Taizong

Chinese emperor (r. 627-649)

• Born: January 23, 0599
• Birthplace: Wohong County, Shaanxi Province, China
• Died: May 649
• Place of death: Changan, Shaanxi Province, China

The second ruler of the Tang Dynasty, Taizong consolidated his regime through administrative reorganization and centralization, codification of laws, extension of hegemony over domestic enemies and menacing foreign powers, stabilization of commerce, and cultivation of the arts. Throughout East Asia, his regime is regarded as the exemplar of civic order and military might.

Early Life

Taizong (ti-tsahng), born Li Shimin, was the second son of the first Tang emperor, Gaozu (Kao-tsu, r. 618-626). A member of the influential Dou clan, his mother was equally aristocratic, having been reared in the northern court of an imperial uncle.

Because his father’s reign did not begin until Li Shimin was seventeen, he was reared without special preparations. He received an upper-class Confucian education, exposing him to historical and classical learning. Buddhist beliefs, important to his family, were also passed on to him, and he persisted in observance of Buddhist rituals. His northern frontier upbringing centered on development of the martial arts pertinent training in view of the political rivalries, rebellions, and warfare that marked Chinese history after the imperial unity of the Han and the Jin Dynasties shattered.

Traditional accounts of Li Shimin stress his youthful military prowess. While an adolescent, he accompanied his father and brothers on campaigns against the Turks. Apparently, he was a superb presence: forceful, histrionic, imperious in bearing, and awesome in his rages qualities requisite for survival in a northern frontier family of landholding, fighting aristocrats.

Ruthless cunning characterized Li Shimin’s responses to the conniving of his eldest brother, Li Jiancheng (Li Chien-ch’eng), the heir apparent to the Tang throne, and his younger brother, Li Yuanji (Li Yüan-chi), who supported the crown prince. Reacting decisively to these fraternal plots, to which his father, in some measure, acquiesced, he ambushed and killed his brothers at the gate of the capital city, Chang’an. Li Shimin then humiliated his father, the emperor, constraining him to abdicate after designating him as heir to the Tang throne in January, 627. Taizong would reign for twenty-three years, a period that, at the outset, he named Zhengua, the reign of “true vision.”

Life’s Work

Taizong endeavored to mark his rule with an indelible personal style. Unlike most educated Chinese, he was preeminently a rationalist. The shaping of human destiny, in his view, was the consequence of human actions and not the uncertain result of magical rituals, superstitions, or intractable mandates of heaven. Unlike his predecessors, he developed his own role as a leader whose initiatives or failures would be evaluated by history rather than by spirits or gods. To this end, the advice he sought, his consultations with officials, and the manner in which he arrived at decisions were open and carefully recorded. Anxious to place his imprimatur on his times, he was capable of sublimating his convictions the better to ensure the approbation of those around him and to avoid the risk of historical rebuke or misjudgment. For much of his reign, he acted out a drama of which he perceived himself to be the principal author. If Taizong’s style deemphasized the accomplishments of previous reigns, while exaggerating claims for his own, his problems nevertheless were immense and his assaults on them were impressive, often unprecedented.

Once renowned for his military prowess, after assuming power he affected the role of the humble scholar, anxious to remedy his lack of administrative skills. By virtue of his high intelligence and inexhaustible energies, however, he swiftly reordered imperial administration and soon evidenced increasing confidence in his mastery of administrative affairs. Officials, like himself, were expected to be continuously accessible. He valued their frank criticisms and strove to convince them that they had a share in policymaking, thus in improving the lot of the people those to whom he and his officials were ultimately responsible.

Confucian frugality marked the early years of his reign. Public works were curtailed or abandoned in order to lessen the burdens of corvée labor and of taxation. Though he had been an ardent hunter, he forbade great formal hunts, principally because, like military maneuvers, they were expensive and destructive of property. Similarly, he at first restrained the elaborate construction of palaces. Such measures brought him wide popularity.

Selection of his chief ministers brought him great respect. He valued ability and dedication over personal compatibility. Wei Zheng (Wei Cheng) and Wang Gui (Wang Kuei), two of Taizong’s principal ministers, for example, had served against him with the slain crown prince. Generally, he sought to minimize nepotism and, despite exceptions, preferred his own appointments to the continuation of inherited ministers. A notable deviation from this preference was the installation of his brother-in-law, Zhangsun Wuji (Chang-sun Wu-chi), as vice president for the department of state affairs. Zhangsun Wuji remained the emperor’s confidant throughout his reign, despite allegations of excessive influence, and was entrusted with a codification of Tang laws and with settlement of the future question of succession to the throne.

