Tang Dynasty China: Xuanwu Gate, Empress Wu and the An Lushan Rebellion

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The House of Li rose from the wreck of the Sui dynasty when Li Yuan became Emperor Gaozu in 618. In 626 his son Li Shimin ambushed his brothers at the Xuanwu Gate, killing two of them, and forced his father to abdicate, becoming Emperor Taizong. He issued a legal code of more than 500 articles that became a model for Japan, Korea and Vietnam, though it punished crimes by social rank, and he expanded the civil service examinations. Wu Zetian, once a minor consort, ruled from behind a screen for the ailing Gaozong and in 690 proclaimed her own Zhou dynasty, the only woman to rule China as emperor.

Her grandson Xuanzong reigned for 44 years over a population of about 50 million, the age of the poets Li Bai and Du Fu, and abolished the death penalty in 747. His jiedushi frontier governors raised their own taxes and armies, and in 755 one of them, An Lushan, marched on Chang'an and drove the emperor from his capital. The weakened state shifted to cash and a salt monopoly as private trade and invention boomed. Huang Chao's rebellion from 874 massacred foreign merchants at Guangzhou, and in 907 the former salt smuggler Zhu Wen deposed and poisoned the last Tang emperor.

Wu Zetian circulated the Great Cloud Sutra, which prophesied a female monarch, and invented new written characters.
At the Battle of Talas in 751 captured Chinese artisans carried papermaking into the Islamic world.
The Tang called in Uyghur and Abbasid forces and paid them in silk to put down An Lushan.
The physician Zhen Quan identified diabetes, and doctors treated goiter with sheep and pig thyroid glands.
An Arab traveler in 851 recorded his shock at the Chinese using paper in the toilet.

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