Huichang persecution: Emperor Wuzong suppresses the Buddhist monasteries

Wuzong, raised to the throne in 840 by the eunuch commanders of the palace armies, relied on the chancellor Li Deyu and increasingly on Taoist masters such as Zhao Guizhen, who urged him against the Buddhists. Measures against the clergy began in 842, when monks and nuns who broke the monastic rules were returned to lay life and monks were told to hand their wealth to the state. In 843, after his armies routed the Uyghur remnants on the northern frontier, the court confiscated the estates and money of the Uyghurs and of the Manichaean temples. The war had nearly emptied the treasury, and the tax-exempt wealth of the monasteries was a tempting resource.

In 845 the suppression became general. In the 4th month the Bureau of Sacrifices counted 4,600 monasteries, 40,000 smaller shrines and hermitages and 260,500 monks and nuns. From the first day of that month (10 May) the monks and nuns of Chang’an were returned to lay life in stages — first those under forty, then those under fifty, then those without ordination certificates; Ennin, who lived in the city, wrote that some 300 were laicized every day. In the 7th month an edict allowed each of the two halves of Chang’an and Luoyang to keep two monasteries with thirty monks each — in the capital Ci’en, with Xuanzang’s Great Wild Goose Pagoda, and Jianfu on the east side, Ximing and Zhuangyan on the west — and each provincial seat one; bronze images and bells were to be melted down for coins and iron images for farm tools. On 12 September the emperor proclaimed the result: more than 4,600 monasteries and over 40,000 shrines destroyed, 260,500 monks and nuns and 150,000 temple slaves registered as taxpayers, and the Nestorian and Zoroastrian clergy — ‘more than 3,000’ according to the Old Book of Tang, ‘more than 2,000’ according to the Zizhi tongjian — returned to lay life, ‘lest they confuse the customs of China’.

Wuzong died on 22 April 846, possibly because of the elixirs of immortality he had been taking. His successor, Emperor Xuanzong (Li Chen), had Zhao Guizhen beaten to death, allowed eight more monasteries on each side of the capital and resumed ordinations, ending the persecution. Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism, however, all but vanished from China, and the Church of the East did not recover until the Yuan dynasty; Islam, confined to foreign merchants, was spared.