The History of China - #78 - Sui 2: Reconstruction

Episode Date: October 18, 2015

Today we finish out out look into the reign of the Sui Dynasty’s founding emperor, Wen. We begin first with the military roferms he imposed on his newly reunited state, mirroring those he made to the civil government. Once completed, Sui China will find itself on a footing it hasn’t reliably been for centuries: outward-facing and expansionist. The repercussions of this epochal change in circumstance for Chine will be felt across the globe.Time Period Covered:581-605 CEMajor Historical Figures:Sui DynastyYang Jian (Emperor Wen of Sui) [r. 581-605 CE]Crowned Prince Yang GuangPrince Yang YongGeneral Yang SuGeneral Liu FangChampa KingdomKing ÇambhuvarmanMajor Works Cited:Hirth, Friedrich (1913). “The Mystery of Fu-Lin” in The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 33. Pp. 133-208. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/592825Arthur 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. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War

and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. Today's episode is made possible by you, the listeners. I'd love to see more of you beautiful people on Twitter, since we are under the handle at THOCpodcast, or on Facebook at facebook.com slash thehistoryofchina. And of course, you are always welcome at the website, thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com. Thanks again, and enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 78, Reconstruction. The year 589 marked the year of Chinese reunification with the utter defeat of the Chen Dynasty, the destruction of its seat of power at Jiankang, and the relocation of the former Emperor of the South and his family to the Sui capital, Chang'an.

It had been an absolutely massive offensive more than a decade in the making, and obsessively planned for by Emperor Wen of Sui, with contingency and counter-contingencies all taken into account, with potentially as many as half a million soldiers near simultaneously invading from the north and the west, both by land and by an immense river navy. But the campaign that would see the end of the period of disunity and the supremacy of the Sui would turn out to only be the beginning of the Sui dynasty's military adventures, as well as hearkening a new age of long-neglected ties with kingdoms that China had long ignored, both near and greatly distant. Before launching into those, however, it's worth taking a look at the Sui military, both the organization one had inherited from the Northern Zhou upon his enthronement, as well as the significant changes he would impose upon it

once in office. As I mentioned last episode, Chinese societies, both northern and southern, had been by the end of the 6th century thoroughly militarized. By the 570s, owing to the northern Zhou's widespread conscriptions of its peasant population into its armed forces, some of the older histories state that half the Chinese population became soldiers. Well, that's pretty obviously an exaggeration, but even as such, such a statement can be used to pretty safely infer that the proportion of soldiers to the overall population of the state was huge. And that was all well and good for an empire waging a fearsome civil war for dominance over its two competitors, but not so suitable for

a postbellum return to civil government. This was exacerbated further by the fact that the mechanisms of civilian government had been pretty thoroughly co-opted by regional military commanders and vice versa, rendering the machinery of state unstable, heavily armed, and localized, all veritable recipes for future disaster. Large infrastructural changes would have to be enacted across the empire for Emperor Wen's Sui dynasty to avoid simply refracturing into warlord states, as had Han at the outset of the Three Kingdoms period, centuries prior. To this end, Wen immediately set about, much as he would do with his civil governmental systems over the course of his reign, as we discussed last time, completely revamping the way his military operated as well, with a proclamation

stating, quote, now let all military men without exception be subject to the prefectural and county authorities. Let their land allotments and registrations be the same as the common people's, end quote. What this meant in practice was to simultaneously demilitarize the majority of the empire and give control of the military units that were left back to the civil officials. In fact, following this proclamation, one would order the total disarmament of the entire Chinese northern plains region, the area that had long been the breeding ground for ethnic rivalries and civil disturbances, and even to that point remained a hotbed for anti-Sui sentiments.

Notably, the order demilitarizing the northern plains would conspicuously leave out the garrisons at Guangcheng and Houteng, as they were the imperial army's prime staging areas in the north of China, and thus needed to be ready at all times to carry out the imperial will. This first phase of demilitarization would have one other critical effect, the abolition of hereditary privilege in the military structure. As with the civil government, the Chinese militaries had developed an entrenched system of nepotic practices, and even outright favoritism towards the family members of the elite, which just like with his civil government, one felt both weakened the military by elevating

