The trajectory of Gao Pian 高駢 (821–87) is a case history of the powerful and ambiguous role of military governors in late Tang politics. Its underexplored record also reveals one of the most intriguing personalities involved in shaping the turbulent events of ninth-century China. Gao began his military career on the northwestern frontier, where he recovered strategic territories for the Tang. From the gateway to Central Asia, he transferred to the empire’s southernmost border as protector general of Annan (North Vietnam), then successively governed Shandong, Sichuan, the middle and lower Yangzi regions, and finally Huainan, the Tang’s economic heartland centered on the financial and commercial hub of Yangzhou. Having won two wars against the kingdom of Nanzhao and scored major victories against the Tibetan Empire and the Tanguts, as commander-in-chief of the Joint Expeditionary Armies raised to suppress the Huang Chao 黃巢 rebellion (877–84), Gao Pian uncharacteristically allowed the insurgents to cross the Yangzi in 880, precipitating the fall of the capital, the emperor’s flight to Chengdu, and the government’s exile in 881–85.

The portrait that emerges from Gao’s writings and the testimony of contemporaries is no less fraught with complexity than the issue of his ultimate responsibility for the fall of the Tang. A man of many talents and wide-ranging curiosity, Gao was versed in alchemy and the esoteric arts of war, an accomplished engineer, architect of the medieval citadels of Hanoi and Chengdu, and, not least, a respected poet. Some twenty percent of his surviving poems can be labeled “Daoist.” Gao Pian’s Daoist poems project a self-image that is jarringly at odds with his public persona.