BEFORE CHINA’S ADOPTION OF THE STANDARD Gregorian calendar in 1912, each month of the Chinese year lasted twenty-eight to twenty-nine days, that being the duration of the moon’s cycle. But since 28/29 days x 12 months comes to somewhat less than the 365 days of the solar year, the Chinese calendar, like other luni-solar calendars, needed a way of accommodating the difference. The Julian and Gregorian calendars manage this by extending the duration of most months to thirty or thirty-one days, so spreading the differential throughout the year. But in China, as in pre-Julian Rome, the moon-length month remained standard. Instead, the luni-solar difference was taken up by the introduction, every eighteen months or so, of an additional month.
When to introduce this ‘intercalary’ month was a matter of deep concern and elaborate computation, for on the exact harmonisation and synchronisation of the terrestrial world with that of the cosmos depended just about everything – virtue, longevity, health, prosperity, justice, dominion and immunity from disasters. Like other essential ongoing corrections – to the name of the year-period, the setting of the hours, the timing of the seasonal rites, the musical pitch of the ritual pipes – it was ultimately an imperial responsibility. Outstanding emperors, especially those who founded a dynasty or achieved much in their own right, were thought to have been well advised in such matters; bad emperors were generally supposed to have neglected or manipulated them.
This idea of fraught but cathartic interludes in which human affairs were realigned with the rhythms of the cosmos could be extended to the dynastic succession itself. Some dynasties lasted long; others barely survived a few turbulent decades – it was as if they had been inserted to fill a hiatus or give a new direction. The Former Han had been preceded by the intrusion that was the First Emperor’s Qin dynasty, and the Later Han by the ‘blip’ that was Wang Mang’s Xin dynasty. A pattern was apparent; and since the succession of dynasties was supposed to mimic the cycles of the planets, some Chinese historians embraced the possibility of ‘intercalary’ dynasties. Thus Qin and Xin could be seen as necessary, if traumatic, correctional preludes that had brought Former Han and Later Han into propitious harmony with the cosmic forces.
The task of what he calls ‘making a distinction between the orthodox and the intercalated status [of dynasties]’ was one that eventually defeated Sima Guang, the eleventh-century author of the Zizhi Tongjian (and not to be confused with Sima Qian, the second-to-first-century BC ‘Grand Historian’ who wrote the Shiji). In the post-Han period there were just too many dynasties for Sima Guang to decide which were intercalary and which, if any, were not. Yet the title of his all-embracing history, which translates as something like ‘A Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government’, seems to endorse the idea of history ‘reflecting’ the cosmic cycles.1 And in common with all Chinese historians, Sima Guang continued to subscribe to the belief that each individual dynasty did indeed conform to a cyclical pattern. Planet-like again, every dynasty ascended and declined, waxed and waned, shone and faded. Strong and virtuous emperors usually came early in the succession; weaker and worse ones usually came towards the end. Indeed, ‘the bad-last emperor’, a necessary conjunction if the Mandate was about to be forfeited, features so frequently in the Standard Histories as to be considered a convention of history-writing. As with the ‘vindictive empress’ and the ‘scheming eunuch’, the dismal deeds and delicious improprieties credited to such stereotypes should be approached with caution.
Moreover Sima Guang did not entirely abandon the idea of dynasties themselves being intercalary. It might not be applicable in respect of the localised dynasties of the ‘Period of Disunion’, but with the return to a wider dominion in the late sixth century it was about to be demonstrated in the most satisfactory fashion. For before the Tang dynasty could embark on its long and glorious career, another short and dramatic intercalary prelude would serve to bring the country back into what dynastic historians regarded as its natural trajectory. This was as a unitary empire; and the dynasty responsible was the Sui.