those based on birth rather than potential, and also created dangerous networks of officers potentially more loyal to their family's interests or the general who secured their appointment for them than their duty to the interests of the empire as a whole. But as with any major change, if one was going to make this stick, he would need to turn to precedent. In order to justify the wholesale abandonment of the by now long-standing system of peasant conscription, which was called Fu Ping, one claimed in this, as with so many of his other policy decisions, to be hearkening back to the glory days of the Han. And as such, the Sui military model should emulate that of the Han. The Fu Ping conscription model was, he argued, an innovation of the northern dynasties and the non-Chinese

who had founded them. Thus, not only were they unnecessary now that peace and national unity had returned to China once more, at least theoretically, but the conscription-based military was in fact inconsistent with the Sui's revitalization of China's ancient glory. And so, clearly, it had to go. Instead of a vast, largely conscript army that had relied on overwhelming numbers of poorly trained peasants given spears in the style of Northern Zhou, the 12 guards units and the army high command of the Sui would instead, quote, draw their men from those selected, trained, and administered locally for such service throughout their adult lives, end quote. In other words, the Chinese army was going professional once again. This initial downsizing of the regional power bases of the military and its restoration to a peacetime, centralized, and civilian control would be expanded much further some five years later.

In 595, disarmament was expanded from the northern plains to empire-wide through a proclamation, quote, ordering the confiscation of all weapons in the empire and decreeing that those who attempted to manufacture them privately would be punished, end quote. Once the end, however, the staging area for the Sui imperial armies was exempted from this action. No more of these local lords building up their own stockpiles of arms and drafting their populations to fight for them. No, from here on out, you were either in the army or you were disarmed. No two ways about it. That said, it was one thing to promulgate an edict declaring that all weapons were to be confiscated. It was quite another thing, though, to actually enforce it.

Just the sheer size of the militaries that existed across China, not to mention the number of arms and armor that, quite frankly, could not be accounted for. And it's no surprise that by the time the population of China would, spoiler alert, ultimately get fed up with the emperors of Sui, there would still be plenty of weapons for the peasantry to pick up and rebel with. To give a reference point for the scale we're talking about, by the year 605, a decade after this disarmament order had gone into effect, the number of as-yet-still-decentralized regional military commands, empire-wide, still numbered 36. The following year, those three dozen semi-private armies would at last be rolled into the central control of the 12 guards, but still we're talking about a long, drawn-out process, to be sure. Nevertheless, it would prove a vital task in order to secure the interior of China against

further outbreaks of rebellion, or even the nightmare scenario, that is, refracturing into warlord states once again. That was no idle threat, either. For instance, in either 589 or 590, a rather devastating rebellion broke out in the southern provinces against the northern conqueror's rule. Much like the policy pursued by the United States against the southern states following its own civil war almost 12 centuries later, Emperor Wen had, following his reunification of China, appointed northerners as the prefects of the southern provinces to administer his new imperial holdings. And, as you might imagine, this went over about as well as a lead balloon. Much like that postbellum of the American Civil War, the southerners largely resented their new

northern, one might even intone carpetbagger, overlords, a state that was only compounded by the fact that the southern population was, as you may recall, so linguistically different from their new northern governors that the two groups couldn't even effectively communicate with one another. Moreover, the southern gentry, who were able to maintain their positions, were nonetheless subjected to the stark realities of northern rule. Namely, that whereas under Chen and its prior incarnations they'd been given great favor by the southern dynasty's monarchs, now under the Sui they were merely tolerated and given no such special dispensations. Nor did the imperial court at Chang'an do itself any favors in this regard. Immediately following

the conquest of Chen, the official Su Wei drafted and distributed across the southern provinces a written work known as the Five Teachings, or Wu Jiao. Now unfortunately, this document, like so many others, has since been lost to time, but it was apparently a sort of moral catechism that was used primarily as a form of minor punishment against those imperial subjects who breached the bounds of classical Confucian ethics. The punishment would be that one must memorize and then publicly recite the Five Teachings, which historian Arthur F. Wright took to be a recitation of the gradations of respect to be shown to one's betters, and apparently included a particularly inflammatory passage

on the former citizens of Chun to show absolute loyalty to the Sui dynastic rule. This already simmering situation was put to full boil, however, when a rumor began to spread rapidly through the southern populations, insisting that their Sui overlords had devised a secret plan to deport them all from their homes and forcibly resettle the entire southern population into the Guangzhong region of the North China Plains, that war-torn region that now served as the central imperial government's military hub. You might compare the sentiment of the rumor as being akin to the southerners fearing that they were about to be loaded up and sent en masse to a military internment camp indefinitely, an image that conjures up no small number of contemporary parallels.

