The History of China - #77 - Sui 1: Internal Affairs

Episode Date: October 8, 2015

Emperor Wen of Sui is potentially the most important monarch you've never heard of. For him, militarily reuniting China wasn't his legacy - it was his prelude. Both pre- and post-reunification, we explore the internal facets of his truly impressive reign today: his origins, personality, outlook, confidantes, the existential problems he inherited from the Period of Disunion, and the novel, world-changing solutions he'd craft to ensure China's reunification would be factual, rather than just rhetorical.Time Period Covered:581-600 CEMajor FiguresYang Jing (Emperor Wen of Sui)[r. 581-604]Empress Dugu QieluoGao JiangYang SuSu WeiLi DelinArthur F. Wright, Chaffee and Twitchett (ed.) The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 3 (1979) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 77, Internal Affairs.

It is a well-known truism that any new national leader inherits the government of his or her predecessor. Oftentimes, that includes its strengths and its solutions, but it almost always includes its problems. Whether we're talking about an American president, a German Kaiser, Japanese Shogun, Roman Princeps, or indeed Chinese Emperor, they are inevitably forced to wrestle with the demons of those who came before them before they are ever allowed to fully grow into their own office. And just like any exorcism, at best, you can hope to maybe contain the demons of old, perhaps even drive them away for a time. But at worst, their evils and sins stand to consume you entirely and with you everything you hold dear. This holds true even in the best of circumstances, but all the more so for a society that has been rent apart

for more than three centuries, as is the case with China as we begin today. With that happy image in mind, then, today we will focus our laser gaze onto the reign of the man who had done what no other could since the collapse of Han some 360 years prior, which was, of course, unite China. I speak of Yang Jian, formerly the Duke of Sui, but as of 581 in pretense and then 589 in fact, the unquestioned emperor of China in its totality and the founder of the Sui dynasty. And before going further, I'd like to put your mind at ease, at least for now. In spite of my earlier dire illusion of an exorcism gone wrong, Yang Jian will prove a capable administrator of his realm, if by no means perfect.

Under his rule, Sui will set the foundations for a dynasty that will rival even the likes of Zhou, or Han in its majesty, glory, and sheer endurance. It simply will not be his own dynastic line that will reap the benefits of his, and his subjects, hard work. But make no mistake, China in the late 6th century is in dire need of an exorcism of the highest order, where it has the accumulated demons, skeletons, and ghosts of 360 years packed into its civilizational closet. And so, today we are going to follow Yang Jian, that is Emperor Wen of Sui, as he sets about purging his newfound empire of the dead weight, historical sins, and cultural specters

that have nipped at China's heels since the late Han of the 3rd century. In so doing, we are actually going to be looking through his early reign through a completely different lens of focus than we've done before, beginning in 581 with his accession, and to the period beyond his reunification of China altogether. This episode, we are going to be primarily focused on the internal affairs of the newborn Sui dynasty. That is, the cultural, legal, and ethnic deadwood that he's going to have to cut through in order to make his military conquest of the North and then the South anything more than a flash-in-the-pan, in-name-only reunification, and instead reforge the shattered pieces of China into a cohesive empire that can stand the trials yet to come.

Then, next time, we will take a closer look at the military reforms that he sought to implement and what that would mean for the Sui army, the Sui government, and of course, China's neighbors. For all of this, I've organized the coming couple of episodes a little bit differently than we might all be accustomed to. Instead of plodding along in a straight chronological order from one event to the next, today we're going to be far more interested in the themes of Emperor Wen's period of rule, which I've divided into his court, his physical empire, and then the vast array of problems he inherited over the course of his conquests, and then the solutions he would spend the rest of his reign pursuing. But before we launch into the grand perspective of the internal machinations of the Sui dynasty's clockwork,

it is definitely worth asking the question, just, uh, who are we dealing with exactly? What kind of a man is Yang Jian, this one of Sui? I should note that I have been immensely helped and enriched in this endeavor by my readings of probably the authoritative English-language work on this period, the third volume of the Cambridge History of China, and in particular, the section on the Sui Dynasty, written by the distinguished Arthur F. Wright.

