Person

Almost everything described on this page is in a museum, and much of it is in Henan. The ceramics are the part that can also be owned: the Tang sancai tradition continues in Luoyang today, and the horses and camels that filled Tang tombs are still made here in the same three-colour glazes. The animal that filled those tombs is a subject of its own — see The Tang Horse.

The pieces are listed on the main site: Tang sancai and the Tang dynasty horse.