Thought of in that light, it really is no wonder that this rumor would prove to be the spark that once again ignited the whole of the South in rebellion. Wright described the events as follows, quote, revolts broke out in many places, sway officials were attacked, some were dismembered and eaten, while others disemboweled. The natives were supposed to have said to their victims, this will make you more able to memorize the five teachings. The revolts ranged in size from a few thousand to several tens of thousands, and disorder fell on disorder." Fortunately for the Sui dynasty as a whole, if not for its officials to the south, the revolts against its authority were at their core unplanned, unled rabble,

what seems to have been just a collective release of pent-up anger against the new laws and policies rather than anything approaching a real, organized rebellion. Had it been more adequately led, for instance, it's hard to say what the outcome might have been. Personally, I find it unlikely that another rebellion so early after Sui's conquest would have met with anything except total defeat, but it certainly would have put up a more dogged fight had it had proper leadership. Instead, the disorganized peasants and local nobility remained fragmented and only in pockets, and as such all too easy for the Sui dynasty's axe man, Yang Su, to roll in with his imperial army detachment and easily crush the insurgents within a year. Still, the potential for

the apparent latent anger that still lurked in the hearts of the conquered southerners must have weighed on Emperor I considerably, and was almost certainly a major factor in him deciding to outlaw weapons across the entire empire in 595, and then would go so far as to confiscate and ban all civilian watercraft over the length of 30 feet in 598. His thinking may have been, how could the peasants rebel against imperial authority if he took away all the means for them to do so? As I said earlier, however, proclamation was again very different from enforcement. Of course, these internal reforms were not happening in a vacuum, and even as he pursued the reduction and centralization of his military, Emperor I was at the same time forced to confront the external threats that, especially as his internal reforms progressed,

became of foremost importance to his regime's stability. As he got his internal house in order, the dual priorities of frontier defense and outward expansion began to move higher on Wen's to-do list. And a familiar list it was. The Guke Turk Khanate to the north, the Tuyuhyun Empire to the west, the Nam Viet Kingdom in the far south, and the Goguryeo Kingdom, once more ascendant, in the Korean peninsula and northern Manchuria. And yeah, that is a lot to take on, so today we're going to look at the first three and then leave that last one, Goguryeo, for next episode,

because it will ultimately be tiny Korea that will prove to be the toughest nut for Sui to crack. As we discussed in the last few episodes, the Gukturk Khanate had in fact been the Sui dynasty's first foe to contend with. Even before, it could turn south to deal with the coup de grace to Chun in 589. Emperor Wen had deftly parried the looming threat of the north by whittling away at the joints that held the sprawling steppe confederation together, the great Khan's uncle and nephew, respectively, his right and left hands, to rule the Khanate. By slowly turning them against one another, and then launching a surgical strike at the last holdout of the northern Qi's loyalist generals, who had allied themselves with the Guq Turks, one was able to unravel their unity and

set them on a course for a destructive civil war of their own, resulting in the empire splitting down the middle into eastern and western halves. And boy, aren't we glad we don't have to launch much into that whole quagmire, right? The key points are that one used the disunity to keep the eastern Guq Turk Khanate weak, but not too weak. As explained by Wright, quote, the Eastern Empire, with the contested accession of a new Khan in 582, offered the sort of opportunity Chinese statesmen were long accustomed to exploit. They backed sometimes a Khan, sometimes an anti-Khan, so that the political unity of the Eastern Turks was destroyed. At the same time, they saw to it that

the Eastern Empire did not so far disintegrate as to make it possible the forcible reunification of the two empires by the Khan of the Western Turks, Tardu. End quote. As a brief tangent, over the course of writing this episode, I came across a great conversation online that led me to a great source regarding the interplay between Sui-China in the East and the successor state of the by now long-divided Roman Empire in the West, the Eastern Romans, aka the Byzantine Empire. The question that originated the discussion was what, if any, knowledge did the Chinese have of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, little more than a century prior back in 476. At the time, they possessed, of course,

very little knowledge indeed. In the 5th and 6th centuries, China, for one, was far too preoccupied with its own internal strife to take much notice of even its closest neighbors, much less an amorphous, ill-defined concept halfway across the world. Added to that overall indifference was the fact that since the collapse of the Han, China's access to the Silk Road trade route had been severely curbed, with most of it slipping into local control and later into the likes of the Teyuhyun-Chenbei Coalition and the Hephthalite Khanate. It seems to have taken almost a century for any news on the fate of Da Qin to reach the Chinese, and it's a little ironic that when word did seem to have reached the imperial court of Northern Zhou, possibly according to historian Friedrich Hirth as early as 568 or

