The Sui Dynasty

Since the fall of the Western Jin in the early fourth century, China had been divided between a succession of northern states and southern dynasties, the era covered on our page on the Six Dynasties. North and south had developed their own courts, literary styles and forms of Buddhism.

Yang Jian was a senior official of the Northern Zhou and father-in-law of its emperor, Xuan. When Xuan died in 580, leaving a young son on the throne, Yang Jian became regent, and in 581 he took the throne himself as the first emperor of the Sui. He is known by his posthumous title, Emperor Wen. In 589 his armies crossed the Yangtze and conquered the southern Chen dynasty, and China was united under one ruler for the first time in nearly three hundred years.

The Sui is often compared with the Qin: a short, forceful dynasty that unified the country, overreached and fell quickly, leaving its institutions to a longer-lived successor.

Emperor Wen set out to rebuild imperial authority. Central government was organised around three departments and six ministries, a structure the Tang and later dynasties kept. A new law code, simpler and less harsh than those of the preceding northern states, became the basis of the later Tang Code.

Local government was simplified from three tiers to two, prefectures and counties. The old Nine Rank system, which had let great families fill office by recommendation, was ended, and officials were appointed by the centre, barred from serving in their home districts and moved on regularly. The Sui also began to select some officials by written examination, the start of a system later dynasties would greatly expand.

A careful census brought many households back onto the tax registers. The equal-field system, first introduced under the Northern Wei, was applied across the empire: the state allotted land to farming households for their working lives, most of which returned to the state when they died. Large state granaries were built to hold grain against poor harvests. In practice, powerful landowners often found ways around the allotments.

Emperor Wen was a devout Buddhist. He sponsored the building of temples and in 601 had relics distributed to stupas across the empire, and Buddhist sculpture was in great demand under his rule.

The chief threat in the north was the Turkic khaganate, which controlled the steppe from Manchuria westward. Sui diplomacy encouraged its split into eastern and western halves in the 580s and played rival khans against each other, while garrisons and walls strengthened the northern border.

In the south, Sui armies reasserted Chinese control over the Hanoi region in 602. A few years later they attacked the kingdom of Linyi, later known as Champa, in central Vietnam. According to the Chinese histories, the Sui forces dug pits to trap the enemy's war elephants and won the campaign, but disease killed many of the northern troops on the march home.

Emperor Wen's second son, Yang Guang, came to the throne in 604 and is known as Emperor Yang. Later historians, writing for the Tang, made him the model of a bad last ruler, and their portrait should be read with that in mind. His ambitions were real, however, and so was their cost.

In 605 he began a new eastern capital at Luoyang. In the same years he built the Grand Canal, a network of waterways that linked the Yellow River and the Yangtze, running south towards Hangzhou and north towards the region of modern Beijing. It carried grain from the rich south to the capitals and troops to the northern frontier, and it served every later dynasty. Hundreds of thousands of labourers, perhaps more than a million, were conscripted to dig it.

Emperor Yang also had sections of the Great Wall rebuilt in 607 and 608, again with forced labour on a huge scale. The Sui capital at Daxing, planned under Emperor Wen by the architect Yuwen Kai, became the great grid-planned city of Chang'an under the Tang.

The Korean kingdom of Goguryeo controlled Manchuria and the north of the peninsula and refused to accept Sui overlordship. An expedition under Emperor Wen in 598 failed. Emperor Yang led three more, in 612, 613 and 614.

The official history puts the army of 612 at more than a million fighting men, a figure historians treat with caution but which shows the scale of the effort. That campaign ended in disaster at the Salsu River, where a large Sui force was destroyed on its retreat. The later expeditions achieved little.

The Korean wars drained the treasury, emptied farms of men and turned conscription into a cause of open revolt.

The Sui is too short to have a ceramic style entirely of its own, and its wares shade into those of the early Tang. Two groups interest collectors.

The first is celadon-glazed stoneware, made in both north and south. The glaze is thin and glassy, olive to yellowish green, and often finely crazed. It usually stops well short of the foot in an uneven line or in drips, leaving the grey or buff body bare. Typical forms include tall jars with small loop handles, dish-mouthed bottles, and high-footed dishes.

The second is white ware. Northern potters of the late sixth and early seventh centuries produced some of the first true white-bodied wares with a clear glaze, a direct ancestor of Tang white porcelain and, in the long run, of the porcelain that followed.

Sui pieces are dated mainly by comparison with finds from tombs whose dates are known from their epitaphs. Because the style overlaps so closely with the early Tang, many pieces are described simply as Sui or Tang.

From 611 rebellions broke out, first in the flooded and overtaxed north-east and then across the empire. In 616 Emperor Yang withdrew to Jiangdu, the modern Yangzhou, and in 618 he was killed there by his own officers.

In the north-west, Li Yuan, a Sui general and aristocrat, had already taken Chang'an in 617 and placed a grandson of Emperor Yang, Emperor Gong, on the throne as a figurehead. In 618 Li Yuan took the throne himself as Emperor Gaozu, founding the Tang dynasty. A second puppet emperor in Luoyang was deposed in 619.

The Tang kept almost everything the Sui had built: the capitals, the canal, the law code, the organisation of government and the equal-field system. The Sui's legacy lies less in its own short reign than in the foundations it laid for one of the great ages of Chinese history.