Information or intelligence is critical if those in power are to be both well-informed and fully capable of enacting those policies and processes that will reflect proper governance. Perhaps nowhere in the lives of a common people is this better reflected than in those inevitable concerns regarding both ‘death and taxes’. In “The Lushan Rebellion and its Aftermath (755-960)”, Chapter 6 of her book The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600, Valerie Hansen astutely notes that the “[…] the Tang dynasty lost most of its power in 755, the year of the An Lushan rebellion”. If one follows Hansen’s line of reasoning, then one may view this period as one marked by both loss and fragmentation, whereby Emperor Xuanzong and his successors were forced to cede power away from the central authority of the Emperor and towards regional military commanders. These provincial powers became responsible for both local armies and their funding, paid not by a centralized Imperial government but by local taxes. Taxation, difficult even in the very best of times, was further compounded by a lack of tri-annual (land and population) census data which Hansen argues “wrecked the equal-field system”, in that “the government no longer maintained any records concerning the landholdings or output of any individual cultivator”. Individual taxation could no longer be representational (with tri-annual reallocations made) but, rather, simply reflected a part-share within a larger regional quota, with individual tax burdens assigned at the whim of government officials and taxes collected twice-yearly. The overall economic effect proved profound. As Hansen points out, “after the rebellion, the tax base of the empire was less than one-third of what it had been”, with far less flowing into the Imperial coffers. Defence, a matter of life and death, no doubt suffered under a divided, decentralized, and defunded China.  As an aside, one need only look to the recent controversies within our own country surrounding the temporary suspension of the long-form census or the willful purging of huge amounts of archived scientific and statistical data by the previous federal government to see how the loss of information held by a government in power can have unforeseen effects both subtle and far-reaching. One of the poems of the period, written by Bai Juyi, reflects the reality of unfair government privilege. In this poem, a palace marketing system—whereby the price of goods flowing into the palace might be set by palace eunuchs, regardless of the fair market price—is used by two officials to cheat an old charcoal-seller out of an entire cart of charcoal for a mere pittance. Again, this burden was not equally shared by all. Buddhist clergy and monasteries who were themselves tax exempt were viewed by some as posing a burden on an already strained economy—so much so that the year 845 saw an attempt by the Emperor to suppress Buddhism, by returning the clergy to the laity and in confiscating or re-purposing monastic wealth and properties. One may well view this moment as analogous to the blatant ‘cash grab’ seen with confiscation of Catholic wealth by the English monarch King Henry VIII. The indigenous Chinese conception of death was itself not free from material concern, with one’s spirit traveling to the Underworld “in one’s own body”, and enduring the physical torments of Hell. Hansen highlights a shift in Chinese Buddhist culture, whereby charitable contributions or offerings to the living Buddhist community (and not to one’s dead ancestor) that the greater merit might be accumulated towards the benefit of one’s departed kin. This proved a key alternate funding model for monastic communities.