December 16, 755 · Fanyang (near modern Beijing) Theater

The most powerful frontier general in the empire, An Lushan — commander of three great northern military regions — declared that he was marching to remove the corrupt chief minister Yang Guozhong, and led an army of some 150,000 hardened frontier troops south toward the imperial heartland. The peaceful, prosperous interior had no armies to stop them.

December 755 · Luoyang, the eastern capital Theater

An Lushan's veterans swept aside the hastily raised, untrained conscripts sent against them and captured the eastern capital of Luoyang within weeks. Early in 756 An Lushan proclaimed himself emperor of a new dynasty, the Yan. The panicked Tang court then executed its two able generals, Feng Changqing and Gao Xianzhi, for retreating — a disastrous blunder.

July 756 · Tong Pass, gateway to the western capital Theater

The veteran general Geshu Han held the impregnable Tong Pass, the gateway to the western capital Chang'an, with a huge army — and knew that time was on the Tang side. But the court, urged on by the jealous minister Yang Guozhong, ordered him to abandon his defences and attack. Lured into an ambush in the narrow defiles, his army was annihilated and the pass fell.

July 756 · Mawei Post Station, near Chang'an Theater

As the rebels closed in, the aged Emperor Xuanzong fled the capital toward Sichuan with his court and his beloved consort Yang Guifei. At the Mawei post station his own escort mutinied, blaming the war on the Yang family: they killed the chief minister Yang Guozhong and then forced the grief-stricken emperor to have Yang Guifei — the most famous beauty in Chinese history — strangled before them.

756 · Henan (eastern China) Theater

The loyalist officer Zhang Xun held the small city of Yongqiu against overwhelming rebel numbers with a mixture of ferocity and cunning — famously tricking the besiegers into wasting their arrows on straw dummies lowered from the walls at night, then using the harvested arrows against them. His stubborn defence tied down large rebel forces and shielded the rich south.

January 757 · Luoyang Theater

The self-proclaimed emperor An Lushan, by now grotesquely obese, half-blind, and given to violent rages, had become intolerable even to his own household. In January 757 he was murdered in his bed by his own son An Qingxu, in a plot with a trusted eunuch — An Qingxu then seizing the Yan throne.

757 · Suiyang (modern Shangqiu), Henan Theater

In one of the most horrific sieges in history, Zhang Xun held the vital city of Suiyang for ten months against a rebel army many times his size, fighting off hundreds of assaults with a garrison that dwindled from thousands to a few hundred. As starvation set in, the defenders ate the city's horses, then its rats and leather, and finally — in an act that has haunted Chinese memory ever since — its people, beginning with Zhang Xun's own concubine. The city fell at last, and Zhang Xun and his officers were executed.

October – November 757 · Chang'an and Luoyang Theater

The great Tang general Guo Ziyi, reinforced by a corps of fearsome Uyghur cavalry summoned from the steppe, defeated the rebels outside Chang'an and retook the western capital, then drove east to recapture Luoyang as well. To secure Uyghur help the Tang had promised them the plunder of the cities they liberated.

March 759 · Yecheng (Anyang), Hebei Theater

A vast Tang army of some 600,000 men under nine separate generals — the emperor pointedly refusing to appoint a single supreme commander for fear of over-mighty subjects — besieged the rebels in Yecheng. But without unified command the great host was paralysed, and when Shi Siming arrived with a relief army, a sudden violent storm threw both sides into chaos and the huge Tang army disintegrated and fled.

759 – 761 · Luoyang and the North China plain Theater

An Lushan's old comrade Shi Siming murdered the weak An Qingxu, took over the Yan cause, retook Luoyang, and reinvigorated the rebellion, defeating Tang armies and prolonging the war. But history repeated itself: in 761 Shi Siming, harsh and suspicious, was in turn murdered by his own son Shi Chaoyi, and the rebel leadership fell apart once more.

762 – 763 · Luoyang and Hebei Theater

With the rebels demoralised and divided under the incompetent Shi Chaoyi, a Tang army again reinforced by Uyghur cavalry retook Luoyang in 762 and broke the last rebel resistance. Hunted and abandoned, Shi Chaoyi fled north and, cornered, hanged himself early in 763. The rebellion was over.