The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

The plunder of the immense wealth of the Buddhist establishment had helped the imperial family and the nobility pay their armies and survive in the short term, but it did not address the continuing economic crisis. In 860, there were mutinies of the army on the frontiers, while at home unrelentingly heavy taxes and labour burdens provoked rural revolt. One peasant uprising, terming itself the ‘Righteous Army’, gathered over 200,000 peasants, vagrants, beggars and pirates. The empire was now hugely overstretched geographically and secession wars began in frontier provinces. Then droughts, floods and famine struck. In the 870s and ’80s, there was widespread belief that heaven was displeased, that the dynasty had lost its Mandate. The coup de grâce was the rebellion of Huang Chao, a final brutal spasm of almost unimaginable violence with many parallels to the Taiping, the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century, as this was of the ninth.