576, it was through the Guk Turk empire that word arrived. The Book of Sui mentions, The emperor of the Sui dynasty always wished to have open intercourse with the Fulin, but did not succeed. It remains unclear as to whether this name for the distant foreign empire, Fulin, is specifically in reference to Byzantium or perhaps to the Sassanids of Syria, both of which the Western Gukturks had entered into diplomatic relations with by this time. Still, though the sources seem to acknowledge the fact that the Chinese court was made aware of the shift in Western power structure, significant enough to warrant a name change from Da Qin to Fu Lin, it's equally apparent that they were relatively indifferent to that state of affairs. Hurth writes, quote, Up to the ascent of Yang of Sui in 605, there are no passages on

record showing that anyone in China took particular interest in either the old Dachin or Fulin. Had this been the case, the Chinese would have had every opportunity to collect information through the Western Turks. But instead, after a long pause marked by indifference, the first mention of a Chinese record which points to renewed interest is a remark found in the Book of Tang. End quote. So yeah, Sui-China was vaguely aware by the end of the 6th century that something had changed in the West, they just didn't particularly care. That was about as relative to their own situation as something happening on another planet. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of

Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to Season 1 to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America, and in the Caribbean, the first steps of the East India Company and the political battles between King and Parliament. Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution and regicide which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the fledgling Empire.

In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax. So anyway, back to the Eastern Guk Turks. That was that, right? We don't have to deal with them anymore. Well, not quite. Emperor Wen, forward-thinking as he was, seemed to understand that with the horsemen, any peace was only as lasting as the next time a famine rolled around and set the steppe peoples to raiding their neighbor once more, as they'd been wont to do for millennia. It had been the

case with the Xiongnu, with the Rouran, and now with the Gukturks, and that very predictable pattern virtually ensured that at some point the steppe peoples would unite once more to threaten China again, and Emperor Wen planned for his Sui to be good and ready when that inevitability happened. And as it so happened, there was already a nicely prepared defensive position from which to protect China from the barbarians of the Gobi, the Great Wall System, of course. Well, that would have been, at least, if most of it hadn't fallen into 300 or so years of neglect, disrepair, and abandonment. This isn't to imply that all of the northern dynasties had disdained the formidable fortification. But given the fractious nature of the period, at best, their respective efforts had been local in nature, and brief in duration.

They might have used them or even repaired them a bit, but on the whole, the Great Wall was in a bad way, and Emperor Wen was just the guy to fix that starry state of affairs. From virtually the outset of his rule over the north, he enacted broad, sweeping plans to repair, extend, and of course man the walls once more. And like the Great Wall Qin Shi Huang had first ordered constructed, and then the Han extended and maintained, it would be a massive undertaking. The crumbling ancient walls would serve as the foundations of the new Sui structure, but the building materials would remain much the same. Sun-dried mud bricks and stamped clay, materials that sound almost primitive, but in fact rivals even modern-day concrete in durability and material strength. It just took more work to build. A lot more work. The first year of Wen's reign, he reportedly commissioned one of his trusted officials to

round up and set to work on the project some 30,000 conscripted workers. Unlike the Qin and Han, who had used their multitudinous prisoner populations as effectual slave construction teams, the Sui dynasty utilized corvée labor as a form of tax on the peasantry. From the local tribes living in the vicinity of the construction project, each household was to provide 20 days of labor on the walls each year. But the 30,000 workers of 581 would prove to be just the beginning. By 586, the ranks of forced laborers had risen to 110,000, and then another 100,000 the following year. The walls were rising, but the work only expanded further. A decade later, under one's eventual successor, Emperor