So who is the man who history would come to know as Emperor One? He was born on July 21st, year 541, as the eldest child of the then Duke of Sui and his mother, the Lady Lu. Ultimately, he would have five brothers and three sisters. Though of course, as the eldest, he stood to inherit all of the accumulated power and prestige his father had managed to gain for their shared family name. Yang Jian, like his father before him, would claim ancestry from the Han people, and specifically from a well-renowned general from the Eastern Han period by the name of Yang Xuan. But such claims of being legitimately Chinese only reveal part of the truth. In all likelihood, yes, there was probably a direct connection tracing back to an ancestor of possibly even pure-blooded

Han ethnicity, but any such clarity was centuries in the rearview mirror by this point. To the contrary, Yang Yangjian, undoubtedly like virtually every other so-called Han family that wished to survive, much less thrive, in a northern China dominated by Mongol-Turkic steppe peoples between the 3rd and 6th centuries, was almost undoubtedly a mix of several ethnicities. It had, after all, long been the policy of the ruling elite and the noble families of the north in general to use intermarriage to secure alliances, advancements, and social prestige in this new world dominated by the peoples formerly known as barbarians. In truth, it was only the Southern Chinese, safely huddled away

as they were behind their Yangtze River fortification, who could even possibly lay claim to the pure-bloodedness with a straight face at this point? Yang Jian, rather, was culturally Chinese, and in fact that was the ultimate measure by which one's worthiness was defined. In short, do you act, dress, and walk sufficiently like a duck? And indeed, he did. Still, it is worth pointing out exactly what we mean by culturally Chinese. After all, the North and South of China have by the late 6th century been politically and

culturally divided for more than 300 years. Think of the cultural divisions and fractures between the American North and South, perhaps. The American Civil War was a conflict that lasted only five years, and it's now almost exactly 150 in the U.S.'s past. And then go ahead and multiply that by 60 in terms of time frame, and having only just now been resolved. When Emperor Wen's armies captured Nanjing in 589 and hauled the Chen Emperor Xuan up to Chang'an as guests, the linguistic differences alone that had accumulated in the prior three centuries were enough to render conversation between the two opposing monarchs impossible. It was then, as it is now, an interesting wrinkle of the Chinese language that,

while spoken dialects might easily become mutually unintelligible, written language, divorced as it is from its spoken counterparts, has remained over time so standardized and universal that the two were easily able to converse via correspondence, but rendered utterly mute in person. Even today, many Chinese could gain some semblance at least of meaning by reading the ancient texts outright, in spite of the fact that they were written thousands of years ago. In contrast, the earliest examples we have of written English in any form is of course the epic poem Beowulf, written between 1,000 and 1,300 years ago, and I defy any but the most

ardent old English scholars to know what that all says without an outright translation. Back to the Chinese culture of the late 6th century, then. We must at the very least differentiate between northern and southern ideations of what Chinese actually was. In the south, what it was to be Chinese was a reflection of the relative abundance the Han peoples found themselves surrounded with. The ability to farm rice meant frequent and even predictable surpluses. Moreover, the relatively mild climate negated

the need for adaptation to potentially deadly climate conditions. And culturally speaking, the southern Chinese were able to, well, live the good life. One might reasonably look to the southern poetry as a metric for what they deem to be important enough to write about. A popular Southern ballad of the time translates as, quote, set out in the morning from Cassia and Orchid Isle, stopped to rest at noon under the mulberries and elms, gathering rushes you and I, less than a handful all day, end quote. It sounds positively idyllic. Contrast that, then, to the images of a contemporary poem from the northern expanses. Quote, The quick horses are always terribly thin, the young hands always so terribly poor. It takes yellow grain to get a weak horse going,

