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One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
Something weird has been happening on China’s internet. One small and vocal corner has been claiming the country’s most famous historical dynasty never existed.
That’s the Tang, which ruled China from 618 AD to 907 AD, a period that saw huge territorial expansion, booming international trade and the flourishing of a high culture envied far beyond its borders. Every child learns about the Tang at school; historical dramas inspired by its palace intrigues are a staple of state TV.
Claiming that the 300-year dynasty was actually a myth is akin to saying the American Civil War never happened, or telling a Brit that the Magna Carta is a fiction. But in recent months it’s been spreading among China’s very online population, posing a headache for a ruling Communist Party obsessed with controlling how its citizens talk about their 5,000 years of fractious and contested history.
It all appears to have started when a history influencer named Qiao Yu deployed some baffling astrological data in a video in May, to “prove” the Tang had never existed.
The outlandish claim has since spread far and wide. Reports later emerged that people were calling up the tourism bureau in Xi’an, the site of the ancient Tang capital, to demand it close down because the dynasty itself had been shown to be a hoax.
The hashtag “the Tang dynasty doesn’t exist” now has tens of millions of views on China’s X-like Weibo.
What motivated the hoax and its spread is hard to pin down. The Tang dynasty has been criticized in the past by Chinese nationalists as its founding emperor was not from the Han ethnic group that makes up most of China’s people. The basis of Qiao Yu’s claim is that the succeeding Song dynasty actually began far earlier than traditionally accepted, therefore canceling out the Tang. The Song dynasty was of ethnic Han origin.
“This is basically insane,” said William Kirby, a professor of China studies at Harvard University, adding that there are facts in history and “the Tang dynasty is definitely one of them.”
“It was much more than a Chinese dynasty. It was an inner Asian dynasty as well,” he said.
As the fallacy spread on social media, China’s powerful and tightly controlled state media waded into the controversy.