In the year 671 CE, a Buddhist monk named Xuanzang arrived in the Tang capital of Chang'an after a sixteen-year journey across Central Asia and India, carrying with him 657 Buddhist texts that he had collected, translated, and memorized over years of study at the great monastic universities of the Indian subcontinent. The emperor Gaozong received him in formal audience, ordered the construction of a grand translation institute to support his work, and made Xuanzang's translations available to scholars across the empire.
Xuanzang's reception tells you most of what you need to know about Tang China. Here was a foreign scholar arriving with foreign knowledge from foreign lands, and the imperial response was not suspicion or restriction but active enthusiasm and state support. This was not an anomaly. It was the operating principle of an entire civilization.
The Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) is frequently described in Chinese historical writing as a golden age—and for good reason. It was a period of extraordinary cultural achievement, political stability, military reach, and economic prosperity. But perhaps its most distinctive characteristic, and certainly the one most relevant to contemporary debates about globalization, was its remarkable openness to the outside world.
A Capital Like No Other
Chang'an—modern Xi'an—was, for most of the Tang period, the largest city in the world. At its peak in the early 8th century, it housed a population of approximately one million within its massive walls, making it larger than Constantinople, Baghdad, or Rome at the same moment in history. But raw size understates what made Chang'an remarkable.
The city was laid out on a grid that reflected Chinese urban planning principles, but its population was profoundly cosmopolitan. The markets of Chang'an sold goods from the Roman Mediterranean, from Persia, from India, from the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, and from the steppe confederations of Central Asia. The city's eastern market (东市) and western market (西市) were the commercial hubs of the known world, attended by merchants who had traveled for months or years to reach them.
Walking through Chang'an's streets in the 8th century, you might encounter Sogdian merchants from Central Asia speaking a half-dozen languages, Persian Zoroastrian priests conducting religious services, Nestorian Christian monks from Syria, Jewish traders from the Middle East, Korean diplomats, Japanese students, Tibetan officials, and Arab merchants from the Umayyad Caliphate. Each community maintained its own religious institutions, social organizations, and cultural practices within the broader fabric of the city.
This was not tolerance in the grudging, minimum-necessary sense. The Tang state actively facilitated foreign religious practice. Emperor Xuanzong (the one who received Xuanzang) patronized Buddhist monasteries. Emperor Gaozong granted tax privileges to Zoroastrian temples. The famous stele commemorating the entry of Nestorian Christianity into China was erected during Emperor Taizong's reign—an imperial endorsement of a foreign religion carved in stone and displayed prominently.
Why the Tang Was Different
Understanding why the Tang era was so unusually open requires examining several interconnected factors.
The Collapse That Preceded It
The Sui Dynasty (581-618), which preceded the Tang, had reunified China after nearly four centuries of division following the collapse of the Han Dynasty. The Sui and early Tang rulers were acutely aware that the previous era of fragmentation—during which China had been divided among multiple competing states, with the northern and southern regions developing in relative isolation—had weakened Chinese civilization. The memory of that vulnerability shaped Tang cultural policy: a strong, confident empire had nothing to fear from foreign influence.
The Silk Road Was a Two-Way Street
The Tang inherited from the Han a network of overland trade routes connecting China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and ultimately the Mediterranean—the "Silk Road." But the Tang period was the first in Chinese history when these routes were fully integrated into the empire's economic and cultural life, not merely traversed by occasional caravans.
The Tang state actively maintained and protected the Silk Road, establishing military garrisons at key points along the route and providing administrative infrastructure that made long-distance trade viable and safe. Caravans moving goods from Chang'an to Samarkand or Merv encountered a series of Tang-administered waypoints where they could resupply, rest, and conduct business.
This infrastructure investment paid dividends in both directions. Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea flowed westward; glassware, metals, gems, textiles, and—crucially—ideas and cultural practices flowed eastward. The Tang aesthetic, as preserved in surviving artworks and artifacts, shows clear evidence of Central Asian, Persian, and Indian influence in clothing styles, musical forms, decorative motifs, and recreational practices.
Military Confidence
The Tang possessed the most powerful military in the world during most of its existence. Tang armies had conquered the Eastern Turks, defeated the Western Turks, annexed parts of Central Asia, expanded into Vietnam, and maintained tributary relationships with states across East and Southeast Asia. This military dominance provided the security that made cultural openness possible. A society that fears conquest can afford neither tolerance nor cosmopolitanism. The Tang's confidence in its own strength allowed it to absorb foreign influence without feeling threatened by it.
The Cultural Consequences
The results of this openness were extraordinary. Tang culture absorbed, synthesized, and transformed foreign influences into something that was recognizably Chinese yet broader in its influences than any previous Chinese cultural era.
