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In 618, Li Yuan, later Gaozu – High Progenitor – of the Tang dynasty, made a deal with the khagan of the Gokturks (Celestial Turks) to give him the cover to seize China. After a decade of wars, he and Taizong had unified the empire. Yet quickly all of this was placed in peril by the fratricidal rivalry of the heir apparent and his brother – both of them opposed to the dynamic Taizong. When the brothers tried to poison him, Taizong accused them of having sex with the emperor’s concubines, knowing that they would be summoned to explain themselves. On their arrival, he shot one brother with his crossbow and beheaded the other. Gaozu, who was fishing, was shocked to be informed that he was now retired and Taizong in charge. China did not practise primogeniture: since emperors were meant to be sages, dynasty was balanced by the selection – by choice or force – of the ablest prince to succeed.

Taizong, aged twenty-six, was both killer and humanitarian, scholar and soldier, brusque, energetic and fiercely intelligent, ice-cold and yet emotional. He had not been raised as heir so he had seen the grit of ordinary life – ‘When I was eighteen,’ he later wrote to his son, ‘I was still living among the people and I knew everything true and false’ – but he was the son of a well-connected, part-Turkic general, educated in Confucian ideals and Taoist ritual, and trained in Turkic archery. He was one of those who defy pigeonholing – a poet and calligrapher who killed his own brother with his own bow. At fifteen he volunteered to fight against the Turks and at eighteen he helped Gaozu plan their coup. Taizong was a conqueror who ruled for twenty-three years, pushing Chinese power as far west as the Han. But it was also he who found the most extraordinary woman of Chinese history, Empress Wu. Between them they would dominate the century.

Taizong was immediately challenged by the Goturk khagan who had forced his father to make embarrassing concessions. Starting in 629, Taizong deployed generous diplomacy, such as exchanging bales of silk for myriads of horses, cunning manipulation, such as ‘using barbarians to control barbarians’, and savage violence. After the Goturk khagan tried to assassinate him, he fought the khaganates of the eastern and western Turks,^* forcing them to recognize him as Tengri Khagan, Heavenly Khan of the Turks, and propelling Tang power back into central Asia. Taizong personified his multi-ethnic ‘empire open to all’, in which Turkic fashions and dances were popular, where elites spoke Turkic as well as Chinese and embraced Turkic equestrian style, women riding horses and men playing polo, where caravans of Bactrian camels bearing Indian pepper, Malay patchouli, aromatic woods from Java and figs from Persia joined Uighurs, Persians and Indians in the markets of his million-strong capitals Chang’an and Luoyang.

Yet each move has its unpredictable consequence. In this case the breaking of the Goturks presented an opportunity for the Tibetans, under a young king called Songtsen Gampo, to extend their mountain kingdom southwards into northern India and eastwards into Szechuan province, an expansion that would one day cost the Tang dear. The son of a murdered chieftain, Songtsen united much of Tibet, sending his minister to India to learn about government, Buddhism and language, and devising a Tibetan script. He married Bhrikuti, believed to be an Indian princess, an incarnation of Tara, a Hindu and Buddhist goddess. When he campaigned against barbarian Tanguts on the Chinese border, he won the attention of the Chinese emperor.

Songtsen requested the greatest recognition an Asian king could receive: a Tang princess. Taizong grandly refused. The Tibetan raided Tang provinces in Szechuan and, once pushed back, Songtsen again sent an envoy. The emperor was not going to give a daughter to such a barbarian. Instead in 640 he found a cousin, created her Princess Wencheng and sent her to marry Songtsen. Later Taizong lent troops to back a Tibetan raid into India – the first Indo-Chinese clash.

Taizong now became fascinated by Buddhism and studied its spread in China. In his Emperor’s Preface to the Sacred Teachings, he tried to reconcile Indian Buddhism and Chinese Tao. When a Buddhist monk named Xuanzang asked permission to embark on a pilgrimage to India, Taizong refused, but in 629 Xuanzang ignored orders and set off on an astonishing journey, almost dying several times, to reach Samarkand and then Afghanistan, where at Bamiyan he admired the giant statues of Buddha before trekking through the Khyber Pass to make a pilgrimage to study and pray at Peshawar and Nalanda. Xuanzang was witnessing an extraordinary conquest of the east, not by armies but by a culture. ‘People of distant places with diverse customs,’ he noticed, ‘generally designate the land they admire as India.’

XUANZANG’S TRAVELS: THE OPENING OF THE INDOSPHERE