Author: Guo Zhongli (202.137.2.---)
Date: 11-22-01 03:00
The foundations Sui Emperor Wendi laid for political unification and economic prosperity were at first strengthened even further by his son Yangdi, who extended his father's conquests and drove back nomadic intruders who threatened the northern frontiers of the empire. He promulgated a new and milder legal code and devoted considerable resources to upgrading Confucian education and restoring the examination system for regulating entry into the bureaucracy.
These latter measures were part of a broader policy of promoting the scholar-gentry in the imperial administration, often to the detriment of the military commanders from the great aristocratic families and nomadic. Yangdi was overly fond of luxury and delighted in construction projects that reached megalomaniacal proportions. He forcibly conscripted hundreds of thousands of peasants to build numerous palaces, a new capital city at Loyang, and above all a series of great canals to link the various parts of his empire. His demands on the people seemed limitless. In his new capital at Loyang, for example, Yangdi had a vast, heavily forested game park laid out. Because there were not enough trees on the site chosen, tens of thousands of laborers were forced to dig up huge trees in the nearby hills and cart them miles to be replanted in the artificial mounds that tens of thousands of other laborers had built.
Even before work on his many construction projects had been completed, Yangdi led his exhausted and angry subjects into a series of unsuccessful wars to bring Korea again under Chinese rule. His failures in the Korean campaigns between 611 and 614 and the near-fatal reverse he suffered in central Asia at the hands of Turks in 615 set in motion widespread revolts throughout the empire.
Provincial governors declared themselves independent rulers; bandit gangs roved and raided at will; and nomadic peoples again established control over large sections of the north China plain. Faced with a crumbling empire, an increasingly deranged emperor retreated to his pleasure palaces in the city of Yangzhou on the Yangtze River to the south. When he was assassinated by severak if his own ministers in 618, it looked very much as if China would return to the state of political division and social turmoil it had endured in the preceding centuries.
The dissolution of the imperial order was averted by the military skills and political savvy of one of Yangdi's most illustrious officials, Li Yuan, the Duke of Tang. An ethnic Han Chinese of noble and mixed Chinese-Turkic-Persian origins, Li Yuan was for many years a loyal supporter of the Sui ruler. In fact, on one occasion, Li Yuan had rescued the impetuous Yangdi, whose forces had been trapped by a far larger force of Mongol cavalry in a small fort that was part of the Great Wall defenses.
But as Yangdi grew more and more irrational and unrest spread from one end of the empire to another, Li Yuan was convinced by his sons and allies that only rebellion could save his family and the empire. From the many-sided struggle for the throne that followed Yangdi's death and continued until 623, Li Yuan emerged the victor. In 618, after major military successes in north China, he took the imperial name, Gaozu, and founded the Tang dynasty that would rule China for nearly three centuries.
Together with his second son Tang Taizong, in whose favor he abdicated in 626, Gaozu laid the basis for the golden age of the Tang.
Tang armies conquered deep into central Asia as far as present-day Afghanistan, thereby forcing many of the nomadic peoples who had harrassed China in the Six Dynasties era to submit to Tang overlordship.
Of all the nomadic peoples on the empire's borders, the Mongol tribes posed the greatest threat.
Therefore, the early Tang rulers sought to play one Mongol people off another, a stratagem that very often succeeded. They also completed the repairs begun by the Sui and earlier dynasties on the Great Wall and created frontier armies, partly recruited from the nomadic peoples, that gradually became the most potent military forces in the empire.
Leaders of Turkic tribes were compelled to submit as vassals to the Tang rulers, who took the title of "heavenly khan." The daughters of the Turkic khans were often married into the imperial family. The sons were sent to the capital to guarantee the good behavior of the tribe in question and as students who were to be educated in Chinese ways in the hope of their eventual assimilation into Chinese culture.
The empire was also extended to Tibet and the shores of the Caspian Sea in present day Iran in the west, the homeland of the Chams in the south of Vietnam, and Manchuria and Siberia in the north. In the Tang period, the Yangtze River basin and much of the south were fully integrated with North China for the first time since the Han. In 668, under the emperor Gaozong, Korea, whose peoples' resistance had done so much to bring down the Sui dynasty, was overrun by Chinese armies.
In a matter of decades the Tang had built an empire that was far larger than even that of the early Han, an empire whose boundaries in many directions extended beyond the borders of China today.
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