Tang Dynasty Timeline

Although Bi Sheng's movable type printing in the 11th century was innovative, woodblock printing that became widespread in the Tang remained the dominant method of printing in China until the more advanced printing press from Europe became widely used in East Asia.

Image source: Woodblock printing

As written by Zhen Chuan and others in the Tang, the thyroid glands of sheep and pigs were successfully used to treat goitres; thyroid extracts were not used to treat goitre patients in the West until 1890.

One of the world's oldest surviving printed documents is a miniature Buddhist dharani sutra unearthed at Xi'an in 1974, dated roughly from 650 to 670, demonstrating early woodblock printing during the Tang.

Image source: History of printing in East Asia

Two 7th-century monks, Zhi Yu and Zhi You, visited the court of Emperor Tenji of Japan, whereupon they presented a gift of a south-pointing chariot that they had crafted.

Image source: South-pointing chariot

A 0.9 m tall mechanical wine server created during the early 8th century took the shape of an artificial mountain, carved out of iron and resting on a lacquered-wooden tortoise frame, showcasing Tang mechanical ingenuity.

The Tang mathematician, mechanical engineer, astronomer, and monk Yi Xing invented the world's first clockwork escapement mechanism in 725, drawing inspiration from earlier mechanical gear systems of Zhang Heng and Ma Jun.

Image source: Yi Xing

By 729, the team led by scholar Gautama Siddha, an ethnic Indian born in Chang'an, had finished compiling the Treatise on Astrology of the Kaiyuan Era, an astrological encyclopaedia.

The 8th-century author Lu Yu, known as the Sage of Tea, wrote a treatise on the art of drinking tea called The Classic of Tea, codifying Chinese tea culture. During the Tang, wrapping paper was also used as folded and sewn square bags to hold and preserve the flavor of tea leaves.

Image source: Lu Yu

The cartographer Jia Dan made a sophisticated map carved on a stone stele with a grid scale of 100 li; a Chinese map of 1137 is similar in complexity to Jia Dan's work.

Image source: Jia Dan

It was during the Tang dynasty that a strong Chinese maritime presence could be found in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, into Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt, Aksum, and Somalia in the Horn of Africa.

The Tang diplomat Wang Xuance travelled to Magadha, in present-day northeast India, during the 7th century, strengthening diplomatic ties between Tang China and Indian states.

An embassy sent in 643 by Boduoli was identified as Byzantine ruler Constans II Pogonatos, and further embassies were recorded as being sent into the 8th century.

After Silla and Japan reopened renewed hostilities in the late 7th century, most Japanese maritime merchants chose to set sail from Nagasaki towards the mouth of the Huai River, the Yangtze River, and even as far south as Hangzhou Bay in order to avoid Korean ships in the Yellow Sea.

Each year the emperor had labourers carve 1000 blocks of ice from frozen creeks in mountain valleys, each block measuring roughly 0.9 m × 0.9 m × 1.1 m, for use in food preservation and cooling.

In an age before Neo-Confucianism and figures such as Zhu Xi, Buddhism had begun to flourish in China during the Northern and Southern dynasties, and became the dominant ideology during the prosperous Tang era.

Image source: Chinese Buddhism

An 8th-century court official allegedly had a serpent-shaped structure called the 'ale grotto' built on the ground floor using a total of 50,000 bricks, which featured bowls from which each of his friends could drink.

The High Tang period (c. 713–766) is regarded as the golden age of Chinese poetry; later, Yan Yu conferred the poetry of this era with canonical status within the classical poetic tradition.

Image source: Tang poetry

Short story fiction flourished during the Tang; Yingying's Biography by Yuan Zhen (779–831) was widely circulated in his own time and by the Yuan dynasty became the basis for Chinese opera.

Image source: Yingying's Biography

Before the persecution of Buddhism in the 9th century, Buddhism and Taoism were both accepted. The prominent status of Buddhism began to decline as the dynasty and central government declined during the late 8th century to 9th century.

Image source: Persecution of Buddhists

The Tang period was placed into the enormous 294-volume universal history text of the Zizhi Tongjian, edited, compiled, and completed in 1084 by a team of scholars under the Song dynasty Chancellor Sima Guang.

Image source: Zizhi Tongjian

The Tang continued the Northern Zhou fubing system of divisional militia, in which farmer-soldiers served in rotation from the capital or frontier in order to receive appropriated farmland.

By the late 7th century, the fubing troops began abandoning military service and the homes provided to them in the equal-field system, weakening the traditional militia structure of the Tang military.

The rise of regional military governors known as jiedushi during the 9th century undermined the civil order that had sustained centralized Tang governance.

Image source: Jiedushi

Although natural calamities and rebellions stained the reputation and hampered the effectiveness of the central government, the early 9th century is nonetheless viewed as a period of recovery for the Tang.

The dynasty and central government went into decline by the latter half of the 9th century; agrarian rebellions resulted in mass population loss and displacement, widespread poverty, and further government dysfunction.

Image source: Huang Chao Rebellion

After the fall of the Tang, southern China remained splintered into various small kingdoms until most of China was reunified under the Song dynasty (960–1279).

Image source: Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period

The dysfunction caused by rebellions and regional warlords ultimately ended the dynasty in 907, closing nearly three centuries of Tang rule over China.

So significant was the population loss of the late Tang that half a century later, jinshi examination candidates were required to write an essay on the causes of the Tang's decline.