Culture · Dynasty · 618 CE–907 CE
Tang dynasty
唐朝 · Táng Cháo. The cosmopolitan high-water mark of Chinese imperial culture — the dynasty whose poetry, painting, Buddhism, and city planning still define the East Asian classical aesthetic.
The dynasty
The Tang dynasty is conventionally regarded as the golden age of Chinese civilisation. Chang'an — the imperial capital — was the largest city in the world during the 7th and 8th centuries, with over a million residents inside its planned grid of 25 km² and a foreign population of Persians, Sogdians, Arabs, Koreans, Japanese, Tibetans, and Indians. The city's grid layout influenced Heian-kyō (Kyoto) and Pyongyang.
Tang poetry — Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Bai Juyi — defines classical Chinese literary aesthetics. Tang Buddhism — under emperors who alternated between patronage and persecution — produced the Chan (Zen) school, the great Mahayana commentaries, and the Buddhist cave-temple complexes at Longmen and Mogao at their artistic peak. The block-printing of texts, the standardised silver tael currency, the regular postal system, and the imperial examination as a mass meritocratic mechanism all matured in this period.
The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) effectively shattered the high-Tang state; the dynasty struggled on for another century and a half before disintegrating into the Five Dynasties period.
Legacy
Classical Chinese poetry. The Buddhist artistic vocabulary of East Asia. The grid-city template. The civil service examination as a tool of social mobility.
Where to see it today
- Big and Small Wild Goose Pagodas, Xi'an
- Longmen Grottoes, Luoyang (UNESCO)
- Mogao Caves, Dunhuang (UNESCO)
- Famen Temple, Shaanxi
- Tang Paradise (themed reconstruction, Xi'an)