Yang, reportedly more than a million men were conscripted in a single year into the Great Wall Engineering Corps in order to complete a brand new section of the fortification that would run north to south and connect previously existing segments between the Ordos Loop and Shanxi Province. The following year would see the number scaled back down to a mere 200,000 laborers, but on and on it would go. In terms of what these tremendous projects would ultimately mean to the larger society beyond their immediate application, it is important to remind ourselves that the wall was not the only mega-project using hundreds of thousands of corvée workers. There was also the ongoing and ever-expanding Grand Canal Network, which had grown well beyond merely linking up

the capital city to the Yellow River directly, but swiftly grew in scope and scale to link the Yellow River to the Yangtze River itself, a permanent water bridge between the north and south. And then of course, there was the new capital we talked about last time, Daxing, which just kept growing and growing. Millions of people every year were called up to pay their due in three weeks of back-breaking manual labor, for which they would not only receive no pay, but could actually impose significant hardship on the entire household in question. Even if they served out their terms without injury or death, the strongest workers of many peasant farming households and fieldhands were simply gone for almost a month, forced to leave

their farms that they were tending or shops that they ran to the rest of their family in the interim. And this is certainly not to imply that the women, children, and young men of the family wouldn't have been able to pick up the slack, and they most certainly did, but it was a hardship, and one that returned year after year to impose itself once more on the increasingly put-upon population. Because remember, the conscripted labor force was only a portion of the imperial tax. The funds to pay for the mega-projects Emperor I had commissioned, of course, also came from high tax rates on goods and services. And the grumblings of the peasants continued to grow. While the Great Wall was built and rebuilt anew, one's military began experimenting with methods of extending their reach beyond the wall in a permanent fashion. You may remember that up to

this point, more often than not, Chinese expeditions into the steppelands would end in disaster for the force in question, as they moved further and further from their supply caches and into the wilds of the great northern expanses. The Sui army first attempted to deal with this issue by constructing specially designed farming villages that were fortified to resist barbarian raids, even without a direct military response. However, it turned out that such plans were unworkable, either because the horsemen were able to breach the defenses, or possibly, they simply couldn't find enough civilian farmers crazy enough to stake a claim in the middle of hostile country, fortifications or no.

Nevertheless, with the failure of the fortified villages, the Sui dynasty turned to a tactic which had proved quite useful in the time of Cao Cao and the Three Kingdoms, the Tuntian farming system. As a reminder, the Tuntian field system was to essentially take a military garrison and equip them to do their own farming within and surrounding their fort, soldier-farmers as it were, feeding themselves off of the very lands that they were assigned to defend. This practice beyond the Great Wall proved far more effective at increasing the range of Sui northern expeditions. With the fractured Guktuk Empire unable to strike southward,

Emperor Wen could now turn westward to deal with the Toyohyun Empire of the Gansu Corridor, which lay in between the Tibetan highlands and the Gobi Desert. The Sui dynasty had been making on-again, off-again war with the tribal empire since virtually its inception in 581. Over the course of the decade to follow, the conflict had turned decidedly against the Tu-Yu-Hyun, and in 591, its Murong Shi-Fu Khan offered the Sui emperor peace terms, and as per his tribe's custom, one of his daughters to become one's concubine. One would accept the peace proposal, but turn the daughter down, since as I'd mentioned previously, he was not at all about collecting a large harem.

Nevertheless, the two Yuehuen and Sui would build stronger political ties over the 590s, and in 596, in a similar show of favor, one proclaimed the daughter of one of his clansmen as the imperial princess Guanghua, and then sent her to the two Yuehuen Khan to become one of his own many brides. This time, the offer was readily accepted, since Murong Khan had none of one's qualms about polygamy. The bond between the two rulers cemented, the western regents would once again submit to the will of the Son of Heaven, for the first time since the collapse of the Han. We'll travel now to the far south, to the

Nam Viet Kingdom, which we had last left to its own devices back in episode 70, when the Liang dynasty's push to recapture the breakaway region was called off pending the southern dynasty's own impending collapse as a result of the civil war Ho Jing had touched off in the 530s and 40s. For the next four decades, it had been an independent kingdom ruled by the Trio clan as the kings of Viet. Picking back up where the Liang had left off, the southernmost units of the Sui army ended the four-decade armistice and resumed the military campaign against the erstwhile Liang province. By 602, that campaign had seized the Viet capital city, Long Bien, modern Hanoi, Vietnam, ending the Trio dynasty and forcibly reintegrated the Viet capital city, Long Bien, modern Hanoi, Vietnam, ending the Trio dynasty

