Tang Xuanzong(李隆基): The Emperor Who Made Laozi a God
Paul Peng
He was the ruler of the greatest empire on earth. Chang’an was the largest city in the world. His poets—Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei—were writing the finest verse in the Chinese language. His armies guarded frontiers thousands of miles from the capital.
And he spent a significant portion of his reign making sure that every subject in his empire knew the following fact: Laozi, the author of the Tao Te Ching, was his personal ancestor.
Li Longji (李隆基, 685–762 CE), known to history as Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, did more to elevate the status of Taoism than any ruler before or since. He did not merely patronize the religion. He transformed it into a state cult, with Laozi at its centre as both a god and a blood relative of the imperial house. He ordered temples built in every prefecture. He made the Tao Te Ching compulsory reading for civil service candidates. He claimed to have seen Laozi in his dreams—twice—and had the dream recorded and circulated throughout the empire. This was not philosophy. This was the manufacture of a state theology.
The Family Business
Xuanzong did not invent the idea that the Tang imperial house was descended from Laozi. He inherited it. Li Yuan, the first Tang emperor, posthumously honoured Laozi as his imperial ancestor in 620 CE. Li Shimin, Taizong, formally declared that “the origin of our clan traces back to the official under the pillar of the Zhou dynasty.” Gaozong, Xuanzong’s grandfather, conferred on Laozi the posthumous title “Supreme Mysterious Primordial Emperor”—an unprecedented honour that placed a philosopher in a category that did not previously exist: a non-royal person who had become royal through the sheer force of his wisdom. But Xuanzong went further than all of them combined.
The Dream
Sometime in the early years of his reign, Xuanzong announced that he had had a dream. In the dream, Laozi appeared to him in his true form and delivered “endless blessings, with virtuous words lingering in my ears,” promising “extraordinary celebrations” and “spiritual favours to come.” Later, Laozi appeared again through physical manifestations: a stone turtle that spoke divine words, a withered cypress tree at the Bozhou temple that suddenly revived. Xuanzong responded with a series of decrees that transformed the religious landscape of the empire.
The Construction of a State Cult
The programme was comprehensive. Temples: Xuanzong ordered the establishment of Temples of the Mysterious Primordial Emperor in both capitals and in every prefecture throughout the empire, each conducting regular Taoist rituals. Schools: Attached to these temples were “Schools for Venerating the Mysterious” where the curriculum consisted of four texts: the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi, the Wenzi, and the Liezi. Students were eligible to sit for a special Taoist track of the civil service examination. Portraits: Xuanzong ordered the painting of Laozi’s true portrait based on his dream vision, distributed to Kaiyuan Temples in every prefecture. Liturgy: Xuanzong personally presided over the formulation of the rites for sacrificing to Laozi—the location, the costumes, the offerings, the musical pieces. An emperor was now acting as the chief liturgist of a Taoist cult. Parents: Not content with deifying Laozi alone, Xuanzong posthumously honoured Laozi’s mother as “Empress of the Primordial Heaven” and his father as “Emperor of the Primordial Heaven,” with temples built for regular sacrifices.
The Book That Became a State Scripture
The most consequential of Xuanzong’s reforms concerned the Tao Te Ching itself. He declared that the book “should be kept in every household, whether of scholars or commoners,” and ordered that it be placed “above all other classics.” He reduced the number of examination questions on the Confucian canon and added questions on the Tao Te Ching—the first time in Chinese history that mastery of Laozi was a formal requirement for entry into the imperial bureaucracy. Finally, Xuanzong personally annotated the Tao Te Ching and promulgated his commentary to officials and academic institutions with an imperial decree commanding that they study it. The Son of Heaven now claimed to be the supreme interpreter of the Way.
The Irony of State Taoism
There is a tension at the heart of Xuanzong’s project that his decrees do not acknowledge. Laozi had written: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” He had written: “When the great Way is abandoned, benevolence and righteousness appear. When wisdom and cleverness emerge, great hypocrisy follows.” And yet his self-proclaimed descendant was spending vast sums of state revenue to build temples to him, establish schools devoted to his book, paint his portrait on silk, and add questions about his teachings to the highest-stakes examination in the empire.
Xuanzong’s State Taoism was the most elaborate and expensive tribute ever paid to a philosopher who had said that simplicity was the highest value and that the sage “does not display himself, therefore he shines.” Perhaps Xuanzong was a genuine believer who saw no contradiction between the message and the machinery. Or perhaps he was a politician who recognised that a state religion anchored in a divine ancestor was more useful than a state philosophy of impersonal virtue. The Tao Te Ching says: “The sage has no constant mind. He takes the mind of the people as his mind.” Xuanzong gave the people Laozi. Whether Laozi would have wanted to be given is a question the emperor did not ask.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
The Taoism that Xuanzong built was a state cult, centred on the person of the emperor and the legitimacy of his dynasty. It did not survive the fall of the Tang. But the institutional structures it created—the network of temples, the system of ordination, the standardisation of ritual, the canonisation of texts—provided the framework within which later Taoist movements could develop. The Zhengyi tradition, centred at Tianshi Fu on Longhu Mountain, is not a direct descendant of Xuanzong’s imperial cult. But it inherited the world that Xuanzong helped build: a world in which Taoism was a public religion with temples, priests, and liturgies, not merely a private philosophy of withdrawal. The Zhengyi priest who performs a ritual today does so in a tradition that Xuanzong, by making Taoism a state enterprise, helped make possible.
What the Emperor Left Behind
Xuanzong’s reign ended in catastrophe. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755 CE shattered the Tang empire. Chang’an fell. The emperor fled to Sichuan. His beloved consort Yang Guifei was executed by his own guards. He abdicated in disgrace and died a broken old man in 762 CE. The temples he built were destroyed or repurposed. The examination reforms were reversed. But the idea that Laozi was a god—not just a philosopher but a divine being worthy of temples and sacrifices—survived. And the Tao Te Ching, which Xuanzong had tried to turn into a state scripture, survived too, in a form that no emperor could control. The man who had tried to make Laozi into an ancestor made sure that Laozi would never be forgotten. The empire fell. The book remained.
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