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Meanwhile, at the court, An Lushan continued to play the self-mocking bumpkin. At one point, rumors that An Lushan was planning a revolt reached the emperor. Summoned before him, An Lushan promptly fell weeping to the emperor's feet, swearing his loyalty and declaring slander by his detractors. The emperor was completely convinced, and lavished An Lushan with new honors.30

Shortly afterward, in 755, An Lushan rose in rebellion. Both Changan and the eastern capital of Luoyang fell instantly to An Lushan's forces. The emperor and Yang Guifei, along with a few troops, fled ignominiously to Sichuan. The emperor's troops then mutinied, demanding that he kill his consort, whom they blamed for their plight. Left with no choice, the heartbroken emperor ordered his chief eunuch to strangle his beloved concubine. Her corpse was thrown into a ditch, and the crushed emperor himself soon abdicated in favor of his son. It was not until eight years later, in 763, that the An Lushan Rebellion was finally suppressed and the Tang family restored to power.

The An Lushan Rebellion was a turning point in Chinese history, marking the beginning of the long Tang decline. Prior to the rebellion, the Tang emperors had tried to blur the divide between Chinese and non-Chinese, pursuing deliberate policies of ethnic and cultural intermingling. For years, this policy proved surprisingly successful. Even as the empire expanded its dominion over more and more territory, Tang China drew strength and vitality— economic, military, and cultural—from the participation of foreigners at all levels of Chinese society. All this was to change. By the late eighth century, the openness of the Tang to foreign peoples and foreign ideas had become a source not of power but of division, insecurity, and violence.31

Even before the An Lushan Rebellion, incursions and insurrections by non-Chinese peoples like the Tibetans, the Western Turks, and the Nanchao had occurred in the frontier regions of the Tang territories. With the An Lushan crisis, these military defeats intensified and the Tang frontiers began disintegrating. Tibetan power expanded into China's western regions, and the Tang rulers lost control over the lucrative Silk Road. At the same time, regional military commanders across China—almost all of foreign descent—grew increasingly defiant of the Tang central government. Islam spread rapidly throughout the Tang's central Asian lands, eventually replacing Buddhism as the dominant religion. But whereas in the past the Tang rulers had welcomed Islamic practitioners and mosques as part of their cosmopolitan society, Islam now became a rival force and a threat to Tang power.32

In the late eighth century, intolerance seized Tang China and spread like a cancer. Chinese high and low began blaming foreigners for all of China's problems. An uneducated Turk, after all, had nearly brought down the Tang Empire. It was humiliating, moreover, that Ming Huang's government had permitted barbarians to so dominate China's military leadership.

Perhaps the most reviled of the “barbarians” were the Uighurs. In exchange for their support during the An Lushan Rebellion, the desperate Tang emperors lavished the Uighurs with gifts, Chinese royal titles, marriages with Tang princesses, and a monopoly on horse imports into China. The latter arrangement worked as follows: Each year the Uighurs brought to China tens of thousands of horses, many of them weak and sickly, and demanded forty pieces of silk for each horse. This rate of exchange was extremely unfavorable to the Chinese, and before long the Tang imperial coffers were depleted. None of this stopped the Uighurs from routinely abusing Tang officials, raiding imperial courts, kidnapping Chinese children, and killing Chinese citizens.

In the end, Taizong's experiment with a “universal empire” proved a failure. Tang China ultimately could not overcome the deep-seated, centuries-old Chinese contempt for and fear of barbarians. Unlike Rome, China never developed a concept of politicai