The History of China - #79 - Sui 3: Yang's Imperial Tour

Episode Date: October 28, 2015

The second emperor of the Sui Dynasty gets bad rap - his postmortem regnal name means "the Slothful" and he's commonly lumped together with the rest of the "bad-last emperors" as being hedonistic, wasteful, and just generally monstrous. But is this really the case, or was Emperor Yang the victim of a historical hatchet job?Today we look at the upbringing and early life of Prince Yang Guang, his unlikely rise to power, and then the early period of his reign over China as Emperor Yang, and how he picked up where his father had left off in trying to reignite the glory of the ancient Han.Time Period Covered:605-609 CEImportant Figures:SuiYang Jian (Emperor Wen of Sui) [d. 605]Empress Dugu [d. 602]Yang Guang (Emperor Yang of Sui) [r. 605-618]Empress XiaoGeneral Yang "Axe Man" SuIntelligence Chief Pei JuJapanPrince Shotoku [Sovereign of Nihon]Gökturk KhannateQimin Khan [alt. Yami Khan]Goguryeo Kingdom (North Korea and Manchuria)King YeongyangWorks CitedSima, Guang. Zizhi Tongjian (Reflections of Governance) (1084 CE)Vout, Caroline. The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal CityWei, Zheng, et al. Sui Shu (The Book of Sui). (636 CE)Wright, Arthur F., 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. 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. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 79, Yang's Imperial Tour. So, a funny thing happened to me on my way to the recording studio this week. Right after, and I mean right after, I got done recording last week's episode 78, the wire to my microphone broke. Snapped right in two. And it's of a design that, wouldn't you know it, has proved rather difficult to get shipped with any speed here to Shanghai. An especially ironic thing, since I know for a fact that almost all of them are made here.

So my replacement mic cord is somewhere on a boat in the Pacific right now. But that means that in the meantime, I'm stuck with decidedly inferior recording equipment. So I'm hoping that quality of content will out-trump the relative lack of quality of recording tech this week and the next. But while I was waiting and waiting, I just kept writing and writing and writing. And wouldn't you know it, by the time I looked down at my word count, it had ballooned to about 9,500 words for a single episode. And even my longest don't typically run more than 5,500. I was treading dangerously close to Dan Carlin length,

but without nearly the narrative gusto to justify an hour and a half nonstop episode. So I've done the next best thing. I went ahead and broke it in two. So we're going to have two episodes in pretty rapid succession. Today, episode 79 over Young of Sui's early reign, ending off with a lovely little cliffhanger. And then, in a few days' time, we'll drop episode 80 to follow it up. Deal? Wonderful. Well then, let's get right down to it then. Last time, we left off with the first Emperor of Sui, Emperor One,

having died in the year 605, under some quite possibly shady circumstances. Though he was sick, and in his 60s, the end came just a little bit too quickly for him. Or at least, so has gone the thoughts and speculations of many a historian since that era. And indeed, there is a relative abundance of textual basis for such a claim. One's second son, the crown prince Yang Guan, had, after all, the motive, the means, and the opportunity to off his weakened father. The motive? Why, acceding his father to the throne before one could rescind his title and give it back to Guang's elder brother, following a rape charge by none other than the emperor's own

concubine. The means? Well, chiefly the utterly immoral Axeman of Sui, Yang Su, for whom no job was too distasteful and no target off-limits, for the right price. And the opportunity? Emperor Wen had retreated to his remote summer palace at Runshou in an attempt to beat the heat of the Shanxi summer, and in all likelihood, recuperate his flagging health. But whether or not the crown prince ultimately put a hit out on his own father, in the end it really made no difference. Eight days after one died in the year 605, at the height of the August heat in central China, Yang Guang assumed the mantle of Sui as

its emperor. Now, before moving forward, I must address the issue of his imperial name, because it affects him personally, in terms of his historical reputation, as well as gives us insight into the nature, and critically biases, of classical Chinese historiography. Yang Guang will, well, let's just get this out of the way, be the second and last emperor of the Sui dynasty, which I don't think should come as any real huge shocker since I feel like I've been telegraphing it from about 100 miles away for the last few episodes, but there it is. As such, his legacy has fallen into the almost inevitable black hole of final emperors for a given dynasty, the reputation we've by now explored at length

