by John Keay
Yet for the powdered scholars dissecting the finer points of the Lotus Sutra, as for the rouged poets rhapsodising over the almond blossom, a nasty shock awaited. The long reign of the ultra-pious Liang Wudi (r. 502–49) was interrupted by a crescendo of rebellions that climaxed in 548 with Jiankang itself capitulating after a four-month siege. Brocaded aristocrats, deserted by their retainers and unacquainted with the mechanics of cooking, were said to have starved to death in the lacquered luxury of their own apartments. The city was sacked with appalling brutality; and when order was restored in the 550s, the new Chen dynasty (557–89) ruled a reduced and enfeebled southern empire. It was further circumscribed by a defeat at the hands of the Northern Zhou in late 577. As of that date, ‘to any northern statesman . . . the Chen must have looked like an easy conquest’.6
Only a dynastic crisis in the north delayed the inevitable. In 579 the Northern Zhou emperor died. He was succeeded by Crown Prince Yuwen Pin, a pathological libertine in whom the attributes of ‘bad-last’ emperor assumed monstrous proportions. Bingeing from the sacerdotal vessels reserved for the ancestors, he flouted the rites, chastised his womenfolk, violated the wife of a kinsman, and beheaded those even suspected of disapproval. His one asset was his father-in-law, the duke of Sui, a man of mixed ethnicity and a veteran of the wars with the Northern Qi who was indeed, as per his title, a ‘Pillar of the State’.
When in 580 Yuwen Pin suffered a stroke and died of natural causes, the duke of Sui engineered his own appointment as commander-in-chief and regent for Pin’s seven-year-old successor. Events then took a predictable course. Rebellions were quashed, the Yuwen clan was steadily eliminated, and pleas for a new dynasty, supposedly emanating from the young emperor and backed by all manner of portents and predictions, rained down on the duke of Sui. In 581, with a show of the utmost reluctance, he accepted the incumbent’s abdication and assumed the Mandate. Soon after, the suspicious demise of the ex-emperor brought the number of Yuwen kinsmen purged in the changeover to exactly sixty.
Five years of consolidation and inclusion ensued. Sui Wendi (that being the temple-name adopted by the once duke, now emperor) embarked on an important programme of administrative reform that, in reinstating the institutions of the Han empire, brought into government far more Han Chinese than non-Han. The recent proscription by the Northern Zhou of both Buddhism and Daoism was reversed, while all of that dynasty’s archaic introductions were unceremoniously junked. Confucian as well as Daoist stalwarts were artfully placated. The Buddhist community was deluged as never before with favours and patronage. Signifying the new dynasty’s ambitious intent, the city of Chang’an was dismantled and its place taken by a replanned and rebuilt capital of cyclopean proportions. Agriculture recovered, tax receipts improved and labour was abundant. Meanwhile the military build-up continued.
When it came in 589, the conquest of the south had an air of inevitablility about it. Weakened by the loss of territory along the north bank of the Yangzi and in Sichuan, the Chen, last of the southern ‘Six Dynasties’, planned its resistance with little hope and dwindling conviction. Ideologically as well as physically, the ground had been cut from under the southern empire. The Northern Zhou’s reunification of the north, and the Sui adoption of Han administrative norms, had undermined the southern case for an exclusive legitimacy. Unlike previous southern dynasts, the Chen were not artistocratic northern émigrés who could pose as guardians of a cultural tradition reaching back through the dynastic pedigree to the Jin, the (Cao) Wei and the Later Han; rather were they local military leaders of no more illustrious descent than their counterparts in the north.
Cultural and commercial contacts between north and south had never ceased during the ‘Period of Disunion’, but the social distinctions that had struck the visitor in, say, the fifth century were no longer so clear cut. The stereotyping of northern rulers as bloodthirsty and uncultured ‘barbarians’ who lived on mutton-and-dumpling stews was as unsustainable as that of southerners as effete and indolent courtiers picking at fish-and-fried-rice delicacies. Non-Han steppe-men in the north increasingly conformed to Han Chinese norms; Han Chinese émigrés in the south were increasingly tainted by association and intermarriage with the indigenous Man and other southern ethnic groups. North and south shared more than they cared to admit. Both segments of the erstwhile empire accorded primacy to devotional Buddhism; both honoured Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian scholarship; both treasured their common linguistic and literary heritage; and both still subscribed to the ideal of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ (zhongguo) as a single integrated entity.
