Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
highly organized system of ranks and salaries for its officials, who
were not allowed to remain in any one locality for very long. The
government feared, probably with justification, that an official who
remained in an area too long might become too comfortable there,
put down roots, and eventually become corrupt. Every three years or
so, the Tang government rotated its officials throughout the Chinese
population of the Tang empire.
The “equal fields system” was the Tang's way of dealing with the
age-old landlord problem. In this system, most large private land
holdings were simply confiscated and remanded to government
ownership. (This idea was not the Tang's but came from previous
dynasties during the Period of Division; however, the Tang was the
first dynasty to give it widespread implementation.) The government
then distributed plots of its land to peasants to farm, but not to own.
That is, although the peasants were given sole right to farm land for
their own living, nobody could buy it from them and they could not
sell it to anyone. This was land, not real estate. Able-bodied males
from age 16 to 60 were given exclusive rights to plots of land approxi-
mately 14 acres in size, and in exchange for these rights, the peasants
were required to pay three types of taxes to the government: grain, cor-
v´e (a fixed number of days of laboring on government-sponsored
construction projects), and cloth. In essence, peasants rented the land
long term, with tax payments as rent. Of course, the Tang government
instituted the equal fields system so that it would not have to compete
with landlords and mortgage sharks for revenue from the land. Exten-
sive government surveys underpinned this system, and with a power-
ful and highly organized government it all worked for a while. When
the government weakened after the An Lushan rebellion in 755, the
landlord problem gradually began emerging once again, and eventu-
ally the system fell apart.
Many Chinese view the Tang as China's single greatest age for
poetry. During China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), a compila-
tion of Tang poetry called ThreeHundredTangPoemsbecame very
popular, and even today some cultured Chinese families still encour-
age their children to memorize large parts of it. Famous Tang poets
include Li Bo, Du Fu, Bo Juyi, and Li Shangyin.
EMPEROR AND KHAN: TANG RELATIONS
WITH THE TURKS
Li Yuan's son, the second Tang emperor, is known to Chinese history
as Tang Taizong. An energetic and assertive personality, Taizong was