in our journey thus far. That is, the classical stereotype of the bad last emperor. And that has almost invariably been an outcome of the fact that, as a final emperor, your legacy isn't written by your own court, but rather by one of your enemies, who, assuming they themselves last long enough, have every reason to paint you in as bad a light as possible in order to maximize their own justification in having overthrown you in the first place. So yeah, Yang Guang, or as he's known historically, Emperor Yang, the slothful, gets a bad rap from the Tang Dynasty historians who ultimately wrote his epitaph. But more modern scholarship has revealed that much of the classical histories

about the supposed monster that the final emperor of Sui became is unwarranted, or at worst, a slight overreach in the continuation of his father's own and much more lauded policies. Even his derogatory regnal name, Yang, the Slothful, is not just mean-spirited, but as we'll see today, just outright wrong. And while he's certainly no one I'll be shedding tears for any time soon, as he will ultimately drag his nation into what amounts to a vendetta-fueled obsession that would be his and his dynasty's own undoing, and at the cost of millions of lives, his portrayal does seem to be one of the more obvious hatchet jobs thus far in Chinese history, where the actual facts don't nearly match up to the boogeyman portrayals. So Yang Guan was born in the year 569, as the second of five sons to Yang Jian,

the man who we all know would later found the Sui dynasty and become Emperor Wen. His was, from the sounds of it, a childhood fairly typical for the family of a relatively minor northern noble at the time. He was brought up with a combination of classical Chinese culture and the horse-and-bow reverence of the steppe. Like both of his parents, he was a devout Buddhist and was raised in accordance with the principles such teachings espoused. But whatever sense of stability or serenity in his family's life was thrown right out the window once his father claimed the imperial throne from the last emperor of northern Zhou and established the Sui. As historian Arthur Wright puts it, quote, they, meaning Guang and his brothers, became imperial princes, were given fiefs and high-sounding titles, but they also became pawns

in the insidious intrigues around the centers of power, where officials, palace favorites, soothsayers, monks, and charlatans jockeyed for advantage. The Yang family had, with Emperor Wan's usurpation, been plunged into the deepest of the deep ends, and there they would each learn to swim, or they'd swiftly drown. For Prince Guang, he would find himself buoyed by the fact that, alone amongst his brothers, he was favored by his mother, now the Empress, Du Gu, and therefore spared the ire and paranoia of his father, who, as we'd said in earlier episodes, would come to view almost all of his sons as potential rivals to his power, to their eventual downfalls. At the age of 13, he was named to his first official post, that of Inspector of the northernmost regions of the newly disarmed North China Plains.

It sounds like a lot for a 13-year-old to take on, and it was. Thus, despite the title of command, in fact, Emperor Wen sent along a whole cabal of his veteran staff, military and civil alike, to assist Prince Guang in his charge, and administer appropriate discipline to the youth if necessary. While on assignment in the North China Plains, the young prince would be informed by his father that a bride had been selected for him, one of the daughters of the former imperial clan of Western Liang, a princess of pure Han ethnicity and southern nobility, an august match if ever there was one. As first Prince Guang's wife, and later his empress Xiao, she would remain his beloved, confidante, and consort for the rest of his life.

Wright posits, in fact, that it may have been her gentle southern ways that would plant the seeds of fondness for southern culture that would come to dominate Yang Guang's reign as emperor. In 589, Prince Guang would serve as the supreme commander of the Sui expeditionary force to capture the south, although again the post was more ceremonial than tactical, as the then 20-year-old was once again surrounded by his father's chief military advisors, such as the general, Gao Jiang, who steered the imperial commander to chart the proper

course to victory. Nevertheless, his role in the conquest of Chen was notable. He is said to have endeared himself to the southern population upon entering the defeated capital, Jiankang, by personally executing several southern imperial officials who had been despised by the populace for their flagrant corruption and oppression of the people. Likewise, he ordered the state storehouses sealed so that over the course of the Sui occupation, nothing could be raided or stolen from them. However, it was in the initial stages of this occupation that Prince Guang would come to despise General Gao, when the military commander, acting against the prince's orders to bring before him the Chen emperor's consort, with whom he'd apparently grown infatuated.

