ABSTRACT
The decline of the Tang dynasty laid the groundwork for the Five Dynasties period, shaping the nature of the political and military struggle, often shaded with ethnic concerns, for the first half of the tenth century. The southern and western parts of the Tang Empire became peripheral to the struggle for power in North China by the end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth centuries. The North was tightly bound to the Steppe and its politics. Steppe groups had been active in North China for centuries before even the Tang Dynasty was founded. A significant bias of the eleventh-century reading of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period is the assumption of a natural division of loyalties between Chinese and non-Chinese people. The Tang ruling family emerged from the mixed Chinese-Steppe military aristocracy of northern China in the seventh century.
