Career
In the spring of 875, Huang Chao raised a bandit army in response to an uprising started the previous year by Wang Xianzhi, another illegal salt trader.
As the main capital was well guarded, Huang Chao led his peasant army south, crossed the Yangtze, and took large parts of the modern provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Fujian. In these areas, he exterminated Tang officials and loyalists in the name of egalitarianism, but he rarely set up permanent bases, moving on after each conquest.
The southward march culminated in 879 in the sack of the southern port city of Guangzhou (Canton), then the greatest East Asian centre of international trade. The massacre was reported in Arab sources but is unrecorded in the Chinese official records. Estimates of the number of foreign residents killed in Canton range from 120,000 to 200,000, demonstrating the scale of Chinese-Middle Eastern trade, which took many years to re-establish.
He fled Chang’an in early 883 and was finally cornered in 884, near the coast not far from his birthplace, and killed on 13 July.