Why did Chinese dynasties fall? Modern scholarship has focused on demographic pressures, socioeconomic tensions, and climate fluctuations. Traditional Confucian historians, in contrast, pointed the finger at morally flawed individuals: weak emperors, scheming concubines, corrupt eunuchs, and treacherous ministers. In the case of the Tang dynasty, the most eminent historians in the service of the next unified imperial regime, the Northern Song, assigned a large share of blame to Gao Pian (821–887), a prominent general who ended his career as military governor of the economically vital territories between the Huai River and the Yangzi. Specifically, the Northern Song historians accused Gao of allowing Huang Chao’s rebel army to cross the Yangzi unopposed, and then dragging his heels when ordered to lead his army to recover the capital from the rebels. In this volume, Franciscus Verellen, emeritus director of the École Française d’Extrême Orient, seeks to reverse this traditional verdict. For most statesmen and generals of the late Tang, this would be an all but impossible task, as almost everything we know about them comes from the official dynastic histories. For Gao Pian, however, Verellen is able to draw on a number of additional sources that have been underutilized, including Daoist writings, anecdotal histories, weird tales belonging to the chuanqi genre, Gao’s own poems, and, most important of all, the documents drafted for Gao by his Korean-born secretary Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn and included in Ch’oe’s Cassia Grove Collection (Guiyuan bigeng ji). These materials present Gao Pian in a more favorable light, and without them, this book could not have been written.

Although the central theme of The Fall of the Tang is the defense of Gao Pian against accusations regarding his actions during the final stage of his career, the book is laid out as a full-scale biography with its first three-fifths devoted to Gao’s life before his appointment as military governor of Huainan. Indeed, his exemplary performance in earlier assignments forms an important part of Verellen’s case. Born into a northeastern military family that had relocated to Chang’an, Gao joined the Divine Strategy Army (Shence jun, the central army of the late Tang court) as a young man and built his career on the northwestern frontier. He received his first major independent command as defense commissioner of Qinzhou (near today’s Tianshui, Gansu) in 860, inflicted a major defeat on the Tibetans at the Battle of Phoenix Grove Pass, and went on to recover some long-disputed border territories. From there, he was sent to the far south in 864 to recover the Annan protectorate (today’s northern Vietnam), which had been overrun by the aggressive Nanzhao kingdom based in the Dali region of Yunnan. After succeeding in this mission and governing Annan for 5 years, he was recalled to the capital to serve as general of the Imperial Insignia Guard and then sent out to be military governor in western Shandong. By 874, however, another frontier was under threat, and Gao—now clearly regarded as a champion troubleshooter—was sent to defend western Sichuan and its capital city, Chengdu, against pressure from Nanzhao. Next came a quick succession of what turned out to be brief assignments to governorships in parts of Hubei and Zhejiang, where he tangled with the rebel forces of Wang Xianzhi and Huang Chao before being sent to Yangzhou as military governor of Huainan in 879. This was an extremely sensitive location, as Yangzhou was a major commercial entrepot, transportation hub, and headquarters of the government’s salt monopoly. It also turned out to be Gao’s final post, as he was killed in an uprising led by several of his subordinate commanders in 887.

Contrary to what this resumé might suggest, Gao Pian cannot be dismissed as simply a military man. Verellen’s account highlights several motifs in his life story that transcend the brute facts of politics and warfare. One of them is poetry. Like other members of the educated elite of Tang times, Gao and his staff produced a considerable number of poems, some of which have survived, and Verellen taps them for evidence of Gao’s emotional state and the character of his relationships with others. (The book includes an appendix with translations of all his known extant poems.) Another recurring motif is engineering. Gao substantially augmented the fortifications of three of the cities he governed—Jiaozhi (today’s Hanoi), Chengdu, and Yangzhou—and was not just a high-level manager but took a keen interest in the technical aspects of these projects. The third and most important motif is Gao’s lifelong commitment to Daoism; he extended his patronage to Daoist adepts, was drawn to alchemy as a way of transcending mortality, and invoked appropriate themes in his poetry. The motifs of religion, engineering, and literary culture came together when, as protector general of Annan, Gao completed the construction of a transport canal across the base of the Jiangshan peninsula on the Gulf of Tonkin. To commemorate the accomplishment, one of his subordinates, Pei Xing, drafted a stele inscription that credited the removal of an obstructing mass of rock to “divine assistance” (p. 87) in the form of a massive thunderstorm. In trying to make sense of this for a presumably skeptical modern audience, Verellen appears to accept Joseph Needham’s suggestion that this was one of the first practical applications of gunpowder, itself a product of Daoist alchemy.

The strongest and most effective component of Verellen’s effort to rehabilitate Gao Pian is his questioning of key sources underlying the verdict of the great Song historians, Ouyang Xiu and Sima Guang. He presents a compelling case that much of their criticism derives from a single unreliable source, the pamphlet Bewitched in Guangling (Guangling yaoluan zhi), which descends to the level of “burlesque farce” (p. 283) and was written “out of spite” (p. 281) by a scholar who had failed to secure Gao’s patronage. Verellen also notes that the indictment of Gao for failing to lead his army to recover the capital rests on two documents, an edict and a memorial, that are both clearly spurious, while Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn’s more trustworthy Cassia Grove Collection quotes an imperial edict, now lost, that excuses the Huainan military governor from this mission. Explaining away Gao Pian’s other great offense, his failure to even attempt to prevent Huang Chao’s northbound rebel army from crossing the Yangzi River, presents Verellen with more of a challenge: “Gao Pian, now sixty sui of age and no doubt deeply affected by his misjudgment of Huang Chao’s intentions and … possibly also resentful at the court’s recent obstruction of his plan to trap Huang at the opportune time in Guangdong, let events run their course” (p. 162). This is a significant concession, one that opens the door to an alternative interpretation of Gao’s behavior that highlights neither loyalty nor active disloyalty, but rather hedging and self-interest. That is not the pattern that Verellen chooses to emphasize, but much of the strategic maneuvering that he recounts, such as Gao’s extending his control over some territories outside of his jurisdiction, is consistent with this interpretation—and with the activities of many other regional military leaders during this time of imperial breakdown.

In his preface, Verellen states that the “primary purpose” of this book is not to rehabilitate its central figure, but rather “to examine what the case of Gao Pian can bring to light about the actual causes of the fall of the Tang and the strengths and limitations of official historiography” (p. xiii). Surprisingly, the “actual causes” receive no sustained or focused attention until the last three pages of the book, where the author identifies three “regional developments” that “stand out as decisive factors in the collapse of the Tang” (p. 248). The first two can really be combined into one: Huainan’s extensive resources had to be devoted to the defense of Huainan itself, meaning that the province could make no contribution to the larger struggle (including the recovery of the capital). The third development was “administrative breakup at the regional level” (p. 249), namely Gao Pian’s loss of control over his military subordinates. Some important questions are not just unanswered but unasked. Why was it so difficult to prevent administrative breakdown? Was Gao’s experience as a military governor representative or atypical? The Fall of the Tang provides a remarkably deep and nuanced understanding of a pivotal leader, his political, military, and religious engagements, and the relevant sources; but with regard to explaining the fall of the Tang, much work still remains to be done.