Instead, the general beheaded her after comparing the girl to the wicked consort of the despised last king of Shang in ancient times. When Yang Guang learned of Gao's actions, he darkly stated, Upon his return to the north, with the captured imperial family and surrendered Chen generals in tow, he was lavishly rewarded by his father, the emperor, with wagons, horses, clothing, and jade. His stay in his homeland, however, would be brief. Only a year later, when the bloody peasant uprisings against Sui domination swept over the southern provinces, Emperor Wen would once again send his second son southward to replace his brother as the viceroy of the southeast, at the military command center at Jiangdu, near modern Yangzhou. Over the course of the following

nine years, he would work tirelessly to strengthen relations with the southern population and its local officials, in which his southerner wife was of no doubt a great boon. He'd even go so far as to learn to speak the dialect of the south, the Wu language that you'll still hear spoken by millions in cities like Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, just to name a few, thus increasing his rapport with the southern populace and showing them that, far from some step-barbarian warlord, he and his clan were civilized Chinese men who shared and appreciated a common culture and heritage. From his seat at Jiangdu, he would work to build the military compound into a cultural and spiritual capital of the South, a replacement for the now totally destroyed Jiankang, by ordering the collection, safe housing, and recopying of

hundreds of Buddhist scriptures that had been scattered over the course of the war, as well as constructing temples at which the faithful might once again worship and the monks might carry on with their holy studies. His efforts were duly rewarded in 591, when, at a Buddhist vegetarian feast he threw for supposedly as many as a thousand southern monks, he was summoned to kneel before the eminent monk Qi Yi, the founder of the Tiantai school and long favorite of the Chen dynasty, to receive from the elder holy man the Bodhisattva vows, the highest honor a layperson could receive from the priesthood, as well as the religious name

slash title, Dong Che Pusa, or the bodhisattva of absolute self-control. His distance from the capital, and thus the stern, paranoid gaze of both of his parents, would do wonders for his image in their eyes. Whereas his elder brother, the crown prince Yang Yong, had been thoroughly scrutinized and found rather lacking in his penny-pinching father's eyes for his wastefulness and his puritanical mother's eyes for his polyamory. In contrast, Prince Guang was able to give the appearance, from half an empire away, of being both frugal and monogamous, though in reality he was neither. Thus, by the year 600, when Prince Wang returned to the capital to pay visit to court, he discovered that he was in a

very unique position. With the right pressure at the right place, he just might be able to tip his elder brother off of his pedestal and out of the airdom altogether. The Book of Sui tells of him later returning to his own seat of power, Jiaqiangdu, to discuss this gestating idea with his lackeys and confederates. It would require absolute secrecy, and had the potential for either the greatest of rewards, but if it failed, the steepest of punishments for those involved. But one of Guang's more, uh, blunt underlings piped up. What have you got to lose? Should the plot succeed, you'll become the heir of Sui.

If not, we can always fall back and return to the old pattern of a southern dynasty like Liang and Chen. It was convincing enough for Yang Guang, and so he moved forward, enlisting the ever-mercenary axeman Yang Su to head his conspiracy after paying the exorbitant sum the brilliant but unscrupulous general demanded for his loyalty. With Yang Tzu at the helm, the conspirators were able to plant evidence enough to stoke the paranoia of Emperor Wen, convincing him and members do go alike that the crown prince planned to murder them had assumed the throne. All the while, Prince Guang remained at his distant southern capital and continued to make every appearance of being a pious, loyal, monogamous, and diligent son.

In short order, the crown prince was crown prince no more, and for his efforts, the ultimate prize was now Guang's. The Empress Dugu would die in the year 602, and Emperor Wen, now in his 60s, would never recover from her loss. As he wallowed in mourning and despondency, he gradually handed over more and more imperial authority to Crown Prince Guang, until in 604 he too grew ill. We mentioned last time the conspiracy theories surrounding Emperor Wen's death that summer at Renshou Palace, and so we won't rehash it all. It remains conjectural whether or not the crown prince and his mercenary lieutenant may have helped one shuffle off his mortal coil.

But it is factual that only eight days after the elder emperor's demise, Yang Guang officially assumed the throne, a period of time brief enough to raise more than a few eyebrows and set conspiratorial lips a-flapping, not to mention one of his younger brothers crying foul and raising a rebellion of his own in his power base to the northeast. But though 19 other provinces rallied to his cry, he proved fatally indecisive as to whether he should challenge Yangguan's claim to the throne directly or secede from Sui altogether and declare a second dynasty in the territories

that had once been northern Qi. This dithering would prove the rebellion's undoing, as once again, the pitiless Yang Su had no such indecision. He would crush this uprising against his imperial master's authority without scruple or mercy. The rebellious Prince of Han was taken captive and brought back to Chang'an in chains. But Emperor Yang Guang opted to forego the death penalty such treason warranted, and instead, perhaps as a show of his mercifulness, merely handed down the sentence of life imprisonment as a commoner. Nevertheless, the former Prince of Han would soon die, in prison, under rather murky circumstances. The power of the man history would come to remember as Emperor Yang of Sui was now unquestioned, and he would now seek to expand on the glory his father had already achieved. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile,

