"A true man dies without looking back."
It was easy to say. Impossibly hard to do.
For Li Jing, all that later generations said about the Tang people valuing warrior spirit had always been a vague notion at best. But now, seeing that even a thousand years later, people were still searching for the battlefield silhouettes of Great Tang warriors, he finally understood.
A century of flourishing Tang, much like the Han Dynasty before it, had carved a mark into the bloodlines of its descendants. That was why later generations would cross a thousand years of time, all for a single glimpse of Tang's martial spirit.
And with that realization came a surge of regret. 'If only I could personally lead troops to fight such an empire, even if it meant burying my bones beneath the desert sands, it would still be a worthy death.
"The only tragedy of that campaign was the sudden betrayal of the Karluk mercenaries," Li Jing muttered, striking his palm against his hip. To a master tactician, an unexpected mutiny from within was the ugliest possible way to lose a flawless record.
Li Shimin felt much the same. He said nothing, his dark eyes locked onto the black ink-blot expansion of the Abbasid Caliphate as it surged out of the far west. His blood stirred. To clash with a foreign empire and dismantle it. Just thinking about it made his hands tremble with adrenaline.
For the first time in his life, Li Shimin felt a flicker of envy toward his disaster of a descendant. "The later generations joked about it... if you can time-travel, why don't you let me go?! Li Longji, you incompetent fool, you got to fight the Abbasids and you wasted it. Just hand me the reins!"
While the generals were still dissecting tactics, Yan Lide's eyes lit up. He had already begun sketching intently. In painting technique, he could not match his younger brother Yan Liben, but every craft had its own specialty. As Director of Imperial Works, architecture, armor, metallurgy... he knew a bit of everything.
Thus, although the brothers were both drawing feverishly, the focus of their brushes could not have been more different. Yan Liben was capturing a masterpiece of history. Yan Lide was reverse-engineering military blueprints.
A few paces away, Du Ruhui leaned over the transcribed records, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully as he read between the lines. "To the far west of this Arab Empire, there exists another vast and established state... is this the Byzantine Empire mentioned within the records?"
Fang Xuanling dragged a half-forgotten fragment from the depths of his memory. "Has the ancient state of Rome already fallen by this point in history?"
---
If the legendary saga of Zhang Yichao had merely introduced the ministers of Chengdu to the grit of a lone Tang warrior, then the combined histories of Wang Zhongsi and Gao Xianzhi had given them a full masterclass in Tang strategic warfare.
"Now those are ferocious commanders," Zhang Fei muttered, fully convinced. "So you are saying that if you do not wipe out a country, it does not even count as merit?"
To march an army five thousand kilometers across an unmapped wasteland without triggering a single logistical collapse, then dismantle a kingdom upon arrival. To stare down a force larger by over one hundred thousand men and calmly order the vanguard to lower their spears and charge.
Zhang Fei had previously been feeling rather smug about his exploits at Yangping Pass and Hanzhong. But after witnessing these colossal clashes between empires, he suddenly felt slightly embarrassed to bring up his own record. And that endless chain of foreign conquests... it set his vanguard instincts on fire with envy.
Across the table, Zhao Yun worked side by side with Kongming, both men recording every piece of military hardware flashing across the screen in perfect silence. The staggered crossbow formations. The locked spear-walls. The mechanics of overlapping volley fire. The disciplined rotational firing patterns of the missile troops.
The heavy Mo-Dao blades, the brilliant Ming-Guang armor, the heavy infantry resembling moving iron fortresses, and the massive shock cavalry where even the warhorses were encased in steel plating.
As Kongming sketched the equipment designs, a long sigh escaped his lips. His mind instinctively compared the crushing poverty of Shu-Han against the overwhelming material wealth of the future Tang.
Take even a single unit of that elite heavy cavalry. The warhorses alone required constant supplies of premium grain, while the riders had to be selected from among the finest veterans in the army. Then came the industrial burden: forging the armor plates, training master blacksmiths, mastering the intricate weaving of iron rings, and developing entirely new battlefield doctrines. Every stage demanded mountains of silver and years before any real results could emerge.
An empire needed complete mastery over iron production before it could even dream of fielding units of that caliber. By comparison, merely copying the weapons themselves was far cheaper.
Zhao Yun remained silent, but the speed of his brush strokes noticeably increased. As a cavalry commander, he felt as though he were staring directly at the pinnacle of his profession.
---
[Lightscreen]
[One of the most fascinating aspects of the Battle of Talas is how vividly it illustrates a brutal rule of geopolitical history. Small states have no sovereignty. Weak states have no diplomacy.
For the Great Tang Empire, the tactical defeat at Talas amounted to little more than an operational setback. It neither damaged the empire's core infrastructure nor destabilized the heartland. Although Gao Xianzhi was technically stripped of his frontier command after the retreat, Xuanzong still attempted to appoint him as Military Governor of Hexi before ultimately settling on the prestigious title of Grand General of the Right Feathered Forest Guard.
