On the Dangers of International Maritime Trade in the Tang Era (The Incidents of Genocide of the Arab-Persian Population of China in 760 and 879)

Abstract

At the end of the Tang Empire (618–907), the universally recognized “golden age” of imperial China, the country entered a long period of socio-political and ethnic turmoil. The broader set of problems associated with the An Lushan uprising (755–763) is widely known — this civilizational catastrophe marked a turning point in the development of the dynasty and, by impacting all aspects of a powerful empire, caused the sun to start setting on Tang China. Still, many episodes remain relatively unexplored, among them the crises that befell Arab-Persian communities in southern China, which fell victim to the echoes of the An Lushan and Huang Chao uprisings (878–884), which also aimed to put an end to the Tang Dynasty. In layman’s Asian studies and public consciousness, the tragedies that occurred in Yangzhou and Guangzhou a little more than a century apart and took the form of largescale massacres of foreign merchants of Arab and Persian descent are often taken out of context and extrapolated to the entire system of interactions between China and foreigners — in particular, Muslims from West Asia arriving in the ports of the Tang Empire. This article seeks to place these dramatic events in a tighter historical context. Part of the difficulty here lies in the absence of Chinese sources about the Guangzhou massacre, known to researchers only from reports by Arab authors. The paper aims to consider some of the pre-requisites of these incidents, showing the role of Arab-Persian merchants not only as victims of violence by rebels and locals alike, but also by analyzing their own raid on Guangzhou at the very beginning of the events in question. The author also warns against simple projections around conflicts in China’s coastal cities because these sunset episodes of the Tang Dynasty do not extrapolate well to later history.