The History of China - #81 - Sui 5: Disintegration

Episode Date: November 8, 2015

With its push against Goguryeo rather catastrophically stalled out, the whole enterprise begins to unravel with spectacular speed for the Sui Dynasty. All the while, its Emperor Yang will maintain a disturbingly unaffected demeanor for the suffering his edicts are creating across the countryside - in large part because his lackeys have created a "reality-distortion filter" around him they'll literally kill to maintain.But elsewhere, agents of insurrection will rise to challenge the waning star that is Sui China, especially in the form of one Li Yuan, the Duke of Tang and his family.Time Period Covered:614-618 CEMajor Historical Figures:SuiEmperor Yang of SuiEmpress Xiao Prince Yang You (Emperor Gong)Prince Yang Hao, Prince of QinGeneral Yuwen HuajiRebel Tang ForcesLi Yuan, Duke of TangLi ShiminLady Li/ Pingyang, Commander of the Woman's ArmyGokturk KhannateShibi KhanWorks CitedSima, Guang. Zizhi Tongjian.Wright, Arthur F. The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3Bennett Peterson, Barbara. Notable Women of China: From the Shang to the Early 20th CenturyWen, Daya. The Diary of the Founding of the Great Tang Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred 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. Learn the History of China. Episode 81, Disintegration Last time, the Sui Dynasty's second emperor, Yang, had committed himself and his Chinese empire to the conquest of the Korean kingdom, Goguryeo, and its Manchurian holdings.

He and his court had been expecting a walkover. After all, just how much resistance could a tiny little kingdom hope to put up before the might of the unified Sui Imperial Army and Navy? Well, much to everyone's surprise, the answer turned out to be a hell of a lot. Of the strike force sent to capture the Korean capital, Pyongyang, again a truly massive combined land and sea force consisting of more than 300,000 infantry and 100, Pyongyang, again a truly massive combined land and sea force consisting of more than 300,000 infantry and 100,000 marines, only a couple thousand would survive the deadly defensive tactics Goguryeo's field marshal, Yeolje Mundoek, would crash against them. But the cost of the devastating defeats hadn't been only paid for in the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of

Sui soldiers slain. But even across the empire, the war taxes, rationing, and domestic disasters had sapped the Chinese populace's will to tolerate such tremendous efforts. In 313 and 314, Emperor Yang had tried and tried again to take Korea, and for all his efforts had only served to compound his initial failure. And when we last left off, he had at last been forced in 615 to scuttle his plans to commit a fourth invasion of Goguryeo, because his own kingdom was beginning to come apart at the seams. And it's here that we pick up the thread today and continue to pull. It's worth briefly recounting the major reasons for the peasantry's outrage

against the Sui imperial authority, because it was several-fold. The war was rather obviously a factor. One army of nearly 300,000 killed almost to the last man is bad enough, but then again, it was a risk any army at any time ran on the invasion path. But then to keep re-raising, and keep re-raising the imperial levies to futilely fling at the Korean defenses for no appreciable gain, a tremendous expense, and seemingly just because the emperor had become obsessed with the idea of winning no matter the cost, must have been a terrible burden both in terms of material spent as well as emotional cost. But that wasn't the half of it, because even if you weren't slated to take that long march north, the imperial government

had other uses for the peasantry left behind. High taxes, of course, but also the compulsory labor from each household per year. You may remember that the law stipulated a period of three weeks from each household per annum. And it wasn't light duty, either. The corvée laborers were primarily put to work on the Sui Monarchs' three pet projects. One was rebuilding and expanding the Great Wall along the northern border. The second was building the new capital, Daxing City, right next to the old capital, Chang'an. Or the third was digging out further expansions of the newly revitalized and vastly enlarged Grand Canal Network. And in the case of the latter, figures indicate that as many as 40-50% of the laborers sent to dig canals would never return home. Personally, if my required

duty to the government was basically a coin flip over whether or not it would kill me this year, I'd get pretty tired of it pretty fast too. But it was probably the ongoing reverberations of the latest disastrous flooding of the always fickle Yellow River in 610 that might be most blamed for the suffering of the populace of northern China and their eventual rebellions. It reportedly inundated more than 40 prefectures and caused a series of famines across the northern plains that strained the already weakened empire's food supply past its breaking point. It was no real great wonder, then, when in 614 a major rebellion broke out dangerously close to Emperor Yang's secondary capital at Luoyang and captured one of the vital juncture points of the Grand Canal, bringing the flow of goods and men to the warfront to a standstill. This rebellion

