Huang Chao rebellion

In the 870s floods and droughts struck the provinces east of the passes year after year, while the boy emperor Xizong left the government to his favourite, the eunuch Tian Lingzi, and taxes kept rising. In 874 Wang Xianzhi, a salt smuggler from Puzhou, raised several thousand men at Changyuan, and in 875 Huang Chao of Yuanqu — another salt trader, a skilled rider and archer who had repeatedly failed the imperial examinations — gathered thousands more to join him. Their bands roamed Henan and Shandong. At the end of 876 the court tried to win Wang over with an army post; Huang, left out, struck him and protested that their followers would be abandoned, Wang refused the post, and the two leaders parted. After Wang Xianzhi was killed in 878, Huang took command of the remaining rebels.

Huang led his army south through Zhejiang and Fujian. When the court refused to make him military governor of Guangzhou — a minister argued that the port where ‘the treasures of the sea trade gather’ could not be handed to a bandit — he stormed the city in a single day in the autumn of 879. Arabic-language authors later wrote that at Khanfu, usually identified with Guangzhou, 120,000 (Abu Zayd al-Sirafi) or 200,000 (al-Masʿudi) Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian merchants were massacred. Chinese sources do not mention the massacre; Abu Zayd dates it to 877–878, Shine Toshihiko holds that Khanfu was in fact Qinzhou, and Morris Rossabi regards the figures as inflated. With 30–40 per cent of his men dead of tropical fevers, Huang turned north, down the Xiang River and across the Yangtze and the Huai. On 22 December 880 Luoyang opened its gates to him; on 8 January 881 Xizong fled from Chang’an towards Sichuan, and that afternoon the rebel vanguard entered the capital. On 16 January Huang Chao proclaimed himself emperor of the Great Qi.

His regime soon turned to plunder and to the killing of officials and of the Tang imperial clan. Tang armies and the Shatuo Turks of Li Keyong closed in; in the autumn of 882 Huang’s general Zhu Wen went over to the Tang, and on 18 May 883 Li Keyong’s troops entered Chang’an, while Huang burned the palaces and fled east. After further defeats he took refuge in the Langhu valley near Mount Tai, where on 13 July 884, according to the Zizhi tongjian, his nephew Lin Yan cut off his head and those of his brothers, wife and children; the New Book of Tang says that Huang took his own life. Communist historians presented the rising as a great peasant war, while the Cambridge History of China notes that Huang had no programme of land redistribution and did not enjoy the support of the peasantry. The war left power in the hands of warlords such as Li Keyong and Zhu Wen, and in 907 Zhu Wen deposed the last Tang emperor.