Yang was also irrepressible, quick to joy, fast to fury. The rows she and Xuanzong had were tumultuous. Finally the offended emperor sent her away. ‘My offence deserves death, and it is fortunate that His Imperial Majesty did not kill me,’ she wrote to him. ‘I will forever leave the palace. My gold, jade and treasures were all given me by His Imperial Majesty, and it would be inappropriate for me to offer them back to him. Only what my parents gave me I would dare give.’ Typically she was keeping the jewels.
When she cut off some tresses and sent them to the emperor, he could not resist her scent and ordered his eunuch Gao Lishi to summon her back. Of course she returned. Wherever she was, Xuanzong ensured that her beloved lychees were delivered by relays of horses and that Gao served her every wish. He also promoted her cousin to chief minister. This paladin, An Lushan, was so sycophantic that she proposed to adopt him as her son, leading to a comical scene in which Consort Yang dressed the gargantuan, bewhiskered old ruffian in baby clothes and bathed him as he gurgled, a favour which he repaid by always bowing first to her: ‘Barbarians bow to mothers first before fathers.’ Xuanzong found all this charming, and raised An to prince.
Yet as the empire was rocked by floods and rebellions, the emperor failed to control a feud between the chief minister and General An Lushan. In December 755, mustering his army, he rebelled and quickly defeated the Tang armies. The brittle regime collapsed at once. An Lushan took Luoyang, where he declared himself emperor. Emperor Xuanzong, Consort Yang, her cousin the minister and eunuch Gao, guarded by cavalry, fled Chang’an towards Sichuan. The soldiers killed the minister, then seized the emperor, demanding the end of the Yangs and the execution of his mistress. The emperor could not bear the thought, but Gao persuaded him to go ahead. Yang asked to die by silk rather than beheading, so that her looks would remain perfect for the afterlife. Eunuch Gao strangled her and buried her with a sachet of perfumes.
An Lushan occupied the other capital, Chang’an, amid apocalyptic scenes. ‘I remember when we first fled the rebels, / Hurrying north over dangerous roads,’ wrote an eyewitness, Du Fu, a government official and China’s greatest poet, who witnessed and experienced the suffering of millions of refugees:
Night deepened on Pengya Road,
The moon shone over Whitewater Hills.
A whole family endlessly trudging,
Begging without shame from the people we met.
Just months after capturing the two biggest cities on earth, An Lushan, holding court in Luoyang, was going blind, probably from diabetes, and was now so obese that he supposedly crushed a horse to death and it took a team of eunuchs to pull him out of bed. His sons plotted. He executed one of them.
In December 757, another son murdered An and seized the throne. But the Tang generals, now under the former crown prince, Emperor Suzong,* moved against the An family. Unable to muster large armies to retake Chang’an, Suzong turned to the khagan of the Uighurs, Bayanchur Khan, who had hacked a new empire out of the ruins of the Goturk confederacy, based in his Mongolian capital, Ordu-Baliq, and was ruling eastern Siberia, Mongolia and most of central Asia. Bayanchur’s Uighur troops joined the Tang armies and took Chang’an and Luoyang, which they were allowed to loot for three days. Suzong gave them 20,000 bales of silk and married his own daughter, Princess Xiaoguo, to Bayanchur, the only emperor’s daughter ever married to a barbarian. But Suzong and his son Daizong still struggled to control the empire as the Tibetans, who had already conquered Nepal and Assam as far the Bay of Bengal, seized most of central Asia.
In 763, the Tibetan emperor Trisong Detsen dispatched 200,000 troops into China, storming Chang’an. The Tang soon pushed the Tibetans back with Uighur help. Tang gratitude was short-lived: the Uighurs were massacred and driven out, though their khagans ruled their vast empire into the ninth century.* The Tang had been fatally damaged: the rebellion and its sequels were among the most catastrophic wars in human history, with thirty-six million killed or displaced. ‘Weeping in the wilderness, how many families know of war and loss,’ wrote Du Fu. ‘All word of events in the human world lost in those vast silent spaces.’*
At the height of his crisis, Emperor Suzong, bearing no grudge after the modest Arab victory at Talas, asked al-Mansur for help, and the caliph may have sent a small Arab contingent to China. It is said that enslaved Chinese prisoners brought the Chinese invention of paper to the Arab world, whence it ultimately reached Europe.