The appointment of Fang Xuanling (Fang Hsuan-ling), who for thirteen years helped direct the department of state affairs, was another splendid ministerial choice. A practical man of affairs, though intellectually precocious, Fang, an easterner from Shandong, brought many of the emperor’s former enemies from the east into high office. In company with Du Ruhui (Tu Ju-hui), scion of a famed northwestern clan of officials, Fang developed a brilliantly balanced executive administration respected for its efficiency and fairness. Similarly, the humorless Confucian moralist Wei Zheng (Wei Cheng), a southerner and former enemy of the emperor, was chosen for his diplomatic skills and served superbly in negotiations with external opponents of the regime.

Appointments of this caliber not only brought singular talents into Taizong’s service but also lent geographical breadth and social cohesion to the government. Fearless critics were made integral parts of policymaking and administration. Aided by such experts, Taizong reordered and consolidated administrative changes begun by his father. Where Gaozu, however, had greatly increased the number of government positions to increase his patronage support, Taizong reduced them. China was divided into ten dao, or circuits, which were overseen by imperial commissioners. In tightening and centralizing authority, Taizong, through his ministerial galaxy, also attempted an upgrading of provincial bureaucracies by special education in law, calligraphy, and civil administration establishing the School of the Sons of State, the School of Calligraphy, and the Superior School and by means of rigorous examinations. Endemic under his father’s regime, bribery and corruption were substantially diminished or made disreputable.

Isolated on the north central Chinese frontier, Taizong, like his father, was ringed by real and potential enemies with their own bases of political and social power. Therefore, he gave priority to centralization of authority, through combinations of diplomatic and military action. The broad geographical representation of his officials, their obvious contributions to Tang policy, plus their cultivation by the emperor, drew many of his enemies’ followers under his rubric. Establishment of more than six hundred provincial militias led by loyal aristocrats or solid citizens contributed to this process of ensuring the ascendancy of Chang’an over neighboring regions, without necessity of quartering alien troops and without the imposition of financial burdens on local populations.

The reunification of China was Taizong’s most formidable objective. Not since the Han Dynasty had China been united, although the Sui and Qin rulers, and Taizong’s own father, had taken steps in that direction. While Taizong consolidated his own authority, he initially sought détentes with menacing neighbors, but direct military actions were unavoidable. In 630, when the collapse of the khanate of the Eastern Turks eliminated his most dangerous foreign rivals and opened a political vacuum along the northern frontier, he seized the chance for expansion. Whereas his father had been obliged to declare himself a vassal of the Eastern Turks, Taizong so effectively defeated them that the new khan acknowledged his vassalage to the Tang, dramatically altering the Asian power equilibrium for half a century.

The Western Turks, however, had grown stronger with the collapse of the Eastern Turks, dominating a vast stretch from the Great Wall to the western borders of Sāsānian Persia and from Kashmir in the south to the Altai Mountains in the north. Using “barbarians” to control “barbarians” and exploiting their internal dissensions, Taizong defeated them in the 640’, liberating the Silk Road from China to the Western world and extending his hegemony over most of Central Asia. Subsequently, he added the oasis states and eventually nearly all states in the Tarim basin, either through military occupation or by accepting their tribute.

Bitter opposition by his chief ministers worried about military expenditures as well as the employment of Chinese troops among foreigners did not alter Taizong’s imperial ambitions. The powerful and expansive Tibetan state, which eventually he defeated in battle, he allied to the Tang by marriage. By 646, he had also crushed and received the submission of the chief Turkish tribes in northern Sinkiang. Anxious to redeem his father’s failures, he found pretexts for the reconquest of Koguryŏ (now in Korea) in 644, although in this venture he succeeded no better than his predecessors.

Such attempts at grandeur curtailed prosperity at home. Commerce was made safe and flourished. Although Taizong was unable to solve some major agricultural problems, he sought to prevent the growth of large estates, partly to maintain revenues and partly to increase peasant proprietorships. Although an effervescence of fine arts and letters awaited Taizong’s successors, historical scholarship, long neglected, prospered under his aegis. Directed by Wei Zheng and Fang Xuanling, histories of the Liang, Chen (Ch’en), Qi (Ch’i), Zhou (Chou), and Sui Dynasties were begun in the 630’. Work on the Northern Wei recommenced after 636 and a fresh history of the Qin (Ch’in) was completed by 646. Although they promoted Taizong’s historical prejudices about his own regime, these works nevertheless proved invaluable to subsequent generations. In spite of neo-Confucian pressures on him to extirpate Buddhism, Taizong reformed aspects of the religion’s relationships to the state and, though publicly observing its rituals, tried to meliorate criticisms by bringing it under official control.

