The initial rise of the Sui dynasty in the early 580s appeared to be just another factional struggle of the sort that had occurred repeatedly in the splinter states fighting for control of China in the centuries after the fall of the Han. Yang Jian, a member of a prominent north Chinese noble family that had long been active in these contests, struck a marriage alliance between his daughter and the ruler of the north- ern Zhou empire (Map 13.1). The Zhou monarch had recently defeated several rival rulers and united much of the north China plain. After much intrigue, Yang Jian seized the throne of his son-in-law and proclaimed himself emperor. Although Yang Jian was Chinese, he secured his power base by winning the support of neighboring nomadic military commanders. He did this by reconfirming their titles and showing little desire to favor the Confucian scholar-gentry class at their expense. With their sup- port, Yang Jian, who took the title Wendi (or Literary Emperor), extended his rule across north China. In 589 Wendi's armies attacked and conquered the weak and divided Chen kingdom, which had long ruled much of the south. With his victory over the Chen, Wendi reunited the traditional core areas of Chinese civilization for the first time in over three and a half centuries (Map 13.2). 

Wendi won widespread support by lowering taxes and establishing granaries throughout his domains. Bins for storing grain were built in all of the large cities and in each village of the empire to ensure that there would be a reserve food supply in case floods or drought destroyed the peasants' crops and threatened the people with famine. Large landholders and poor peas- ants alike were taxed a portion of their crop to keep the granaries filled. Beyond warding off famine, the surplus grain was brought to mar- ket in times of food shortages to hold down the price of the people's staple food. 

Sui Excesses and Collapse 

The foundations Wendi laid for political uni- fication and economic prosperity were at first strengthened even further by his son, Yangdi, who murdered his father to reach the throne. Yangdi extended his father's conquests and drove back the nomadic intruders who threat- ened the northern frontiers of the empire. He established a milder legal code and devoted resources to upgrading Confucian education. Yangdi also sought to restore the examination system for regulating entry into the bureaucracy. These legal and educational reforms were part of a broader policy of promoting the scholar- gentry in the imperial administration. But their advancement often worked to the detriment of the great aristocratic families and nomadic military commanders.

Yangdi was overly fond of luxury and extravagant construction projects. He forcibly conscripted hundreds of thousands of peasants to build palaces, a new capital city at Luoyang (lwoh-yahng) (Map 13.1), and a series of great canals to link the various parts of his empire. His demands on the people seemed limitless. In his new capital, Yangdi had an extensive game park laid out. Because there was not enough forest on the site chosen, tens of thousands of laborers were forced to dig up huge trees in the nearby hills and cart them miles to be replanted in the artificial mounds that tens of thousands of other laborers had built. 

Even before work on his many construction projects was completed, Yangdi led his exhausted and angry subjects into a series of unsuccessful wars to bring Korea back under Chinese rule. His failures in the Korean campaigns between 611 and 614, and the near-fatal reverse he suffered in central Asia at the hands of Turkic nomads in 615, set in motion widespread revolts throughout the empire. Provincial governors declared themselves independent rulers, bandit gangs raided at will, and nomadic peoples again seized large sections of the north China plain. Faced with a crumbling empire, the increasingly deranged emperor retreated to his pleasure palaces in the city of Hangzhou on the Yangzi River to the south. When Yangdi was assassinated by his own ministers in 618, it looked as if China would return to the state of political division and social turmoil it had endured in the preceding centuries. 

The Emergence of the Tang and the Restoration of the Empire 

The dissolution of the imperial order was averted by the military skills and political savvy of one of Yangdi's officials, Li Yuan, the Duke of Tang. Of noble and mixed Chinese-nomadic origins, Li Yuan was for many years a loyal supporter of the Sui ruler. In fact, on one occasion Li Yuan rescued Yangdi, whose forces had been trapped by a far larger force of Turkic cavalry in a small fort that was part of the Great Wall defenses. But as Yangdi grew more and more irrational and unrest spread from one end of the empire to another, Li Yuan was convinced by his sons and allies that only rebellion could save his family and the empire. From the many-sided struggle for the throne that followed Yangdi's death and continued until 623, Li Yuan emerged the victor. Together with his second son, Tang Taizong (tahng teye-zohng), in whose favor he abdicated in 626, Li Yuan laid the basis for the golden age of the Tang. 

Tang armies conquered deep into central Asia as far as present-day Afghanistan. These victories meant that many of the nomadic peoples who had dominated China in the Six Dynasties era had to submit to Tang rule. Tang emperors also completed the repairs begun by the Sui and earlier dynas- ties on the northern walls and created frontier armies. Partly recruited from Turkic nomadic peoples, these frontier forces gradually became the most potent military units in the empire. The sons of Turkic tribal leaders were sent to the capital as hostages to guarantee the good behavior of the tribe in question. At the Tang capital, they were also educated in Chinese ways in the hope of their eventual assimilation into Chinese culture. 

