Repercussions

The rebellion shattered the power, wealth, and self-confidence of Tang China at the very peak of its glory. Though the dynasty survived for another century and a half, it never recovered its former strength, prosperity, or control over its own territory — the golden age of the mid-Tang was gone forever. The An Lushan Rebellion is traditionally seen as the great turning point of the Tang and of medieval Chinese history, dividing the brilliant early dynasty from its long, troubled decline.

The war, and the famines and epidemics it unleashed, caused staggering loss of life. The imperial census recorded a fall from about 53 million people before the war to roughly 17 million after it — a drop of some two-thirds. Even allowing that much of this reflects the collapse of the state's ability to count its people rather than literal deaths, the human catastrophe was immense. By some interpretations of the census figures, the rebellion ranks among the deadliest events in human history; more cautiously, it was one of the great demographic and administrative catastrophes of the medieval world.

Too weak to destroy the surrendering rebel generals, the Tang confirmed them as hereditary military governors (jiedushi) of the north-east, effectively autonomous of the central government. Real power devolved to these regional warlords across much of the empire. The semi-independent warlord provinces created by the war's settlement hollowed out Tang central authority for the rest of the dynasty and led directly to the fragmentation of the empire and the chaotic era of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms after 907.

To fight the rebellion, the Tang stripped its western frontiers of troops, and it lost control of the Central Asian territories and the Silk Road oases it had dominated. The Tibetan Empire seized the opportunity, even briefly capturing Chang'an itself in 763. The Tang retreat from Central Asia left the region open to Tibetan and, ultimately, Islamic influence, permanently ending Chinese power in the far west and reshaping the balance of Inner Asia.

The dynasty survived only by calling in the Uyghur cavalry, whom it paid with plunder, tribute, and humiliating trade terms. The proud empire that had once dominated the steppe now depended on steppe mercenaries and bought their favour at great cost. The reliance on the Uyghurs marked a lasting shift in the balance between China and the steppe peoples, and the burdensome relationship strained the Tang economy for decades until the Uyghur khaganate itself collapsed in 840.

The rebellion was witnessed and mourned by the two greatest poets in Chinese history, Du Fu and Li Bai, whose verses on the suffering, exile, and ruin of the war — Du Fu's 'the state is shattered, though the mountains remain' — are among the most beloved and moving in the language. The literature of the An Lushan years gave Chinese civilisation some of its most enduring works, and the tragedy of Yang Guifei, immortalised in Bai Juyi's 'Song of Everlasting Sorrow,' became one of its central romantic myths.

The devastation of the north and the loss of central control forced a fundamental restructuring of the Tang state: the old equal-field land system and militia armies collapsed, replaced by professional armies, new taxes like the salt monopoly and the twice-yearly tax, and a shift of China's economic centre of gravity toward the Yangtze and the south. The fiscal and military transformations forced by the rebellion reshaped Chinese government and society, and the enduring shift of population and wealth to the south set the pattern for the rest of imperial Chinese history.

By the scale of the census collapse it produced, the An Lushan Rebellion is frequently ranked among the deadliest conflicts in all of human history, cited alongside the world wars and the Mongol conquests — a distinction that, however uncertain the figures, marks the sheer magnitude of the catastrophe. The rebellion stands in world history as a byword for the fragility of even the mightiest civilisation, and a reminder of how swiftly a golden age can collapse into one of the great tragedies of the human record.