Chinese History for White People - Sui Dynasty

Northern Zhou general Yang Jian would purge all 59 princes of the Zhou royal family and take power as the Sui Emperor. He removed the anti-Han policies of the Xianbei, restored the prominence scholars enjoyed in the Han dynasty, and invaded Chen via the Yangtzi with 518,000 troops and thousands of boats. The Chen immediately surrendered to such an overwhelming force¹. How did Yang Jian amass such forces? By bankrupting the treasury²! But this actually has nothing to do with why Sui Dynasty only lasted 37 years.

As Emperor, Yang Jian was renown for his frugality. The palace meals had only one meat dish! The palace women wore clothes that had been washed instead of worn once and thrown away like nearly every other Imperial Family in Chinese history. Sui fashion switched to cotton over silk, copper and bone decorations over gold and gems. The Emperor himself surpassed even this—he only ate meat once a year, and wore clothes that had been patched. He took only two concubines, and he didn't touch them³ until his beloved Queen died. He deposed the Crown Prince solely for his wasteful decadence—such as carving a pattern on his jade pendant, dyeing his armor, and having a child with his concubines before his wife⁴. The throne would pass to the younger brother, Yang Guang, who was a model child and definitely not a sycophant or the second worst Emperor in Chinese history after Qin’s “torture all the princesses to death” Huhai.

Foibles of Yang Jian aside, some consider him second only to Qin Shihuang. China had been in chaos for 400 years, and the shared Han identity was nearly forgotten. Yang Jian faced nearly the same task as Qin Shihuang—spending his entire reign dealing with rebellions, foreign invasions, and enforcing the same laws of meritocracy on corrupt nobility. When he took the throne, Zhou had 1.65 million households; the united Empire counted less than 4 million households; at the end of his reign that number had rose to 9 million⁵ (around 46 million people). A major part of this change was the Equal-Field system, in which conquest had allowed the government to confiscate land that had accumulated into the hands of noble families and lease (but not rent) it to farmers, where it returned to the government upon death. This effectively reversed the tide of Feudalism. Sui also carefully controlled the price of grain through its government granaries.

Sui didn't just reform the laws⁶—it reformed the entire Imperial structure in a way that would last to the 20th century. Most significant of all—while Qin and Han prospered because of their ideals of meritocracy, Sui implemented the idea of objective standards of merit. Sui divided the Imperial Bureaucracy into 3 Departments and 6 Ministries. The three departments were Legislative⁷, Administrative, and Review⁸; the Administrative Department was divided into 6 Ministries—Personnel, Rites, Works, Revenue, Justice, and War. The Emperor set the agenda and received reports from all 3 Departments (and retained his anti-corruption secret police). Each bureau had clearly defined tasks and transparent objective metrics for their success. Sui abolished Counties as middlemen, restructuring local governance to municipal and provincial only, with 3 year term limits. Furthermore, every assignment and promotion was decided at the Imperial level by the Ministry of Personnel—no local hires. Perhaps most pivotal of all to China's success—part of the Ministry of Personnel's objective metric was the National Exam. Every single person in civil service had to take a standardized test devised by the Ministry of Personnel—which was mostly a combination of quoting some line from Confucius and asking people their interpretation of it, and just making whatever the biggest problem facing the Empire right now the essay question, and seeing if anybody had any new ideas. The idea of a scholar society had been central to China since Confucius, but the National Exam is synonymous with that ideal in the Chinese identity even today.

Yang Jian was succeeded by Yang Guang, who historians suspect murdered his father⁹ after attempting to rape his father's concubines—which would have deposed him and passed the crown to someone else. He then ordered the execution of the previous crown prince, forced the concubines to become his¹⁰, and only then announced his father's death. The legitimacy of his reign was immediately challenged by his younger brother, who started a rebellion that was quickly suppressed. Because unlike in Western history, the good guys don't always win.

After a lifetime of frugal living, Yang Guang now massively increased the spending of the imperial family. A fortune teller said his current palace was bad luck, so he moved from the capital his father had just built. The new capital required a hundred times more conscript labor, and resulted in a thousand times more deaths—largely because Yang Guang gave extremely unreasonable deadlines for all his projects. Nor did he care what season it was and would often let entire harvests fail when he conscripted the entire available workforce. This was just one of multiple palaces he would build. He then commissioned a fleet of Imperial yachts, and brought the entire court and harem on tour with him throughout China. When the water was too shallow to cross, he made conscripts drag the ships by rope. Each place he visited was required to supply the Imperial court with the freshest food available, and the Emperor would fire officials whose food displeased him. Typically only a small fraction of the feasts would be eaten, but it was forbidden for anyone to eat the leftovers—so the servants had to find a spot to bury the meals.

