Elite-formation: the Army, the Lineage and the Examination System

As long as the Tang government was firmly in control, this system remained in effect, but the developments in military organization in the years leading up to and following the An Lushan rebellion had created regional powers along the fron­tier that challenged the central government.

The most independent provincial governors were the rebel generals who were allowed after surrendering to retain command of their armies and to govern large areas in the northeast. Though they accepted Tang titles and owed nominal alle­giance to the imperial government in Chang’an, these former rebels governed their provinces as virtually independent fiefdoms. They appointed their own officials, raised armies, collected taxes, and tried to establish family dynasties through sys­tematic intermarriage. Several of the leading military governors were non-Chinese. The Tang court sometimes intervened when a governor died or was driven out by one of the frequent mutinies. However, the most it achieved was a promise of a larger share of tax revenue in exchange for ratifying the successor’s position, and in practice the Tang court could never extract significant revenue from the northeast.^[1101]

The semi-independence of Hebei was not simply a matter of a few top generals. It was based on a strongly held and broadly based separatist sentiment in the Hebei armies, and perhaps in the provincial elite at large. This sentiment probably dated back to the 690s, when the circuit was occupied by the Khitans and pillaged for sev­eral years.

The greatest impact of the military governorships lay not in this struggle for con­trol of revenue, but in new patterns of local power and recruitment. For the last half of the Tang, through the Five Dynasties period and into the beginning of the Song, the military career became the primary avenue of advancement into local adminis­tration. In this way, power that had previously been dominated by old elite families fell into the hands of new men. The armies, which had been professionals for several generations, and in Hebei and Shandong had become hereditary, gradually formed self-conscious political and social groupings that asserted themselves against the es­tablished values of the literati elite. Thus, the ideal of the peasant soldier had tradi­tionally been advocated primarily by literary men and civil officials, but was rejected by both peasants, who dreaded the duty, and soldiers, who admired professionalism.

These new soldiers, now a distinct professional group, espoused values radically at odds with the generalist, civilian ideals of the old elite. Thus the soldiery often was far more hostile to incorporation in the imperial order than were the military governors, as is shown by the frequent mutinies that occurred when a larger share of revenues was sent to the court (threatening the soldiers' livelihood) or when a military gov­ernor secured appointments for his family at court.

The new armies were also notable for the use of fictive kin ties to secure rela­tions between a commander and his immediate followers. All the military gov­ernors and commanders of this period had small, personal armies that acted as bodyguards, and the general usually adopted these men as his sons. Such adoption of subordinates had been a standard practice in Central Asian states. From there it was imported into the Northern dynasties, and it became even more prominent under the Tang. The Tang ruling house, linked by culture and kinship to the no­madic peoples, employed the practice, as did the eunuchs who came to dominate the court. It became even more widespread at the end of the Tang and in the Five Dynasties, when it formed part of a general social movement toward reliance on kin ties, either marital or created through adoption, to establish local power bases.^[1104]

A final important development in the professional armies was the rise of the yazhong armies, “inner” armies that were manned by elite troops and served di­rectly under the military governor. The structure of power of the Five Dynasties that ruled north China immediately after the Tang was composed of rival armies of military governors and Turkic chiefs. Within these armies, the elite forces were the yazhong armies, and it was from the ranks of these professional soldiers who had lived largely outside the bounds of conventional society that the rulers of many of the states of this period emerged, including the founder of the Song dynasty (960— 1279 ce).

The last major institutional change was the disappearance of the semi-hereditary elite mentioned in the preceding that had come to dominate society after the fall of the Han.^[1106] This elite, based on institutions that guaranteed entry-level government posts to the offspring of certain families, had emerged in the fourth century ce. It also developed a new style of elite culture defined by novel artistic forms such as lyric po­etry, calligraphy, and skillful conversation. This facilitated their repeatedly rising to the highest offices in the courts of the Northern and Southern dynasties (although no family remained at the pinnacle of power for more than two or three generations) and enabled them to enjoy both local and empire-wide prestige for centuries. Outliving the succession of dynasties that appeared and disappeared in China during this pe­riod, they enjoyed higher status than many imperial families, and even in the first cen­tury of the Tang they challenged the imperial family for social preeminence.