There were only two Sui emperors, their combined reigns lasting just thirty-seven years (581–618), but for maniacal energy and solid achievement it is hard to find their equal in the later history of the empire. Rather one must look, as they did, to the past. Just as the mighty empire of Han had relied on the administrative structures, legal constraints, mobilisational capacity and awesome reputation generated by the Qin First Emperor, so the empire of Tang would scarcely have flourished without the conquests, institutions and infrastructure bequeathed it by the Sui. And yet, since neither Qin’s controversial reputation nor any hint of ‘intercalated status’ could be entertained by a dynast ambitious for his lineage, it was not the example of Qin which inspired the Sui but that of Han itself. As will be seen, the dynasty that the Sui regarded as traumatic and transitional was the one they replaced. Intercalary interludes, like ‘bad-last’ emperors, were always someone else’s.
When in 534 the newly rebuilt Luoyang had been forcibly evacuated, it was on the orders of a warlord called Gao Huan. Himself Chinese but from the northern frontier and married to a Xianbei, Gao Huan then ruled in the name of several short-lived Northern Wei descendants (known as the Eastern Wei) from a more defensible capital at Ye in the south of Hebei. Luoyang was thought too exposed because to the west another warlord of pure Xianbei descent called Yuwen Tai ruled in the name of more puppet emperors of Northern Wei descent (there known as the Western Wei). In time-honoured fashion, both these Wei remnants were soon removed, with Gao Huan’s successors in the east reigning as the Northern Qi (551–77) and Yuwen Tai’s in the west as the Northern Zhou (557–81). (They called themselves just ‘Qi’ and ‘Zhou’, of course, all the ‘northerns’, ‘easterns’ and ‘westerns’ having been added later for the convenience of historians.)
The Northern Qi in the east was the more sinicised of the two regimes and may be seen as continuing the ethnic assimilation of Han and non-Han promoted by Dowager Empress Feng and Xiao-wendi of the Northern Wei. But it was Yuwen Tai’s Northern Zhou dynasty based in Chang’an which, though initially the weaker of the two, proved the more innovative and dynamic. According to one historian – admittedly not a Chinese one – this largely non-Han regime, headed by a Xianbei elite many of whom spoke no Chinese at all, ‘was the anvil on which were forged the structures of power – the economic, political and military institutions – upon which [the Sui-Tang] monolith grew’.2 In fact the Northern Zhou actually fashioned that monolith to the extent that they reunified the north, added to it the ever vital resource-base of Sichuan, revived claims to Gansu and some of the oasis-cities beyond, and ennobled a man whose son, as Sui Wendi, would complete the process of reunification. Just as the dukes and kings of Qin in the ‘Warring States’ period had developed centralised bureaucratic structures and mobilised massive armies for the career of conquest that made possible the Qin, and then Han, empires, so it was the little-honoured innovations of the Northern Zhou which made possible the better-known triumphs of Sui, which in turn underpinned the glorious Tang.
One day in 535 Yuwen Tai, already the power behind the Western Wei throne, was out fishing with friends near Chang’an. In what must have been a novel sport for men from the desiccated northern frontier, the anglers chose a stretch of water that looked to have been man-made. Curious about its origins – it probably dated from the Former Han – Yuwen Tai sought information. A local man called Su Chuo was produced, and he proving a fund of information, the Xianbei warlord took more delight in his antiquarian ‘catch’ than in the fishing. He kept Su Chuo talking for the rest of the day and well into the night. Besides information about ‘the vestiges of the rise and fall of successive dynasties’, he learned of ‘the way of orderly government . . . the way of emperors and kings’ and of the political teachings of ancient sages like the legalist Han Fei. Curiosity and an open-minded pragmatism being among the finer qualities of the non-Han incomers, Yuwen Tai was intrigued. He co-opted Su Chuo as his fiscal adviser and also entrusted him with the task of devising a legitimising ideology for the new regime, a role in which subsequent Northern Zhou rulers would retain him.3
Su Chuo’s approach to the problem of how to make non-Han rule more palatable in northern China was to present it not as a compromise with the surviving traditions of the Han Chinese but as a reversion to the pre-Han, and of course pre-Buddhist, purity of those traditions. In other words, he would out-orthodox the orthodox. Like Confucius, he harked back to the age prior to the ‘Warring States’ period when society supposedly conformed to the highest ideals of Confucian decorum and duty. Hence the choice of ‘Zhou’ as the dynastic name; hence his putting into Yuwen Tai’s mouth sentiments and speeches culled from those credited to the Duke of Zhou; and hence his promotion of the Zhouli (‘Rites of Zhou’), a contentious text, also sometimes credited to the Duke of Zhou, that described the life and times – and more especially the life and terms – of that Elysian age.