and forcibly reintegrated the Viet kingdom back into greater China under its old name, Liao province. That victory would present yet another challenge, or seen in the right light, potentially opportunity, in the form of the kingdom to Viet's south, Champa, which suddenly found itself once more the uncomfortable neighbor of a united China. Chang Pa was what is today much of central and southern Vietnam, and was a collection of tribal chams dominated by five major principalities. In spite of their proximity to China, it would be incorrect to assume that they or the other peoples of Southeast Asia had much in common with the Han, either culturally or even genetically. In both cases, the residents of the Changpa principalities were far more closely

related to the peoples of Borneo, and more distantly, the Indian subcontinent, and it showed in their culture and religions. This prehistorical tie was reinforced following independence from the collapsing Han dynasty back in the 2nd century CE, which had failed to reassert its authority over the region, it called Linyi, meaning Forest County. In the vacuum left following the outset of the period of disunion, Indian civilization had flowed in from regions such as Funan and the Thai Kingdom. The Champa Kingdom then emerged in the 4th century, when the process of Indicization was well underway. As such, their written language was derived from Sanskrit rather than Chinese

characters, and their primary religion was a form of Hindu, though Buddhism was also widely practiced. Their capital was due south of the modern Vietnamese city Da Nang, a city the Chams called Simhapura, or Lion City. And no, in spite of it sounding similar, it is decidedly not the modern city Singapore, though it is no accident that they share a similar sounding name, since both derive from the Mele compound meaning Lion City. The Champa Kingdom had maintained a fraught relationship with the various Chinese dynasties of the period of disunity. During periods when the southern dynasties of the period of its unity. During periods when the southern dynasties had been weak or divided, the Chams maintained their full

independence, but when the south had appeared strong, they would typically seek to appease such strength with tributary payments. And it was perhaps their propensity to simply buy off Chinese aggression, and probably bolstered by a successful Chinese raid into the kingdom during the 5th century, that led to the Champa kingdom being viewed, as her right puts it, as a kind of Eldorado where fabulous riches were to be had for the taking. In spite of King Tamhu Varman's having wisely paid the Sui court tribute in 595, Emperor Wen's well-known avarice overcame his accustomed caution.

Around the year 600, Emperor Wen authorized his general, Liu Fang, to lead a strike force consisting of experienced officers, a land force, and even a naval brigade, to march south into Champa, seize the capital, and basically carry off anything that wasn't nailed down. But General Liu quickly realized that basic infantry tactics weren't going to fly in the face of what the Cham armies were able to bring to bear. The Abrams tank of its era, 10,000 pounds of lumbering, trumpeting death. Yes, I'm talking about war elephants. Now, if you've happened to see the Lord of the Rings films, visualize the Battle of Pelennor Field to get a pretty good visual of how ineffective military and even cavalry are up against angry war elephants.

So, what to do? Famously, General Liu baited the Cham defenders into a trap by fortifying and booby-trapping an area with camouflaged pits to trap and kill the elephants, and then he surrounded and massacred the remaining Cham troops before pivoting and capturing the capital, Simhapura. And what did they find in this El Dorado, this mythical land of limitless wealth? Disappointment. Lots and lots of disappointment. Oh sure, there were the golden ancestral tablets of the royal house, and they certainly carried those off, but it turned out that this was no city paved in gold. Oh, the invading army did find at least one other thing they would carry back with them on their return march, deadly disease. The return march to Sui would see huge numbers of

the expeditionary army drop dead in their tracks from the ravages of the innumerable plagues their time in the southern jungles had inflicted upon them, a truly implacable foe that had seen the destruction of entire Han and Liao armies before, and would sap the strength of virtually every invader across time. The officer corps suffered alongside their men, and even lost its commander, General Liu Feng, before the journey's end. To once again quote historian Arthur Wright, quote, the whole effort south of Zhaozhou was a costly failure, and all the Chinese remnant had to show for it were the stolen ancestral tablets, some cases of Buddhist scriptures, and a troop of captured musicians. In the aftermath of the Pyrrhic Chinese capture of Simapura, the Cham king Cangbu Varman was able

to reassert his control over the kingdom and rebuild his shattered capital city. And in an incredibly wise move, he followed up the not exactly successful invasion by the Sui dynasty with an emissary to Chang'an to make lasting terms of peace with the Emperor I. On behalf of the Chan king, the emissary acknowledged the fault of Tsang Buvarmon for having not sent sufficient tribute in 595, and pledged that in the future their tribute would arrive in a timely and plentiful manner. Having seen the almost total destruction of one of his finest military corps at the hand of the devastating Champan diseases, and with pitifully little to show for it, having by now been thoroughly

