The Blacks of Premodern China

Introduction

Introduction Within the span of the nearly three centuries of China’s illustrious Tang Dynasty (618–907), the year 684 is conspicuous mainly for two infamously related events. In the second month of that year the notorious Wu Zhao, or Empress Wu (Wu Hou) (ca. 625–705), initiated her successful bid to become the Middle Kingdom’s only female aspirant to emperorship in its fourmillennia -plus traditional history.1 Almost from the first, her usurpation of power was resisted not only by the legitimate members of the dynasty’s imperial family but also by a disgraced aristocratic bravo named Li or, sometimes in the histories, Xu Jingye (d. 685). In the ninth month, proclaiming either his real or his fictitious intent of restoring the rightful emperor to power, Li Jingye initiated the first internal rebellion actually directed against the state in more than sixty decades.2 These distinct but related events of 684 precipitated bloodshed on an unimaginably massive scale. Owing to the harsh gender biases militating against her ascendancy in the political arena, Empress Wu could claim and consolidate her supreme position only by means of the trail of poisonings and dismemberments that she initiated in 684 and carried out well beyond her imperial accession of 690. Once installed through this chain of usurpation as China’s first and only woman emperor, Wu Zhao would spend the next two decades as she had for at least a decade before that achievement—meting out death to all real or perceived threats to her power, including numerous members of the legitimate imperial family.3 By contrast, the tyranny of Li Jingye was far less longlived . He rebelled largely because he had felt his personal honor besmirched and seen the privileges of his noble standing curtailed. Therefore, he directed his suddenly amassed forces of one hundred thousand in bringing death to countless thousands through his revolt. Wu Zhao met Li Jingye’s rebels with a three-hundred-thousand-man army of suppression of her own. Li, however, did not live long enough to witness the complete destruction of what he had ignited, for he met his own end in short order—when a treacherous subordi- 2 introduction nate, seeking to collect a reward on his defeat and, through dissociation, save his own life, elected to behead him. Thereafter, as was customary repayment at that time for sedition against the throne, all of Jingye’s known surviving family members were exterminated to the last person, and their tombs were desecrated by obliteration.4 With few exceptions, most subsequent scholars have regarded the usurpation of the empress and the insurrection of the renegade as assuredly the two most noteworthy events of the year 684. This is an entirely understandable assessment, given that each produced ramifications that emanated like seismic shock waves, profoundly affecting nearly every aspect of the future fortunes of the Chinese Tang empire’s remaining two-plus centuries of life. However, there was yet an additional act of violence—smaller but hardly unnoticed—that transpired in that same critical year of 684. Occurring in the interim months between the previously mentioned cataclysms, this incident constituted a much lower order of violence than either of the aforementioned disruptive events of 684 that framed it, and it therefore understandably has generally not garnered attention on a level that is commensurate with its significance . Yet, we can scarcely overemphasize the portentous nature of this event, and it would prove no less consequential in its implications for the subject of this study than either of the other two has customarily proven to be to any study of Tang politics or institutions. The event in question is the sordid and unseemly murder of the civilian official Lu Yuanrui, who, during the seventh month of 684, died savagely while serving as governor of the remote and still somewhat marginally incorporated southern Chinese port of Guangzhou, the future Canton.5 Kunlun Exposed and Evolving By the standards of our culture and times, by most accounts Lu Yuanrui was not wholly undeserving of the fate that befell him. He was a petty man and a rapacious bureaucrat, so much so as not to merit independent treatment anywhere in the authoritative sources, despite his relatively high position. Consequently, we first learn about Lu only because of the survival of a terse description of his death—and nothing more—that is included in the officially commissioned biography of the successor to his post. Nevertheless, in the eyes of certainly what was a...