In the capital, eunuchs ruled in the interests of various cliques.  Several emperors fell victim to them or to the drinking of “elixirs of long life”.

Abroad, the Chinese lost their dominion over Turkestan, for which Uighurs and Tibetans competed.  There is nothing to gain from any full description of events at court.  The struggle between cliques soon became a struggle between eunuchs and literati, in much the same way as at the end of the second Han dynasty.  Trade steadily diminished, and the state became impoverished because no taxes were coming in and great armies had to be maintained, though they did not even obey the government.

Events that exerted on the internal situation an influence not to be belittled were the break-up of the Uighurs (from 832 onward) the appearance of the Turkish Sha-t’o, and almost at the same time, the dissolution of the Tibetan empire (from 842).  Many other foreigners had placed themselves under the Uighurs living in China, in order to be able to do business under the political protection of the Uighur embassy, but the Uighurs no longer counted, and the T’ang government decided to seize the capital sums which these foreigners had accumulated.  It was hoped in this way especially to remedy the financial troubles of the moment, which were partly due to a shortage of metal for minting.  As the trading capital was still placed with the temples as banks, the government attacked the religion of the Uighurs, Manichaeism, and also the religions of the other foreigners, Mazdaism, Nestorianism, and apparently also Islam.  In 843 alien religions were prohibited; aliens were also ordered to dress like Chinese.  This gave them the status of Chinese citizens and no longer of foreigners, so that Chinese justice had a hold over them.  That this law abolishing foreign religions was aimed solely at the foreigners’ capital is shown by the proceedings at the same time against Buddhism which had long become a completely Chinese Church.  Four thousand, six hundred Buddhist temples, 40,000 shrines and monasteries were secularized, and all statues were required to be melted down and delivered to the government, even those in private possession.  Two hundred and sixty thousand, five hundred monks were to become ordinary citizens once more.  Until then monks had been free of taxation, as had millions of acres of land belonging to the temples and leased to tenants or some 150,000 temple slaves.

Thus the edict of 843 must not be described as concerned with religion:  it was a measure of compulsion aimed at filling the government coffers.  All the property of foreigners and a large part of the property of the Buddhist Church came into the hands of the government.  The law was not applied to Taoism, because the ruling gentry of the time were, as so often before, Confucianist and at the same time Taoist.  As early as 846 there came a reaction:  with the new emperor, Confucians came into power who were at the same time Buddhists and who now evicted