As the just-reunited empire dissolved into chaos again, the chances of Sui Yangdi’s successor inaugurating the most glorious era in the whole of China’s history looked remote. The empire seemed to be relapsing into the anarchy of 400 years earlier, when the knights-errant of the emerging ‘Three Kingdoms’ had confronted the likes of ‘Poison Yu’ and ‘Yang of the Eighty-foot Moustache’. Between 614 and 624 some two hundred mutinies and rebellions reportedly affected practically every province and army unit. More non-Chinese from beyond the frontier were enticed south as auxiliaries, allies and predators. The Chang’an bureaucracy ground to a halt – as bureaucracies do – when the supply of paper ran out. Meanwhile emperors galore were being proclaimed, some of them Sui minors, some supposed descendants of earlier dynasties, and some redemptionist hopefuls in the Yellow Turbans’ tradition of Daoist millenarianism.
Many of the contenders were called Li, there being current at the time a catchy verse that credited someone of that name with an imperial destiny. The language seemed innocuous enough:
Peach-plum Li
Be reserved in speech.
As a yellow heron, fly round the hill
And turn about within the flower garden.
Yet in the context of the time, and to an audience attuned to the subtleties of poetic allusion, it was dynamite. ‘As intended, the seditious character of this refrain emerges only on close examination,’ explains a recent authority. The first two lines identify the subject as a certain Li, whose utterances give nothing away; the third line signifies Li’s high-flying ambition in relation to ‘yang’ (literally ‘the hill’ but sounding like the emperor); and the fourth promises him the freedom of herbaceous precincts, presumably the empire. Whoever composed it – and it could have been Sui Yangdi himself in search of a pretext for eliminating some troublesome Li – ‘it encouraged the idea of rebellion in any outstanding person of the Li name . . . [and] caused the emperor to suspect such a person’.16
Then, as now, Li was about the commonest name in China. A purge of all who bore it would have been a demographic disaster. Yangdi had had to content himself with executing only the more obvious candidates while sparing those of proven loyalty. Those spared included one of his most dependable commanders, the fifty-one-year-old Li Yuan, duke of Tang. Like the Northern Zhou and the Sui, to whom he was related by marriage, Li Yuan was from the frontier region of northern Shanxi, of martial background and mixed ethnicity (though genealogists would later present him with the noblest of pedigrees going back to one of Han Wudi’s generals and even Laozi). He belonged to the same horse-loving, conjugally loyal, open-minded and culturally eclectic social milieu as the Sui, and despite promptings from his own family, he continued to protest loyalty to the Sui until after Yangdi’s departure for the south.
Sui rule succumbed spontaneously, a victim less of the assassin’s sword or the rebel’s challenge than of its own ambitions. Only in 617, when the emperor had practically retired and his empire was being torn apart by others, did Li Yuan endorse the Peach-plum prophecy about a Li succession, summon forces and supporters, enter the fray, and march on Chang’an. The city fell after a stout resistance. Li Yuan then went through the motions of installing one of Yangdi’s sons as emperor, all the while resisting appeals that he assume the Mandate himself. Heaven, of course, was not to be denied. Heeding the portents and prognostications cited by his supporters, within a year Li Yuan had had himself installed as emperor and had named his dynasty after his dukedom of Tang. During the short reign that followed (618–26), most of which was devoted to quelling opposition, the first of the Tang reinstated all but the most recalcitrant of Sui generals and officials. He and his successor would then adopt, with only minor adjustments, the entire Sui fiscal, military, administrative and legal framework.
As the Tang founder, Li Yuan would come to be known by his posthumous title of Tang Gaozu (‘Great Progenitor’), while his more illustrious son and successor is remembered by his temple-name of Tang Taizong (‘Supreme Ancestor’). The dynastic emphasis was justified. The Tang would last, at a generous estimate, for nearly three centuries. But the empire that the Tang inherited had come ready made, albeit battered; like the stately boulevards of Sui Wendi’s temple-studded Chang’an, or like Sui Yangdi’s Luoyang palaces with their winged belvederes, or indeed the Grand Canal, it required only restoration. This called initially for patient campaigning and strict financial restraint, policies alien to the Sui. But once peace had been established and the economy resuscitated,TangTaizong and his heirs would find themselves masters – and mistresses – of the most productive and effective empire in the world.
