Where Is Chang'an?

In the fourteenth year of Tianbao, An Lushan raised his army, and the fault lines in the flourishing Tang dynasty split wide open. This was a war in which everyone lost something. Xuanzong lost his empire and the woman he loved. Guo Ziyi wept in anguish amid the bloodshed at Tong Pass. Yan Zhenqing wrote the Draft of a Memorial for My Nephew through tears of blood. Zhang Xun exhausted the last of his humanity in the besieged city of Suiyang. Li Bai and Du Fu witnessed Chang'an's fall and the people's cries of anguish as they fled.

This is a tragic song of flesh and blood, sung by countless ordinary people. A blacksmith from Fanyang fled with his family's ancestral sword manual. An old eunuch at Mawei Station secretly kept one of the Noble Consort's jade earrings. A musician from Luoyang's Taichang Temple sank the chime bells beneath the water. The soldiers of Suiyang forgot their own names before they died. The rebellion was eventually put down, but the abyss of regional warlordism followed, and the Great Tang barely survived amid the embers. Yet when the sun set over Chang'an, artisans who had fled south fired breathtaking underglaze colors on the banks of the Xiang River, sending poetry and new life across the seas to distant lands.