Zhu Wen and the Forging of Medieval China

Zhu Wen and the Forging of Medieval China

In the dying decades of the Tang dynasty, as famine swept the Yellow River valley and the empire's ancient aristocratic order crumbled under its own weight, a classics teacher's son from a forgotten county in central China began the journey that would end with the destruction of one of history's greatest civilisations, and the founding of another. Zhu Wen was a rebel, a defector, a warlord, a regicide, and an emperor, and his career spanned every register of human violence and institutional ambition that the most turbulent half-century in Chinese history had to offer.

This book traces the full arc of Zhu Wen's extraordinary life: from the poverty and humiliation of his boyhood in Liu Chong's household to the rebel armies of Huang Chao, from his calculated defection to the Tang to the twenty-five years of military and administrative construction at Kaifeng that produced the most formidable regional power in the Central Plains, and from the massacre of the Tang aristocracy at Baima Station to the jade seals of the Later Liang dynasty pressed into his hands in the Luoyang palace. It is also the story of everything he destroyed along the way, and of the world that his destruction, unwillingly and unknowingly, made possible.

Written with the narrative urgency of the best historical writing and the analytical depth the subject demands, this is the definitive account of the man who ended the Tang and opened the door to the Song.