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It is remarkably difficult to get a true sense of the man once he assumed power. As we discussed at the top of the episode, the classical history's portrayals of him are colored by their own biases, and the culturally agreed-upon notion that the final emperor of any dynasty must necessarily be no less than a monster, else why else would the mandate of heaven have been stripped from him? At best, we can hope to see glimpses of a real person behind the politicized mask that was built for him after his death. Like the other bad last emperors, Jung is often portrayed as a wasteful spendthrift, a lustful hedonist, and a relentless self-aggrandizer who would stop at nothing to build up his own glory at the expense of the empire. And there are, to be sure, elements of truth to all of those charges, but more modern analysis shows them to be overblown. blown. The largesse of his reign can largely be understood not as some aberration displaying his

wastefulness, but more than anything a simple continuation and natural expansion of the megaprojects his own father had devoted much of his reign getting underway. Further, his supposedly lustful nature, having as he did a multitude of consorts, is only egregious when compared to his father's notorious near-monogamy. Compare him to any other ruler of the times, and he's par for the course at worst. Moreover, even the harshest critics of Emperor Yang do not deny that over his entire reign, he only ever honored, elevated, and seemed to have truly loved his empress, Xiao. In spite of his other consorts, and the multitudes of younger, prettier things

that must have vied for his attention as the son of heaven, the empress was never set aside in favor of some flavor of the week. That is not the mark of a man ruled by his lustfulness. Nor was his foreign policy some terrible deviation from precedent. Indeed, Arthur Wright points out, quote, he planned and executed the armed expansion of Sui territory and influence, but these dreams and the expeditions were neither fantastic nor unprecedented. They were rather a filling out of the Han model of a Chinese empire, which his father had adopted and Yang Di sought to complete. It was only the disastrous failure of his last adventure that casts a ghastly light backwards and colors all the chronicles of his reign, end quote. From the very outset, Emperor Yong would put lie to the name he'd eventually be

disgraced with, the Slothful. On the contrary, he was an active, mobile, and energetic ruler, a restless man who apparently abhorred routine and enjoyed travel. This is evidenced by the fact that he was not content with a single capital, but would over the duration of his reign maintain three. Chang'an slash Daxing in the west remained the official capital, but following dire predictions from the court sorcerer in the winter of 604 regarding his health should he remain, Yang designated the smaller but revitalized Luoyang as his secondary capital in the east and primary residence. And of course, his southern seat of power along the Yangtze, Jiangdu, would likewise remain a

favorite locale of his and served as a tertiary capital. Over his ever-expanding canal network that linked all of them, he would frequently be on the move, followed closely by the imperial entourage and court. We might compare Yong of Sui in this regard to the Roman emperor Hadrian, in that both, in the words of historian Caroline Wout, toured the empire, taking his court with him. The locus of imperial power was now wherever he happened to be, end quote. Indeed, even beyond the imperial palaces at his three capitals, Yong would order another 40 palaces built to facilitate his frequent movements and tours across his vast empire. Slothful indeed.

The canal-building projects begun by his father accelerated upon the accession of Yang, and in 605 alone, the Corvée laborers rallied, would in a period of only five months complete segments that would link Luoyang to the Yellow River, and then the Yellow River to the Huai River. The dangers and rigors of canal building in general, however, were only exacerbated by the rapid pace of construction, and the achievements were paid for dearly. Between 40 and 50% of the laborers sent to dig the massive linkages would meet their ends in the dangerous conditions.