and a man needs money to be a man. End quote. The differences in ideas and thoughts and outlooks, I should hope, are obvious. Southerners had grown accustomed to their, well, soft way of life, other finer things, green hills, and abundant waters. Meanwhile, their brothers that had remained in the North, they had come to regard as crude, simple, and even with contempt. Meanwhile, the Northerners regarded their southern cohorts as indolent, weak, and unaccustomed to what was real struggle in life. Theirs was a martial, even Spartan lifestyle, devoid of extraneous comforts or security, tied to the romance of the hunt, the horses, the dogs, and a climate of shared experiences with Chinese and non-Chinese alike. Now, if this sounds to you like two cultures who just might have a difficult

time swallowing the idea that they are now all one again, well, you're absolutely right. In terms of origin stories, our eminent Emperor Wan of Sui is a good one. As Yang Jian, he was born in 541, within the confines of a Buddhist monastery in Wenan Prefecture, in what is today modern East Central Shanxi Province, roughly midway between the two ancestral capital cities, Luoyang and Chang'an, and completely coincidentally, virtually the same birthplace as the grand historian himself, Sima Qian, some seven centuries prior. Taking a liking to the infant, apparently on account of his atypically good looks, one of the nuns in the order took up caring for Yang Yangjian throughout his childhood until he turned 12,

and as a result, he grew up to be a devout Buddhist. He was trained very early on, as was the northern custom for virtually all aristocratic youths, in the ways of the horse and bow. Thanks to his lineage and his father's position within the northern Zhou aristocracy, he was appointed as the assistant to one of the imperial princes as his first assignment at just 14 years old. Only two years later, he would be married to a young woman of the Dugu clan of Xianbei, one of the most powerful non-Chinese families in the north. As a result, by the time he'd hit his stride as a young adult, he was already a successful, well-connected career military man

with experience in both warfare and civil administration under his belt. He is, however, remembered as being a reserved and rather uncharismatic person in both his professional life as well as his professional dealings. But Arthur F. Wright advises that, quote, there are many sides to his personality. There are those that can be related to a traditional Chinese value or behavior pattern, those that can be explained by the time and milieu in which he lived, still others which are related to the pathology of supreme power, and finally, those which are peculiar to his own character.

He was harsh and forbidding, with an outlook which brokered neither magnanimity nor much pity towards others. Yet at the same time, he spent the vast majority of his adult life, well, virtually his entire reign in fact, mired in doubt, paranoia, and insecurity. While at the same time, displaying all the hubris of the founder of the dynasty, his own most closely sought to mirror, and ultimately would in many ways, the first emperor of Qin, the man who had first forged China into a unified empire at all. In fact, Yang Jian displayed many of the same personality traits as Qin Shi Huang. Like the ancient prince of Qin, he too was a natural warrior with a similarly tempestuous

temperament, and quick to anger, but later on often regretful of the rash actions he might have taken. He was likewise tireless in his administration of his empire, bordering on micromanagement, and may indeed have tended to step over that line altogether. Yang Jian thought big, too, and indeed under his reign, he would order the reconstruction and expansion of the Great Wall, an entire new capital city constructed, an entire new legal and governmental system set into place, and a system of official selection that would do away with the nepotism and corrupt favoritism of old. Not to mention, a grand canal system that would link the north and the south

of China together for the first time. Like the first emperor of Qin, the first emperor of Sui thought big and planned to build an empire that would last a thousand years or more, and he would succeed, just not, as it ultimately turned out, for his own family line, just like Qin Xiaohuang. As emperor, Yang Jian, or as I will heretofore refer to him his regnal name, Wen, the civil, was a deeply distrustful man and confided in almost no one outside of his inner circle. And it was a very small circle indeed, consisting of only four chief advisors and his wife, the Empress Dugu. His closest advisor was named Gao Jian, and he would prove to be Emperor Wen's most devoted, capable, and flexible administrator, able to implement the imperial will in almost any situation and molding the administrative