Undeniably the quality of Taizong’s regime degenerated in the latter years of his reign. He became arrogant, self-satisfied, and spendthrift. He relapsed into extravagant palace building, indulged in memorializing his horses and dogs, rediscovered the delights of expensive and destructive hunts, and shaped major policies contrary to ministerial advice. In addition, efforts to extend his fiscal system throughout his realms were aborted; despite numerous battles and lengthy sieges, Koguryŏ escaped incorporation; and his own succession was mismanaged. Debilitated by a disease incurred during his campaigns in Koguryŏ and thereafter dependent on the heir apparent, Taizong died in May, 649, in his capital, Chang’an.

Significance

The weaknesses of Taizong’s rule are easily listed because they were few and natural. Expansions of his fiscal system failed, and a larger proportion of the population than ever before eluded taxation; the growth of landed estates slowed but did not cease; codifications and revisions of the law remained incomplete; state-sponsored historical scholarship tended to exaggerate the emperor’s attainments; Confucians who wanted Buddhism eradicated saw it merely controlled; the emperor’s foreign policy burdened the nation’s manpower and resources and the Korean adventure failed; and finally, his personal virtues degenerated.

His weaknesses or failures, however, were but the obverse of Taizong’s great achievements in the face of immense difficulties. He consolidated a precarious Tang rule, carrying to fruition initiatives of his father. He brilliantly rationalized China’s administrative system both formally and stylistically. Ministerial selections based on talents and character brought the highest capacities to bear in governance, discouraging sycophancy and venality. Emphasis on the emperor as the people’s servant set a high tone for the times and for future generations. His ideal of service was enhanced by legal codifications, as was his restoration of China’s historical record. Subordination of Buddhist influences to those of the state, while keeping an open arena for other religions, was important for China’s spiritual and intellectual needs. Combinations of astute diplomacy and decisive military action against opponents brought the Chinese domestic tranquillity and prosperity. Finally, his virtual reunification of China restored an important part of China’s heritage.

Taizong’s regime represents an unprecedented high point in Chinese history. It approximated the Confucian ideal of wu and wen: a harmonious combination of civil order and military strength. It was a regime centered on securing the people’s welfare. For later generations, Wu Jing’s Zhenguan zhengyao (705; important principles of government from the Zhenguan period) embodied the wisdom accumulated by Taizong and his ministers, and Li Jing’s Li Weigong wendui, also compiled after his death, summarized the military strategies of the emperor and his principal general, Li Jing. Both works have continued to be reminders throughout Asia of the principles of wise and effective government.

Major Rulers of the Tang Dynasty, 618-907

Reign

• Ruler

618-626

• Gaozu (Li Yuan)

627-649

• Taizong

650-683

• Gaozong

684

• Zhonggong

684-690

• Ruizong

690-705

• Wu Hou

705-710

• Zhongzong

710-712

• Ruizong

712-756

• Xuanzong

756-762

• Suzong

762-779

• Daizong

779-805

• Dezong

805

• Shunzong

805-820

• Xianzong

820-824

• Muzong

824-827

• Jingzong

827-840

• Wenzong

840-846

• Wuzong

846-859

• Xuanzong

859-873

• Yizong

873-888

• Xizong

888-904

• Zhaozong

904-907

• Aizong

Bibliography

Benn, Charles D. Daily Life in Traditional China: The Tang Dynasty. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. An examination of the social life and customs of the Tang Dynasty in which Taizong lived. Bibliography and index.

Bingham, Woodbridge. The Founding of the T’ang Dynasty: The Fall of Sui and Rise of T’ang, a Preliminary Survey. 1941. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books, 1975. Concentration is on the fall of the Sui Dynasty; of Tang rulers, only Gaozu is examined. The study identifies the period’s important problems. Useful appendices.

Capon, Edmund. Tang China: Vision and Splendour of a Golden Age. London: Macdonald Orbis, 1989. A study of the civilization of China during the Tang Dynasty. Illustrations, bibliography, and index.

Fitzgerald, Charles P. Son of Heaven: A Biography of Li Shih-min, Founder of the T’ang Dynasty. 1933. Reprint. Taipei: Ch’eng Wen, 1970. A classic biography of Taizong.

McMullen, David. State and Scholars in T’ang China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. An examination of learning and scholarship during the Tang Dynasty. Bibliography and index.

Pulleyblank, Edwin G. Essays on Tang and Pre-Tang China. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001. These essays focus on the history of the Tang Dynasty and deal with the period just before it. Bibliography and index.

Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. An examination of the relations between China and India in the Tang and Song Dynasties. Bibliography and index.

Twitchett, Denis Crispin. The Writing of Official History Under the Tang. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. A look at the writing of official histories, which flourished under Taizong. Bibliography and index.

Wechsler, Howard J. Mirror to the Son of Heaven: Wei Cheng at the Court of T’ang T’ai-tsung. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974. Wechsler looks at the relationship between Taizong and Wei Zheng. Bibliography and index.