The Zhouli, it may be recalled, was also the text so slavishly adopted by Wang Mang in the early first century AD. Once again the long-forgotten nomenclature of Zhou times was resurrected; edicts were issued in the archaic Chinese of that period and all officials compelled to learn it; a handy catechism comprising the Six Articles of the new dispensation had also to be memorised by heart; and the ‘equal-fields system’ of land tenure, though introduced by the Northern Wei, was retained as a fair approximation to the ancient ‘well-field’ grid of equal peasant holdings. Naturally Buddhism and Daoism were frowned on and both were eventually proscribed.
Whether such affectations endeared the foreign elite to their Chinese subjects is, however, doubtful; for when the duke of Sui, a member of that elite, rose against the Northern Zhou in 581, one of his first moves would be to reject the whole exercise. In effect, Confucian ‘fundamentalism’ probably served the Northern Zhou no better than it had Wang Mang. On the other hand, it served their successors rather well, in that abolition of such an inconvenient model not only enhanced their credibility but threw open the ideological arena for other political exemplars from the past.
More practical and much more productive were the Northern Zhou’s recruiting initiatives. When they first arrived in Chang’an, Yuwen Tai and his Xianbei followers mustered an effective but not numerous cavalry. To hold off repeated attacks by the Eastern Wei/Northern Qi, they needed to organise local recruitment, enlist the loyalty of various rural militia, and raise both the standing of military men and the standard of military training. This they did so successfully that by 550 the records speak of ‘Twenty-four Armies’ and by the early 570s of 100,000 men under arms. The Gansu corridor was successfully subdued by 549, and after the collapse of the Liang dynasty in the south, Sichuan and then the Han River basin were taken in the 550s. Northern Zhou territory now reached to the Yangzi. To complete the reunification of the north it remained only to overwhelm the Northern Qi in Shandong and Hebei, a feat that was achieved in 577 with a massive force put at 570,000.
But just how this turnaround in the size and cohesion of the Northern Zhou’s military machine was effected is far from clear. The key development is thought to have been the institution of fubing (‘territorial forces’ or ‘militia forces’). These fubing would famously become the backbone of the Sui and Tang armies and attract much later comment, none of which has helped to clarify their genesis. Under the Northern Zhou most fubing were probably infantry rather cavalry, Han Chinese rather than non-Han, and volunteers rather than conscripts, having been lured into service by exemptions from taxation and corvée. Yet there were numerous exceptions: conscription was by no means abandoned; some fubing may have originated in units previously recruited by local magnates and then incorporated into the ‘Twenty-four Armies’; the enormous numbers of horses mentioned show that cavalry, both light and heavy, remained crucial; so did the recruitment of non-Han forces; and in the north, as in the south, there is evidence for the growth of military professionalism and a martial culture. Long-term enrolment, with military families or groups of families providing recruits from one generation to the next, is evident; and the growth of an esprit de corps may be inferred from the news that, as of the 570s, the Twenty-four Armies ‘began to perform guard duty by rotation in the environs of the imperial palace, an important feature of the fubing system under the Sui and Tang dynasties’.4
But perhaps nothing contributed more to this steady build-up than the success it generated. Victory brought reward to all – grants, amnesties and booty to the rank-and-file, honours, emoluments and more booty to their commanders, and additional manpower and foodstuffs to the regime. Expansion created its own momentum; and there seemed no limit to it. For the conquests of the Northern Zhou, reaching from the Liao River in Manchuria to Gansu, Sichuan and the upper Yangzi, had not just reunited the north but had thrown a cordon round the breakaway southern empire based at Jiankang (Nanjing) on the lower Yangzi.