cogs of the old bureaucratic systems he'd inherited to the requirements of the newborn Sui. Second among his advisors was the brutal and utterly amoral Yang Su, a distant relation of Emperor Wen, who would be tasked with dealing with the problems administrative finagling simply wouldn't solve. A warrior's warrior, Yang Su was most at home administering harsh authoritarian justice to whomsoever the emperor required, and was utterly without compassion or remorse. He was, as Arthur Wright put it, the Sui dynasty's hatchet man. Third among the inner circle was the brash, young Sui Wei, who would prove to be a loyal and effective central court official, although his real contribution would be to lend the gravitas and authority of his father's name to the dynasty. Finally, rounding out the quartet was Li Dalin,

a staunch Confucian scholar who proved a useful tool in justifying and legitimizing the legal and governmental changes the Sui would begin implementing on Chinese society virtually from the outset. After all, newly reunified as it was, the very fabric of the empire would need to be fundamentally reconstructed from the ground up. But that could only happen, much less stick, if Emperor Wen could point to tradition and precedent from the Han and Master Kong's teachings to back those changes up. Finally, and undoubtedly the most important, the fifth and perhaps only other person in the empire one trusted was his wife, Dugu Qieluo, whose relationship with her husband was highly unusual for its time. In accordance with her own Xianbei traditions,

you see, Emperor Wen had prior to the wedding pledged to his empress-to-be that he would not sire children with any other woman, a vow that he would very famously keep for the rest of his life. With the exception of the Hongzhe Emperor in the 15th century Ming Dynasty, who was absolutely monogamous, Wen Oswe would hold the record for the fewest number of concubines for any adult emperor in Chinese history, only two, and it is indeed questionable whether he ever engaged in sexual activities at all with either of them, even after the death of his empress. Empress Dugu was both a powerful proponent of Buddhism in the imperial

palace in the capital, as well as a shrewd and capable administrator in her own right. She was known to ride alongside Emperor Wen in the official state carriage from place to place. And during official government meetings, though tradition dictated that the emperor alone hear state petitions and reports, the empress would famously wait in the adjacent antechamber and send in one of her personal eunuchs to observe and report on the proceedings. And if she felt that her husband's policy decisions were out of order, she had no compunction about admonishing him when the audience was over, and as they made their way back to their private quarters together. The two formed such an effective and unified front during his early reign

that palace officials referred to the pair as the Archang, that is, the Two Sage Emperors. Surprisingly, it was Empress Dugu herself who would wind up being the driving force behind the Sui's solution to a long-standing problem that had plagued the ancient dynasties, often to their eventual deaths. The so-called Wai-Chi problem, aka the erosion of dynastic power over time through the old tradition of appointing the Empress's extended family to positions of great power. Emperor Wen and Empress Dugu recognized the potency of this problem, one that had brought the Han dynasty to its knees at least twice. And rather ironically, you may recall that it was this exact issue that resulted in Emperor Wen's own rise to power, since he was the former

Empress of Northern Zhou's father. The solution then was kind of obvious in hindsight, to keep her own family out of powerful state positions entirely, and she shared her husband's determination to do so. In terms of children, one, Ndugu, would ultimately have ten. Though, in again, typical northern tradition, none of Emperor Wan's sons would ever share his confidence, and he tended to view them more as potential rivals to his throne than as advisors to be trusted, and he would, over the course of the rest of his life, keep the lot of his issue at arm's length. In fact, during the latter half of his reign, one's natural suspicious nature of his sons would be joined by Empress Dugu's rising level of paranoid jealousy over her husband, and ultimately result in the demotion, deposition of, or even outright execution of four of his five sons, leaving only her favorite, Yang Guang,

to ultimately inherit the throne of Sui. But moving off of Emperor Wen's personality and familial trust issues, he had inherited an empire, well, several empires in fact, that had been over the previous 360 years veritably overgrown with the collective detritus of the period of disunion's unaddressed problems, inconsistencies, and personal and societal quirks of the 30-something emperors who divide for power over its duration. All of this would need to be ironed out, and quickly, if the Sui dynasty was going to prove anything more than a brief respite from the horrors of disunion, much less forge China into a lasting empire once again. Among the myriad issues in need of resolution, even before his

