Xunwu Gate Incident In The Epigraphs

Xunwu Gate Incident(玄武门之变)which happened in the ninth year of WuDe(武德)is very important in the Tang history. Before the incident, prince and Qin king convened a lot people to against the other. At last, Qin king killed prince, and took the power. On the surface, this incident looks like just a struggle between prince and Qin king. In fact, it’s a conflict between the Guanlong Group and the Shandong Group.Because it’s a struggle between two brothers just for power which was disrepute, so it left very few records in the documents. But fortunately, there are some epigraphs, which kept records about the incident, providing helps to the study. However many researches on epigraphs just used epigraphs for the case study of persons related to the incident but few researches made the overall awareness for the incident. Hence this article tries to infer that the owners of the epigraphs should be the group of Guanlong or Shandong by combing three aspects of informations--prefecture, official positions of the owner and his fathers—of both sides, Prince Mansion and Qin King Mansion, in Xunwu Gate Incident. Through the analysis and comparing the documents, this article wants to point out the change of the power of the Guanlong Group and the Shandong Group and the development direction of the Shandong Group after the Xunwu Gate Incident.This paper includes the introduction and three chapters.Introduction summarizd the recent progress in the research on the Xunwu Gate Incident and the research deficiencies. Then it pointed out the object of the study and the research methods.Chapter one talks about the consist of the staffs of Qin king and prince. According to epigraph and documentary records, it makes a distinction on staffs between Prince Mansion and Qin King Mansion.Chapter two is about the tendency of staffs of Shandong group in Qin King Mansion. According to epigraph and documentary records, it discussed the function of Shandong Group in incident and its development direction after incident.Chapter three is about the epigraph of Zhao Deming which recently found in Xingyang in Henan province. According to epigraph and documentary records, this article analysed the changes of Zhao’s government post and deduced that he went to Qin King Mansion and took part in Xuwu Gate Incident.