proved to be doubly dangerous when it was determined to have been led by none other than one of the imperial court's own members, the president of the Board of Rights, Yan Shuanggan. Though the rebellion was quickly routed by the crack imperial units sent against it, and its treasonous leader executed most cruelly, it simultaneously showed that even elements of the emperor's own inner circle were deeply dissatisfied with the state of the empire, and emboldened other rebellious elements to declare war against the throne. The same year, no fewer than eight more major uprisings broke out all across Sui. Invasion was now thoroughly out of the question, and Emperor Yang would have to throw everything he had against these insurrections, lest they be left to subsume everything he and his father

had worked to create. He dispatched everyone he felt he could trust to mobilize segments of the imperial army and ruthlessly extirpate those traitorous rebels from his realm before they could do any more harm. One of our major focuses today will be one of those field commanders dispatched to protect his monarch and secure the empire in the name of the Sui. He is Li Yuan, decorated war hero, the Duke of Tang, and member of Emperor Yang's inner circle at court, serving as the vice president at the Court of Imperial Insignia. His was, apparently, a long and distinguished line of, apparently, purebred Han nobility, dating back, apparently, to the ruling household of the short-lived 16 Kingdoms era Western Liang. That said, there are suggestions that this Li clan's ethnic background might not be as

straightforward or as honest as the Tang Dynasty records would have us believe. Historian Arthur Wright notes, quote, There is some reason to believe that this line of descent, presented as solid fact by the Tang histories, is in fact a deliberate fabrication. It has been suggested that the Li clan was not connected to the royal household of western Liang, but was a minor offshoot of an eastern lineage, and had intermarried widely with the non-Chinese aristocracy. Two of the men who, it has been suggested, were among the ancestors of Li Yuan were the generals Li Chuguba and Li Maide, whose names showed that they had either adopted or been granted the Chinese surname Li,

but retained alien, perhaps Xianbei, personal names. End quote. Thinking back, you may remember when the Tuoba Xianbei emperors of the north had adopted Chinese names, dress, and culture, right? Well, this theory alleges that rather than being from a storied line of ethnically Han nobility, the Li clan of Li Yuan was in fact crypto-Xianbei posers. It's both fascinating to think of the clan as essentially being the 6th century version of Eddie Murphy in trading places, and also definitely understandable as to why the Tang dynasty historians were virtually bending over backwards to silence any whiff of such a tale. Their careers, and possibly lives, may have hinged on making every assurance that no, no, the Li clan is definitely royal blood and certainly not a clan

of high-stakes con artists. Ultimately, though, it remains conjectural, and as far as the royal courts of First Northern Zhou and then the Sui were concerned, the Li clan was everything it claimed to be, and further still, one of the single most powerful families within the empire. As such, during the second phase of the Goguryeo-Sui War, it had been Li Yuan who had been in charge, essentially, of the logistics of the entire imperial military supply chain, moving men and material from the Zoujun northern terminus of Grand Canal, at modern Beijing, into Manchuria across the Zoujun northern terminus of the Grand Canal at modern Beijing into Manchuria across the Liao River and beyond. He had served Emperor Wen and Yang both, and was among the most distinguished and trusted members of the Sui court.

Obviously, he was above suspicion. As such, he was charged in 615 with taking an army and heading north from Luoyang to protect its western approaches from potential malfeasance from Shanxi and Gansu provinces, as well as the Turkic Khanate. Rebels and bandits had been plundering the countryside in the northwest, and had taken special interest in the horse pastures that were so vital to the Sui's military cavalry operations. Their looting and general driving off of the army's horses had been one of the root causes of the lack of cavalry in Sui's subsequent expeditions into Goguryeo between 613 and 614, and thus it was of vital importance to the state to end such activities quickly. Li Yuan and his army were able to accomplish this easily, and either killed, captured, or drove off the rebel units and their commanders. This campaign he followed up with further excursions into the northern borderlands of Shanxi, those areas abutting the Gokturk territories, leading largely

successful expeditions to end so-called banditry in the region, again likely agrarian rebels, as well as drive off Turkic raiding parties that sought to capitalize on the internal weaknesses of the Chinese government at this time. In light of his battlefield successes, Emperor Yang would in 617 promote Li Yuan to the garrison commander of the Taiyuan region. We'll get back to him and Taiyuan in a bit, but for now, back to Emperor Yang. In spite of Duke Li Yuan's personal successes, on the whole, things had been going from bad to worse for Emperor Yang's increasingly unstable grip on power in the Six Tens. In 615, he made one of his habitual tours of his territories, this time

