by John Keay
It was unrivalled in its extraordinary splendour [says the Standard History of the Sui]. Since the emperor, as imperial prince, had pacified the south in person, he assimilated the curvilinear and angular [forms] of Liang and Chen [architecture] . . . Its walls rose higher than the Mang mountains. Floating bridges spanned the Luo River. Above the golden gate and ivory watchtower were erected winged belvederes. Precipices were collapsed and rivers cut off to make way for pillars [or perhaps mounds] shaped like multi-coloured clouds . . .11
The main palace hall stood on a 2-metre-high (6.5-feet) pedestal. It was about the length of a football pitch and as tall as a stadium. Its roofline commanded the city; and between its pillars probably hung the mother-of-pearl blinds that had adorned its predecessor and which ‘at sunset flashed with a dazzling radiance’.12 Yuwen Kai, the architect who laid out the city as well as designing the main buildings, seems to have been preserved for just such work, he being one of the few members of the Northern Zhou’s Yuwen clan not to have perished in Sui Wendi’s purge. His Luoyang creation delighted Yangdi, and his abilities as a civil engineer would be further tested. Among several other palaces commissioned by Yangdi in the course of his extensive travels was one on wheels. In 607 it accompanied the imperial entourage on a grand tour of the northern frontier. Carried there in kit form by cart – a palace-on-wheels on wheels – it was assembled in situ and then trundled into an auspicious alignment. It was used for the reception of tribute missions and, in addition to the dignitaries, could apparently accommodate ‘several hundred’ imperial guardsmen.
Sui Yangdi’s 607 northern excursion took him beyond the Ordos, where, like his father, he sought to emulate the Qin and Han in respect of frontier management and wall-building. The strategic value of a walled or fortified northern frontier had been somewhat discredited over the preceding four centuries. In fact, as wave after wave of steppe-people poured into China, it was hard to think of any incursion that had been inconvenienced by it. Sui Wendi, and then Yangdi, ascribed this to the lamentable state of the surviving earthworks; and while Wendi had built westward, Yangdi set a workforce doubtfully put at 1 million, of whom half were said never to have returned, to construct a new wall east from Yulin to the Taihang mountains. But the new walls proved just as provocative, ineffective and ruinously expensive as their predecessors. Disowning Sui precedent for once, the Tang would make little attempt to maintain them. Across the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia those parts of Sui Yangdi’s wall that survive may therefore be genuine examples of seventh-century workmanship. A recent visitor noted ‘a massy stretch of earthen rampart, perhaps 2.5 metres [8 feet] tall, running between solid towers rising twice as high out of archetypal Gobi vistas . . . it looks more like a termite-infested bank than a man-made defence’.13
Decidedly less redundant are the still-churning thoroughfares of what was Sui Yangdi’s, and indeed one of imperial China’s, most ambitious and rewarding creations. This was a canal – or rather it was the many canals and hydraulic features that, connecting numerous rivers, lakes and pre-existing conduits over a total distance of nearly 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles), came to be known as the Grand Canal. Excavated between 605 and 611, the Grand Canal ran north-west from Hangzhou (south of the Yangzi delta) to the Yellow River near Luoyang, with a long extension from there north-east to where Beijing now stands. In effect it linked north and south, east and centre. It was an axial artery for a reunited empire. It was also ‘without doubt, the grandest navigation system ever undertaken by a single sovereign in pre-modern history’.14
Sui Yangdi followed the work closely, and by way of inauguration, in 611, made a stately progress up the length of it; his flotilla of extravagantly dressed craft was said to have stretched for over 100 kilometres (62 miles). But China’s Grand Canal, unlike its Venetian namesake, was rarely a stylish processional path, more a gigantic transport corridor. Much rerouted and often widened and dredged, in 1793 it would wring grudging admiration from the first British mission to imperial China; and some sections of the original alignment must still today be among the busiest waterways in the world. Past Suzhou (between Shanghai and Nanjing) tug-towed strings of wallowing barges snake continuously, head to tail, round the clock, in both directions, at a bank-sloshing pace; gondolas would be swamped, vaporettos vaporised. Nor is the canal’s utility exhausted. Twenty-first-century plans envisage its conversion into a giant aqueduct to divert the Yangzi’s flood waters to the now parched and polluted aquifers of Beijing and the north.
