Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [47]
Among the Chinese residents of Changan, foreign music, fashions, and flavors were all the rage. The game of polo, almost certainly from Persia, became one of the favorite sports of Tang high society. On special occasions, female musical troupes from central Asia, seated on platforms carried by camels, played strange new instruments such as the pipa (a pear-shaped lute) to the delight of imperial officials. Aristocratic Chinese women wore tight-fitting dresses and shawls in the central Asian style. Other times, they wore loose trousers and rode horseback, in stark contrast to upper-class women of later periods in Chinese history, who could barely walk because of their bound feet.21
Changan was not just stylish and eclectic. It was a center of learning and high art. Under Ming Huang, literature, painting, historical and aesthetic theory, and especially poetry flourished as never before. The most celebrated poets in Chinese history, including Li Po, Tu Fu, and Wang Wei, lived during this period. In one historian's words, “Ch'ang-an was more than the functioning capital of a great empire: it was a cosmopolis, the greatest city in the world; it was the radiating center of civilization for the whole of Eastern Asia.”22
Like Taizong, Emperor Ming Huang was famous for his openness to foreigners and tolerance of cultural and religious differences. In 713, Ming Huang received an Arab delegation of ambassadors from the Umayyad caliph Walid seeking China's military cooperation. In violation of Chinese imperial etiquette, the Arabs refused to perform the ceremonial kowtow—a forehead-to-ground prostration—before the emperor. The strangers asserted that Muslims prostrated themselves only to God and would merely bow for a king on earth. Displaying surprising restraint, Ming Huang waived the requirement, declaring, “Court etiquette is not the same in all countries.” (A thousand years later, China's Manchu rulers would make the opposite decision. When the English ambassador Lord Amherst similarly refused to kowtow, he was turned away and the diplomatic mission was ended.) During the Tang Empire's golden age, foreign merchants and missionaries—whether Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Manichaean—worshipped freely at their own temples, without fear of persecution, and sometimes even with imperial military protection.23
The tolerance of the Tang is all the more striking when compared to the conduct of the two other major empires of the time: the Umayyad caliphate and the Byzantine Empire, both far more religiously dogmatic.
The Umayyad Empire (661-750) was built around Islamic orthodoxy, rejecting all other religions as heresy. Although persecution of non-Muslims was relatively mild under the early Umayyad rulers, in 704-5 the same Caliph Walid just mentioned rounded up the Christian nobles of Armenia and burned them to death in their own churches. Others were crucified or decapitated. A few years later, Caliph Umar II issued the following pronouncement: “O ye who believe! The non-Moslems are nothing but dirt. Allah has created them to be partisans of Satan; most treacherous in regard to all they do; whose whole endeavor in this nether life is useless, though they themselves imagine that they are doing fine work. Upon them rests the curse of Allah, of the Angels and of man collectively.” Non-Muslims were not allowed to hold public office. (By contrast, when the Sassanian prince of Persia, defeated by the Arabs, fled to China in 674, he was welcomed at Changan and made a general of the Imperial Guard.)24
The Christian Byzantine Empire was even more extreme in its persecution of heretics. In the seventh century, paganism was essentially eradicated, through forced conversions, torture, starvation, and brutal massacres. Anti-Semitism pervaded the empire, and various Byzantine rulers from Heraclius to Leo III ordered the forced baptism of Jews. Under Justinian II (685-695, 705-711),