Then, in winter 879, claiming the title of the ‘Heaven-Storming Generalissimo’, he attacked the Tang’s richest port of Canton, whose warehouses were crammed with the accumulated goods of merchants who traded with Sumatra, India and the Persian Gulf. After a prolonged siege, the city’s resistance was broken and punished by a horrendous massacre, the death toll estimated at 120,000 by Arab chroniclers, who noted the deliberate targeting of resident aliens, foreign merchants, Arabs, Persians and Jews.