Like the Qin First Emperor, Sui Wendi planned his assault on the south as an affair of many prongs. From Sichuan to the sea, half a million troops massed along the Yangzi in eight strike forces. In recognition of the difficulties of combat in the south, they included contingents of Man boatmen, a large infantry component and vast fleets of warships and transports. These had been constructed as surreptitiously as possible at four strategic locations: on the coast, near the middle Yangzi, on the Han River, and at Fengjie just above the gorges in Sichuan. It had taken two years of meticulous preparation, but by the winter of 588/89 all was ready. In a well-coordinated movement, the amphibious advance got under way.
Down through the Yangzi gorges came the Sui’s most feared commander at the head of an armada that included what must have been the largest vessels afloat in the sixth century. Each was a five-deck fortress from whose embrasured cladding 800 men could discharge their crossbows, while overhead, like gesticulating antennae, 15-metre (16-yard) derricks swung spiked iron weights to disable approaching vessels. Yet despite their superior weaponry, the northerners remained wary of river combat, especially amid the treacherous currents and commanding heights of the gorges above Yichang. To outflank and overpower the assortment of fleets, fortified obstructions and chain barriers strung across the stream, they relied more on landward excursions, often under cover of darkness. Progress was steady and occasionally sanguinary but was soon overtaken by events downstream.
There the main Chen forces were concentrated around Jiankang. But because much of the Chen fleet was engaged upstream and cut off by the intervening Sui flotillas, the river itself was here poorly defended. Two Sui columns crossed it unopposed, and after just one battle of note, both entered the city of Jiankang. It was all over in a matter of days. Some Chen units fled rather than fight; others readily surrendered when the Chen emperor so ordered. (An early captive, he had been extricated from his place of refuge at the bottom of a well, where he was found in the clammy embrace of two favoured concubines.) In proportion to the number of combatants, the casualties of the campaign had not been heavy; and the clemency now shown to the vanquished was exemplary. Jiankang was not sacked, the ex-emperor and his officials were spared, and a rumour of mass transplantations proved to be exaggerated.
Though a heavy death toll resulted from the suppression of a series of subsequent rebellions, by the end of 590 the south was pacified. Demobilisation throughout the empire was then declared, if not universally effected. Weapons were supposedly collected, their private manufacture banned and, setting a precedent that would have long-term consequences, all boats of more than 10 metres (33 feet) were confiscated. As well as outlawing local navies, this had the effect of containing mercantile enterprise and ensuring that water transport served the interests of the state. From his new capital at Chang’an, Sui Wendi ruled a realm that, long divided, was now to be physically united.
SUI-CIDE
The emperor had been raised a devout Buddhist. ‘With the armed might of a Cakravartin [a world-ruling ‘turner-of-the-wheel’ in Indian Buddhism], We spread the ideals of the Ultimately Enlightened One,’ declared Sui Wendi’s first edict. ‘With a hundred victories in a hundred battles We promote the practice of the Ten Virtues. The weapons of war We regard as incense and flowers offered to the Buddha . . .’7
Nearly four thousand temples, pagodas, nunneries and monasteries were founded during Sui Wen
di’s reign, many of them in his rebuilt Chang’an, where one pagoda reportedly measured 100 metres (109 yards) in height and 120 metres (131 yards) in girth. The number of new Buddha images erected ran to over a hundred thousand, while those repaired following the Northern Zhou’s iconoclasm exceeded 1.5 million.8 In China there was no nobler exemplar of the Buddhist sovereign as maha-danapati (supreme donor) than Sui Wendi. Towards the end of his reign he organised a ceremonial distribution of Buddha relics to thirty specially built reliquary sites dotted throughout the land. Packed and sealed in jars by the emperor himself, the relics were distributed by an army of monks and were all enshrined on the same day. Offices everywhere were closed for a week. It was an act of empire-wide dedication consciously modelled on a distribution of the Buddha’s remains by the Indian emperor Ashoka, Buddhism’s first imperial patron. Ashoka’s action had been intended not just as a demonstration of piety but as a celebration of sovereign power over a sprawling empire. So it was with Sui Wendi. The distribution twice repeated, the number of Sui-sponsored reliquary shrines, which also served as places of congregation and pilgrimage, rose to 114.
