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T'ang Studies 7 (1989) The Li Hsun Faction and the Sweet Dew Incident of 835 JENNIFER w.JAY UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA The recent history-rewriting of the Tiananmen massacre by the Chinese government brings to mind a bloodbath in late T'ang court politics, the Sweet Dew Incident tt it z.~ of December 14, 835.1 Although the circumstances and participants bear no resemblance, striking parallels can be observed in the aftermath of terror and the subsequent official historiography of the events. On that fateful day Li Hsiin *illJl and his faction at the Ch'ang-an court launched an anti-eunuch coup which backfired and in which three thousand men, mostly civilofficials, died when the eunuchs sought revenge against the entire officialdom. Emperor Wentsung (r. 827-40) had been involved in the coup in order to address the problems of external incursion, provincial recalcitrancy , factional politics, and eunuch dominance. The aborted coup subjected him to strict surveillance and almost cost him the throne. The traditional interpretation of this climactic episode has been based on the standard histories for the period-Chiu T'ang shu, Hsin T'angshu, and the Tzu-chih t'ung-chien.2 These histories 1 On the June 4, 1989 military crackdown, the official position of the Chinese government was that a "counter-revolutionary rebellion" was crushed and no civilians died. Among the voluminous publications on the topic, see Andrew Nathan, China's Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy (New York, 1990). 2 Even the Cambridge History of China subscribes to the traditional interpretation that viewed Li Hsiln and Cheng Chu as the sole architects of the coup. See Michael Dalby's account, in Cambridge History of China, Volume 3: Sui and Tang China, 589-906, Part I, ed. Denis Twitchett (Cambridge, 1979),663-66. Other modern scholars generally see the Li Hsiln faction merely as the puppet of rival eunuch cliques. See Ch'en Yin-k'o, "T'ang-tai cheng-chih shih shu-Iun kao," first published in 1944, in Ch'en Yin-k'o hsien-sheng lun-chi (Taipei, 1971), 179-80; Lil Ssu-mien, Sui-Tang Wu-tai shih (Peking, 1959), 393; F.A Bischoff, La Foret des pinceaux (Paris, 1963), 11. La Hsiang-lin began but did not finish a re-assessment of the incident based on Hu Hsi's 1i1l1lll manuscript; see La Hsiang-lin, "Hu-chiKan-lu shih-lei ts'ao-kao pa-wei," Wen-shih hsueh yen-chiu-so yiJeh-k'an 3.1 (1934), 1233-36. 39 Jay: The Sweet Dew lncident essentially utilized imperial decrees and prosecution orders concerning Li Hsiin and his men.3 The eunuchs, however, had dictated these documents to a cowed officialdom in the immediate days after the fiasco.4 The compilers of the standard histories felt no sympathy for Li Hsun's unorthodox and bold political methods and portrayed him and his associate, Cheng Chu tim tt ,as immoral scoundrels. While the two were singled out for the blame of the bloodbath, the role of respectable officials such as Wang Ya :E g and Chia Su • ii* was glossed over to the extent that their participation in the faction has not been easily recognized. A divergence of opinions also exists among the standard works: for example, while the ChTS defended the innocence of Wang Ya, the TCTe faulted the senior ministers for associating with the "petty men."s A critical reading of the discrepancies among the standard accounts and the non-official sources substantiates a re-appraisal of the Li Hsiin faction and the coup for which it was condemned. My objective in this paper is twofold: to reconstruct the composition of the faction and to examine the execution and repercussions of this event. The interference of the eunuchs in history-writing extended to the removal of the names of the Li Hsiin partisans from various files, including those in the Han-lin Academy and the ministry of 3 For events of the sweet Dew Incident, the ChTS seems to have utilized the non-extant official Wen-tsungshih-Iu )c *ffj~; see WHTK, 194.1642. In addition to the Wen-tsung shih-lu and the ChTS, the HIS...

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