h/t turtle: an ethnography of the Tang as seen through its diehards out in Dunhuang (pdf).
The Tang are about my favourite of the regimes ruling the Middle Kingdom. Many such rulers have been foreign: the Yuan of course (Mongol) and Qiang (Manchu). I'd thought the Tang were indigenous. Sanping Chen here is looking into Dunhuang's history after that An Loshan / An Shi mess.
As "An Lushan", this rebel attracted a bit of attention a decade back when John Derbyshire, whose wife is Han, transmitted Pinker's musings that he was the worst rebel in human history. In recent years it seems the bodycount was revised downward. It was still a mess for the Tang: the Tibetans rallied the Tangs' enemies, which included the Qiang interestingly and also the Tanggut, to encircle and extort Dunhuang, Comanche-style. Then they simply took it.
"Simply" rather oversimplifies the matter given that a pro-Tang revolt broke out, throwing off the Tibetan yoke. Sanping Chen notes that the faction proudly proclaimed the Tang lineage as "Tuoba" - even Tabγač. That is a Turkic name. This would be like an inner-mongolian outpost of Chinese waving a Manchu flag. I mean, at least they're not Mongols, right?
I find an irony in that the Tang are most famed, for Central-Asian / Iranian historians, for smashing, in fact, the Turks. This is what opened the (northern) Silk Road and led to Dunhuang's seventh-century prosperity. Admittedly making it a plum target for Tangguts and Tibetans later.
BACKDATE 9/4
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