Taming the Early Tang

Taming the Early Tang is a long alternate-history novel by the web author Qingliao. Serialized on Qidian from September 2007 and completed in November 2008, it runs to roughly 3.64 million Chinese characters and was later retitled The Second Son of the Fang Household in the Early Tang. It was named one of China's ten best online literary works of 2007. The protagonist, a modern middle-school teacher, dies in a car crash and wakes up in the Zhenguan era of Emperor Taizong of Tang, in the body of Fang Yiai, second son of the celebrated chancellor Fang Xuanling. Historically, this young master Fang is destined for execution in the treason case of Princess Gaoyang. To escape that fate, the protagonist feigns madness under the cover of amnesia while using his knowledge of early Tang history and modern management methods to remake the empire from inside the Fang mansion: improving writing implements, introducing anonymous grading in the imperial examinations, experimenting with tax reform and land swaps, founding a military academy and a new army system, developing gunpowder and firearms, reforming Confucian education, and gradually expanding Tang territory through foreign wars and diplomacy. On the romantic side, he becomes involved with Princess Gaoyang (Li Shu), the palace maid Wu Zhao (the future Empress Wu Zetian), Cheng Yaojin's daughter Cheng Luanluan, the maid Lüdè, and Huo Liushuang, disciple of the astrologer Yuan Tiangang, as domestic life intertwines with court intrigue. Narrated in the first person and written in a briskly comic tone, the novel moves between palace power struggles, street life, and institutional reform, and stands as one of the early representatives of the "historical time-travel plus relaxed farming" mode.