specifically to one of his northernmost cities near the borders, then called Yanmun. Well, that turned out to be rather ill-advised. As we just discussed a minute ago, the Gukturs had been periodically raiding into Sui territory, which wasn't great, but let's face it, raiders are going to raid. That wasn't in and of itself terribly worrisome for the emperor by any means. But the fact that the Gukturk ruler, Shibi Khan, had become overtly hostile to the Chinese would certainly prove itself of great concern indeed. As you may recall from last episode, Shibi Khan had essentially figured out the Sui court's long-standing game of playing his tribesmen off of one another in order to keep the Gukturks weak and subservient to Chinese interests,

and he'd understandably take an exception. When word reached the Great Khan that Emperor Yang had ventured perilously close to his own territories, Xibi seized on the opportunity presented, and galloped forth to Yanmen and laid siege to the city, thus trapping Emperor Yang inside. Now, the horsemen of the steppe, it should be said, were always fearsome warriors, archers, and most especially, raiders. One thing they were definitely not, however, were great besiegers, a fact that would stymie steplord efforts at Asiatic domination for millennia. In fact, centuries from now, the successor state to the Guk Turk Khanate, the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan, would finally solve their perennial

weakness at sieges by simply capturing the Chinese and making them conduct sieges on the Mongols' behalf. But anyway, the Turkic siege of Emperor Yang at Yanmen was loose enough that at least a few imperial messengers were able to break through and relay Yang's desperate plea for assistance in driving off these treacherous barbarian horsemen. To those who responded and saved him, he promised fabulous rewards to the commanders, and further still, was said to have personally visited the soldiers of the city, and promised that should they get out of this situation alive, he'd call off his further proposed invasions of Goguryeo and return the empire to peace. By this point, the prospect of being part of a Chinese army advancing over the Liao River was rightly viewed as little more than a death sentence,

leading to numerous accounts of newly conscripted men deliberately breaking their own arms or legs in order to avoid the draft, a practice that came to be known as lucky hand or fortunate foot, depending. And evidently being enough of a problem for conscription that the state's eventual successor state would feel the need to enact new laws harshly punishing such deliberate injuries to avoid military service. Nevertheless, Emperor Yang's assurances, his pleas to the commanders and promises of lavish rewards for his rescuers, and critically, the collusion of an imperial princess who had been married off to the Great Khan as part of the traditional marriage alliance between the Khanate and the Empire, and who now convinced her lord-husband that the Turkic territories were under threat from a force to its north, ultimately resulted in the lifting of the siege of Yanmen and allowing

Emperor Yang to escape. And it was at this point that all those promises of ending wars, peace in our time, rewards for the rescuers, titles, yeah, all of that was just promptly forgotten. Yang would opt not to return to Chang'an, nor would he change his plans for sending further armies into the meat grinder that was Goguryeo, and possibly worst of all, he refused to even properly reward or promote those officials and commanders who had ridden to his defense. The siege of Yanmen may have been a military failure for the Turkic Khan, but it, or rather Yang's behavior in its aftermath, would prove disastrous for the Turkic Khan. But it, or rather, Yang's behavior in its aftermath, would prove

disastrous for the Sui. His military commanders, the people on which his power rested, were now deeply resentful of the monarch's callous indifference to their lives and apparently honor as well. What might explain Emperor Yang's behavior? As we went over last episode, Yang's tendency to be ever on the Mu had meant that he had grown reliant on an increasingly small cohort of trusted insiders, a policy that had, over the course of his reign, turned into an effective bubble around the emperor, warping his understanding of what was happening across his empire, or the effects his decisions were having on his subjects. From the Cambridge History of China, quote,

his particular style of governing made it inevitable that his inner circle would try to keep the whole bitter truth from him. According to one account, his advisors indulged in Delphic utterance, double talk, and outright lying to do so. One man who spoke out was beaten to death in the audience hall, end quote. By the way, a Delphic utterance refers to the famous Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece, and means presenting information in a deliberately vague, obscure, or unclear way. The imperial officials were so committed to keeping Yang in the dark regarding the realities of the empire's situation that they were apparently willing to beat a guy to death who tried to break through his reality-warping bubble. And it seems pretty clear that it worked, too. Emperor Jung seems to

