54 China in World History
offi cials. Equally important, he was able to encourage, accept, and learn
from their criticisms. He pacifi ed the border regions of the empire from
Korea and Manchuria in the northeast and across the long northern
borders from the Tarim Basin to the edge of Persia in Central Asia. He
also pacifi ed the southern borders from Annam (precursor of today’s
Vietnam) in the southeast to Tibet in the southwest. These military vic-
tories were solidifi ed by strategic alliances that helped neutralize poten-
tial hostile forces. The Tang rulers managed to create the world’s largest
empire at that time. This was possible because the strong central gov-
ernment in the early Tang enjoyed a solid tax base and the increasingly
prosperous Yangzi River valley was now tied closely through the Grand
Canal to the capital in the north.
Determined to impose his strong will on the entire empire, Tang
Taizong issued a comprehensive legal code in 653, which was revised
and reissued every fi fteen years. The Tang Code is the oldest surviving
complete legal code from China. Following Qin and Han precedents, the
Code specifi es a series of general principles and, in fi ve hundred articles, a
remarkably detailed list of crimes with stipulated punishments. The Code
was to be applied universally, but in deference to Confucian ideas about
social hierarchies, punishments differed according to the social status
and rank of the offender. Penalties ranged from ten strokes with a light
stick or whip to one hundred blows from a heavy stick (which could be
fatal), from a few years to a lifetime of penal servitude, and from exile to
the borderlands to execution. In keeping with Confucian values, a father
would not be punished for beating his son, but a son who struck his father
would be in serious trouble. The Tang Code became the legal model for
all subsequent dynasties from Tang times into the twentieth century.
In the early twentieth century, a dramatic archeological fi nd gave
scholars an intimate glimpse of the ways that Tang power extended
to the remote corners of the empire. At Dunhuang (where the Silk
Roads began), a sealed-up cave was discovered containing hundreds
of documents surviving from their creation in Tang times. Many of the
documents were Buddhist scriptures, but because paper was scarce, the
scriptures were often copied on the backs of any paper the scribes could
fi nd, including contracts, loan agreements, bills of sale for slaves or
land, notices of divorce, adoption or family division, and so on. In addi-
tion, the many government documents found at Dunhuang demonstrate
how, even in that remote town, the Tang government regulated prices
in local markets and kept meticulous track of land deeds, sales, and
transfers in carrying out the equal-fi eld system of land allotments to all
commoners.