The wider world figures prominently in the history of the Tang. Contact with maritime Asia through the seaports of the south, which were now restored to the empire, was about to be complemented by throwing wide the western ‘Jade Gate’ into central Asia. Turkestan, Tibet and Persia, no less than Vietnam, Korea and Japan, would fall within the Tang perspective and loom large in imperial policy-making. Still farther afield in India and the Byzantine empire, the political, cultural and productive preeminence of Tang China gained widespread acceptance. Its tolerance of alien belief systems and its enthusiasm for foreign craftsmanship and performances brought a cosmopolitan dimension to urban life. Society savoured the exotic; artists showed a willingness to experiment. There was now substance to the conceit of ‘All-under-Heaven’ looking up to the Celestial Emperor. It was as if the world had so tilted on its axis as to leave the ‘Middle Kingdom’ at last in the middle. The period from c. 650 to c. 750 would be the first and most convincing ‘China century’.
But this wider world beyond zhongguo’s traditional frontiers was not that into which explorer Zhang and the armies of Han had ventured eight centuries earlier, nor was it that from which had emerged the Tabgach Northern Wei and the forebears of the Northern Zhou and Sui. As adversaries, the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Qiang and others had faded from the records. Some of those so identified had been incorporated into the ethnic mix of north China; others had been absorbed by new confederations and kingdoms outside it.
Their place along the northern and north-western frontiers had been taken by peoples whom the Chinese histories call ‘Tujue’. Turkic inscriptions of the eighth century in the Orkhon region of Mongolia support the identification of these ‘Tujue’ as Turks, although the inscriptions provide little help with the origins of the Turkic-speaking peoples. Like so many inner Asian peoples, their early trajectory remains ‘wrapped in obscurity’.17 Under the leadership of a qaghan (kakhan, khan), the equivalent of the Xiongnushanyu, the Tujue/Turks had emerged rapidly in the mid-sixth century and at the expense of peoples who had previously replaced the Xiongnu and Xianbei.
By the 570s the Northern Zhou had been obliged to buy off the Turks with 100,000 silk pieces a year; in return Chang’an received horses of lesser value; both sides regarded the trade as tribute, though differing as to who was the tributary. In the standard history of the Sui, the Turks are described as their own worst enemies, ‘preferring to destroy one another rather than live side by side’. Certainly a succession dispute in the 580s divided the Turk qaghanate into western and eastern branches. The former’s authority extended beyond the Tian Shan into what is now Kazakhstan and the latter’s throughout Mongolia and into western Manchuria. One contender for the qaghanate sought support, and then refuge, from Sui Wendi, who by dexterous intrigue promoted and exploited the divisions among the Turkic clans. But it would be left to Tang Taizong to perfect this policy and reap the dividends.
In foreign relations, as in domestic policy, the Sui had emulated the Han. That meant establishing concentric rings of subordinate territories, allied dependants and tributary states that rippled to the horizons of the sinocentric world in all directions. Sui Wendi’s conquest of the southern Chen dynasty had been followed by an expedition to re-establish Chinese authority in northern Vietnam. This succeeded in 602, though further expeditions down the Vietnamese panhandle to Champa, a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom located near Danang, amounted to little more than raids. ‘All the Chinese had to show [for them] were the stolen ancestral tablets [of the Chams], some cases of Buddhist scripture, and a troupe of captured musicians.’18 Thereafter Champa, along with its great rival, the proto-Khmer kingdom on the lower Mekong, would send and receive occasional missions which, though gratifying Chinese sensibilities, in no way prejudiced south-east Asian sovereignties.