have had very little idea as to the severity of the rebellions breaking out all across his empire, even as his own military continued to struggle just to contain them. But his reality filter could only sieve out so many problems that were engulfing Sui. He seemed to have had a bit of an epiphany moment during the new year of 616, when he was surprised by the fact that the expected messengers from 20 of his prefectures had not arrived to deliver their reports. His advisors were forced to inform him that they would not be coming at all, because they had all been either captured or killed by the rebels across the countryside. And it was only from this point on that he really began starting to take the uprisings seriously. He began drawing up plans to pull a Jin dynasty, that is, flee the north entirely and run to the south bank of the Yellow River. In preparation for that eventuality, he ordered the construction of two new palaces

at Piling and Kuaiji. Even this moment of clarity was fleeting for Yang, though, and he preferred to not think about the ongoing rebellions whatsoever. Apparently, at a later point in 616, when another official repeated concerns over the progress of the Agurian rebellions, Yang flew into a rage and had the man accused of capital crimes. He initially decreed the official's execution, but later lowered the punishment to being stripped of title and rank and demoted to a commoner. Still, it shows that while Yang's court was doing its level best

to keep him in the dark, he was in no hurry to switch the lights on either. Regardless, it would prove to be too little, too late. In fact, by 617, the whole of China was in imminent danger of reverting to its previous makeup of competing warlord states. Modern Inner Mongolia had been seized by a rebel commander who had proclaimed himself the Emperor of Liang. In fact, there'd be two nominal emperors of Liang at this time. The far western portion of Gansu had been taken over by another warlord styling himself the Prince of Liang,

while in eastern Gansu there was suddenly the hegemonic Prince of Western Qin, which is definitely my favorite title of the bunch. In the far south at Guangdong, yet another commander had taken the title of the Emperor of Chu, and in northern Shanxi, there was now a Dingyang Khan popping up. But all these guys are going to have to play second fiddle in this show, because, as promised earlier, we're going to stick with the guy who will end up on top of the pile, the Duke of Tang, Li Yuan, who by 617 would control the capital region as the rebel regent presumptive of Yang's grandson, whom he declared the true emperor of Sui. 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. Now hold on a minute, you might be saying, wasn't Li Yuan fighting for Emperor Yang when we were just talking about him a few minutes ago? Yes, indeed he was. But it's amazing how quickly things can change in times such as this. Duke Li had been tasked by the Emperor, as I said, to strike at the Turkic raiding parties. But by 616-617, the Emperor had grown frustrated with what he deemed to be the ineffectiveness of his operations. And going back a little bit further, between 614 and 617, a popular ballot had been circulating across the populace, prophesying that the next occupant of the imperial throne would be surnamed Li. When word of this popular song had reached Emperor

Yang's ears, he rather overreacted and began ordering the systematic extermination of anyone he could get his hands on with that surname, regardless of their social standing or position. Though he was for the time being safely off on campaign in the Northlands, Li Yuan must have realized that he was as vulnerable as anyone else to being either executed or at the very least stripped of title and deported to the frontier regions as a result of this purge against the Lys. And he likewise realized that he was in an almost perfect position to lead a revolt that could be successful against the by now clearly waning star that was Sui. His family and personal credentials were impeccable. He was an aristocrat related to the imperial house, and at the age of 51, he was at the peak of a long and successful military career that had spanned the reigns of both Sui emperors. Moreover, as the military commander of the Taoyuan region, he was ideally placed geographically, militarily, and tactically. Taoyuan itself was considered virtually impregnable to attack, and from there, Li Yuan could easily mount strikes at both Chang'an and Luoyang, the very heart of the empire.

But what of loyalty? Wouldn't Li Yuan, long-time servant of the Sui as he was, at least pause to consider this question? Well, historian Arthur Wright tells us, no, not really, or at least not in the way that we today would understand the idea. He says, quote, men of Li Yuan's generation were unaffected by the later Confucian conception of loyalty, or cheng, which forbade a man who had served one royal house from serving its successor. He and his contemporaries felt far more a sense of loyalty towards the social order than to any particular reigning dynasty. End quote. In other words, the sentiments of the era were that the