conquest of the south was complete in 589, one was forced to deal with the social dislocation that crippled large swaths of China, and most especially in his war-torn north. Markedly unlike the ethnic Han of the south, the Xianbei dynasties had had little compunction against the practice of taking and using slave labor from captive military and civilian populations. As a result, traditional tribal and ethnic geographic groupings had been shattered across the northern half of the empire, which presented huge roadblocks on the road to permanent reunification. Many now lived in places and among people with whom they shared almost nothing in the way of

culture, tradition, or even spoken language. And as such, to simply leave such a situation to its own devices would certainly have seen the site undone along such ethno-cultural lines. Moreover, economically, the north was still in dire straits on the whole, especially when compared to its southern counterpart. While the lands and dynasties south of the Yangtze had enjoyed relatively unspoiled agriculture, fertile climates, and perhaps most importantly, the efficacy of rice cultivation as opposed to the North's millet. Meanwhile, the North had devolved over the course of the conflict from empire into little more than medieval feudal manners, where serfs toiled

over the lands governed by local military lords for mere self-sufficiency. In addition, the now more than three centuries of relatively weak central authority and relatively strong local and regional feudal lords had resulted in widespread corruption, graft, and outright fraud against the imperial tax authority. We'll be looking at the military situation in more depth next episode, but the short of it was that with the widespread disarray following the fall of Han, local civil governors had assumed more and more military authority over their respective areas of control, while military commanders likewise had assumed more and more military authority over their respective areas of control, while military commanders likewise had assumed more civil authority over the areas they occupied and or defended.

The civil government was by the 580s being run as though it were a military, over large swaths of the North especially. Because, for all intents and purposes, that is exactly what it was. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World podcast. or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era,

then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. The problem was that such a lack of central oversight or authority allowed those local lords to do pretty much whatever they wanted over the course of the period of disunion. Even during the Northern Zhou Dynasty, its emperors had been forced to acknowledge the extent of the problem such a state of affairs was causing to their coffers and their empire's overall stability. Having wryly noted that prefectures had been declared of areas with as few as a hundred households,

and local commandery groups created with the absurd number of three families. The duplication of official positions in both the North and the South, and between the civil and military governments, which were widely overlapping in their authorities, had resulted in a pitifully small tax yield in even the largest and most affluent of tax regions. It was a state of affairs which could not possibly stand, and would bring any dynastic line that could not sufficiently address it swiftly to its knees through bankruptcy alone, if nothing else. Probably the most humorous observation on the state of the empire was made by the court official Yang Shangxi in 583 when he dryly quipped on the number of officials in relation to the respective tax bases they oversaw, quote, it's like using nine shepherds to watch over ten sheep, end quote. As a result, while in the south trade and commerce had flourished and hard money was relatively widespread

in its usage, in the far more populous north, the idea of an empire-wide economy, or really anything much beyond a local barter-based market, was by now utterly alien. The challenges for Sweden were manifold. In addition to needing to accommodate the tax collections between the North, where trade and collection was typically concluded in kind, and the South, where hard specie yet ruled, so too would there be ongoing challenges in rectifying an empire where the center of governance, at Chang'an, was so far divested from the center of commerce and imperial wealth, until recently, Jiangkang specifically, but more generally,

the South as a whole. Emperor Wang's solution would be massive in its scale and scope. Mere words, after all, could not fix such a physical, economic, and social division as this. Rather, he concluded that the only way to truly rectify this economic disparity must be physical in nature, a literal binding together of the two halves of his empire, in the form of a canal network the likes of which had never before or since been envisioned. As I'd mentioned the last time, one had ordered ground broken on a vast shining new capital built alongside the ancient imperial seat at Chang'an. This new sprawling, very much incomplete metropolis he christened Da Xing, a name whose meaning gives insight into his hopes as to this new era. It literally means great revival,