This divergence from the customs of his father, however, created a rather unique set of circumstances for Emperor Yang. Mobile as he was, he could only realistically take with him on his near-ceaseless touring a finite number of court officials and court members. As a result, over time this inner circle would come to intimate themselves with Yang, making him increasingly reliant on a shrinking pool of close advisors. This would come to form a bubble around the emperor, in which his advisors and caretakers would ultimately shield him from necessary information to make informed decisions, feed his ego, cater to his prejudices, and take care of independent spirits

who might wish to penetrate Yong's imperial echo chamber. One such dangerous outsider would be none other than General Yong Su. That's right, the conniving, merciless mercenary who had been so instrumental to Yong's rise to power over the Sui Empire in the first place. Before his service to the emperor, he had been given a high rank and title, along with vast holdings and wealth, but he remained a dangerous individual, and a man who knew far too much about Yang's dirty laundry and his path to power. When in 606 the Axeman grew weak from illness, Emperor Yang dispatched one of his personal physicians with instructions to make sure the ailing general succumbed to his illness. Wright elaborates, quote, The old warrior knew what he was in for, and downed his medicine, saying to a relative, with a belated burst of Buddhist piety, Shall I not be reborn in a moment?

He left in a state of immense proportions, testimony to the recognition given him by two emperors who, when they wanted a particularly difficult or dirty job done, knew his value and his price. End quote. 608 would prove a year of particular import for the Sui and its emperor Yang. For one, he would receive the submission of the Khan of the Western Turks, as well as militarily retaking the western regions heretofore occupied by the Tu-Yu-Hun Empire, and resettling the region with convicted criminals punished with deportation to frontier regions. But perhaps the most notable event to come before the court of Sui

was in the form of an ambassadorial visit from Japan, the first of its kind since the Han Dynasty. Back in 605, Yang had himself sent an emissary to re-establish diplomatic ties with the long-lost island kingdom, writing in his missive, quote, His reply would come on behalf of the monarch of the distant eastern isles, styled variously across the sources as emperor, king, or prince, so take your pick, and is largely believed to have been none other than Prince Shotoku, the mythologized and semi-legendary figure in Japanese history famed for, well, establishing relations with China.

In the letter, the ambassador produced to the Sui Emperor, we have what is apparently the earliest known instance of Japan being referred to as Nihon, which is the basis for its modern name in most languages, including English. It read, Unfortunately, it would be the very language of this letter that would sour the diplomatic proceedings, since Shotoku's referencing to himself as the son of heaven proved upsetting to the Sui monarch, who could broker no competitor. He would remark before breaking off the diplomatic proceedings that the letter from this barbarian king was discourteous,

and that such insolent letters from foreigners should not again be brought to his attention or waste his august time. Nevertheless, despite this setback, the following year the Sui would send a low-level emissary of their own to Japan, establishing a long-term embassy between the two civilizations and providing a more accurate account of the state of the distant kingdom to the Sui. For the Japanese, this would prove to be a historical moment with profound cultural effects. Chinese culture had been being imported on a continual basis from Korea since at least the time of the Han, but with direct relations re-established for the first time in centuries, Japanese sinicization and large-scale conversion

to Buddhism would only accelerate. Such were the times, however, that for Sui-China, the establishment of relationships with the Japanese islands would warrant little more than a footnote and a low-level diplomat. The author of the Zizhi Tongjian, Sima Guang, wrote that it was the year 609 that we might most convincingly point to as the zenith of Sui's imperial might and majesty. Historian Sima points to the order that had at last been imposed across the empire, which was now divided into 190 prefectures and 1,225 counties, as well as to the sheer physical extent of the Sui's domination. With the conquest of the Tiyu-Hun territories to the west, Sui-China now stretched some 9,300 li east to west and more than 14,800 li north to south, or in terms we are probably more familiar with, more than 3,300 miles by 4,900 miles respectively.

China's population had likewise rebounded to near their Han-era highs. By 609, census data reported more than 9 million households across the empire, equating to potentially more than 50 million individuals. Through all this, the Sui court had been all the while deftly playing the now-split Guk Turk Khanates off of one another, as we went over before, keeping them weak but not too weak, subservient, and a useful tool against their own neighbor states. In 605, for instance, the Sui had used the Turkic cavalry to punish the Khitan tribes of Manchuria for their earlier raids into Sui territory. But in 607, a diplomatic

faux pas had occurred for the Turkic Khan, Timin, sometimes also rendered as Yami Khan, during one of Emperor Yong's periodic visits to the Khanate's capital. In the sometimes also rendered as Yami Khan, during one of Emperor Yang's periodic visits to the Khanate's capital. In the middle of the multi-day proceedings, an ambassadorial mission from none other than Goguryeo, the northern Korean kingdom and one-time Chinese vassal state, happened to arrive. Deeply embarrassed by the Sui Emperor being present at what was pretty obviously supposed to have been a secret meeting between the two Chinese satellites, Chi Min-Kan nevertheless

