Emperor Shunzong

A long apprenticeship

Li Song was the eldest son of Emperor Dezong and was made crown prince soon after his father came to the throne in 779. He waited a quarter of a century to succeed. In 783, when mutinous troops seized Chang’an, he fled with his father to Fengtian and shared the siege that followed, an experience that left the court deeply wary of its own armies and of the provincial governors who commanded them.

In the Eastern Palace he gathered a small circle of trusted companions. Two of them held posts as expert attendants: Wang Shuwen for his skill at Go, and Wang Pi for his calligraphy. Wang Shuwen in turn drew in able younger officials, among them Wei Zhiyi, Liu Yuxi and Liu Zongyuan, who shared his view that the dynasty had to curb the power of the palace eunuchs and the greed of the provinces. In late 804, before any of this could be tested, the crown prince suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak.

A reign of six months

Dezong died early in 805. Some at court hesitated over an heir who could not speak, but Li Song was enthroned. Government now ran through a narrow channel: Wang Shuwen and Wang Pi passed proposals to the eunuch Li Zhongyan and Consort Niu, who alone attended the emperor, and edicts came back the same way. Wei Zhiyi was made a chancellor, and Wang Shuwen, from a post in the Hanlin Academy, directed policy, including the state finances.

This arrangement gave the reformers their opportunity, but it also made them easy to attack. They held office through the favour of a sick emperor rather than through rank, and their rivals called them upstarts.

The Yongzhen reform

In a few months the reformers struck at several long-standing abuses:

• they abolished the ‘palace market’, through which eunuch agents took goods from Chang’an traders at nominal prices, a practice Bai Juyi later attacked in his poem ‘The Old Charcoal Seller’;
• they disbanded the petty agents of the imperial hunting establishments, who extorted money from the people of the capital;
• they forbade provincial governors to send the irregular ‘tribute’ to the throne with which they had bought favour under Dezong, and remitted arrears of tax;
• they released palace women and court musicians, and dismissed Li Shi, the harsh governor of the capital district.

Their boldest step was an attempt to take the palace armies, the Shence troops, out of eunuch hands by appointing the veteran general Fan Xitiao to command them. The eunuch commanders ordered their officers to ignore him, and the plan failed. From then on the eunuchs, led by Ju Wenzhen, worked with powerful provincial governors such as Wei Gao to remove the reformers. When Wang Shuwen had to leave office to mourn his mother, the group lost its leader.

Shunzong’s eldest son, Li Chun, was named crown prince in the fourth month of 805 and made regent in the seventh. In the eighth month the emperor abdicated in his favour, and the era name Yongzhen, from which the reform takes its name, was proclaimed. Wang Pi died soon after in exile. Wang Shuwen was banished and ordered to take his own life in 806, and eight of their associates, Liu Yuxi and Liu Zongyuan among them, were sent to distant provinces as prefectural marshals (sima): the ‘two Wangs and eight sima’ of later tradition.

Retirement and legacy

Shunzong lived on as retired emperor for only a few months and died early in 806. Some later writers suspected that his death was hastened, but there is no firm evidence. His son reigned as Emperor Xianzong and restored much of the court’s authority over the provinces, though not over the eunuchs.

Most of what we know of the reign comes from the Veritable Record of Shunzong compiled by Han Yu, which is unsympathetic to the two Wangs. Modern historians are kinder, and see the Yongzhen reform as an early and serious attempt to break the eunuchs’ hold on the palace armies, a problem that would shape the rest of the Tang dynasty. Its most lasting product was literary: Liu Zongyuan wrote much of his finest prose during his long exile at Yongzhou.

Ceramics of the Reign

Little can be said of ceramics in a reign of six months, and nothing is known to have been made for Shunzong’s court. The wares of the years around 805 are those of the mid-Tang, when stonewares and porcelain for daily use were overtaking the lead-glazed burial pottery of the previous century. Among the most striking are the splashed wares of Henan, made at kilns such as Lushan, with milky bluish patches over a dark glaze, as on the jar shown here.

The white wares of Xing and the green Yue wares of Zhejiang were well established, and the Changsha kilns in Hunan were expanding a trade that carried their painted bowls by river and sea to South-East Asia and beyond.