Liang dynasty: A Visual History

The Liang dynasty (502-557) was the third of the Southern Dynasties, founded by Xiao Yan, a general who overthrew the Southern Qi. As Emperor Wu he presided over the longest and culturally richest reign of the period, patronising Buddhism (he took monastic vows three times and had to be ransomed by the state), literature and scholarship. In 548 the defector Hou Jing rebelled, besieged Jiankang and left the 86-year-old emperor to die of neglect. Civil war and a Western Wei invasion followed, and the general Chen Baxian founded the Chen dynasty in 557.

When it existed: the era ribbon

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Liang territory

Timeline of the Liang dynasty

1. 502
   Xiao Yan founds the Liang
2. 527
   Emperor Wu's first 'donation' of himself to a monastery
3. 530
   Wen Xuan compiled
4. 547
   Hou Jing defects to the Liang
5. 549
   Jiankang falls; Emperor Wu dies
6. 552
   Hou Jing killed
7. 554
   Western Wei sacks Jiangling
8. 557
   Chen dynasty founded

Emperor Wu

Xiao Yan, a Southern Qi general and cousin of its emperors, took the throne in 502 after a civil war. His reign was frugal and learned: he wrote commentaries on the classics, founded a university, reformed the calendar and law, and made Buddhism virtually a state religion, forbidding animal sacrifice, building monasteries and personally lecturing on sutras. The southern aristocracy enjoyed decades of peace while the north was divided.

Culture

The Liang court produced the Wen Xuan anthology compiled by Crown Prince Xiao Tong, the earliest surviving anthology of Chinese literature, and Liu Xie's Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. Painting, calligraphy and Buddhist sculpture flourished; the Bodhidharma legend places his meeting with Emperor Wu in this era.

Hou Jing

In 547 Emperor Wu accepted the defection of the Eastern Wei general Hou Jing with his lands; when the Liang seemed ready to hand him back, Hou Jing marched on Jiankang, took the city after a five-month siege in 549 and let the emperor die of hunger and neglect. Hou Jing's reign of terror devastated the lower Yangtze until he was killed in 552. Liang princes fought each other; the Western Wei sacked Jiangling in 554 and killed Emperor Yuan; Chen Baxian deposed the last Liang emperor in 557.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Liu Song dynasty (420 to 479)
• Northern Wei (386 to 535)
• Northern Qi (550 to 577)
• Northern Zhou (557 to 581)
• Sui dynasty (581 to 618)
• Eastern Jin dynasty (317 to 420)

Wars of the same era and region

• Goguryeo-Sui War (598 to 614)

8 surprising things about the Liang dynasty

1. Emperor Wu 'gave himself' to a Buddhist monastery four times and each time his ministers paid enormous sums to buy him back.
2. He banned meat and wine at imperial sacrifices, substituting flour models of animals.
3. He is said to have asked Bodhidharma how much merit his temple-building had earned, and been told 'none at all'.
4. Emperor Wu reigned longer than any southern emperor and was one of the very few Chinese rulers to live past 80.
5. The fall of Jiankang in 549 reduced a city of a million to a wasteland where, one chronicle says, only a few hundred families remained.
6. The Wen Xuan anthology was memorised by scholars for a millennium and became a set text in Japan.
7. Hou Jing proclaimed himself emperor of Han in 551 and was killed by his own men the next year; his corpse was reportedly eaten by the people of Jiankang.
8. The Liang gave the Southern Dynasties their cultural high point and their most terrible collapse.

Sources

• Liang dynasty Wikipedia
• Wudi (emperor of Liang dynasty) Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Northern and Southern dynasties Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Mark Edward Lewis, China Between Empires (2009) Harvard University Press

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