The man who inherited Gao Xianzhi's position was another commander, Feng Changqing. Within a single year of taking office, Feng Changqing marched an iron column straight to the gates of Kingdom Bolor, forcing its king to emerge in chains and surrender, vividly demonstrating to the Western Regions that the crushing authority of the Tang Empire had not weakened in the slightest.
That same year, the Abbasid Caliphate dispatched a grand diplomatic embassy to Chang'an. Relations between the two empires quickly warmed. The Caliphate willingly returned the majority of captured Tang prisoners, formal diplomatic ties were established, and both superpowers returned to doing what they did best: making absurd amounts of money through continental trade.
Meanwhile, the small kingdoms of Central Asia had genuinely believed that by helping the Caliphate repel the Tang, they were securing an era of peace and independence, but reality struck them like a hammer. The Abbasid Caliphate ruled with the iron heel of heavy cavalry, and within only a few short years, the kingdoms of Chach and Kang vanished from the map entirely.
Faced with annihilation, the surviving states of Central Asia formed a desperate coalition barely three years after the Battle of Talas. They dispatched embassies to Chang'an, formally begging to become Tang vassals and pleading for the empire to send troops westward, drive out the Abbasids, and restore the stable rule of the Han people over the region.
Tragically for them, the Tang Empire was already standing on the edge of the An Lushan Rebellion, while the court itself had signed an immensely profitable non-aggression pact with the Black-Robed Tashik. At that moment in history, the strategic attention of the Anxi, Hexi, and Longxi Military Governors was locked entirely on the destruction of the Tibetan Empire. Consequently, the desperate cries of those minor kingdoms were doomed to vanish into history.
In the modern era, the historical impact of the Battle of Talas has been wildly exaggerated by certain Arab historians. For example, Ibn al-Athir's The Complete History boldly claims: "The two great armies clashed at Talas; the Muslim forces annihilated fifty thousand Tang soldiers, captured twenty thousand more, and the pitiful remnants fled back to China." Likewise, al-Maqdisi's Book of Creation and History records: "The Chinese army was hunted down and destroyed in detail, with forty-five thousand slain and twenty-five thousand captured. Their military camps were seized, their children enslaved, and their treasures plundered."
Mind you, these are considered the relatively restrained and authoritative versions. In popular Middle Eastern folklore, the numbers become outright absurd, with claims that the Abbasids annihilated a Tang field army of one hundred thousand men, leaving barely a thousand survivors to crawl home.
The Tang lost the battle. There is no point denying historical reality. But inflating the numbers to this extent is completely ridiculous. If Gao Xianzhi had truly commanded an army of that scale in the Western Regions, the Tang court would not have been discussing frontier defense at all. They would already have been preparing to contest dominion over the entirety of Central Asia.]
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[Server Chat Log]
[HistoryLine: Holy Shit, Tang Dynasty's officer corps was just a cheat code! But man, Gao Xianzhi gets screwed by modern Korean media trying to claim him as their national ancestor.
NoPrettyBoy: For real... I remember seeing a historical documentary produced by South Korea that treated Gao Xianzhi like a national hero, and I was just sitting there bewildered. Bro, your ancestors belong to the lineages of Silla and Baekje! Gao Xianzhi was ethnically Goguryeo. Those are different historical entities
Dunhuang Moon: To make it even funnier, back when Gao Xianzhi was managing his frontier commands, one of his primary methods for personal enrichment was launching slave raids into the Korean peninsula, capturing Silla women, and selling them to the aristocratic markets of Chang'an for a premium.
Tea and Scrolls: So they are crying at the wrong grave, right? Not only is Gao Xianzhi unrelated to their national lineage, but in the context of their ancestors' history, the guy was a literal supervillain?
Tanker_65: Korean historical dramas have always been brain-damaged. Just look at their TV shows. Taizong gets shot in the left eye one moment, the right eye the next. An absolute circus.]
---
Inside Ganlu Hall, the ministers of the Zhenguan era felt zero sympathy for the Central Asian states. Their opportunistic flip-flopping drew nothing more than a cold smirk from Zhangsun Wuji.
"Is this not the perfect illustration of 'small states lack sovereignty, weak states lack diplomacy'?"
Hou Junji barked out a laugh. "The Great Tang gave them a choice. They chose poorly."
Li Shimin, however, paid little attention to their fate. His gaze locked onto the modern commentary, irritation rising. "These peninsula fools... they truly deserve to be put to the sword! Why do you people have a vendetta against my eyes? Did I personally offend your entire bloodline in the future?!"
