Page 138 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

emperor and his court fled in panic from Ch'ang-an. To appease
his escort, Ming Huang, now over seventy, was forced to hand his
favourite over to the soldiers, who promptly strangled her. A few
years later the rebellion was crushed by the efforts of his son Su-
tsung; the dynasty staggered to its feet, and there was even some-
thing of a revival in the early years of the ninth century; but its
power was broken, its glory past, and the long, slow death of the
T'ang had already begun.
In 751, Chinese armies in central Asia had been severely de-
feated by Moslems advancing from the west, with the result that
Chinese Turkestan now came permanently under Moslem influ-
ence. The Arab conquest of central Asia began the destruction of
that chain of prosperous, civilised kingdoms which had provided
the overland link between China and the West in the seventh cen-
tury, a process which was in due course to be completed by the fe-
rocity of the Mongols. Contact with the Western world was now
maintained by way of the southern ports. The quays of Canton
and other southern ports were thronged with Chinese and for-
eigners who lived in peaceful prosperity with each other until the
peasant rebel Huang Ch'ao massacred the latter in 879. And at
Ch'iian-chou in Fukien (Marco Polo's Zayton), recent excava-
tions have revealed that as late as the thirteenth century Hindus,
Arabs, Manichacans, and Jews were settled in that great trading
port, whose cosmopolitanism is symbolised by the twin pagodas
of the K'ai-yuan temple, built in the twelfth century by Chinese
and Indians working sidc-by-sidc.
1 46 The main hall of Fu-kuang-MU,
Wu-l'ai-ihan, Shami Ninth ctmwy.

ARCHITECTURE As so often happens in history, China became less tolerant as her
power declined, and the foreign religions suffered accordingly.
The Taoists were jealous of the political power of the Buddhists
and succeeded in poisoning the mind of the emperor against
them, while the Confucians had come to look upon certain
Buddhist practices (particularly celibacy) as un-Chinese. The
government also viewed with increasing alarm the vast sums
spent on the monasteries and their unproductive inmates, who
now numbered several hundred thousand. In 845 all foreign reli-
gions were proscribed and all Buddhist temples confiscated by
imperial edict. The ban on Buddhism was later relaxed, but in the
meantime so thorough had been the destruction and looting that
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