One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed

There are primary sources. There are archeological sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianling_Mausoleum There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sources. Among others, Japanese histories detail the journeys of emissaries to the Tang Court: https://web.archive.org/web/20260315181529/https://japansoci... So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously. But I'll give it credit for hijacking a genuinely interesting scholarly premise: What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed. It is of rather mythic proportions; later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy. And there is very little evidence to support its existence. The Shang Dynasty is also supported by rather scant evidence -- and is also mythic, though obviously less so than the Xia. Worth noting that both the Xia and Shang are exceedingly ancient -- roughly 2000 BC to 1000 BC between them -- unlike the Tang, which fell around 900 AD and is thus middle-of-the-pack by Chinese dynastic standards.

Its a Chinese equivalent of the phantom time theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory Its just as silly as phantom time and covers almost exactly the same period. The motive is possibly racist which makes it more sinister.

The same sort of arguments are playing out in the US, albeit on a shorter timescale. I couldn't say when it started, but it's extremely depressing that the history section in most general bookstores is just a locus for narrative warfare rather than scholarship. Of course, this phenomenon is by no means unique to these two countries. I know a Japanese author who has a small but dedicated following for his argument that nuclear weapons don't exist: https://books.google.com/books/about/Death_Object.html?id=Mw...

A much better article about the phenomenon: https://open.substack.com/pub/ramble/p/the-tang-dynasty-was-...

"The negationist proposition, in the age in which it is being advanced, cannot therefore be truly denied, since everything, all of us, including those who reject it, have passed over, whether we like it or not, into an age where there is no longer any objective recourse. The proposition, therefore, can be rejected only by a kind of mirror denial. And that is where its victory lies - though in fact it is not its victory, but the victory of real time over the present, over the past, over any form whatsoever of logical articulation of reality." - Jean Baudrillard