Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the twentieth century. China imported much from the rest of the out-
side world and gained its widespread taste for tea, an important
Southeast Asian crop, during this time. It also gained a taste for for-
eign wines.
For the Chinese, Tang domination of the Turks was evidence that
China and its emperors truly possessed the Mandate of Heaven; how
could they not, when all of China and the majority of its erstwhile ene-
mies recognized Tang leadership? From the Turks' point of view, how-
ever, this period of submission was an unfortunate step they had to
take to prevent their own dissolution. With Taizong's death in 649,
things began to change when the young Turks began to question their
fathers' loyalty to Tang China. By 680 the Turks had formally broken
away from Tang control and asserted their independence. Patriotic
Turk hotheads began to bemoan the fact that their people had ever
submitted to Chinese overlordship at all. The Turks pursued their
own national destiny until 744, when they were conquered not by the
Chinese but by the Uighurs, a related Turkic-speaking people. In 745
the Uighurs presented the Tang Chinese with the head of the last
Turkish khan to prove that they were now the masters of the steppe
lands on China's northern borders. The Uighurs never did accept an
inferior position vis-` -vis China. In fact, in many ways, the Uighurs
lorded it over China because the Tang had, in the 750s, asked for and
received their help in quelling the An Lushan rebellion. Tang China
after An Lushan owed its empire to the Uighurs and knew it, so Tang
authorities never dared cross the Uighurs. Uighur horsemen haughtily
pranced about the streets of Chang'an, seemingly aware of popular
Chinese resentment against them but caring little about it.
PARTIAL RECOVERY: SONG, 960-1279
The Tang dynasty came to an end in 907, when the last Tang
emperor gave up his throne. With this abdication, China entered a
brief period of disunity called the Five Dynasties period, which lasted
from 907 to 960. Each of the Five Dynasties lasted only a brief time
before being overthrown by another, and all of them ruled only in
northern China. (During this period, the south was ruled by a series
of motley regimes that were later called the Ten Kingdoms.) During
the Five Dynasties, a powerful barbarian people on China's north,
the Kitans, conquered a portion of northern China and proclaimed a
new dynasty of their own: the Liao (907-1125). The portion of northern
Chinese territory occupied by the Kitan Liao was not recovered by a
native Chinese dynasty until 1368.