an aspirational statement if ever there was one. Once again, in the words of Arthur Wright, quote, the building of the capital on such a scale so early in the dynasty was an act of faith expressing the confidence of the sui founder and his advisors that their dynasty would have a wider sway and longer life than the regimes which preceded them, end quote. However, since it was built literally next door to the old city of eternal peace, it shared a very similar set of challenges as a center to the empire. If you go ahead and look up modern Xi'an on a map, you may notice that it is rather well far away from any major natural water source, stuck as it is pretty much smack dab in the middle of China proper,

near neither the Yellow, nor Huai, nor Yangtze rivers. In fact, the only river near the capital, the Wei, was prone to silting, which rendered it seasonally too shallow to properly navigate, as well as requiring near-constant dredging and maintenance. Well, now, that is rather awkward, not to mention really expensive to supply and maintain. The food production capacity of the local region was already strained, and the further expansion of the capital city promised to stress the local agricultural capacity to its breaking point. As such, in early 584, Emperor Wen had commissioned the engineer Yuan Kai to design and begin construction of a massive canal from the capital itself all the way to Dongguan Communications. This project would, of course, prove backbreaking and extremely long-term, not to mention extremely expensive. Labor, for now, would prove no object, as families without property or taxable income were expected to supply their duties to the

government in the form of some 20 days of statute labor per year. As for the expenses incurred outright, well, that would be what the taxable population was for. The canal of expanded communications promised to more than pay for itself, as well as the toils of the populace directed to construct it, in eventual surpluses and a year-round navigable waterway to and from the capital that would be open to both official and private use. And in that, it would ultimately prove a resounding success. Nevertheless, as the canal projects continued and then expanded, because make no mistake, the canal connecting the capital will only be just the beginning of the Sui's ditch-digging enterprises. They would combine with other massive projects

Emperor Wen and then his successor would envision and direct his populace to complete on their behalves, such as, as mentioned earlier, the new capital and the reconstruction of the Great Wall. Ultimately, both the labor supply and the tax base of the Sui Empire would begin to wonder exactly what the limit on this credit line

was going to be. But then again, that's getting ahead of ourselves, isn't it? Another important issue for the nascent Sui government would be to determine what its governing philosophy was going to be, exactly. In this realm, perhaps more than any other, Emperor Wen's administration turned to past precedent to set their own policy guidelines. As I'd said in our summation of the Age of Disunity last episode, the doctrines of Confucius and his disciple Mencius had largely fallen out of favor in widespread usage in the three centuries prior. Their always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life exhortations of the innate goodness of mankind

just didn't really quite seem to resonate with the horrors of protracted warfare. Go figure. But that is not to say that Confucianism as a whole was put out to pasture. Quite the contrary, it remained the very basis and cornerstone of both the imperial claim to power and of Chinese society, northern and southern, as a whole. Its rituals and symbolism infused the monarch with claims to spiritual as well as temporal authority derived from heaven itself, and at the same time hearkened back and linked the foundling Sui to the likes of the great Han, Qin, and Zhou of old. Moreover, and particularly appealing for a man such as Emperor Wen, was the Confucian exhortation that the central importance of filial loyalty and submission, that is, knowing and accepting one's place within society and then

freely submitting to the responsibilities of that status, in short, the very foundation of China's hierarchy itself. And as he happened to be the father of the empire, and as such all of its subjects, well, that made them all beholden to his will. Convenient. Thirdly was the central importance Confucianism placed on classical learning. Now, to be sure, Emperor Wen himself was no bookworm. He was well-read enough, to be sure, and highly intelligent. But like many highly authoritarian autocrats across time, especially the overtly militaristic ones, he tended to be anti-intellectual, at least beyond that which directly impacted his own ability and right to rule. But as it so happened, with the total governmental reorganization ongoing across the

empire, Sui-China turned out to be in dire need of literate and dedicated officials under this new central bureaucracy to take the place of the newly ousted nepotic and corrupt regional government administrators. Grand rewards, therefore, were offered to those in good standing who could demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of the Confucian classics, themselves long held as the source of learning, as well as of governmental theory. In official edicts, one asked the country magistrates across the empire to recommend those men, quote, who have clearly understood the modern and the ancient, fully comprehended the configurations of order and disorder, and who have inquired deeply into the basis of political doctrines, end quote. Yet this would ultimately prove deeply disappointing to the