Zhangsun Wuji stepped forward with a smooth, comforting smile. "Such foolish people cannot match Tang's divine might. All they can do is deceive themselves. Without the breadth of true powers, they will inevitably fade into history. Why trouble Your Majesty over them?"
The logic was sound. Li Shimin's focus snapped back to the strategic map. Gazing at the grand chart hanging on the right wall of Ganlu Hall, tracing the dangerous corridors through Tibet and down into India, the Emperor voiced a sudden tactical hypothesis.
"If we follow Xuanzong-era thinking... destroy Tibet, then use its rear routes to enter India, establish commanderies there, and lock down Central Asia from the south?"
The Hexi strategy had been studied many times. The greatest obstacle to field armies was always supply. Gao Xianzhi led only twenty thousand, not because the Tang lacked manpower, but because the Western Regions were barren. Where would provisions for a massive army come from?
Du Ruhui considered carefully before ruling out the diplomatic angle. "The Silk Road has flourished for centuries. Along it lie countless states without virtue or goodwill. If we advance westward, they will assume we intend to monopolize trade, and rebellion will follow endlessly."
Li Shimin nodded. That matched his own assessment. But managing the geopolitics of a century away was a distant problem. His eyes hardened as he stared at the marked territory on the light screen.
"Regardless of Central Asia, Tibet must be destroyed."
The Tang was non-negotiably committed to controlling the Western Regions, and Tibet functioned like a cancerous growth attached to their spine. If left unchecked, it could strike east to sever the Hexi Corridor, or north to bleed the western commands dry. Without eliminating this threat, the future would play out exactly like Xuanzong's nightmare: hundreds of thousands of elite troops permanently locked down in Longxi and Hexi just to act as a reactive shield, leaving power projection in the deep west dangerously hollow.
Before the council could dive deeper, Hou Junji let out a theatrical groan. "Another famous general, Feng Changqing... Is there a factory producing these guys in the future?"
Li Jing burst into a deep, booming laugh, clapping Hou Junji heavily on the shoulder. "Keep your chin up. It just means you need to work twice as hard to keep your name in the history books."
As for the wild, inflated numbers recorded by Arab historians, Li Shimin dismissed them with a casual flick of his wrist. "They possess the same cultural dignity as those peninsula clowns."
But the light screen had confirmed something that piqued the curiosity of the entire Zhenguan cabinet. "This Byzantine Empire... did it conquer and replace Rome?"
"So even in the West, there is no dynasty that lasts a thousand years."
---
[Lightscreen]
[Now that we have covered these brilliant, deeply tragic frontier commanders, it is time to turn back to the catalyst of the cataclysm: An Lushan.
In November of 755 AD, An Lushan raised the banners of rebellion under the slogan of Cleansing the Court of Corrupt Elements. At the launch of his campaign, he had a strategic choice that mirrored the path taken by Tang Gaozu, Li Yuan, when he first founded the dynasty: seize Taiyuan, cross the Yellow River, and drive a lightning-fast knife straight into the heart of Chang'an.
Theoretically, since An Lushan was racing against time before the other Military Governors could mobilize, a direct sprint to Chang'an was the most efficient, high-reward strategy on the board. But An Lushan had a Ph.D. in psychology, not military strategy. He opted for the most cautious, slow-paced plan available. March south through Hebei, capture Luoyang first, and only then attempt to breach the mountain passes for Chang'an.
While this looks reasonable on paper, his primary motivation was pathetic. At the start of the rebellion, An Lushan lacked the political capability to sway the frontier troops of the Hedong command.
When comparing Wang Zhongsi and An Lushan, aside from the obvious reality that one was a fiercely loyal protector and the other a treasonous snake, there is a massive structural difference in their respective commands. By the time An Lushan was appointed Military Governor of Pinglu, the ancient Militia-Garrison system of the early Tang had collapsed into history.
In 737 AD, Li Longji terminated the traditional system, replacing it with a Professional Volunteer Recruitment model.
By 738 AD, Li Longji declared his recruitment initiative a success: frontier stations were permanently staffed by career, long-service professional soldiers, eliminating the need to rotate seasonal militias from the interior.
It was at this structural flashpoint that the dry rot set in. From that moment forward, the elite soldiers of the three northeastern border commands were entirely localized men. Their salaries, their families' safety, their promotions, their concepts of military honor... all determined by a single signature. An Lushan's.
Through years of calculated infiltration beneath the blind gaze of Xuanzong, An Lushan converted the garrisons of Fanyang and Pinglu into his own private, fanatical mercenary force. Every key post was held by his hand-picked loyalists.
But the Hedong region was a different beast. Though the local soldiers harbored grievances against the civilian bureaucracy in Chang'an, they possessed a visceral hatred for the non-Han barbarian tribes, and their ranks were packed with stubborn Han loyalists who would not bend the knee to a rebel.]