Yuan Tiangang, a famous metaphysicist in the early Tang Dynasty, once asked Li Shimin, Emperor Taizong of Tang, to retire to his hometown. Before leaving, Emperor Tang Taizong asked Yuan Tiangang to calculate when the Tang dynasty would fall, and Yuan Tiangang answered “when the pig is on the tree”. After hearing this answer, Emperor Tang Tizong was satisfied to let him go, because he did not know that this “pig” was not the other “Zhu”.
Besides being good at divination for himself, Yuan Tiangang also once told the fortune of Wu Zetian, who was born in 624 AD. Although Yuan Tiangang only saw the young Wu Zetian at that Time, he concluded through the science of face reading that Wu Zetian would be able to achieve great things in the future. As luck would have it, Wu Zetian made herself king in 690 AD by replacing Tang with Zhou. She also became a very famous queen in Chinese history.
Yuan Tiangang was also invited by Emperor Taizong of Tang to join the government, and together with other Taoists, he also deduced the famous “Push Back Diagram”. Therefore, Yuan Tiangang has his own secret and exclusive skills in divination. It was because Yuan Tiangang was well versed in divination and prediction, and he had been ordered to predict the end of history more than 2,000 years later.
That’s why he knew that leaving was the best way out for him, and when he finished his last job for Emperor Tang Taizong, he resolutely asked to retire to his hometown. This would not only remove The Emperor‘s wariness, but also give himself a happy ending. So how could he offend Emperor Tang Taizong by saying something that would make him unsatisfied with his answer before he left?
Many people, after hearing the answers Yuan Tiangang uttered, would default to the assumption that he was complimenting Li Shimin, and perhaps preserving himself. Not to mention whether Yuan Tiangang was really able to calculate the time when the Tang Dynasty’s qi was near, even if he could calculate all this, he did not dare to act in front of the supreme ruler. So he said that when the pigs are on the tree, the Tang Dynasty will be destroyed. But how could a pig go up a tree? Tang Taizong naturally believed that the Tang Dynasty would continue for thousands of generations.
However, this “pig” is not his “Zhu”, Yuan Tiangang actually did not deceive Tang Taizong. Since the middle of the Tang Dynasty, the centralization of power had been greatly reduced after the formation of vassalism. Various forces had risen. In 904 AD, when Emperor Miao of Tang gave the throne to Zhu Wen. Zhu Wen also became the founding emperor of the Later Liang. From that time on, the Tang Dynasty really disappeared from history, and the era of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms had just arrived.
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