The Sea Without Shore: The An Lushan Rebellion and the End of the Medieval World

The Sea Without Shore: The An Lushan Rebellion and the End of the Medieval WorldIn 755 CE, a Sogdian-Turkic frontier general named An Lushan raised his standard against the Tang dynasty and unleashed the most proportionally destructive war in recorded human history. Within a year he had captured both imperial capitals. Within eight years, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-six million people were dead or permanently displaced - ten to fifteen percent of the entire human population of the eighth-century world.
The Sea Without Shore tells the full story of the An Lushan Rebellion: its origins in the Tang golden age's structural contradictions, its catastrophic military unfolding, and its extraordinary civilisational consequences. The rebellion ended the medieval Chinese world. It destroyed the Tang aristocratic order, collapsed the land-based fiscal system, shattered the dynasty's famous cosmopolitanism, and permanently relocated Chinese civilisation's centre of gravity from the Yellow River plain to the Yangtze delta.
The Song dynasty that eventually emerged from the wreckage was a fundamentally different civilisation from the one An Lushan had challenged. Drawing on the full range of Tang historical sources and modern scholarship, this book makes the case that the An Lushan Rebellion deserves its place alongside the Black Death and the Mongol conquests as one of the great turning points of world history.