exacting standards of one who, by 601, would close many of the Confucian schools he himself had commissioned, stating, quote, those scholars in the state academy number almost a thousand. They simply have their names enrolled and vainly waste their time. They have not the virtue to be exemplars for their time, nor the talent to serve the needs of the state. End quote. Instead, Emperor I would, even very early on in his reign, be forced to implement a radically new method of training and selecting his imperial officials, one that in fact ran directly counter to traditional Confucian ethics of loyalty to familial and kinship ties, an official series of exhaustive, comprehensive, and impartial examinations. By 587, it would be official state policy that each prefecture was to annually send

to the capital no fewer than three men it deemed capable to take one or more of the official imperial service examinations laid out by one's administration. They were the General Examination, or Xiuzai, the Classical Examination, or Mingqing, and the Examination of Literary Ability, or the qin shi. These exams proved so exhaustive and stringent, in fact, that they would in turn generate an entire new problem for the sui, which was the inability for it to rapidly fill the official positions empire-wide. In an official complaint to Emperor Wen, an official on the board of Civil Office decried, quote,

at present, the Board cannot staff more than a few hundred counties out of the whole empire. Out of a population of six or seven million families, is it only possible to select a few hundred county magistrates? End quote. The exactitude of the exam requirements would ultimately result in staff shortages for more than a decade before sufficiently large numbers of officials had at last passed their tests and been certified. Nevertheless, it would in the long run result in a total paradigm shift in Chinese officialdom toward meritocratic placement that would ultimately become a cornerstone of the empire itself for the rest of its lifespan, all the way to 1905. Emperor I, at least on the face

of things, accepted Confucian ideology. But if that is in fact true, then it was at least a very different ideation of the philosophy than that of Master Kong, or Mencius for that matter. Wright likens one of Sui's understanding of Confucianism as more along the lines of the Confucian realist, Xin Zi, who taught in the 4th century BCE that man's inherent nature was in fact evil, and only through construction and adherence to ethical norms that had to be taught and then enforced, could they become good. In fact, Wright asserts that Emperor One, in his heart of hearts, was not a Confucian at all, but instead a staunch legalist who paid lip service only to Confucian doctrines. This tendency towards strict adherence to stricter still laws

would be played out time and again over the course of one's reign over Sui, and further enhanced the parallels between him and the reign of the ancient Qin Shouhang. One was a firm believer in the letter of the law, and even more critically, equality of all before it. This would be played out most famously against his own son, Prince Yang Jun of Qin, who had been found guilty of a rather petty theft of public funds, and at the time of his trial in 579 was probably already dying of a disease. Nevertheless, the emperor pronounced sentence over his own son, that he be stripped of all positions and titles save that of imperial prince itself.

At this, his closest ministers Yang Su and Liu Sheng begged him to reconsider, telling him that the sentence was far too severe for such a piddling crime. To this, however, Emperor Wen flatly stated, quote, the law may not be violated, quote. When such a laconic explanation yielded only further exhortations of clemency, Wen then elaborated, quote, I am the father of five sons, not of the masses of the people. If I were to follow your idea to its conclusion, would I not be establishing a separate law entirely for the children of the Son of Heaven? Even a man as kind as the Duke of Zhou was forced to execute his sons because his laws commanded it. Myself, I am nowhere near his equal. Thus, how could I even think to break my own laws?

Suffice it to say, the petition for clemency was denied. He would further express classically legalist ideas of governance in an edict promulgated in 601 stating, quote, the teachings established by former kings is to replace mercy with justice. To cut off all feelings of affection for one's kin is to realize in full the principle of service to one's prince, end quote. Harsh, no doubt, but fair. Ideologically, Buddhism, too, played a central component in Emperor Wen's vision of a reunified China. It was, of course, the personal faith of the North, and of course later the South, would be to lift the prohibition on the faith that had been put into place under the final emperors of Northern Zhou a little more than a decade before.