To the pre-motorised economy, bulk transport had posed a logistical problem that was nigh insuperable. It frustrated trade in all but high-value commodities, inhibited urbanisation, impeded the development of industry and undermined efforts at major state-formation. This was especially so in Sui China, where roads were subject to annual inundation and coastal shipping was deemed precarious. Yet coinage being scarce and paper money still to be invented, the entire tax yield came in kind – usually grain and silk – and so in bulk. Moreover, the movement and storage of this agricultural surplus was the only insurance against the ever-present threat of famine and was a strategic necessity for provisioning frontier garrisons and supporting military ventures beyond.
The Grand Canal, linking the Yangzi region with its rice surplus to the heavily populated and famine-prone northern plains, thus had a similar effect to the first transcontinental railroads in North America. It made China’s economic integration feasible. Disparities of climate, terrain, produce and demographic distribution were suddenly converted into assets. Granaries – which were less mud-built silos than vast installations, walled and guarded, like oil-storage depots – were strategically located along the canal. Big government-owned grain barges, hauled by manpower wherever sluice and current required, constituted the bulk of the water traffic; a burgeoning private trade in salt, fish, vegetables and manufactured goods made up the rest. Along the route, irrigation schemes fed off the canal to increase crop yields, so boosting population figures, tax yields and corvée numbers; and below the Yangzi in ‘Nanjiang’ (all ‘south of the Yangzi River’) more land was brought into cultivation courtesy of the canal, so accelerating the pace of the population drift from north to south. Great cities – the future Hangzhou, Suzhou, Zhenjiang, Yangzhou and Kaifeng – grew up along the towpath. Existing metropolises, such as Chang’an, to which Sui Wendi had constructed a short canal from the Yellow River, and Luoyang, which Sui Yangdi similarly integrated into his system, could now outgrow the alimentary limitations of their immediate hinterlands.
But the cost was colossal and the human suffering incalculable as corvée demands took their toll of agriculture. Millions, or rather ‘tens of hundreds of thousands’, are said to have dug the channels and distributed the spoil of Sui Yangdi’s waterways, though whether such figures refer to the total labour force involved or the total number of corvée periods worked is unclear. They used spades and picks, plus wicker baskets balanced at either end of a pole to maximise carrying capacity and absorb jolts. Wheeled transport was provided more by barrows than ox-carts. The man-drawn wheelbarrow, a Chinese invention, had made its first appearance some time in the previous three centuries. By transferring the weight from the human frame to an axle, it more than quadrupled average loads. Men – and then women when the corvée pool began to dry up – graduated from being beasts of burden to serving as draught animals.
Ultimately it was all too much. The canal system could distribute only what the farmer could produce. But serious flooding of the Yellow River in 610/11 had reduced yields, while military requirements drained the labour pool and emptied the granaries. As the demand for manpower for both the army and public works raced ahead of supply, truancy increased and soon turned to popular revolt. Critics at court were ruthlessly silenced: powerful challengers began to mobilise within the provinces and the army. The final straw came when the last of three disastrous expeditions against Koguryo, a reluctant tributary state occupying much of Manchuria and northern Korea, was in 614 rec
alled in the face of minimal gains and escalating mutinies. Leaving the north in turmoil, in 616 Yangdi retired to the south. It had earlier been his adoptive homeland; now it became his last refuge. With Yangdi isolated from events as much by his tremulous courtiers as by distance, his megalomania subsided into melancholia. In 618, at his southern capital in what is now Yangzhou, he was murdered. The assassin was the son of one of his generals and a member of the once-purged Yuwen clan; but it could have been anyone.
According to the traditional histories, his fate was no less than he deserved. The sufferings Sui Yangdi had inflicted on his people had been intolerable and the strains he had imposed on the just-reunited empire unforgivable. Seldom had the Mandate been so obviously forfeited. Yet the products of so much distress would be acknowledged even by critics as an inestimable boon, ‘enormous indeed’ and ‘monumental’. Better still, according to a writer of the later Tang period, they came at no cost to posterity. The canal, for instance, ‘did not require a single [Tang] labourer to carry a basket of soil nor a single [Tang] soldier to hack through an obstruction’. ‘Is it not true’, concluded this observer with a smug flourish, ‘that Heaven has greatly benefited us with the help of the despotic Sui?’15 Such was the function, and such the fate, of an intercalary dynasty.