Into the same wishful category fall Sui relations with the island world of the Yellow and East China Seas. Sui Yangdi is said to have launched two naval expeditions against somewhere called ‘Liuqiu’; it could have been Taiwan/Formosa or possibly Luzon in the Philippines, but was probably the Ryukyu Islands. The first expedition was repelled and the second, though more successful, withdrew. Both ventures, being Yangdi’s, are represented as ill conceived and ruinously expensive. Of ‘Liuqiu’ all that can be said for certain is that it was hot and sticky and that it was not Japan.
For from Japan, or from its self-styled ‘Sunrise Son of Heaven’, there had come to Chang’an in 607 a large embassy, plus monks, conveying congratulations on the efforts made by the ‘Sunset Son of Heaven’ to promote Buddhist precepts. Sui Yangdi heartily deplored all this fraternal terminology; at best it implied equality of status between Heaven’s twin sons, at worst a dawn precedence for the Japanese emperor. But with a view to setting the record straight, the religio-diplomatic intercourse continued with more missions in both directions. Uniquely they are chronicled not only in Chinese sources but also in the Nihon Shoki, an eighth-century text that is Japan’s first comprehensive history. The slant put on diplomatic protocol for the benefit of the ‘Sunset Son’ may thus be compared with that put on it for the the ‘Sunrise Son’ (actually a daughter, the Yamato ruler of the time being a lady emperor). Yangdi was reassured that the Yamato acknowledged Sui suzerainty, revered its Buddhist scholarship and emulated its culture. The Japanese, on the other hand, while conceding their need for further religious, literary and bureaucratic novelties, seem never to have accepted that their diplomatic presentations amounted to tribute or that their ruler was other than a counterpart of the Sui and Tang.
Official contacts between Japan and China would continue sporadically throughout the next two centuries. But they were conducted in the face of great difficulty. Nearly half of the traffic was lost at sea, and this despite the route usually involving a landward crossing of the Korean peninsula, so halving the sailing distance, and despite such Chinese maritime inventions as the magnetic compass, the sternpost rudder and watertight bulkheads. In 838, a Japanese mission would fare better on the high seas and would yield the first account of life and travel in China to be penned by a foreigner. But the mission would also prove to be ‘the last to be dispatched abroad by the Imperial court of Japan until the nineteenth century’.19 Though cultural, commercial and piratical contacts flourished, authority in Japan fell a prey to feudalism and its diplomacy slipped into a milliennium-long hibernation.
Korea served as both a conduit and an obstacle in this Sino-Japanese intercourse. The Sui and then the Tang generally kept on good terms with the southernmost Korean kingdom of Silla, whose mariners’ intimate knowledge of the treacherous Tsushima strait was invaluable. But from the north Korean kingdom of Koguryo (whence derives the name ‘Korea’), Chang’an failed dismally to win other than token acknowledgements of suzerainty. Sui Yangdi’s three disastrous invasions had been preceded by an equally unrewarding intervention under Sui Wendi and they were followed by worse under the Tang.
Relations had briefly improved when the advent of the Tang coincided with a change of ruler in the Koguryo capital of Pyongyang. Tang Gaozu at the time was too busy pacifying the empire, and then Tang Taizong too busy with the Turks, to launch assaults in the north-east. But the temptation to upstage Sui Yangdi eventually proved too great. Buoyed by success elsewhere and ignoring the almost unanimous advice of his ministers, in 645 Taizong launched a massive assault across the Liao River supported by a naval attack from Shandong. Unusually the emperor led his forces in person, such was the importance he attached to the campaign. Not unusually, ‘the whole expedition ended in disaster’.20 The imperial forces got bogged down trying to reduce the fortified cities of Liaodong and were then overtaken by the Manchurian winter. They scarcely entered the Korean peninsula.
Taizong tried again in 647, but with little success; and he planned yet a third invasion that was cancelled on his deathbed in 649. Not until twenty years later would Tang troops finally enter Pyongyang and complete the reassembly of the Former Han’s territorial behemoth by appending its Korean tail. But the triumph would be short-lived; and in the eyes of the annalists, it would be vitiated by its being less that of Taizong’s successor than of the latter’s formidable consort, the Empress Wu.