ABSTRACT
A golden age of poetry had dawned—an anthology of nearly 50,000 T'ang Dynasty poems was later assembled—and it was in the pear garden of the imperial palace that the first drama was performed. In Europe the Holy Roman Empire was to end an age of disorder, only to collapse itself. But the Tang Dynasty was to endure for three centuries, to take the frontiers of China almost to Samarkand in the west, to Manchuria and Korea again in the north, and Yunnan and Annam in the south. In 1962 Lu Ting-yi, then Chinese Minister for Propaganda, commissioned a biography of Wei Cheng, personally edited the draft, wrote a preface to it, and then saw that it was widely distributed both inside and outside the Communist Party. A few days after he had assassinated his brothers, he summoned Wei Cheng, the political adviser of the murdered heir-apparent, and sternly taxed him with sowing discord among the imperial princes.
