The Tang dynasty did not collapse after An Lushan’s rebellion. It was too big. Rather, it died a slow and painful death, like Yahoo after the dotcom bubble.
The number one thing was to put down the rebellion. But how? The central government was so weak. So it… created more colonies. Got the colonies to fight each other. Encouraged subordinates to kill their governor and become governors themselves. Armed Al-Qaeda to fight the Soviets.
By this point, the emperors had developed PTSD from the generals. If I give them military power, they will surely rebel. Who could they hand command of the imperial army to, then? They decided to hand it to the eunuchs. Okay great, now the people around you have the power. You have none. The eunuchs now got to decide who would be the next emperor. A few emperors were killed by eunuchs during power transitions. One emperor tried to fight back. The eunuchs imprisoned him and massacred the rest of the court officials. The emperor became a mascot.
The colonies owned the land, the eunuchs owned the palace. What about the remaining central officials? They split into Gryffindor and Slytherin and fought among themselves. The Muggle-borns vs the pure-bloods. Whichever faction seized power would banish the members of the other to Azkaban. They would also overturn the other faction’s policies, whether they made sense or not.
One time, a foreign general offered to surrender a city to the empire. The faction in power thought it would lead to war, so they rejected the offer. Then the other faction came to power and tried to take the city back. Then the original faction returned to power and abandoned the attempt.
What about the emperors themselves? They all got into alchemy. Maybe they wanted to recreate the alien teleportation device. The bad news is, it is currently 2026 and humans still haven’t figured out teleportation yet. The second bad news is, the pills they consumed contained mercury, arsenic, and lead. Yum. They would literally be safer throwing darts at the periodic table and consuming whichever elements they hit.
Anyway, the dynasty dragged on for another hundred years, then it was struck by yet another rebellion and usurped by Zhu Wen.
In the next fifty years, China saw five short-lived dynasties with 14 emperors. They changed emperors like I upgrade my iPhones. Their motto was A-B-K. Always be killing. We had son kills father, brother kills brother, subordinate kills boss, friend kills friend. During that period, all pretense of civilization went out the window.
Zhu Wen liked to sleep with his daughters-in-law. But we’ve seen enough crazy guys already, so in the grand scheme of things he was kind of meh. The consequential one was Shi Jingtang. To become emperor, he asked the Khitan for help. Then he gave them a piece of important land in exchange. The land was like a natural Great Wall. Without it, China couldn’t defend itself against the north for over 400 years.
There were also 10 kingdoms in the south. The only things I remember about them are a great poet and a kingdom that forced all its officials to castrate themselves. (And you thought 996 was bad…) They were so small and insignificant that I’m going to cover them like Yakko’s World:
Former Shu, Later Shu,
and the kingdom Ma Chu,
Yang Wu, Wuyue and Min.
Southern Han, Northern Han,
and the state of Jingnan,
Southern Tang and that’s the ten!