Wendi

Wendi (born 541, China—died 604, China) was the emperor who reigned from 581–604 and reunified and reorganized China after 300 years of instability, founding the Sui dynasty (581–618). He conquered southern China, which long had been divided into numerous small kingdoms, and he broke the power of the Turks in the northern part of the country.

Early life

Yang Jian was born into a powerful family that had held high office under the non-Chinese dynasties that controlled northern and central China in the period of fragmentation. His ancestors had married into prestigious non-Chinese clans, and the culture of such families was as mixed as their descent. Until he reached the age of 13, Yang was brought up by a Buddhist nun. He then briefly attended the school maintained by the state for the education of sons of nobles and officials; it is doubtful that he acquired more than the mere rudiments of composition, a bit of history, and some maxims of Confucian morality, for young men of his class devoted themselves chiefly to horsemanship, the hunt, falconry, archery, and military exercises.

He received his first military appointment at 14 and rose rapidly in the service of the Yuwen, the non-Chinese ruling house of the Bei (Northern) Zhou dynasty (557–581), who, with their military prowess, would soon control all of North China. Wendi held a command in the campaign against the dynasty that controlled the northern plain and a post in the administration of the conquered territory. He had done well for the Bei Zhou, and, as part of his reward, he was permitted to marry one of his daughters to the Zhou crown prince.

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Seizure of the throne

When the Bei Zhou emperor unexpectedly became ill and died at age 35 and the successor’s sanity became doubtful, Yang Jian, his wife, and their confidants decided to seize the throne. The summer of 580 was crucial, for rival contenders and Zhou loyalists rose in many places. But, with luck, ruthlessness, superior military force, and discord among his rivals, Yang prevailed. He assumed the imperial title, held an audience on March 4, 581, and the Sui dynasty was founded.

The Wendi emperor surrounded himself with able men, mostly of mixed descent and mostly from backgrounds similar to his own. An early move was the building of a new capital on a new site southeast of the Han capital of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an); it was built on a scale unprecedented in Chinese history. The Sui evidently meant to replace the weak regimes of the age of disunion with strong centralized government, to unify China by eliminating the feeble “legitimate” Chinese regime at Nanjing.

The emperor moved into his half-built capital in 583, and he immediately set his grand design in motion. Centralization required drastic reforms on many levels—for example, the entrenched families that held local office by hereditary right had to be replaced by a bureaucracy answerable to the throne. The hereditary rights and the institutions that supported them were quickly abolished; a method of selecting new men by examination and recommendation was devised; appointment powers were vested in the Board of Civil Office (Chinese: Libu); and the “rule of avoidance” was instituted, forbidding officials to serve in their native places. Wendi planned the conquest of the south with his usual care and attention to detail. The eight-pronged assault by land and water overwhelmed the southerners; the integration of this culturally different area into the Sui empire began and was greatly facilitated by the canal system that Wendi had begun.

Foreign affairs

Beyond China proper Sui power was less easily asserted against the formidable empires of the western and the eastern Turks, but fortune and Sui intrigues brought success; the Turkish empires were weakened by internal rivalries, and by 603 the Sui had broken Turkish power in the areas most vital to them: Turkistan and Mongolia. A Sui attempt to administer Vietnam was a failure, but, toward the close of the Wendi emperor’s reign, Korea and Japan were beginning to notice the new paramount power in eastern Asia.

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In the year 601, when Wendi was 60, he had solid grounds for satisfaction: the empire was reunified and at peace; the people were productive, and the officials—carefully selected, frequently rotated, and under constant checks—collected taxes, saw that the granaries were filled, and carried out imperial orders at the local level. Looking about him in his spacious capital city, Wendi could see a large and increasing population, the opulent mansions of his nobles and ministers, temples, and thriving marketplaces. Moreover, the arrival of tribute missions reminded him that Sui power was being felt by neighbouring peoples.

Yet, for all his accomplishments, the Wendi emperor was deeply unhappy. Henpecked by his aging wife, on bad terms with his sons, deprived of many of his life-long confidants by death or by his wife’s jealousy of them, haunted by feelings of guilt and nameless fear, he turned against state Confucianism and ever more ardently to Buddhism. On his birthday in 601, he began an elaborate empire-wide series of observances. Shrines were built in key cities and towns; then the emperor himself sealed holy relics in jars, which delegations of eminent monks carried into the provinces. At a set time throughout the empire, the relics were simultaneously enshrined with appropriate ceremony. By this act of grandiose public piety, Wendi followed in the footsteps of the great 3rd-century-bc Indian emperor Ashoka, who was, like himself, a unifying emperor. At the time he assuaged his feelings of fear and guilt and laid in a great store of spiritual merit (karma) to see him through the lives to come.

Three years later—at the end of one of the great reigns in Chinese history—he fell ill and died. It has been said that he was killed by his son Yang Guang, who succeeded him as the Yangdi emperor.