disabused of the notion that it was some kind of city of gold, really what else was Emperor Wen to do? He accepted the pledge of continued tribute and made peace with Champa. In the year 602, the Empress Dugu would die, leaving Emperor Wen in a state of deep mourning, and during which time he found comfort in his consort's arms and finally began to have sexual relationships with them. In the spring of 604, he made preparations to journey to his usual summer retreat at Runshou Palace in order to avoid the searing heat of the capital. And having been to Xi'an at the height of summer, it is definitely nothing to sneer at. Nevertheless, prior to him setting off, he was supposedly given a dire warning from his palace sorcerer, a man named Zhang Chou Taiyi, that should he venture to Runshou, he would never return.

Dire indeed, if it was to be believed, but less mystical sources indicate that the aging emperor was already rather ill when he set off for the summer palace. Still, there is considerable evidence of foul play having been worked to hasten Emperor Wen's demise at Renshou, by none other than his crowned prince, Yang Guang. This was nothing new for Prince Guang, though. He had, after all, enlisted the help of the Axeman Yangsu back in 600 CE to unseat his own elder brother and claim the status of heir for himself. After having been motivated to action by the exhortation, what have you got to lose? Either you become the heir of Sui, or at worst, you can fall back to the seacoast and return to

the old pattern of a southern dynasty like Liang or Chen. Because you know you're truly power-hungry when plunging your kingdom back into a hateful civil war seems like an acceptable fallback for your power grab. The most often told story, and one with quite a bit of textual evidence supporting it, is that while his father was away, back at the capital, the crown prince attempted to rape the imperial consort, Chen. When she reported the assault, Emperor Wan grew understandably enraged and penned an edict deposing Yang Guang and reinstating his previously deposed elder brother, Prince Yang Yong, as the imperial heir. But once Guang found out about his impending demotion, he quickly mobilized an assassin to venture to the Renzhou Palace and lay the sick emperor to rest. Soon thereafter, Emperor Wen was indeed found dead, less than a month after his 63rd birthday.

Some eight days later, the not-quite-deposed Crown Prince Yang Guang would be enthroned as the Emperor Yang of Sui, and as one of his first acts in office, order the execution of his elder brother, the one man who might have had a better claim to the throne than him. But more on Yang next time. For now, let's send off Emperor One of Sui, who for all his faults led China from bitter division to a stable, if still uncomfortable, reunification, and time of internal peace. Well, mostly. His period of reign was some 33 years, and he boasted among his many accomplishments, apart from that little reunification thing, the reconstruction of the Great Wall, the commissioning of the project that would come to be known as the Great Canal, and an entirely new and modern capital city, Daxing, now well-supplied by the canal network.

He had rebuilt Chinese law, government, and military structures virtually from the ground up, placing them on par with the heights of Han and Qin, and putting the empire back on an outward-facing, expansionist footing for the first time in almost half a millennia. Sima Guang summarizes Emperor Wen in the Zizitongjian, quote, Although he was himself stingy, he did not hold back his awards when rewarding the people with accomplishments. He loved his people, encouraging them to till the field and grow mulberries, and decreasing their labor and tax burdens. He himself lived simply and frugally, and the vessels enclosed he used, even after they had become worn out, continued to be patched and used again. Based on his influence, during his reign men wore only cotton and cloth, not silk, and their decorations were made of copper, iron, bones, and horns,

not gold, silver, or gemstones. There were beautiful productions of food and textile, so much so that the storage was insufficient for them. At the start of his reign, the census rolls only had less than four million households, but at the start of his reign, the census rolls only had less than four million households, but at the end of his reign there were almost nine million households. However, he was suspicious, critical, and picky, believing many alienating words of his officials. Therefore, even of those with the most accomplishments and his old friends, not one was able to maintain the relationship from start to end.

He even treated his own sons as enemies. These were his faults. End quote. Next time, we will go over the reign of one's successor to the throne of Sui, Yang Guang, the Emperor Yang. And under his rule, Sui-China will continue to expand its already enormous megaprojects, and cast its expansionist eye on yet another kingdom that seems ripe for the taking, Goguryeo, aka Korea. After all, what's the worst's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over 10 generations, 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.