Chapter 17 Emperor Sui Yang

Today we are going to write the biography of Emperor Sui Yang, but in fact we will encounter many difficulties. Arthur Wright, who has worked on this topic for a while, said: "(He) is regarded as a typical subjugated emperor, and in a big Under the distorted historical records and legendary hearsay, if people today want to get a glimpse of this person's true character, they can only get a glimpse of it." However, Yang Guang, Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty, was very talented, his writing was gorgeous, his mind was extraordinary, and he also had a creative personality.Even those who criticize him cannot deny these advantages.Another example is that in 608 AD, he ordered the eagle masters from all over the world to gather in Chang'an, and there were more than 10,000 people there. In 610, he held Chen Baixi in Duanmen Street, Luoyang. , He himself went to watch it in micro-clothes several times.He also heard that Tuyuhun (a tribe who flowed into Qinghai from Xianbei) rode Persian horses and put them on the grasslands of Qinghai, which could give birth to dragon colts. He bought 2,000 female horses in the valley in order to seek "dragon breeds", but he gave up because it didn't work.Even if such an act is considered absurd by traditional historians, today we can speculate that he was imaginative, willing to experiment, and able to express his personal wit in various trivial matters.

On the other hand, from various indications, Yangdi lacked the thoroughness and prudence as a commander, and he was not able to serve as an imperial general.This weakness may also be due to the arrogance of Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty.For example, when he was only thirteen years old, he was granted the title of king of Jin and became the governor of Bingzhou (the governor of Shanxi Province).In the campaign against Chen in 589 AD, he was appointed as the marching marshal before he was 20 years old. He commanded the army in Liuhe, and he also restrained other military chiefs, such as the veteran Yang Su.These 518,000 people took less than a month to pacify Jiangnan and reunify China. The weakly crowned King Jin wrote a letter to report to his father and accomplished the task.This battle, of course, increased his prestige, but also indulged his arrogance, making him think that everything in the world is so easy.Later, he built the Great Wall, built canals, sent Liu Fang to defeat Linyi (in today's Vietnam), listened to Feiju's plan to break through Tuyuhun, and imprisoned the Turks. He patrolled Yanzhi Mountain in the west. Not frustrated.In the future, he will be in adversity, that is to say, he will be lazy and discouraged, and escape from reality, so his tragic complex also has the causes and consequences of long-term accumulation.

It is said that Emperor Yangdi of the Sui Dynasty mobilized 1,133,800 people in his attack on Koryo, twice as many.How reliable this figure is is impossible to ascertain.It's just that Yang Guang's superstitious belief in the superiority of military numbers is beyond doubt.In fact, in the siege battle that day, the number of field troops was too large to be manipulated.It will be effective unless the number is used to win the first blow and make the other party lose their fighting spirit.Otherwise, if you deploy too many troops, you will have the difficulty of commanding the manager in your lineup first, which will become your weakness on the battlefield in the future.Sure enough, in the battle of 612 AD, the Sui army encountered strong resistance from Goryeo in the area north of the Yalu River and east of the Liaohe River. The army was unable to provide supplies in time, and the command power was too strictly controlled. In addition, the Sui Emperor did not have the determination to fight to the death. Once the war was favorable, Koryo feigned surrender, and the senior generals did not dare to make decisions, so they could not expand the results of the war.Finally, due to the arrival of the autumn rain, they began to retreat in the thirty miles north of Pyongyang. The soldiers had no actual training, and when they were pursued by the Korean soldiers, they collapsed and were out of control. In 613, Emperor Yangdi made a comeback and came to the front line in person.The Sui army had thinned out Liaodong City, and they also used flying ladders to attack the surrounding area, and a few Sui soldiers climbed the city to meet the enemy soldiers with short swords. But at this time, Yang Xuangan, who was in charge of transporting grain and fodder in the Central Plains, knew that there were thieves everywhere, and Emperor Yang could not last long. Liyang (near Junxian County, Henan Province, the midpoint of the north-south transportation) rebelled with soldiers, and Jiao Sizheng, the minister of the Ministry of War, defected to Korea, telling the truth about China.In the middle of the night, Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty summoned his generals to decide not to attack the city.If the troops are brought back again, all the military resources and equipment will be piled up like a mountain, and they will all be abandoned.Finally, this operation was kept secret. Two days after the retreat, Koryo did not dare to pursue it even though she realized it.

