唐宪宗皇帝

The Yuanhe restoration: fifteen years of campaigning that brought the autonomous circuits back under the court, including the night raid through a snowstorm that took Caizhou in 817. It did not outlast him. He was killed in his own bedchamber in 820, almost certainly by the eunuchs who then chose his successor.

The campaigns were paid for out of the salt and tea monopolies and fought with armies the court raised itself, and for a decade the provincial governors submitted census registers and taxes again. Within a few years of his death the northeast had gone back to inheriting its own commands.

Consort Guo was the granddaughter of Guo Ziyi, the general who had saved the dynasty in the rebellion, and Xianzong never made her empress — the histories say he was wary of a family that powerful. She became empress dowager when her son took the throne and outlived five emperors in the palace.