Chinese Empire

The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763)

The An Lushan Rebellion of 755 to 763 was the most devastating civil war in Chinese history before the nineteenth century, and one of the deadliest conflicts of the pre-modern world. It began as a mutiny by a single frontier general, An Lushan, who commanded an army of perhaps 150,000 men on the northeastern frontier, and ended eight years later with the Tang dynasty shattered, its capital sacked, its central government decapitated, and its fiscal and military systems in ruins. Estimates of the death toll range from 13 million to 36 million, with most modern historians settling on a figure in the range of 20 to 30 million, the great majority of them civilians killed by famine, disease, and the breakdown of order. The rebellion reshaped the Tang in particular and the trajectory of Chinese history in general: it inaugurated the era of the jiedushi (regional military commissioners), it shifted the demographic and economic centre of the empire from the north to the south, and it marked the beginning of the long decline of the Tang aristocracy. The rebellion is treated in the broader context of famous wars and conquests, the Chinese military section, and the history of imperial China.

The topic of the An Lushan Rebellion is also tied to the broader political history of the Tang, because the rebellion was both a military disaster and a political crisis. The Tang dynasty, founded in 618 and consolidated under the great emperor Taizong (r. 626–649), had by the mid-eighth century reached the apex of its power: the capital Chang’an was the largest city in the world, the empire stretched from Korea to the Tarim Basin, and Tang culture dominated East Asia. The reign of Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756) began with brilliance and ended in disaster. The story of the An Lushan Rebellion is in large part the story of how a great empire destroyed itself.

Causes of the Rebellion

The immediate cause of the An Lushan Rebellion was the personal ambition of An Lushan (703–757), a Sogdian-Turkic soldier of fortune who had risen through the Tang military system to command the largest standing army on the Tang frontier. An Lushan was a favourite of Emperor Xuanzong, who had lavished him with titles and gifts. Traditional sources also suggest an intimate — possibly adulterous — relationship between An Lushan and the emperor’s beloved consort Yang Guifei, the most beautiful woman in China, and this relationship was a long-running source of political tension at court. An Lushan was also a political schemer who used his access to the emperor to build up his personal following.

The deeper cause of the rebellion was the structural weakness of the Tang military system. The fubing (府兵) militia system, examined in our in-depth piece on army organisation, had been allowed to decay in the eighth century as the Tang relied more and more on a parallel structure of professional frontier armies. The professional armies were commanded by jiedushi, regional military commissioners who controlled the civil administration, the tax collection, and the military forces of their provinces. By the 740s the jiedushi had become a network of regional warlords, each with his own army, his own tax base, and his own political agenda.

The Course of the War

The rebellion began on 16 November 755, when An Lushan marched his army south from the Fanyang garrison (modern Beijing) toward the Tang capital. The Tang court, taken by surprise, was slow to respond. An Lushan’s army, perhaps 150,000 strong, swept across the Yellow River in early 756, defeated the Tang defenders, and marched on Luoyang, the eastern capital, which fell in the spring of 756. The Tang court in Chang’an panicked; Emperor Xuanzong fled to Sichuan with his court and his beloved Yang Guifei, only to be forced by his own soldiers to order the execution of Yang Guifei at the Mawei Slope — one of the most famous episodes in Chinese history, treated in poetry and painting for centuries afterward.

An Lushan occupied Luoyang and declared himself emperor of a new dynasty, the Yan (燕). In the summer of 756, An Lushan’s army took Chang’an, the western capital, and the Tang emperor fled further into Sichuan. An Lushan ruled from Chang’an for less than a year before being murdered by his son An Qingxu in January 757. An Qingxu ruled for a few months before being killed in turn by one of An Lushan’s generals, Shi Siming, who then handed power to his own son Shi Chaoyi. The Yan dynasty lasted, with rapidly diminishing authority, until 759, when Shi Chaoyi was murdered by his own soldiers and the rebellion collapsed.

The Tang court, having regrouped in the south, now began a long counter-offensive. The new emperor Suzong (r. 756–762) was forced to make concessions to the regional jiedushi and to call on the help of the Uyghur Turks, who sent cavalry to help retake Chang’an and Luoyang. The Uyghur help was decisive but expensive: the Tang court agreed to let the Uyghurs loot the recaptured cities. The war finally ended in 763, with the Tang having recaptured the two capitals but lost effective control of the frontier.

The Sacking of Luoyang and Chang’an

The sack of the two Tang capitals was the most spectacular episode of the rebellion. The first Tang capital to fall was Luoyang, in the spring of 756. Luoyang was a city of perhaps a million people, the eastern terminus of the Grand Canal, and a centre of Tang culture and commerce. An Lushan’s army occupied the city, looted the imperial palaces, and installed a Yan government. The greater shock came in the summer of 756, when An Lushan’s army took Chang’an itself. The Tang emperor had already fled, but the city was left in the hands of the rebels. An Lushan’s soldiers looted the imperial palaces, including the famous Daming Palace, and burned the libraries and the Buddhist monasteries.

The recapture of the two capitals, in 757 and 759, was equally destructive. The Tang court, in return for Uyghur military help, agreed to allow the Uyghur soldiers to loot the cities. The Uyghur sack of Luoyang in 759 lasted three days, during which thousands of residents were killed. The cities never fully recovered: Chang’an in particular never regained its position as the largest city in the world, and the Tang court eventually moved the effective capital eastward, to Luoyang in the late eighth century.

The Aftermath and the Decline of the Tang

The An Lushan Rebellion did not destroy the Tang dynasty, but it destroyed the Tang state. The central government never recovered the power it had exercised in the first half of the eighth century. The jiedushi, far from being abolished, were entrenched in their provinces, where they ruled as hereditary warlords for the next 150 years. The Tang court, dependent on the revenues of the south and the goodwill of the regional commanders, survived in a kind of suspended animation until 907, when it was finally replaced by the Later Liang, the first of the Five Dynasties of north China.

The rebellion also had long-term demographic consequences. The registered population of the Tang fell from 53 million in 754 to 17 million in 764, a decline of roughly 70 percent, almost all of it attributable to the rebellion. The centre of population and economic activity shifted decisively from the Yellow River valley to the Yangzi valley. The economic consequences of the rebellion are treated in the Chinese economy section.The An Lushan Rebellion has been read by Chinese historians as the central event of the Tang, the moment when a brilliant but ageing empire revealed its structural weaknesses. The pattern would be repeated in the late Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing. The longer story of dynastic collapse is told in the section on the fall of imperial China.