Two months later, although Yang Xuangan was wiped out, the prestige of Emperor Sui Yang had been exposed. The people in the north and south were unable to recruit and mobilized, and they mobilized into bandits, numbering in the tens of thousands at every turn. In 614, Emperor Yangdi summoned a hundred bureaucrats to discuss the attack on Goryeo, and issued an edict saying that "the Yellow Emperor's 50th World War II, Chengtang's 27th Conquest", but the ministers did not dare to respond, and the rebels everywhere captured the city. flat suppression.Although at this time the naval army that came to protect the children forced Pyongyang again, and the King of Koryo sent envoys to surrender, and sent Jiao Sizheng to prison, so that Emperor Yang could take advantage of this class, but he had gone astray. In 615, he inspected the north and was besieged by the Turks. It was almost unavoidable.In the following year, he was fortunate to be in Jiangdu (Yangzhou), and he had no intention of returning to the north. Those who advised him were convicted, and in the end he even refused to listen to the report that the overall situation was in disarray.And so on for more than a year. In the winter of 617, Tang Guogong Li Yuan (later Tang Gaozu) entered Chang'an, established his grandson Yang You as emperor, and respected him as Supreme Emperor, but Yangdi did not respond. In the spring of 618, the betrayed emperor was killed.It wasn't the rebel generals on the battlefield or the rebel militia who killed him, but his favored followers and guards.Therefore, although the various reprimands of Sui Yang Emperor Yang Guang by traditional historians may be repeatedly exaggerated, they do not completely falsify the facts, because Yang Guang has his weakness of being attacked by others.

However, we still follow the traditional policy of "praising and criticizing" to write history, but we ignore the factors of time and environment in history.The turn of the Sui and Tang Dynasties at the beginning of the 7th century AD was a prominent period in Chinese history.Today, the end of the 20th century is another prominent period in Chinese history.The "Book of Sui" in the Twenty-Four Histories was compiled in the early Tang Dynasty, and the author referred to it as "Yin Jian is not far away".They never imagined that the Sui Dynasty was not an ordinary dynasty, let alone that the Zhou people in the Spring and Autumn Period generally called China, and it would be deduced into today's China.Because of the different standpoints of looking ahead and looking ahead, even when we write the biography of Emperor Sui Yang, we have to take into account many long-term and long-distance factors in order to keep up with the times.

From the perspective of "big history", Sui, Tang, and Song can be called China's "Second Empire" to distinguish it from the "First Empire" of Qin and Han.Although the Han Dynasty was said to be centralized, its prefectures and counties were still reorganized from the feudal system of the Zhou Dynasty.The original organization inherited by the Sui and Tang Dynasties was traced back from the Northern Qi Dynasty and the Northern Zhou Dynasty to the Tuoba family in the Northern Wei Dynasty. Owner farmers are the main body, focusing on the level of low-level institutions.Bamboo and wood were still used in the documents of the Qin and Han Dynasties; not only paper had been used for more than 500 years between the Sui and Tang Dynasties, but woodblock printing also appeared around 600 AD.These factors made education more common than before, and also enabled the entire civil servant group to be on par with the society of small farmers, and each could maintain the same level of simplicity.

The election annals of "New Book of Tang" mentioned at the beginning that "most of the subjects selected for scholars in the Tang system were from Sui and old".One of the most important procedures is that "scholars are self-listed in prefectures and counties", that is, no recommendation is required, and a comprehensive and open examination system has begun. It has gone through Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties until 1905 in this century. Because of this, civil affairs in the Sui Dynasty began to be controlled by the central government.During the conversation between Emperor Yangdi and Liu Xuan, who revised laws and regulations, Niu Hong once put forward the following paragraph: "In the past, only the discipline was set up in the prefectures, and the prefectures were set up in the counties. No more than a few dozen. This is not the case today, all officials, big and small, belong to the Ministry of Officials. The traces of slender referrals are all about merit."

Although such a personnel system makes the bureaucracy more popular, it also makes the middle-level organization of the country more hollow.Because there is no power and obligation between the upper and lower levels to check each other, the tendency for the emperor to directly rule the whole people is becoming more and more obvious.Emperor Wen, the founder of the Sui Dynasty, started his business with the foundation of the Northern Zhou Dynasty, and swept the Southern Dynasty after annexing the Northern Qi Dynasty.It is also expanded from areas with uniform terrain and simple human factors to areas with complex humanities.After he destroyed Chen, he established five hundred families as the township and one hundred families as the family. He was implementing it in the south of the Yangtze River with his tentative organization, and he was fully resisted by the rich and powerful.Since the rebellion was flattened, his unification must be stepped up, and all of his deliberate designs since then have been based on maintaining a unified empire.So another 15 years.In this primitive agricultural society, the shortcut to achieve the goal is not to increase the complexity of the structure in the middle, but to maintain the balance at the bottom.In 594, Yang Jian, Emperor Wendi of the Sui Dynasty, ordered all prefectures and counties to give their land to each other. In 595, industrial and commercial workers were not allowed to become officials. In 598, private large ships were banned, and all ships over three feet long were admitted to the government.They all focus on maintaining the simplicity and uniformity of rural society.His advocacy of Buddhism is not out of piety in faith, but for the purpose of unifying thoughts.Its large reduction of Guozixue and the abolition of prefectural and county schools are also due to the way of Confucianism, which is nothing more than "knowing the righteousness of father and son, monarch and minister, and knowing the order of superiority and inferiority". , so there is no need for large reserves.He himself is a poor eater, and he is no more than in line with low-level standards.

