Zhu Wen and the Forging of Medieval China

In the dying decades of the Tang dynasty, as famine swept the Yellow River valley and the empire's ancient aristocratic order crumbled under its own weight, a classics teacher's son from a forgotten county in central China began the journey that would end with the destruction of one of history's greatest civilisations, and the founding of another. Zhu Wen was a rebel, a defector, a warlord, a regicide, and an emperor, and his career spanned every register of human violence and institutional ambition that the most turbulent half-century in Chinese history had to offer.

This book traces the full arc of Zhu Wen's extraordinary life: from the poverty and humiliation of his boyhood in Liu Chong's household to the rebel armies of Huang Chao, from his calculated defection to the Tang to the twenty-five years of military and administrative construction at Kaifeng that produced the most formidable regional power in the Central Plains, and from the massacre of the Tang aristocracy at Baima Station to the jade seals of the Later Liang dynasty pressed into his hands in the Luoyang palace. It is also the story of everything he destroyed along the way, and of the world that his destruction, unwillingly and unknowingly, made possible.

Written with the narrative urgency of the best historical writing and the analytical depth the subject demands, this is the definitive account of the man who ended the Tang and opened the door to the Song.

Seán Patrick Etchingham is an Irish historian and writer whose fascination with the great turning points of Chinese imperial history developed during years of research into the medieval world's most consequential but least-examined dynastic transitions. Born in County Clare and educated in history and classical studies, he has spent the better part of a decade tracing the human stories concealed within the administrative and military records of China's Five Dynasties period. He brings to his writing a particular interest in the relationship between individual biography and structural historical change, and in the specific lives ? violent, visionary, morally complex ? that the collapse of great empires tends to produce.