By the sixth century Jiankang, the capital of all the southern dynasties, had grown into ‘the largest city of the age’ with a population of around a million. Commercially and intellectually it shamed the northern capitals of Chang’an, Luoyang and Ye.5 In its markets the silks and hardware of the north met the spices, pearls and feathery exotica of Vietnam and southeast Asia. Beside the Yangzi, and scattered over the wooded slopes behind, some seven hundred Buddhist establishments maintained the highest standards of exegesis, while at court piety vied with conversational finesse and the grossest indulgence.
Yet for the powdered scholars dissecting the finer points of the Lotus Sutra, as for the rouged poets rhapsodising over the almond blossom, a nasty shock awaited. The long reign of the ultra-pious Liang Wudi (r. 502–49) was interrupted by a crescendo of rebellions that climaxed in 548 with Jiankang itself capitulating after a four-month siege. Brocaded aristocrats, deserted by their retainers and unacquainted with the mechanics of cooking, were said to have starved to death in the lacquered luxury of their own apartments. The city was sacked with appalling brutality; and when order was restored in the 550s, the new Chen dynasty (557–89) ruled a reduced and enfeebled southern empire. It was further circumscribed by a defeat at the hands of the Northern Zhou in late 577. As of that date, ‘to any northern statesman . . . the Chen must have looked like an easy conquest’.6
Only a dynastic crisis in the north delayed the inevitable. In 579 the Northern Zhou emperor died. He was succeeded by Crown Prince Yuwen Pin, a pathological libertine in whom the attributes of ‘bad-last’ emperor assumed monstrous proportions. Bingeing from the sacerdotal vessels reserved for the ancestors, he flouted the rites, chastised his womenfolk, violated the wife of a kinsman, and beheaded those even suspected of disapproval. His one asset was his father-in-law, the duke of Sui, a man of mixed ethnicity and a veteran of the wars with the Northern Qi who was indeed, as per his title, a ‘Pillar of the State’.
When in 580 Yuwen Pin suffered a stroke and died of natural causes, the duke of Sui engineered his own appointment as commander-in-chief and regent for Pin’s seven-year-old successor. Events then took a predictable course. Rebellions were quashed, the Yuwen clan was steadily eliminated, and pleas for a new dynasty, supposedly emanating from the young emperor and backed by all manner of portents and predictions, rained down on the duke of Sui. In 581, with a show of the utmost reluctance, he accepted the incumbent’s abdication and assumed the Mandate. Soon after, the suspicious demise of the ex-emperor brought the number of Yuwen kinsmen purged in the changeover to exactly sixty.
Five years of consolidation and inclusion ensued. Sui Wendi (that being the temple-name adopted by the once duke, now emperor) embarked on an important programme of administrative reform that, in reinstating the institutions of the Han empire, brought into government far more Han Chinese than non-Han. The recent proscription by the Northern Zhou of both Buddhism and Daoism was reversed, while all of that dynasty’s archaic introductions were unceremoniously junked. Confucian as well as Daoist stalwarts were artfully placated. The Buddhist community was deluged as never before with favours and patronage. Signifying the new dynasty’s ambitious intent, the city of Chang’an was dismantled and its place taken by a replanned and rebuilt capital of cyclopean proportions. Agriculture recovered, tax receipts improved and labour was abundant. Meanwhile the military build-up continued.
