China’s Cosmopolitan Empire

The Tang dynasty is often called China's "golden age," a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections spanning from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire by Mark Edward Lewis captures this dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule. During this period, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played major roles both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets: Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.

The Chinese engaged in extensive trade across both sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs ventured out to the wider world, marking the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south, controlled from a northern capital, set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems of the time celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described the heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars.

Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government so profoundly that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.