Why We Love the Tang Dynasty

Highlighting some of the amazing achievements and highlights of the Tang Dynasty, and considering its eventual decline and fall.

The home of the Tang – the great city of Chang'an, and how it helped the Tang become so prosperous.

Surveying the landscape of the Tang Dynasty, to discover how its artists charted the changes that they saw about them.

The Tang preference for realism in their paintings.

A look at the amazing calligraphy of the Tang which is seen as a highlight of this fabulous dynasty.

The role of Buddhism on the development of China during the Tang Dynasty, and the key figures who raised this religion to new heights.

How the decline and eventual fall of the Dynasty was reflected in its music.

How guiding imperial hands can influence the development of the arts for generations to come.

The changing musical tastes of the Tang Dynasty, which at one point would have put Hollywood musicals to shame.

Understanding the lives of the Tang poets great and small, and learning how life was not always glamorous and successful.

Introducing the poetry of the Tang, and discovering how it evolved over the three hundred year life of the Dynasty.

Discovering how the great fusion of peoples during the Tang Dynasty set the scene for modern China's ethnic and cultural diversity.

How the Tang Dynasty not only attracted people from countries far and wide to settle, but also how the dynasty drew on those countries for ideas, commodities and friendship.

How the Japanese were so obsessed with the success of the Tang Dynasty they shipped they culture back home on an industrial scale.

How the Tang Dynasty became the go-to place for Japanese diplomats and students eager to understand its success.

Love, Marriage and Divorce in the time of the Tang.

Introducing the women of the Tang Dynasty, and how their social status governed their fortune and fate.

How the Tang built a strong bureaucracy to govern a massive state.

Exploring how the vibrant and colorful Tang Dynasty began to create the building blocks for the prosperity and cultural diversity of generations to come.

Introducing the Tang Dynasty - born of strife, but flowering into an amazing cosmopolitan and achieving society.

Exploring the history and charm of the Tang Dynasty, and attempting to discover how, at its height, it became possibly the most prosperous, inter-connected and innovative country in the world, with a rich and influential legacy that survives even to this day.