Huang Chao Rebellion

Between 874 and 884 a rebel army that began among famine-stricken peasants and salt smugglers marched the length of China, sacked the great port of Guangzhou and seized the imperial capital, Chang'an. Its leader, Huang Chao, proclaimed himself emperor of a new state called Qi before he was hunted down and killed. The rising was crushed, but it left the Tang dynasty in the hands of regional warlords, and the dynasty never recovered.

In the last years of Emperor Yizong's reign, which ended in 874, droughts and floods brought severe famine. Instead of easing taxes in the stricken areas, the court raised them to pay for its spending and wars. Survivors formed armed bands. In 874 Wang Xianzhi, an illegal salt trader, rose in revolt in what is now Henan, and Huang Chao, also a salt smuggler, soon joined him with several thousand men of his own.

In 876 the court tried to buy Wang off with an army commission. Huang, left out of the deal, protested furiously, and the rebel soldiers refused to accept it. The movement split in two. Wang was defeated and killed in 878, and his remaining men joined Huang, who took a grand military title and a new era name to show that he no longer recognised Tang authority.

Huang avoided the forces gathered to protect Luoyang and struck south across the Yangtze, through Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Fujian. He repeatedly offered to submit if he were made a regional governor, but the court refused. In autumn 879 he took Guangzhou after a siege of a single day. Arab sources claim that tens of thousands of foreign merchants and residents were killed there, though Chinese sources do not mention a massacre. Disease then struck his army in the south, killing many of his men, and he turned back north.

In 880, after defeating and killing the leading Tang commander Zhang Lin, Huang crossed back over the Yangtze. Mutinies among the imperial troops left the road north open, and his army, now said to number around 150,000, took Luoyang and then forced the Tong Pass. On 8 January 881 Emperor Xizong fled towards Sichuan, and the rebels entered Chang'an the same day.

Huang declared himself emperor of Qi. He kept many lower-ranking Tang officials in office but executed those who refused to submit and ordered members of the Tang imperial clan killed. When Tang forces briefly re-entered the city in 881, helped by its inhabitants, he drove them out again and then took revenge with massacres. As the war dragged on, farming collapsed around the capital and famine followed; sources record cannibalism on both sides.

In 882 Huang's general Zhu Wen went over to the Tang. The decisive blow came from Li Keyong, a commander of the Shatuo people, who defeated a large Qi army in spring 883 and drove Huang out of Chang'an. Huang retreated east and spent nearly 300 days besieging Chen Prefecture without success. In 884 Li Keyong caught him near the Yellow River and destroyed his army. Huang fled to the Langhu Valley in Shandong, where, on 13 July 884, he was killed by his nephew Lin Yan; one Tang history says instead that he took his own life.

The rebellion has been compared with the Yellow Turban Rebellion and the Taiping Rebellion for its effect on a dynasty. Real power now lay with provincial commanders, and in 907 Zhu Wen, Huang's former follower, deposed the last Tang emperor, opening the era of division known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Older histories held that the revolt wiped out the old aristocratic clans, but recent research suggests that their decline had begun long before.

Our 800 map shows the Tang empire before the rebellion; the 900 map still shows it, only seven years before the dynasty's end, across much of what is now China.