New Shape to the Old Demon

With this understanding, let us now turn to consider the paramount Song instance of luan, occurring prior to the terminus of the original Song state, which arose in the form of the hugely destructive rebellion led by the rebel Fang La (d.

1121).^{^[75]} As a believer in the Persian religion of Manichaeism, Fang La fervently subscribed to one of the numerous transplanted alien cults in China that two and a half centuries earlier through the mass slaughter at Guangzhou the insurrectionist Huang Chao had attempted to annihilate. Since the time of its appearance in perhaps the late sixth century ce, Manichaeism had, at best, been one of the faiths merely tolerated in China. However, by Song times, its already marginalised standing had declined even more precipitously and its adherents had become persecuted. The opponents of Manichaeism in the Confucian cultural mainstream despised the followers of the religion, to whom they ascribed the malevolent Chinese term mo (demon) because of its phonetic approximation of Mani, the name of the prophet founder of the creed. Although the regimen was shared in common with their Buddhist competitors, even the strict vegetarianism of the Manichaeans was denigrated.^{^[76]}

Yet an exploitative policy of the Song state is perhaps just as important as the persecution of their proscribed religion in explaining what incited this harshly relegated group to rebel. To satisfy his penchant for stocking his opulent gardens and villas with exotic flora and stones, the emperor Huizong (1082-1135; r. 1100-25) exacted a heavy tax-in-kind for the continual furnishing of these items at court. This tribute tax was known as the ‘flower and stone requisition' (huashi gang), and whereas it reputedly applied empire-wide, it was levied disproportionately on the southern regions where such exotica were native and plentiful.

Rare plants in particular were extracted from prime areas along the subtropical south-east coastline and transported north. This same region ofJiangnan (‘south of the [Yangzi] River') was coincidentally the heartland of Manichaean worship and thus home to its underground sects of ghettoised congregants.^{^[77]}

Given its disparagement as onerous by nearly all subjected to it, the ‘flower and stone requisition' provided something of a perfect pretext and Fang La began to rail against the tax, deftly linking it to proto-nationalist themes with his claims that its collection really only accrued to the benefit of the foreign borderland regimes of Kitan (also Khitan) and Tangut peoples, to whom - in order to maintain a fragile peace - the Song itself paid tribute.^{^[78]} Gradually, Fang La's message of unjust exploitation became transformed into a passionate call for arms and, in the winter of 1120, the variously dispersed Manichaean sects as well as other malcontents arose with a unified purpose from their marginalisation in open rebellion against the Song.^{^[79]}

Despite being militarily unseasoned, the predominantly peasant rebel forces led by Fang La at first enjoyed stunning successes against the locally stationed and even some of the first imperial troops of the Song mobilised against them. Many of the latter in fact had had to be diverted in order to join the fight from the distant uneasy northern border with the Kitan Liao dynasty (907-1125). The fact that Fang La's uprising, just as had Huang Chao's during the Tang, spawned numerous copycat insurgencies across the Jiangnan region also contributed to success by distraction. Tax revenue from that area earmarked for the court was disrupted. The detested ‘flower and stone requisition' - now fully recognised by the state as the lightning rod of resistance that it had become - was suspended both there and elsewhere.^{^[80]}

Owing most probably to its staunchly Manichaean core, which was regarded societally as heterodox, the Fang La Rebellion is attributed a particular perniciousness in the official sources.

The histories, whether officially commissioned or private, describe with disdain the attacks by the rebels on their religious-intellectual rivals. Having now seized the opportunity for full-scale retribution against their long-standing cultural enemies, the Fang La insurrectionists are said to have been vengeful, unsparing and unstinting in their assaults against them. Being monotheists and anti-idolaters, they razed the monasteries of the Buddhists to the ground and defaced their icons. Being rebels intent on establishing a new non-hierarchical egalitarian order, they torched the schools of the Confucians and murdered countless numbers of their preceptors, mentors and patrons.^{^[81]}

We doubtless err if we dismiss these official assertions of such utterly alienating acts as totally untrue. Unquestionably, the wanton destruction wreaked by the long-oppressed but suddenly ‘liberated' rebels was hugely far- reaching.^{^[82]} Yet neither can we wholly discount that many of these claims might well represent Orwellian cases of the winners in any conflict writing their own self-serving and self-aggrandising accounts of the truth. Our subsequent informant Zhuang Chuo supplies us with a viable case in point via his succinctly revealing description of the aftermath of Fang La activity in the future Southern Song capital of Hangzhou, which had been captured by the rebels on 19 January 1121 and fully retaken by the state by May of the same year.³² Zhuang Chuo, who was neither a Manichaean nor a sympathiser, reports that: ‘When Hangzhou suffered the disorder (luan) of Fang La, the [city wall] watchtowers and gates as well as the dwellings throughout the district were all put to the torch. In order to reconstruct these [structures], Weng Yanguo [j.s. 1097] had the Buddhist temples destroyed [for use as rebuilding material].'³³ In his language, Zhuang Chuo is actually elliptical in implicating whoever may have been culpable in the first place for the arson, though we must assume he means the rebels.

However, Zhuang Chuo, who was potentially an eyewitness to all about which he here writes, could hardly be more direct in naming the person representing the entity that he believed to be responsible for the destruction of Hangzhou's exquisite Buddhist temples. He proffers that their destroyer was no rebel at all but instead an authorised agent of the imperial state, functioning in the jointly civil-militaristic capacity of Song times that had by then become sanctioned and commonplace.^{^[83]} Reinforcing Zhuang Chuo's intimation is the fact that public works during the Song were largely achieved through military labour, with the typically local as opposed to imperial troops deployed for these tasks sometimes even called ‘corvee soldiers' (yibing).^{^[84]} Thus it is hardly unreasonable to posit that the very same armed forces that were responsible for rebuilding Hangzhou's defence stations were the same ones responsible for levelling its Buddhist temples in order to generate reconstruction supplies.

At any rate, the fleeting victory at Hangzhou would represent the pinnacle of the success that Fang La and his rebel legions achieved. By the spring of 1121, the imperial forces dispatched from the Kaifeng in the north against the insurgent Manichaean regime had commenced a pincer offensive designed to hem in, constrict and thus seal off any means of escape for either it or its supporters. Fang La himself retreated to a secret hideaway in the mountain fastnesses of his home region, only to have his whereabouts exposed by the aggrieved son of a gentry landlord whom he had slain. After massacring the estimated 70,000 hardcore participants in the uprising who elected to fight out of desperation to the death, imperial troops succeeded in capturing Fang La alive and, together with his family and inner circle of advisers, he was shipped north to the capital for execution. These leaders of the Manichaean insurrection were publicly executed on 7 October 1121. One non-official source contemporary with the time fixes the overall number of just civilian (pingmin) fatalities in the pacification campaign to quell this most destructive of the peasant uprisings ever to occur during the Song at being ‘not below 36

2,000,000 persons.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

New Shape to the Old Demon

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