Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
This helped reconnect north and south, which had been separated from
each other for a long time and ruled over by different governments.
The first Sui emperor was, unfortunately, succeeded by his megalo-
maniacal son, Sui Yangdi, who is second only to Qin Shihuang in
Chinese history for being a harsh and extravagant despot. He pressed
his people to the breaking point and ruined much of that which his
father had accomplished, ultimately dooming his dynasty. He wasted
money on huge construction projects and built a massive and ostenta-
tious palace for himself. He was obsessively driven to complete the
Grand Canal, at enormous expense. He even pressed women into
construction work when male laborers were too few. When the canal
was finally finished he took a flamboyant tour down it. His power
was, for a time, seemingly limitless; his every whim was satisfied. He
is notorious in Chinese history for compelling thousands of women to
make paper and silk blossoms and paste them on the branches of bare
trees in the wintertime, in order to cure his wintertime depression.
Yangdi squandered national resources on huge, unsuccessful military
campaigns. He attacked Korea three times during his reign but failed to
conquer the peninsula, and his defeats cost the lives of several hundred
thousand troops. In 617 he attacked the Turks; this action also ended
disastrously for the Sui and almost resulted in Yangdi's capture. All of
these military debacles seriously depleted the state budget, and to make
up for the shortfall, he required taxes to be paid years in advance. When
the peasants could take no more of this and rebelled, he appointed a
general named Li Yuan to quell the rebellions. Li Yuan, however, was
fed up with Yangdi and soon turned against him. A Sui official assassi-
nated Yangdi in 618, and Li Yuan created his own dynasty, the Tang,
which was to last for almost 300 years.
The Tang is one of China's two golden ages. Almost every Chinese
points to the Han and the Tang as the two times when Chinese civiliza-
tion was at its highest and most powerful. The Chinese call themselves
“men of Han” after the Han dynasty, and they call overseas Chinese
communities and Chinatowns “Streets of Tang People.” Like the
Han, the Tang had a huge territory that extended in a long arm out
along the Silk Road into Central Asia, and, also like the Han, the Tang
managed for a time to defeat the northern barbarians and extend their
domination over them. In the Han, the barbarians were the Xiongnu or
Huns, but during the Tang they were the Turks. This may surprise
some modern readers because we usually think of the Turks as living
in modern Turkey and other parts of the Middle East, but the earliest
known Turk homeland was in the area known as Mongolia today.
Eventually, the majority of Turks migrated westward and converted