This group, as first suggested by the Song dynasty official and polymath Shen Gua [or “Kuo”] (1031-1095), consisted of two distinct strata. At the highest level were a tiny number of lineages who were famous throughout the empire and enjoyed high titles and immense prestige at court. The most powerful and prestigious were the four great families of what is now Hebei, who claimed to be representatives of the purest Chinese cultural traditions and would marry only among themselves. These families looked down even on the Tang rulers, whom they regarded as parvenus with a heavy taint of barbarian blood and culture.

Almost as proud, and perhaps even more powerful, were the great families of Guanzhong, of which the imperial Li family was one.

Below these great families were several thousand lineages that enjoyed great pres­tige in their own regions, but did not have access to the highest offices at court, which were virtually reserved for those who had noble titles or whose fathers had held these offices. These families ofthe local elite do not figure prominently in the Tang histories, but the names of many of them have been preserved in fragments of genealogies recovered at Dunhuang. They were the primary beneficiaries of the widespread use of the examination system and other alternative modes of gaining office begun by the Empress Wu. However, their actual rise in the ninth century depended less on the examination system than the appearance of the specialist careers that opened up in the different forms of extra-bureaucratic commissions: waterways and transport, military commands, and the salt monopoly.

The Tang did not explicitly recognize the legal existence of this aristocracy, but by reserving the highest offices at court for certain families and granting them special legal privileges, they gave de facto legal recognition to an imperial elite. Emperors also sponsored a series of genealogical compendia that ranked the leading clans of the empire. In the first decades of the eighth century there was a veritable fever of genealogical activity, both private and court sponsored, which largely served to re­assert the rankings based on family prestige rather than on offices held under the Tang. This shows the widespread recognition of this ruling elite.

When the examination system was introduced under the Empress Wu as a high­prestige, fast-track method of gaining office, the elite families used their family connections and literary skills based on family education to dominate the exams.

After the An Lushan Rebellion the genealogical passion rapidly cooled. The major listings of surnames in the ninth century no longer offered rankings, but only gave long lists of famous families organized by rhyme groups, which was the equivalent of alphabetical order. However, the old families continued to dominate the highest offices on the basis of hereditary privilege, personal connections, and their advantages in the examinations. This situation lasted until the end of the Tang, at which time this group, the closest approximation to an aristocracy that ever developed in the East Asian empires, vanished from history.

The end of these families, or rather of their supremacy, was due first to the fact that they had linked themselves completely to the Tang dynasty through holding high office at court. This included abandoning local bases, which had offered a retreat in times of disaster, and physically moving to the capitals—Chang'an and Luoyang—where they bought new properties. The pillaging of the capitals at the end of the Tang resulted not only in the deaths of the leading members of the great families and the end of the dynasty to which they were tied, but also the destruction of their material wealth in land and houses.

A second factor in their disappearance was the proliferation of offspring over the centuries. Most of the provincial elites in late Tang and tenth-century China— as identified from a tabulation of funerary inscriptions—were not people of local origins but members of less successful lines of the great families. The leading fam­ilies of the Tang, like their predecessors in the Northern and Southern dynasties, composed genealogies that acknowledged kin ties only with branches that con­tinued to produce officials. Less successful lines were excluded. However, they did not disappear, but to judge from the inscriptional materials they sought new avenues of advancement with the military governors in the northeast or as local officials or businessmen in the south.^[1107] Thus, while pride in genealogy continued into the eleventh century, as shown in the histories composed under the Song dynasty, the choronyms (surnames identified with a place of origin) of the greatest families no longer distinguished an imperial elite from their provincial counterparts.

A final reason for their disappearance was the aforementioned new emphasis, both in the armies of the military governors and in the financial administration, on professionalization and more practical skills. This provided the basis for the full­blown examination system, based on anonymous tests open to all and initially in­cluding exams on fiscality, that emerged in the Song dynasty.