But to really clench the title of second worst Emperor, you need to get involved in expensive and insanely conducted foreign wars. Among the many invasions Yang Jian had to deal with was Goguryeo (North Korea)¹¹. Yang Guang decided to invade Goguryeo in force with a 1.13 million man army. It is said to have taken 40 days to depart from Beijing in a column that stretched 300km. How did he raise such a colossal force—twice the size of his father’s? Mass conscripts for starters, rather than trained career soldiers. He also ordered soldiers to bring their own logistics—which was disastrously stupid because nobody can carry three months' worth of food and water in their backpack. This was essentially a state-funded death march. Generals were under strict orders not to make strategic decisions without consulting the Emperor, so that every military movement had to wait until a messenger can ride all the way back to Yang Guang to give him the situation and then ride all the way back to Korea to deliver the answer. I don't think you need me to explain why this is absolutely bonkers. There were 3 campaigns—all miserable failures¹².

Aside from being human garbage, Yang Guang is often credited (along with Sui Chief Hydraulic Engineer Yuwen Kai) with building the Grand Canal—which connected the Yellow River to the Yangtzi with flash locks and double slipways. In truth, various sections of the canal were started in the Spring and Autumn Period, and all dynasties had been developing canal systems linking various tributary rivers. Sui just happened to put the final nail in the transcontinental, as it were. And even then, the parts of the canal they dug were solely for the purpose of Yang Guang’s vacations, and were dry and unuseable again in two short years. The Grand Canal wouldn’t actually be completed until the Tang Dynasty.

Yang Guang's reign has the dubious distinction of seeing the most¹³ uprisings of any Emperor. Famines were worsened as able bodied men deliberately broke their limbs to avoid conscription—military or otherwise. Eventually, Yang Guang was assassinated¹⁴ by his own ministers, and the rebellion by aristocrat Li Yuan would take the throne, founding the Tang Dynasty.

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1. Rather than eradicate Chen culture, the Northern Zhou scholars eagerly consumed it, taking their scholars prisoner and forcing them to lecture.

2. Maybe he thought looting the Chen would pay it off—he did raze the Chen capital Nanjing. He conitnued racking up debt through massive infrastructure speding—which was probably the only way out of that hole, honestly.

3. He did, however, have an affair with a maid, and when his Queen executed the girl, the fight they had over it even had the Emperor ride out of the palace in a fit of anger.

4. He even lost favour when she died of a heart attack, even though she had known heart problems before she ever married him.

5. Adult households didn’t necessarily double in his 23 year reign—but the relative stability did help; however, getting undocumented people to sign up for taxes is also amazing in and of itself.

6. For instance, it’s notable that Sui limited executions to just beheading or hanging, and ruled that all executions must exhaust 3 appeals.

7. The Secretariat drafted all the bills in their specifics, but there was no parliament. All resolutions were at the discretion of the Emperor as advised by the Department Heads.

8. By far the weakest of the Departments, the Chancellor was basically just an advisor with license to criticise the other Departments if he thought they were numbskulls. China had had enough of evil usurping Chancelllors at this point, so not giving them power was probably a good call.

9. Ironically, Yang Jian—much like Qin Shi Huang—was very paranoid and easily believed accusations of treason. To be fair, he had made a tremendous amount of enemies, but it didn’t help that not a single friend of his managed to stay by his side from beginning to end. And yet he fell for Yang Guang’s goody-two-shoes piety act.

10. While technically this was within Xianbei tradition, the Empire had largely regained its Han sensibilities at this point, and this was still viewed as a barbaric act.

11. Goguryeo refused to become a vassal state to Sui, and continued diplomatic relations with Sui’s enemies. Suspecting imminent invasion, they conducted a preemptive strike on Sui—which was repelled by the local governor. Sui mobilised, and here the Chinese and Korean acounts differ. Korea records a glorious naval battle and guerrilla supply line strikes. China claims plague and a larger invasion in the west which caused them to turn the immensely superior army around. At any rate, it resulted in a ceasefire.

12. The second campaign was due to logistics and command failure. The third campaign had to turn around due to yet another rebellion against Yang Guang. The fourth campaign saw some Chinese success, which Goguryeo bargained into a treaty with a war-weary, collapsing Sui state, which they immediately defaulted on the minute the Sui army left their lands. I’ll also note that Wikipedia’s account seems to be entirely Korean, claiming 500 Koreans managed to massacre 35,000+ Sui by allowing the Sui to move into an empty fortress, then turning around and attacking that fortress themselves. The Chinese historian opinion is that if you can’t beat an army in the field, you probably can’t beat them in a fortress either.

13. History records it as 16 rebel lords and 64 peasant revolts, but these numbers are understood to be expressions for “a lot in that general range”, since it’s hard to quantify uprisings distinctly from one another.

14. He still got a small Imperial tomb, which was discovered in 2013 by a real estate developer. Whose name happened to be Yang Yong. The very same name as the Crown Prince Yang Guang murdered after he took the throne.