The empire was also extended to parts of Tibet in the west, the Red River valley homeland of the Vietnamese in the south (see Chapter 9), and Manchuria in the north (Map 13.2). In the Tang period, the Yangzi River basin and much of the south were fully integrated with north China for the first time since the Han. In 668, under the emperor Gaozong, Korea was overrun by Chinese armies, and a vassal kingdom called Silla was established that long remained loyal to the Tang. In a matter of decades, the Tang had built an empire that was far larger than even that of the early Han empire whose boundaries in many directions extended beyond the borders of present-day China. 

Rebuilding the World's Largest and Most Pervasive Bureaucracy Crucial for the restoration of Chinese unity were the efforts of the early Tang monarchs to rebuild and expand the imperial bureaucracy. A revived scholar-gentry elite and reworked Confucian ideol- ogy played central roles in the process. From the time of the second Sui emperor, Yangdi, the fortunes of the scholar-gentry had begun to improve. This trend continued under the early Tang emperors, who desperately needed loyal and well-educated officials to govern the vast empire they had put together in a matter of decades. The Tang rulers also used the scholar-gentry bureaucrats to offset the power of the aristocracy. As the aristocratic families' control over court life and administration declined, their role in Chinese history was reduced. From the Tang era onward, political power in China was shared by a succession of imperial families and the bureaucrats of the civil service sys- tem. Members of the hereditary aristocracy continued to occupy administrative positions, but the scholar-gentry class staffed most of the posts in the secretariats and executive ministries that oversaw a huge bureaucracy. 

This bureaucracy reached from the imperial palace down to the subprefecture, or district level, which was roughly equivalent to an American county. One secretariat drafted imperial decrees; a second monitored the reports of regional and provincial officials and the petitions of local notables. The executive department, which was divided into six ministries-including war, justice, and public works-ran the empire on a day-to-day basis. In addition, there was a powerful Bureau of Censors whose chief task was to keep track of officials at all levels and report their misdeeds or failings. Finally, there was a very large staff to run the imperial household, including the palaces in the new capital at Chang'an and the residences of the princes of the imperial line and other dignitaries. 

Institutionalizing Meritocracy: The Growing Importance of the Examination System 

Like Yangdi, the Tang emperors patronized academies to train state officials and educate them in the Confucian classics, which were thought to teach moral and organizational principles essential to effective administrators. In the Tang era, and under the Song dynasty that followed, the numbers of the educated scholar-gentry rose far above those in the Han era. In the Tang and Song periods, the examination system was greatly expanded, and the pattern of advancement in the civil service was much more regularized. This meant that in the political realm more than any previous political system (and those yet to come for centuries), the Chinese connected merit as measured by tested skills with authority and status. Several different kinds of examinations were administered by the Ministry of Rites to students from government schools or to those recommended by distinguished scholars. 

The highest offices could be gained only by those who were able to pass exams on the philo- sophical or legal classics at the highest imperial or metropolitan level. Those who passed the latter earned the title of jinshi. Their names were announced throughout the empire, and their families' positions were secured by the prospect of high office that was opened up by their success. Over- night they were transformed into dignitaries whom even their former friends and fellow students addressed formally and treated with deference. Success in exams at all levels won candidates spe- cial social status. This meant that they earned the right to wear certain types of clothing and were exempt from corporal punishment. They gained access to the higher level of material comfort and the refined pleasures that were enjoyed by members of the scholar-gentry elite, some of whom are shown at play in Figure 13.2. 

Even though a much higher proportion of Tang bureaucrats won their positions through success in civil service examinations than had been the case in the Han era, birth and family connections continued to be important in securing high office. Some of these relationships are clearly illustrated by the petitioner's letter printed in the Document feature. Established bureaucrats not only ensured that their sons and cousins got into the imperial academies but could pull strings to see that even failed candidates from their families received government posts. Ethnic and regional ties also played a role in staffing bureaucratic departments. This meant that although bright commoners could rise to upper-level positions in the bureaucracy, the central administration was overwhelmingly domi- nated by a small number of established families. Sons followed fathers in positions of power and influence, and prominent households bought a disproportionate share of the places available in the imperial academies. Many positions were reserved for members of the old aristocracy and the low- ranking sons and grandsons of lesser wives and concubines belonging to the imperial household. Merit and ambition counted for something, but birth and family influence often counted for a good deal more.