When it came in 589, the conquest of the south had an air of inevitablility about it. Weakened by the loss of territory along the north bank of the Yangzi and in Sichuan, the Chen, last of the southern ‘Six Dynasties’, planned its resistance with little hope and dwindling conviction. Ideologically as well as physically, the ground had been cut from under the southern empire. The Northern Zhou’s reunification of the north, and the Sui adoption of Han administrative norms, had undermined the southern case for an exclusive legitimacy. Unlike previous southern dynasts, the Chen were not artistocratic northern émigrés who could pose as guardians of a cultural tradition reaching back through the dynastic pedigree to the Jin, the (Cao) Wei and the Later Han; rather were they local military leaders of no more illustrious descent than their counterparts in the north.
Cultural and commercial contacts between north and south had never ceased during the ‘Period of Disunion’, but the social distinctions that had struck the visitor in, say, the fifth century were no longer so clear cut. The stereotyping of northern rulers as bloodthirsty and uncultured ‘barbarians’ who lived on mutton-and-dumpling stews was as unsustainable as that of southerners as effete and indolent courtiers picking at fish-and-fried-rice delicacies. Non-Han steppe-men in the north increasingly conformed to Han Chinese norms; Han Chinese émigrés in the south were increasingly tainted by association and intermarriage with the indigenous Man and other southern ethnic groups. North and south shared more than they cared to admit. Both segments of the erstwhile empire accorded primacy to devotional Buddhism; both honoured Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian scholarship; both treasured their common linguistic and literary heritage; and both still subscribed to the ideal of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ (zhongguo) as a single integrated entity.
Like the Qin First Emperor, Sui Wendi planned his assault on the south as an affair of many prongs. From Sichuan to the sea, half a million troops massed along the Yangzi in eight strike forces. In recognition of the difficulties of combat in the south, they included contingents of Man boatmen, a large infantry component and vast fleets of warships and transports. These had been constructed as surreptitiously as possible at four strategic locations: on the coast, near the middle Yangzi, on the Han River, and at Fengjie just above the gorges in Sichuan. It had taken two years of meticulous preparation, but by the winter of 588/89 all was ready. In a well-coordinated movement, the amphibious advance got under way.
Down through the Yangzi gorges came the Sui’s most feared commander at the head of an armada that included what must have been the largest vessels afloat in the sixth century. Each was a five-deck fortress from whose embrasured cladding 800 men could discharge their crossbows, while overhead, like gesticulating antennae, 15-metre (16-yard) derricks swung spiked iron weights to disable approaching vessels. Yet despite their superior weaponry, the northerners remained wary of river combat, especially amid the treacherous currents and commanding heights of the gorges above Yichang. To outflank and overpower the assortment of fleets, fortified obstructions and chain barriers strung across the stream, they relied more on landward excursions, often under cover of darkness. Progress was steady and occasionally sanguinary but was soon overtaken by events downstream.
There the main Chen forces were concentrated around Jiankang. But because much of the Chen fleet was engaged upstream and cut off by the intervening Sui flotillas, the river itself was here poorly defended. Two Sui columns crossed it unopposed, and after just one battle of note, both entered the city of Jiankang. It was all over in a matter of days. Some Chen units fled rather than fight; others readily surrendered when the Chen emperor so ordered. (An early captive, he had been extricated from his place of refuge at the bottom of a well, where he was found in the clammy embrace of two favoured concubines.) In proportion to the number of combatants, the casualties of the campaign had not been heavy; and the clemency now shown to the vanquished was exemplary. Jiankang was not sacked, the ex-emperor and his officials were spared, and a rumour of mass transplantations proved to be exaggerated.
Though a heavy death toll resulted from the suppression of a series of subsequent rebellions, by the end of 590 the south was pacified. Demobilisation throughout the empire was then declared, if not universally effected. Weapons were supposedly collected, their private manufacture banned and, setting a precedent that would have long-term consequences, all boats of more than 10 metres (33 feet) were confiscated. As well as outlawing local navies, this had the effect of containing mercantile enterprise and ensuring that water transport served the interests of the state. From his new capital at Chang’an, Sui Wendi ruled a realm that, long divided, was now to be physically united.