The intense drama of the Tang’s final decline is overshadowed by the sheer violence of the events, but deeper causes lie in what historians and anthropologists have termed systems collapse, pointing to the other great breakdowns in Chinese history: the collapse of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the early fourteenth century; the decline and fall of the Ming between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries; and the fall of the Qing which led to China’s twentieth-century revolutions. These four giant crises are deep-rooted in China’s cultural memory, in historiography, literature, poetry and
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