But his interest in the faith ran far deeper than mere personal spiritualism. Emperor Wen, you see, looked at Buddhism as a potential glue that would help hold his empire together, above and beyond the merely political policies he was likewise enacting towards the same goal. Buddhism had, in spite of its alien origins, by the late 6th and early 7th centuries, very much gone native across China, North and South alike, and could therefore be made to serve as a powerful unifying factor in a way that no secular means possibly could. Even Buddhism's ostensible rival, Taoism, had over the course of the period of disunity, borrowed heavily from the Indian religion, to the point where it can, and has, been argued to have been just by this juncture

little more than a crypto-Buddhist faith. In terms of his personal role as well, one sought to use Buddhism as a kind of secondary legitimization, by branding himself an empire-wide edicts as a Bodhisattva ruler, and greater still, a Sakravartin Raj, that is, an ideal monarch, defender of the faith, and as a surrogate and vicar of the Buddha himself on earth. As with all other areas of his rule, the rehabilitation of the Buddhist church would not be allowed to grow just willy-nilly, nor under anything but his own strict centralized rule. Such, all newly appointed clergymen were exhaustively vetted, and then regardless of

their eventual posting, first placed under the direct authority of the Metropolitan Temple within the capital. With his governing and spiritual philosophies firmly set, the next internal issue for the Sui court to tackle would be implementation, that is to say, actual government structure. And no surprise here, Emperor Wen turned once again to the customs of the ancient dynasties rather than embracing the more recent innovations the Xianbei traditions of the north had grown accustomed to. The northern titles and positions were abolished and replaced with Han, Wei, and Qin equivalents, with one key exception, the chancellor or prime minister. One had keenly noted that in dynasties past, this executor of imperial will

had far too often ultimately usurped that power for himself. Indeed, he himself had done exactly that. Therefore, Emperor Wen resolved that in order to further secure the long-term success of his line, the emperors of Sui should be their own executors, relying on no one else. For officials of the empire, there were changes far greater than that of a mere title swap. Interested in both keeping the officials he dispatched firmly under the imperial thumb, as well as disentangling the civil and military arms of the government, a topic we are going to cover in greater depth in the next episode, one of Sui declared in 594

that the families and parents of officials dispatched to a province were forbidden from accompanying them on assignment. His rationale was that with them safely back at the capital, they would be unable to whisper into the ears of his political officers

or exert undue influence on their decisions while they served their terms. Officials' terms, too, had been rethought virtually from the ground up. Gone was the idea of an appointment being anything but temporary in duration, or of ever being truly away from the eyes of the imperial seat. Officials at all levels were subject to annual evaluations of their performance. Regents exceeding expectations would see their governors lavishly rewarded,

while those that fell short would quickly find themselves fined, demoted, or worse. One also appointed a cadre of traveling inspectors to be the eyes and ears of the emperor in distant places and report back to him on what they observed. And above even them was a powerful censorate bureau, empowered with wide birth to ferret out wrongdoings, and even impeach officials without direct authorization from the throne. All right, so have I given you enough to chew on yet? Because we're not even done with Emperor Wen of Sui. I know, right?

That was only a summation of the internal challenges he faced and his frankly ingenious solutions to them. But fear not. What we're sorting through right now is, as I said at the top of the episode, an accumulated 360 years of 30-something respective dynasties worth of political deadwood, along with all the king's horses and all the king's men trying to stitch the greater empire back together again. It will not remain this dense forever. It is truly amazing though, thinking about it, that a single man with

this laser-like vision would be able to cut through so much detritus and reforge what had been a well and truly shattered pane of glass back into a cohesive political and social unit. But that is exactly what Emperor One has been doing and will continue to do in the coming episode. But be warned, because the parallels between the founder of Sui and the ancient founder of Qin will not stop with their respective deaths. And just as the Qin fell before its second generation had passed, so too will Sui's second emperor be faced with a mortal crisis to all his father had built. Thank you for listening.

The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.