tried to play off the Korean delegate's premature arrival by simply presenting him formally to Emperor Yang, like, yeah, I totally planned this, hmm. Emperor Yang, however, saw right through the paper-thin excuse, and grew rather understandably alarmed at the idea of two potential enemies arranging for secret meetings behind his back. Okay, well, in this instance, literally right in front of him, but you get the point. As he pondered what to make of this development, Yong's chief intelligence officer, Pei Ju, offered his professional opinion. Yong should instruct the Korean diplomat to return to his master and tell

this King Yongyang that, hey, nice to see you guys again. Remember us? We're China, and we've sorted out that whole disunity period now. So he's in charge. So come at once and submit to our imperial might, and we can get back to the good old days of Han, where we were your hegemon and you were our loyal client state. Yang then concluded his instructions with a warning. Should the Korean king fail to personally submit himself before Emperor Yang, then he would face, quote, an imperial tour of his territories, end quote. The rationale behind such a threat of force can be understood as the Chinese court seeing two possible outcomes, both of which would serve its interests just fine, thanks. Either the Korean king would recognize his place in the natural

order of the universe and submit to Sui, in which case it could be returned to its old position as client kingdom, or perhaps the king of Goguryeo would foolishly not submit, in which case the Turkish armies would indeed sweep into Korea and crush it under their horse hooves. In that event, the kingdom could then be dismantled entirely and rendered a part of the empire proper. The Korean ambassador saw a message in hand, duly returned to Pyongyang, and delivered the Chinese ultimatum to his king, Yongyang. But this wasn't the Goguryeo monarch's first radio. You see, he'd already defeated the Chinese before, during the reign of Yang's predecessor, Emperor Wen. Now, this is my mistake that this is the first time this has come up,

because I'd just gotten myself so preoccupied with Wen's other campaigns that I'd managed to leave out the one really dark mark on his military record, 598. That year, in a punitive expedition following armed Korean raids into the Liaodong regions of northeastern China, Emperor Wen had commissioned a force of supposedly some 300,000 to bring Goguryeo to heel. But a combination of disease rippling through the expeditionary force, combined with a typhoon storm wrecking his navy, resulted in total disaster and defeat for the expedition. Suffice it to say, King Yongyang wasn't about to take any flak from this imperious upstart.

Emperor Yong's demand and warning would go entirely without response. In the words of historian Arthur Wright, quote, the authority of the central kingdom had been flouted, and sooner or later, the response would have to be the application of overwhelming force against the miscreant." Emperor Yang had every reason to trust what his intelligence chief, Pei Zhu, told him, that it would be a walkover, and tiny Korea could not hope to stand before a unified and mighty Sui-China. Pei likewise brushed aside the catastrophic defeat in 598 as being a one-off fluke, a freak storm combined with inexcusable ineptitude by the field commander, and something that couldn't possibly happen again.

And Pei certainly seemed to have the experience and pedigree to back up such predictions. His long service to Yang's father had seen him rise to prominence by subduing the southern rebellions of 590, and then successfully engineered the ongoing instability of the eastern Turks. And under Yang directly, he'd convinced his emperor to invade and conquer to Yuhun and the far west, correctly predicting that such a victory would be easy. His experience of the peoples in and surrounding China seemed without equal, and yet for all that breadth of knowledge, Pei pointedly remained silent on one little key detail, that exactly none of his career had been spent anywhere near the northeast. And as such, he was advising in the dark, ultimately just as blind as anyone to the unique challenges and dangers that might await a Chinese invasion of

Goguryeo. But rather than dwell on his total lack of knowledge of the area, Pei chose instead to once more promise a cheap and easy victory, and I imagine you can probably see where this hubris is leading. This is where we will end off this episode, with war looming between mighty Sui and tiny Korea, and with the promise of yet another easy win for Emperor Yang to add to his dynastic tally. But not all promises of cheap glory are to be believed, and next time Emperor Yang of Sui will come to find that when you roll the iron dice of war, Murphy's Law will tend

to step into the fray more often than not. And especially when you are gambling with the lives of millions of your subjects, becoming an inveterate gambler is not a swift way to your people's hearts and minds. In the episode to come, an empire will indeed crack under the strains of invasion, but it may not be the one Yang of Sui was betting on. Thank you for listening. 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. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. wordpress.com. Thanks again. follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.