Like the other enduring empires in East Asia, the Han and the Qing, the Tang dy­nasty was an age of transformation.

Its first half was the age of conquest and glory, made possible by institutions that had evolved in nomad-dominated northern China during the four centuries following the Han. However, these institutions declined, and the court never recovered from the cataclysmic An Lushan rebellion (756-763 ce).

First, the shift from early to later Tang was marked by an institutional revolution. The early Tang state inherited the institutions of the Northern dynasties. Its official landholding system was the “equal-field system” in which state-owned land was pe­riodically redistributed to families who worked it. Associated with this were levies in grain, cloth, and labor service exacted in a fixed amount from all households that received land. The military system combined reliance on foreign nomadic forces and professional soldiers at the frontier with elite military households organized in the “divisional army” that was concentrated in the capital region. Major cities were divided into walled wards, with trade largely restricted to specified markets. Society was dominated at the highest level by a small number of families who had enjoyed empire-wide prestige for centuries, as well as a lower level of regionally eminent families.

While these changes had distinctive histories, the overarching pattern was the abandonment of state control and the increasing commercialization and urbaniz­ation of life. The state gave up attempts to regulate or restrict landownership, and began to tax actual property rather than a standardized household. The family­based military system was replaced largely by professional soldiers. Spatial restrictions of trade in cities broke down, shifting toward the late imperial pattern in

¹ This chapter is extracted from Lewis 2009b.

Mark Edward Lewis, The Tang Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0013.

which commerce was dispersed along streets in association with residence. While a recognized elite status survived to the end of the dynasty, these families were in­creasingly linked to the state through the examination system. '1 hey disappeared for all time with the collapse of the dynasty.

A second change was the emergence of a new cultural geography and the closely re­lated development of inter-regional trade. Specifically, in the Tang the economic and cultural center of the Chinese world shifted permanently from the Yellow River Valley to the drainage basin of the Yangzi and points south. This shift allowed a transfor­mation of agriculture, due to the warmer and wetter climate of the south, and also of trade, due to the large-scale transportation of bulk goods on the southern waterways. This in turn facilitated the emergence of major cities in the south entirely based on their commercial role, the regional specialization of production, and the commercial­ization of crops such as timber, fruits, tea, and medicine. The development of trade also led to the emergence of temporary market towns spread across the Tang land­scape, and the gradual transformation of these into permanent market towns.

A final change was the development of new relations to the outside world. To the north and west, Tang China continued to deal with nomadic confederacies and city­states, and overland trade continued along the “Silk Roads” when they were not cut by Tibet. Southern China, however, with its numerous natural harbors, extended the Southern dynasties’ development of overseas trade. Some trade, dominated by Korean vessels, went to Korea and Japan, but substantial commerce also developed with Southeast Asia, India, and the Persian Gulf. This sea-based trade in bulk com­modities tied China into an emerging world economic system, a pattern which con­tinued throughout the late imperial period. Such commerce attracted many foreign merchants to settle in major Chinese cities, and also initiated the Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia and beyond.