Poetry
Tang poetry is widely considered the apex of Chinese literary achievement. The period produced some 48,000 poems by over 2,000 named poets, collected in the Qing Dynasty's Complete Tang Poems (全唐诗). Many of the most celebrated Tang poems engage directly with themes of travel, cultural encounter, and the cosmopolitan character of Tang society. Li Bai—one of the two most revered Tang poets—spent years traveling through Central Asia and composed poems that show deep familiarity with the landscapes and cultures beyond China's borders.
The most famous of all Tang poems, Changan's Weft Song (渭城曲) by Wang Wei, became one of the most frequently translated Chinese poems in the West precisely because its themes—friendship, farewell, the bittersweet quality of departure and arrival—transcend cultural specificity.
Music and Dance
The Tang court maintained a Department of Music (太乐署) that collected, preserved, and performed musical traditions from across the known world. The "Peacock Flying" (霓裳羽衣曲), perhaps the most famous piece of Tang court music, incorporated Indian melodic elements. Dance forms from Central Asia—particularly the energetic, spinning dances of Sogdian and Turkic origin—became wildly popular at the Tang court, transforming from foreign novelty to courtly essential.
The annual Lantern Festival celebrations in Chang'an featured music, dance, and theatrical performances drawn from across the empire and beyond, creating an annual spectacle of cultural synthesis.
Visual Art and Material Culture
Tang tomb figurines—terracotta sculptures deposited in aristocratic burials—show the remarkable diversity of Tang society. Foreign merchants, Central Asian wrestlers, Korean musicians, African servants, and soldiers in diverse uniforms are all represented in the ceramic record. The famous Tang sancai (三彩, three-color glaze) ceramics display color palettes and decorative motifs influenced by Persian and Central Asian metallurgy.
Buddhist cave temples at Dunhuang, Longmen, and elsewhere contain murals and sculptures that document the artistic cross-pollination of the period. The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, in particular, contain murals that show Central Asian, Indian, Persian, and Chinese artistic elements fused into a distinctive visual language that was itself exported to Korea and Japan.
The An Lushan Rebellion and the Closing
The openness of Tang culture did not end abruptly. It was gradually constrained over a period of decades by a combination of military, political, and cultural factors that together represent one of history's most instructive case studies in how cosmopolitan societies become insular.
The An Lushan Rebellion (755-763) was the turning point. An Lushan was a general of Sogdian-Turkic origin who commanded a large army in the northeast and rebelled against the Tang court with the support of diverse ethnic groups along the frontier. The rebellion lasted eight years, killed an estimated 13 to 36 million people (roughly a third of the empire's population), and fundamentally altered the relationship between the Tang state and its non-Han populations.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, Tang emperors became progressively more suspicious of foreign military commanders, foreign religious institutions, and foreign cultural practices. The An Lushan episode was used—then and subsequently—to argue that openness had vulnerabilities, that the empire had been too welcoming, that its military reliance on non-Han generals had been a fatal error.
This narrative gained force over the following century as the Tang state retreated from its earlier cosmopolitanism. Restrictions on foreign religious practice increased. The state's relationship with its Central Asian tributary network weakened as military resources were concentrated on the northeastern frontier. Cultural production became more self-consciously "Chinese" in its references, less interested in foreign elements.
The dynasty that had welcomed Xuanzang with imperial enthusiasm eventually issued edicts restricting Buddhist monastic activity, culminating in the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution of 845 under Emperor Wuzong—a policy that closed thousands of monasteries and forcibly secularized hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns.
Lessons From the Tang
The Tang story is not simply a morality tale about the dangers of openness, though it has been used that way repeatedly in Chinese history. It is more nuanced—and more useful—than that.
What the Tang demonstrates is that openness and strength are not opposites. The Tang was open because it was confident, and it could be confident because it was powerful. The military security, economic prosperity, and administrative competence of the early Tang created the conditions in which foreign influence could be absorbed, adapted, and incorporated rather than feared.
What the post-rebellion Tang demonstrates is that openness is not a permanent state but a contingent condition—one that depends on continued confidence, continued strength, and continued political will. The conditions that enable cosmopolitanism can erode, sometimes rapidly, and when they do, the reaction can be more extreme than the original openness.
For travelers visiting China today, the Tang legacy is tangible and visible. The Tang-era city walls of Xi'an still stand. The tomb complexes outside the city, with their extraordinary figurines, offer a window into the cosmopolitan world that produced them. The cave temples at Dunhuang, Longmen, and elsewhere preserve the artistic synthesis that was Tang culture's gift to subsequent generations.
Understanding the Tang—that specific combination of confidence and curiosity, strength and openness—provides a lens for thinking about any society that aspires to engage with the world without losing itself. The history suggests that the question is not whether to be open or closed, but whether you are secure enough, confident enough, and clear enough about who you are to absorb the world without being overwhelmed by it.
The Tang, at its height, answered that question with remarkable clarity. Its subsequent contraction suggests that the answer is never permanent.