All of the above facilities are also in line with the tax policy at that time.The Sui and Tang dynasties inherited the "rent-yong adjustment" system of the previous dynasties. The focus was on adapting the state finances to the simple rural economy, paralleling the equalization of land, and avoiding the difference between the rich and the poor of taxpayers in principle. Only by comprehensively collecting extremely low tax rates did widespread Effect.Even so, there are still technical difficulties. "Sui Shu" Shihuo Zhi mentioned that the Northern Qi Dynasty set the tax amount of one husband and one wife as one "bed", and single people paid "half a bed".Just because the imperial power is concentrated at the top, and the obligation to pay taxes is spread to everyone, there is a lack of various institutions that have the power to judge compromises and adjustments, or even provide services. Therefore, whether the system can be implemented depends entirely on the emperor himself. pressure.In his later years, Emperor Wen Yang Jian devoted himself to this matter.He is also jealous of the corruption of his subordinate officials, and whoever receives it will die.He himself interrogated his ministers in the court hall, and if he was not satisfied with the call, he immediately killed him.Therefore, "Sui Shu" said that he "has a deep guessing nature, has no academics, likes decimals, and doesn't know the general".

However, after his high-pressure policy, the treasury of the Sui Dynasty was full of things, and even the cellars could not accommodate them.Therefore, Qian Mu once said that the Western Han Dynasty would prosper after the four emperors rested for 70 years until Emperor Wu reached its peak.This also represents a special phenomenon under China's traditional agricultural policy.Because of full-scale production, no emphasis on exchange and distribution and diversification of the national economy, and no improvement in quality, a short period of national mobilization can make the wealth of agriculture (because its unorganized structure is different from that of commerce) overflowing beyond expected.Emperor Yangdi ascended the throne in AD 604, and he could be regarded as inheriting the economic foundation since the founding of the Second Empire. However, such affluence has become a burden to the country. At that time, political ideology had to prevent "mergers", so the people who had mobilized in the countryside Where does the labor force work, can it make a large number of people unemployed?

In this way, it seems that Emperor Sui Yang's consumption of Chinese manpower and material resources had its historical background, that is, he gathered the eagle masters from all over the world in Chang'an, and gathered musicians in Luoyang, and he was still induced by the objective environment.As for the excavation of canals, Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei Dynasty had already led Luo into the valley for water transportation during Yuan Hong's time.The construction of the palace began when Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty built the Renshou Palace. It is said that "there are tens of thousands of dead".Even the cutting of Goryeo began with Emperor Wen.In the battle of 598 AD, 300,000 people were mobilized. They were hit by rain and disease, and many boats drifted away. Traditional historians call them "eighteen or nineteen dead."Therefore, Yangdi’s various actions followed the steps of Emperor Wen, and were a product of the comprehensive movement of the day. At the beginning, he also had the support of all civil and military officials. Otherwise, Yang Guangzong, Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty, was an independent husband, and it was impossible for him to seize public opinion by himself. so long. Therefore, when we review Yangdi's success or failure today, we cannot focus on his merits and crimes alone as the final answer.That is, before the Yang and Sui Dynasties, the Northern Dynasties had intersected and implemented the land equalization system.In this way, the effect of using an ideal mathematical formula to cover downwards depends entirely on the actual assessment standard of rent-adjusted taxes. Once this plan is launched into a mass movement, it will not be easy to end it in a timely manner.So overkill must be overcorrected.As a result, there are only the numbers needed by the upper levels, and there are no real statistics from the lower levels. As a result, the men are exhausted, and the forced labor is extended to the women. It's the law."Until the failure of conquering Korea, the whole country rebelled, and they didn't know what to do.Although Emperor Sui Yang had imagination, he was not a great thinker after all, nor was he able to see the depth of history in ancient and modern China and abroad like us.In the end, he retreated to Jiangdu for more than a year, but he couldn't come up with an idea, which also shows that he has never fully understood his own position in history.It is said that he once took a self-portrait in the mirror and said to Empress Xiao: "Who should chop the head and neck if it is good?" Whether it is true or not is doubtful.But his helpless tone is in line with his tragic ending.