But if the emperor’s actions stemmed from a concern to expiate his sins and improve his karma (rather than from a complete misunderstanding of the Buddha’s non-violent doctrines), his munificence needed to be on the grand scale. All too easily roused, Sui Wendi sent many to the executioner, readily awarded ‘the privilege of suicide’ to others, penalised even his sons, and himself caned to death those whom he considered not chastised vigorously enough by his officials. His justice was stern, his energy prodigious. Yet, for an emperor, his tastes were modest and his personal life exemplary. With his non-Han wife, he shared the burdens of state in what was tantamount to a joint sovereignty. She bore him seven children, and by mutual consent he had no others. The imperial couple were ‘inseparable and . . . in the palace they were referred to as “the two sages”’.9
Something similar might well have been said of Sui Yangdi (r. 604–18), Wendi’s son and successor. Also a Buddhist benefactor, he too combined personal brutality with operational clemency, while his marriage to a southern princess seems to have been equally harmonious. But the Standard History of the Sui was written under the direction of their nemesis, the Tang; and while Sui Wendi, as the reunifier, could scarcely be denied his share of praise, Sui Yangdi, as the last of his line, could conveniently be credited with more than his share of opprobium. Sui Yangdi brought the empire to the brink of ruin; therefore rumours of his having murdered his father (the most heinous crime in an ultra-filial society) and having ravaged his father’s consorts (which was deemed incest) must be true. V. C. Xiong, his recent biographer, observes that even the name by which he is remembered, Yang (plus the imperial signifier‘-di’), was in fact a post-humous pejorative reserved exclusively for those who ‘lust after beautiful women . . . abandon ritual . . . defy Heaven and abuse the people’. Summarising Sui Yangdi’s many-sided persona as revealed in the traditional histories, Xiong notes ‘a hedonistic philanderer, a prodigal spend-thrift, an oppressive ruler, a cold-blooded murderer, an impulsive aggressor, a hater of remonstrance, a lover of sycophancy, and above all, a tyrant . . .’10 Yet Yangdi’s achievements were far from mean and his crimes not dramatically worse than his father’s – or than those of his immediate Tang successors. As commander-in-chief of his father’s southern invasion and then a sympathetic governor of the south, he had played a leading role in his father’s reunification; and when the apprentice became the autocrat, he pursued almost identical policies with equal, if eventually disastrous, zest.
Sui Wendi’s declared preference for the Han dynasty and the Cao family’s Wei dynasty had been intended to signify dynastic ambition and imperial resurgence. The Cao family’s Wei dynasty provided an acceptable blueprint for a legitimised usurpation and the Han an unassailable example of Confucian rectitude. Wendi’s new Chang’an was called Daxiangcheng, meaning ‘Great Revival City’, and of the Five Phases or Elements, he chose fire and its colour red, they being the same as those adopted by Han Wudi. No scholar himself, Sui Wendi had little interest in the niceties of Confucian morality but saw its value as a basis for social order and bureaucratic centralisation.
Over the previous centuries the proliferation of provincial units and semi-autonomous fiefs had run unchecked. It has been calculated that, since the Later Han, the number of commanderies had increased by six and a half times and the number of prefectures by twenty-two times. There were so many mini-entities, so many parallel administrations, so many tiers of government and so many salaried officials that they absorbed most of the revenue; according to one adviser, it was like having nine shepherds for every ten sheep. Sui Wendi abolished nearly all of them and substituted ministerial offices, departmental hierarchies, graded ranks and parallel inspectorates as favoured by the Han. Grist to the mill of China’s bureaucratically inclined historians, the restored titles, portfolios and pecking orders had a certain rationality but would be subject to constant change. Adjustments by Yangdi further centralised, streamlined and, where convenient, sidelined the system, which would then be thoroughly overhauled by the Tang.
