62 China in World History
The fl ourishing sea-based trade with India and Southeast Asia
brought increasing prosperity to central and south China in the eighth
and ninth centuries. By 742 the government census showed that half
of the population (of perhaps sixty million) now lived in the south-
ern half of the country. The Grand Canal helped to integrate the com-
mercial economy within China proper and gave the Tang government
in Chang’an and Luoyang access to the growing wealth of the south,
primarily in the form of grain and silk. Tea also became a major item
of internal trade. Produced fi rst in the far southwest, its use spread
throughout China, and by the mid-Tang it had become the national
drink of choice. Because it required boiled water, the use of tea had
major public health benefi ts as well and contributed to the rapid popu-
lation growth of the Tang and subsequent periods.
Over the course of the Tang, Buddhist monasteries had become
signifi cant centers of wealth, with large holdings of tax-exempt land
and many magnifi cent treasures of religious art. An estimated 260,000
monks and nuns and 100,000 slaves lived on these tax-free lands. In
845, Emperor Wuzong ordered the confi scation of most Buddhist tem-
ples and shrines, leaving one temple in each prefecture, and four in each
of the two main capitals (Chang’an and Luoyang). Each surviving tem-
ple could have thirty monks or nuns, and everyone else was forced to
return to lay life without any support from the religious establishment.
The emperor ordered the bronze bells and images from the closed tem-
ples melted down into coins, the iron statues melted and converted into
agricultural implements, and all precious gold, silver, and jade objects
turned over to the Bureau of Public Revenue. Emperor Wuzong died
in 846, and his successor ended the suppression, but in one short year
much Buddhist wealth had been confi scated by the state, and Buddhism
would never again be quite as powerful as it had been in the early and
middle Tang.
By 860 the Tang dynasty was clearly in decline, as regional mili-
tary commanders became increasingly independent of the central gov-
ernment and bandits roamed freely across the countryside. The largest
rebellion was led by Huang Chao, an examination failure and unem-
ployed scholar, whose forces captured and looted the southern port of
Guangzhou in 879 before moving directly on the capital of Chang’an in- His forces were brutal and poorly disciplined, and he was defeated
and driven out of the capital in 883. Huang Chao had revealed the great
weakness of the government, inviting by example many others to fol-
low his lead. The dynasty offi cially collapsed in 907, but it had lost all
semblance of control at least three decades before that.