A salt smuggler who failed his exams crowned himself emperor in Chang'an
Huang Chao came from a family grown rich smuggling salt past a state monopoly. After repeatedly failing the imperial examinations he turned rebel, and in 881 his army took the Tang capital Chang'an, sent the emperor fleeing and made Huang ruler of a new Qi dynasty. The Tang never recovered its power.
By the ninth century the Tang dynasty, founded in 618, had long since passed its peak. It had rebounded after the An Lushan Rebellion, even destroying the Uyghur Khaganate in the 840s, but provincial military governors grew powerful and undisciplined, and resentment spread among poor farmers, overtaxed landowners and merchants. Large salt-smuggling networks joined the discontented, and they formed the backbone of rebellions led by Wang Xianzhi and Huang Chao.
Huang came from Yuanqu, in what is now Shandong. Accounts credit him with skill in swordsmanship, riding and archery and some ability as a writer, and he used his family fortune to gather desperate men around him. After joining Wang's revolt in the mid-870s, he split away, marched south and captured Guangzhou, then turned north and seized Chang'an in 881. Declaring himself emperor of Qi, he made his wife, Lady Cao, empress, and tried at first to keep the Tang bureaucracy running, retaining lower-ranking officials who registered their submission. Several Tang generals briefly switched sides before reverting.
The tide turned with the Shatuo chieftain Li Keyong, a former Tang renegade who offered his services against Qi. In spring 883 he and other Tang commanders defeated a Qi army reported at 150,000 men, and that summer Huang abandoned the capital and fled east. Beaten again, including by former subordinates such as Zhu Wen and Shang Rang who had gone over to the Tang, he retreated into Langhu Valley in Shandong.
His end is murky. One account says his nephew Lin Yan killed him on 13 July 884; the New Book of Tang says Huang took his own life so his men could surrender. Some suspect a decoy let him escape, and legends in the following Five Dynasties period claimed he lived on as a Buddhist monk. A line from one of his poems, about a capital full of soldiers in golden armour, later gave the 2006 film Curse of the Golden Flower its Chinese title.
Source: Huang Chao