State and Religion in the Tang and Song Eras 

Increasing state patronage for Confucian learning threatened not only the old aristocratic families but also the Buddhist monastic orders, which had become a major force in Chinese life in the Six Dynasties era. These tensions represent a well-documented instance of the longstanding (and still globally widespread) problem of delineating the boundaries between established religions and state systems. Many of the rulers in the pre-Tang era, particularly those from nomadic origins, were devout Buddhists and strong patrons of the Buddhist establishment. In the centuries after the fall of the Han, Buddhist sects proliferated in China. The most popular were those founded by Chinese monks, in part because they soon took on distinctively Chinese qualities. Among the masses, the salvationist pure land strain of Mahayana Buddhism won widespread conversions because it seemed to provide a refuge from an age of war and turmoil. Members of the elite classes, on the other hand, were more attracted to the Chan variant of Buddhism, or Zen, as it is known in Japan and the West. With its stress on meditation and the appreciation of natural and artistic beauty, Zen had great appeal for the educated classes of China. 

The goal of those who followed Chan was to come to know the ultimate wisdom, and thus find release from the cycle of rebirth, through introspective meditation. The nature of this level of con- sciousness often was expressed in poetic metaphors and riddles, such as those in an 8th century C.E. treatise called the Hymn to Wisdom. The combination of royal patronage and widespread conversion at both the elite and mass levels made Buddhism 

a strong social, economic, and political force by the time of the Tang unification. The early Tang rulers continued to patronize Buddhism while trying to promote educa- tion in the Confucian classics. Emperors such as Taizong endowed monasteries, built in the style of those pictured in Figure 13.3. They also sent emissaries to India to col- lect texts and relics and commissioned Buddhist paintings and statuary. However, no Tang ruler matched Empress Wu (r. 690-705) in supporting the Buddhist establishment. At one point she tried to elevate Buddhism to the status of a state religion. 

Empress Wu also commissioned many Buddhist paint- ings and sculptures. The sculptures are noteworthy for their colossal size. She had statues of the Buddha, which were as much as two and three stories high, carved from stone or cast in bronze. Some of these statues, such as those pictured in Figure 13.4, were carved out of the rock in the great caves near her capital at Luoyang; for cast figures at other loca- tions, Wu had huge pagodas built. With this sort of support, it is not surprising that Buddhism flourished in the early centuries of Tang rule. By the mid-9th century, there were nearly 50,000 monasteries and hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns in China. 

The Anti-Buddhist Backlash 

Buddhist successes aroused the envy of Confucian and Daoist rivals. Some of these notables attacked the religion as alien, even though the faith followed by most of the Chinese was very different from that originally preached by the Buddha or that practiced in India and southeast Asia. Daoist monks tried to counter Buddhism's appeals to the masses by stressing their own magical and predictive pow- ers. Most damaging to the fortunes of Buddhism was the growing campaign of Confucian scholar- administrators to convince the Tang rulers that the large Buddhist monastic establishment posed a fundamental economic challenge to the imperial order. Because monastic lands and resources were not taxed, the Tang regime lost huge amounts of revenue as a result of imperial grants or the gifts of wealthy families to Buddhist monasteries. The state was also denied labor power because it could neither tax nor conscript peasants who worked on monastic estates. 

By the mid-9th century, state fears of Buddhist wealth and power led to measures to limit the flow of land and resources to the monastic orders. Under Emperor Wuzong (r. 841-847), these restric- tions grew into open persecution of Buddhism. Thousands of monasteries and Buddhist shrines were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns were forced to abandon their monastic orders and return to civilian lives. They and the slaves and peasants who worked their lands were again subject to taxation, and monastery lands were parceled out to taxpaying landlords and peasant smallholders. 

Although Chinese Buddhism survived this and other bouts of repression, it was weakened. Never again would the Buddhist monastic orders have the political influence and wealth they had enjoyed in the first centuries of Tang rule. The great age of Buddhist painting and cave sculptures gave way to art dominated by Daoist and Confucian subjects and styles in the late Tang and the Song dynastic era that followed. The Zen and pure land sects of Buddhism continued to attract adherents, with those of the latter numbering in the millions. But Confucianism emerged as the central ideology of Chinese civilization for most of the period from the 9th to the early 20th century. Buddhism left its mark on the arts, the Chinese language, and Chinese thinking about things such as heaven, charity, and law, but it ceased to be a dominant influence. Buddhism's fate in China contrasts sharply with its ongoing and pivotal impact on the civilizations of mainland southeast Asia, Tibet, and parts of central Asia, where it continued to spread in the centuries of Tang-Song rule.