The Transition Of Intellectuals’ Encounters And Memory Writing After The An-shi Rebellion

The An-Shi Rebellion was the turning point of the Tang dynasty from prosperity to decline,causing internal and external troubles as well as affecting countless individual scholars and commoners,whose fate and future were profoundly changed by the war.The Tang dynasty tomb records provide a rich and detailed case study,which makes it possible to analyze from a microscopic perspective the transformation of the intellectuals’ career,daily life,death and burial,and the writing of tomb records after the An-Shi Rebellion.The significance of the An-Shi Rebellion for the intellectuals’ career was the acceleration of social mobility.After the outbreak of the war,the promotion and deportation of scholars by the Tang and Yan regimes accelerated the mobility and differentiation of the intellectuals.On the one hand,the An-shi Rebellion had a great impact on the normal career of the intellectuals.The war broke down the state apparatus and disrupted the normal career process of the intellectuals,who were unable to pursue their careers,either in the mountains or in seclusion,and a large number of intellectuals were killed or captured in the war,leading to the decline of their families.On the other hand,a group of intellectuals also made a leap up the hierarchy during the war.The An-Shi Rebellion provided an opportunity for martial artists and lower and middle class scholars who were attached to the Shogunate to rise to the top.In the middle and late Tang dynasties,joining the Shogunate gradually became a fast track for the intellectuals to reach the top of the career ladder.The An-Shi Rebellion affected the normal daily life of the intellectuals.After the outbreak of the An-Shi Rebellion,the war forced the intellectuals to migrate,and through the examination of the tomb records,we found that,in addition to the practical need to escape from the war,political factors were also an important reason affecting the choice of the intellectuals to migrate.The war and migration further affected the stability of the families of the intellectuals,leading to a crisis of livelihood,so the intellectuals chose to join friends and relatives,self-reliance,and join the curtain as officials to relieve economic pressure.The changes in the real life also affected the mentality of the intellectuals.The main changes were the attitude of the intellectuals towards the way of government and the focus of their interest in Buddhist faith.After the outbreak of the war,the pressure on the conventional way of joining the government grew,while the quick promotion and generous pay of the Shogunate became known to the intellectuals,and some of them gradually became less resistant to joining the Shogunate because of the pressure to make a living.In addition,due to the decline of large Buddhist temples as a result of the war,the intellectuals’ interest in Buddhism gradually shifted from the complex and abstract legalism to the straightforward and direct Zen Buddhism.The An-Shi Rebellion affected the death and burial of intellectuals.The An-Shi Rebellion led to the death of a large number of people in the Tang Dynasty and further affected the forms of burial of intellectuals.The war caused a dramatic decline in the population of the Tang Dynasty in both direct and indirect ways.Due to the changes in social environment caused by the war,the form of burial was forced to change after the death of the intellectuals due to the real conditions such as obstruction of the way of return,lack of human and material resources,difficulty in finding the dead body,and the restrictions of social factors such as laws and beliefs,which were manifested in the prevalence of the right burial and the gradual popularity of soul-recruiting burial.The An-Shi Rebellion affected the emotional world of the intellectuals after death.As a bridge between the living and the deceased,tomb records contain the emotional attachment of the living.Take the tombstones of intellectuals involved in the An-Shi Rebellion as an example,the images of An Lushan and Shi Siming mainly appear as "Hu" and "Rebel" in the tombstones.The writers of the epitaphs were influenced by the metaphor of the rise of the Tang court and the idea of reviving national prestige,which led to the evolution of the An Lushan Rebellion at the end of Tianbao into the "An-shi" Rebellion in the epitaphs.