Much the same could be said of the legal codes introduced by Sui Wendi and Sui Yangdi and famously reworked for export throughout east Asia by the Tang. Both of the Sui codes professed superior logic and greater leniency; yet they were regularly flouted by emperors exasperated as much by the corruptibility of the judicial process as by the growing prevalence of crime. Wendi’s ‘Ten Abominations’ – crimes unpardonable even by imperial amnesties – were reduced by Yangdi to eight, ‘incest’ and ‘discord’ (or ‘plotting to kill or sell relatives who are of the fifth or closer degree of mourning’) being omitted, presumably because they were misdemeanours of which the emperor himself might be guilty. But given that for petty crimes like the theft of a copper cash, the purloining of a roof joist or even the picking of a melon offenders were routinely executed, penal severity seems not to have been significantly restrained by legal codification. Suffice it to say that in opting for Han precedent in matters of ritual, administration and justice, the Sui launched China’s ‘Second Empire’ as a fair approximation to the highly regulated, bureaucratised and draconian despotism that had characterised its First – and which would remain until its last.
Ferocious punishment, although probably no more revolting or, per head of population, more commonly administered in seventh-century China than in seventh-century anywhere, served as a deterrent in a society riven by conflicting loyalties. These were not simply the ethnic, political and regional residue of four centuries of strife. A downside of the Confucian emphasis on family ties was that it encouraged office-holders, for instance, to aim at perpetuating a monopoly of office within the circle of their kinsmen and dependants. Nepotism being respectable, corruption flourished, competence declined and the gap between statutory intent and actual practice widened. If the frequency and tenor of imperial appeals are anything to go by, discovering candidates for office whose ability was uncompromised by hereditary loyalties had challenged every emperor since the First. An efficient bureaucracy, and indeed the whole legitimacy of the regime, depended on its ability to attract men of calibre; yet this had to be done without antagonising existing magnates and, in the case of empire-builders like the Sui, while enlisting the loyalties of powerful new constituents in the south, the east and along the northern frontiers.
The Sui solution to expanding the base of civil service recruitment was to set up a Board of Civil Office to centralise all appointments and scrutinise the selection process. They also revived and developed the Han system whereby each commandery had to identify and recommend a certain number of outstanding candidates for future office; the chosen few were then dispatched to the capital, assigned to one of three academies and there tutored and examined. Though still rudimentary, the examination system was refined by the introduction of degrees in different subjects. Among them was one with a literary bias, known as jinshi, that
would eventually become the acme of social and scholastic achievement. Though it would be left to the Tang, and more especially the Song, to elevate the examination system into one of imperial China’s most distinctive features, the Sui may be credited with having promoted the idea, and laid down the framework, for a genuinely meritocratic civil service.
As with the penal system, it is not clear how closely practice conformed to principle. But if one may judge by documentation relating to the early Tang period and recovered from Dunhuang and Turfan in the twentieth century, the imperial writ carried far and wide. Registration for the purposes of taxation and labour service is seen to have been remarkably thorough. Each household submitted detailed returns of its family members, servants, livestock, cultivable land (and whether hereditary or not), other property and crops. These were then checked, entered, assessed, and the assessments levied. On such meticulous record-keeping depended the revenue and manpower at the Tang’s disposal; and it is reasonable to suppose that the system worked just as smoothly under the Sui since their programme of public works, military expansion and ostentatious expenditure was second to none.
Not content with his father’s replanning of Chang’an, Sui Yangdi founded an alternative capital, more centrally located for a reunited empire, by rebuilding Luoyang. It was not as extensive as Chang’an/Daxiangcheng, being a mere 47 square kilometres (18 square miles) instead of the latter’s 80 square kilometres (30 square miles); and as usual, building materials from the previous city were recycled. Timbers could be rehung and roof tiles relaid; bricks baked easily in the hot dry summers and hangtu foundations required only the tireless tamping of an abundant labour force. The almost stone-free nature of most Chinese architecture goes a long way towards explaining the rapidity with which city after city rose and fell. Completed in 606, Sui Yangdi’s Luoyang had taken little over a year. Yet by all accounts the result was something special.