SONS OF THE SUNSET AND THE SUNRISE
As the just-reunited empire dissolved into chaos again, the chances of Sui Yangdi’s successor inaugurating the most glorious era in the whole of China’s history looked remote. The empire seemed to be relapsing into the anarchy of 400 years earlier, when the knights-errant of the emerging ‘Three Kingdoms’ had confronted the likes of ‘Poison Yu’ and ‘Yang of the Eighty-foot Moustache’. Between 614 and 624 some two hundred mutinies and rebellions reportedly affected practically every province and army unit. More non-Chinese from beyond the frontier were enticed south as auxiliaries, allies and predators. The Chang’an bureaucracy ground to a halt – as bureaucracies do – when the supply of paper ran out. Meanwhile emperors galore were being proclaimed, some of them Sui minors, some supposed descendants of earlier dynasties, and some redemptionist hopefuls in the Yellow Turbans’ tradition of Daoist millenarianism.
Many of the contenders were called Li, there being current at the time a catchy verse that credited someone of that name with an imperial destiny. The language seemed innocuous enough:
Peach-plum Li
Be reserved in speech.
As a yellow heron, fly round the hill
And turn about within the flower garden.
Yet in the context of the time, and to an audience attuned to the subtleties of poetic allusion, it was dynamite. ‘As intended, the seditious character of this refrain emerges only on close examination,’ explains a recent authority. The first two lines identify the subject as a certain Li, whose utterances give nothing away; the third line signifies Li’s high-flying ambition in relation to ‘yang’ (literally ‘the hill’ but sounding like the emperor); and the fourth promises him the freedom of herbaceous precincts, presumably the empire. Whoever composed it – and it could have been Sui Yangdi himself in search of a pretext for eliminating some troublesome Li – ‘it encouraged the idea of rebellion in any outstanding person of the Li name . . . [and] caused the emperor to suspect such a person’.16
Then, as now, Li was about the commonest name in China. A purge of all who bore it would have been a demographic disaster. Yangdi had had to content himself with executing only the more obvious candidates while sparing those of proven loyalty. Those spared included one of his most dependable commanders, the fifty-one-year-old Li Yuan, duke of Tang. Like the Northern Zhou and the Sui, to whom he was related by marriage, Li Yuan was from the frontier region of northern Shanxi, of martial background and mixed ethnicity (though genealogists would later present him with the noblest of pedigrees going back to one of Han Wudi’s generals and even Laozi). He belonged to the same horse-loving, conjugally loyal, open-minded and culturally eclectic social milieu as the Sui, and despite promptings from his own family, he continued to protest loyalty to the Sui until after Yangdi’s departure for the south.
Sui rule succumbed spontaneously, a victim less of the assassin’s sword or the rebel’s challenge than of its own ambitions. Only in 617, when the emperor had practically retired and his empire was being torn apart by others, did Li Yuan endorse the Peach-plum prophecy about a Li succession, summon forces and supporters, enter the fray, and march on Chang’an. The city fell after a stout resistance. Li Yuan then went through the motions of installing one of Yangdi’s sons as emperor, all the while resisting appeals that he assume the Mandate himself. Heaven, of course, was not to be denied. Heeding the portents and prognostications cited by his supporters, within a year Li Yuan had had himself installed as emperor and had named his dynasty after his dukedom of Tang. During the short reign that followed (618–26), most of which was devoted to quelling opposition, the first of the Tang reinstated all but the most recalcitrant of Sui generals and officials. He and his successor would then adopt, with only minor adjustments, the entire Sui fiscal, military, administrative and legal framework.