social order of the entire empire were worth serving and protecting above all else, and if a sitting monarch or even an entire dynasty failed to uphold that social order, then so be it. They had to go. It might not sound like a community that cares, but they do care. It's all about the greater good. The greater good. Thus, in the fifth month of 617, the Yuan mobilized his army stationed at Taiyuan Garrison and began a march on the capital. It's worth taking a minute and looking at the historiography of this particular story, because it is quite fascinating. In the traditional tellings, most famously historian Sima Guang's Zizhi Tongjian, Li Yuan plays a much more passive,

reluctant role in his own seizure of political power, as in essence a mediocre lord with no ambition being unwillingly dragged into power by the machinations of his own son, Li Shemin, who was the true mastermind behind the Taiyuan Uprising. In Sima's version, old man Li Yuan initially wanted nothing to do with his son's planned uprising, since he was not only related to the royal family, but was also famous for being one of its staunchest defenders. But as Wright already noted, that was not an ethic that was even around during this era, and seems far more likely a reflection of the morality of Sima Guang's own time in the 11th century Song China. Personal loyalty, again, just wasn't a thing at this point. But regardless, according to Sima, Li Yuan was only ever co-opted

into the conspiracy when his son forced his hand by bribing one of the palace servants at Chang'an to present the elder Li with several of the emperor's own concubines without telling him where they came from. So Li Yuan had just accepted stolen imperial property and was now a criminal in the eyes of the law, punishable by death, and boom, there you go, he's part of a rebellion. But far more recent research into this chain of events in the 20th century actually came along and rewrote what had been assumed to be true for the millennium prior. Specifically, the account of the far more contemporary work to the Tang era, the Diary of the Founding of the Great Tang, written by a man named Wen Daiya, a native of the Taiyuan region and eyewitness to the events as they unfolded. Wen insisted in his diary that Li Yuan was far from old man unwilling, in fact an active

and engaged mastermind in the uprising as a whole. In the diary, Li is a dynamic, capable, and bold commander, an image that does seem far more in line with his great military successes over his career than the mediocre bumbler presented in Li Zizhi Tongjian. Moreover, the Ballad of Li that had been sweeping the countryside for the previous several years, prophesying that a man named Li would rule the empire, is given a far greater role in the diary, prompting Li Yuan, who was apparently already contemplating rising against his imperial overlord, to exclaim, quote, I ought to rise up and march a thousand Li to fulfill that prophecy, end quote. In any case, Li Yuan, along with his

sons, in less than 10 days' time had managed to raise and encamp some 10,000 men in the Taiyuan area and make preparations for war. But before he could march to seize that capital, he'd have to go deal with another problem first, the Guktarks. As the Sui's power had been waning and fracturing, the opposite had been the case for the Turkic Khanate. It was on the rise once again, and it's Shidi Khan, eager to pay Sui China back in kind for years of keeping his domain weak and fractured. As such, he'd been doing to the Chinese warlords what Emperor Wen and then Yang's courts had previously been doing to his sub-kans, that is, playing them off one another and exploiting

their defenses. The Guk Turks had been giving support to virtually any Chinese claimant who submitted to the Turkic client states. The threat of Turkic attack on Chinese territories had proved to be a good enough cover for Li Yuan, raising his army in the first place, but actually committing to try to fight them off would be self-defeating and likely doomed to failure. Instead, he used the Turkic threat to purge his own ranks of those officers and soldiers he felt were untrustworthy, by accusing them of conspiring with the northern steppe people against China and then executing them. He then, however, wrote to the great Khan Shibi himself, and in essence said, Hey boss, I'm only raising this army to restore order to China, and you have nothing

to fear from us. In fact, we plan to re-establish friendly and mutually beneficial relationships between our China and your Khanate, and we'll be more than happy to send you all of the loot we're about to get from our upcoming campaign if you agree not to attack us and send us support. In the words of Arthur Wright again, quote, the letter was worded very respectfully, and against the counsel of his advisors, Li Yuan affixed the character qi, which was used by an inferior writing to his superior, suggesting that he, like some of the other rebels, may have decided to become a nominal Turkish vassal, end quote. Shibi Khan wrote back, saying,

To this, Li Wen replied that, Sorry, no can do, because my plan is to declare Emperor Yang's grandson the emperor. The two might have been at loggerheads about this particular issue, dissolve the Sui or preserve it for the time being, but somehow they were able to get past it and reach an agreement. Because on the eve of Liu'an's uprising against Emperor Yang, Xie Bikhan dispatched a thousand horses to bolster the rebel army's ranks, and then later committed several hundred Turkic troops and thousands more additional horses to the cause. A welcome gift, indeed. With the establishment of a friendly relationship with the Turkic Khan, and assurances that he wouldn't need to be looking over his shoulder the whole time for Turkic raiders riding up behind him, Li Yuan at last formally established his military campaign, calling it the Dajang Junfu,

meaning the Great General's Administration. But we will go ahead and just start calling it the Tang Army for simplicity's sake. With their ranks having by the seventh month swelled to some 30,000 men, General Li Yuan marched his Tang army out of Taiyuan, leaving one of his sons behind to command a rearguard defense force, and marched towards the dual capital of Chang'an, Daxing. And here we have a really interesting piece of information regarding a type of person that in most histories, most of the time, hardly gets any play at all. Women. It can be easy to overlook the crucial role women must have played in so many of these events because they've so often been left out of the records. But happily, this is not one of those times. Historian Barbara

Bennett Peterson has a whole book on the historically significant women of China, titled Notable Women of China, Shang Dynasty to the Early 20th Century. Among the many notable female figures she covers, the one we get in this story is actually Li Yuan's daughter, whose given name is sadly unrecorded, but is historically remembered to be Princess Zhao of Pinyang, or slightly more abbreviated, Princess Pingyang. Bennett Peterson writes, quote, Li Yuan sent emissaries to recall Cai Shao, Pingyang's husband, who was living in the Sui court as the leader of the palace guards protecting the crown prince. Cai Shao informed his wife of his plans to join the rebellion, worrying that she would be in danger

once his abandonment of the Sui court became known. She counseled him that she could take care of herself and escape, end quote. And saying that she took care of herself doesn't even remotely scratch the surface. After a few days, Pingyang made good her escape from the Sui court and made her way back to her family's estate, where she found that, like so many of the regions in North China, the countryside was experiencing severe drought and famine. As such, she opened up the estate's grain stores to the local populace. Bennett Peterson writes, quote, I should say, quickly, that though it's called the Woman's Army, that is not

meant to imply that it was an army consisting completely of women or the like. The majority of the fighters would still have been men, but men willing to be led by a woman commander, although it is possible that women may have been able to join its ranks as well. Pingyang's Women's Army would go on to ally itself with other rebel and peasant groups across the country, picking up more and more members seemingly everywhere it went. One such ally was a martial arts expert who had pledged himself to help the peasantry, but was so impressed with Pingyong's ability to command that he pledged himself and his entire force to her command. And it's worth pointing out that Pingyong was really young too, like only 17 or 18 years old. So you have to picture a

teenage girl of high nobility marching across the countryside and convincing older men commanding thousands or tens of thousands of rebel troops to follow her lead, and eventually commanding a force of something like 70,000 peasant soldiers. She's obviously a complete badass. On the attack, she forbade her army from looting, raping, or pillaging, and strictly punished anyone who committed such infractions. And she had a wonderful tendency of winning over the local populaces wherever they went by distributing food that they might have captured. Pingyong's army would prove itself to be a true fighting force, too. When the Sui Imperial Army noticed this 70,000-strong band of what it probably presumed were just brigands, its commander sent a detachment

to, you know, sweep them away, drive them off, or kill them. I mean, it can't be that hard, right? Instead, the Sui imperial force was absolutely crushed by Pingyang's women's army. And between that defeat and then another crushing rout at the hands of the rebel army commanded by her father and brother, the backbone of the Sui military was snapped in late 617. By the 10th month of that year, the three armies of Tang had rejoined one another outside the walls of Daxing, and reportedly numbered as many as 200,000 strong. Unsurprisingly, Emperor Yang promptly hit his emergency eject button and fled the capital to his new palace south of the Yangtze. The siege of Daxing and Chang'an was commenced, and ran its course for some five weeks in late 617.

While the population within the city walls watched their food stores deplete and the waste lines begin to shrink, Li Yuan was busy drawing up his final plans for his Tang army's seizure of the capital city. Prior to the final battle to take the city, he issued strict orders to his lieutenants and their soldiers that under no circumstances was the final battle to take the city, he issued strict orders to his lieutenants and their soldiers that under no circumstances was the imperial family to come to harm. Arthur Wright puts what happened next simply, quote, Then, as previously planned, Yangdi's young grandson was made a puppet emperor with the title of Gongdi, although the Tang generals clamored for Li Yuan to ascend to the throne himself. Yangdi, who had long since fled to his southern capital Jiangdu, was given the empty title