As the Tang founder, Li Yuan would come to be known by his posthumous title of Tang Gaozu (‘Great Progenitor’), while his more illustrious son and successor is remembered by his temple-name of Tang Taizong (‘Supreme Ancestor’). The dynastic emphasis was justified. The Tang would last, at a generous estimate, for nearly three centuries. But the empire that the Tang inherited had come ready made, albeit battered; like the stately boulevards of Sui Wendi’s temple-studded Chang’an, or like Sui Yangdi’s Luoyang palaces with their winged belvederes, or indeed the Grand Canal, it required only restoration. This called initially for patient campaigning and strict financial restraint, policies alien to the Sui. But once peace had been established and the economy resuscitated, Tang Taizong and his heirs would find themselves masters – and mistresses – of the most productive and effective empire in the world.
The wider world figures prominently in the history of the Tang. Contact with maritime Asia through the seaports of the south, which were now restored to the empire, was about to be complemented by throwing wide the western ‘Jade Gate’ into central Asia. Turkestan, Tibet and Persia, no less than Vietnam, Korea and Japan, would fall within the Tang perspective and loom large in imperial policy-making. Still farther afield in India and the Byzantine empire, the political, cultural and productive preeminence of Tang China gained widespread acceptance. Its tolerance of alien belief systems and its enthusiasm for foreign craftsmanship and performances brought a cosmopolitan dimension to urban life. Society savoured the exotic; artists showed a willingness to experiment. There was now substance to the conceit of ‘All-under-Heaven’ looking up to the Celestial Emperor. It was as if the world had so tilted on its axis as to leave the ‘Middle Kingdom’ at last in the middle. The period from c. 650 to c. 750 would be the first and most convincing ‘China century’.
But this wider world beyond zhongguo’s traditional frontiers was not that into which explorer Zhang and the armies of Han had ventured eight centuries earlier, nor was it that from which had emerged the Tabgach Northern Wei and the forebears of the Northern Zhou and Sui. As adversaries, the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Qiang and others had faded from the records. Some of those so identified had been incorporated into the ethnic mix of north China; others had been absorbed by new confederations and kingdoms outside it.
Their place along the northern and north-western frontiers had been taken by peoples whom the Chinese histories call ‘Tujue’. Turkic inscriptions of the eighth century in the Orkhon region of Mongolia support the identification of these ‘Tujue’ as Turks, although the inscriptions provide little help with the origins of the Turkic-speaking peoples. Like so many inner Asian peoples, their early trajectory remains ‘wrapped in obscurity’.17 Under the leadership of a qaghan (kakhan, khan), the equivalent of the Xiongnu shanyu, the Tujue/Turks had emerged rapidly in the mid-sixth century and at the expense of peoples who had
previously replaced the Xiongnu and Xianbei.
By the 570s the Northern Zhou had been obliged to buy off the Turks with 100,000 silk pieces a year; in return Chang’an received horses of lesser value; both sides regarded the trade as tribute, though differing as to who was the tributary. In the standard history of the Sui, the Turks are described as their own worst enemies, ‘preferring to destroy one another rather than live side by side’. Certainly a succession dispute in the 580s divided the Turk qaghanate into western and eastern branches. The former’s authority extended beyond the Tian Shan into what is now Kazakhstan and the latter’s throughout Mongolia and into western Manchuria. One contender for the qaghanate sought support, and then refuge, from Sui Wendi, who by dexterous intrigue promoted and exploited the divisions among the Turkic clans. But it would be left to Tang Taizong to perfect this policy and reap the dividends.
In foreign relations, as in domestic policy, the Sui had emulated the Han. That meant establishing concentric rings of subordinate territories, allied dependants and tributary states that rippled to the horizons of the sinocentric world in all directions. Sui Wendi’s conquest of the southern Chen dynasty had been followed by an expedition to re-establish Chinese authority in northern Vietnam. This succeeded in 602, though further expeditions down the Vietnamese panhandle to Champa, a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom located near Danang, amounted to little more than raids. ‘All the Chinese had to show [for them] were the stolen ancestral tablets [of the Chams], some cases of Buddhist scripture, and a troupe of captured musicians.’18 Thereafter Champa, along with its great rival, the proto-Khmer kingdom on the lower Mekong, would send and receive occasional missions which, though gratifying Chinese sensibilities, in no way prejudiced south-east Asian sovereignties.