of retired emperor. It's worth noting that, while surely embarrassing to have lost his capital, and then be given a new meaningless title by Li Yuan, obviously Emperor Yang himself did not acknowledge this new title, and nor did the majority of the empire that wasn't under direct Tang military control. For the time being, at least, they could call him whatever names they wanted, but the rebels were still the rebels, and Yang was still the Emperor of Sui. But that wouldn't last too terribly long. At his Jiangdi palace, Emperor Yang continued his by now well-established custom of living in a bubble totally apart from

what was going on around him. If he was terribly worried about being forced out of the north, it sure didn't seem to show, as once having arrived at his southern capital, he commenced with what seems to have been a running series of daily buffets, with himself, his empress, and his favorite concubines feasting in a different one of his palace's more than 100 rooms each day. He generally just seems to have not particularly cared about his impending fall from grace, and stated at one point to his empress, quote, There must be many people who want to hurt me. However, I will at least be like the Duke of Changcheng, and you like his wife. End quote.

Here, he's referencing the fate of the last emperor of the Chen dynasty, who had been taken up to Chang'an following his defeat at the hands of Yang's own father, and been treated as an honored guest, rather than punished or executed. Yang apparently believed that the same happy, carefree fate would be in store for him, because, again, reality bubble. He went on, however, quote, Do not worry. Let us drink and be merry. End quote. When Empress Xiao, in shock, asked him how he could say such a thing, he merely shrugged and replied, quote,

Honor, wealth, dishonor, poverty, as well as pain and pleasure. They're all cyclical. Why be distressed? End quote. It was becoming rather terribly clear that Emperor Yang's long separation from, well, reality had done things to his mind. A fact that Emperor Xiao would come to find out in one of the most horrific ways possible. Yang's remaining generals had realized that their emperor no longer had any real interest in battling the rebels, or returning to the north, or, well,

doing much of anything anymore, and began pretty flagrantly plotting to either desert or take the imperial army themselves and bring the fight back to the north, and at the very least recover their respective families whom they'd left behind. The plot, as plots will do, leaked, and Empress Xiao heard of the general's treasonous intentions from one of her handmaidens. She instructed the girl, who had reported the plan to her, to tell the emperor as well, and the girl dutifully did so. But Emperor Yang didn't want to hear any such distressing news, and quite frankly, hadn't he already warned his wife that she needed to stop being such a worrywart and just enjoy already? She was really messing up his zen thing,

man. As such, when the handmaiden gave him the details of the plot, he had had enough, and he had her executed on the spot. The Empress, horrified, realized that it was already too late to save her husband from what had become his, and possibly theirs, inevitable fate. Late the following spring in 618, the Sui generals launched the coup that everyone knew was coming. The generals collectively entered the palace and surrounded Emperor Yang, accusing him of a whole list of crimes. Yang admitted his faults, but then added that had he not always treated they, his generals, well and with respect? One of the generals then shot back, quote,

the whole earth is angry at you. It is not just the anger of one man, end quote. Then they brought out Yang's third son, Yang Gao, and killed him before his father's eyes. Emperor Yang, realizing that there was well and truly no way out of this mess, then offered to swallow poison and just get it over with. When none could be found quickly enough, he instead removed his selkhan scarf and offered it to the conspirators, who then wrapped it around his neck and strangled him to death. With the emperor dead, the coup then turned against the royal household, slaughtering all but one of the imperial princes, though leaving the empress and the royal concubines untouched. The leader of the coup, General Yuwen Huaji, named the last surviving prince, Yang's nephew Yang Hao,

as the new emperor and with him as the imperial regent. And then they collectively abandoned Jiangdu altogether and led the Sui army back north to challenge the Tang rebel force once again. Here is where we will leave off this time, China once again in a state of total disarray, shattered once more into pieces almost too numerous to count. It seems as though the reunification of the Sui was, just like the brief reunification under the Jin dynasty following the Three Kingdoms centuries before, merely a fleeting phase preceding a renewed period of disunity.

But next time, we will find out that history does not necessarily repeat itself, and though China has just had yet another great fall, the Duke of Tang, Li Yuan, with all of his horses and all of his men, will find himself in a position to have a real shot of putting it all back together again. Thank you for listening. Twitter, under the handle at THOCpodcast, and, as always, at our home on the web, thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com. And while you're there, consider clicking on the support page to help us keep chugging along. Thanks again, and see you next time. 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 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.