There is such a huge organization in Chinese history, some people say that it made Emperor Wen of Sui and Emperor Gaozu of Tang, and some people say that it made emperor Sui fall into disrepute, and this is the Guanlong clique that has influenced the course of China's history for more than a hundred years. In this issue, let's talk about this aristocratic group that makes the rulers of the dynasty love and hate the military and government.
When it comes to the Guanlong clique, many friends will think of warlord division, but I tell you that the Guanlong clique is different from the warlord division, and compared with the warlord division pattern in the Three Kingdoms period, the birth of the Guanlong clique has historical accidents. The Guanlong clique belonged to the community of interests of the warlord alliance, but its early purpose was to achieve a confrontation with the Eastern Wei, in other words, they were local armed forces officially supported. In 398 AD, in the face of foreign invasions from time to time, Emperor Daowu of Northern Wei established six military towns near Pingcheng in order to protect the capital city of Pingcheng from foreign enemies, and the soldiers of these military towns were some local heroes and strongmen, and enjoyed a high reputation in society, but later because the Northern Wei regime moved the capital to Luoyang, these military towns were the value of their existence, and no longer valued by the imperial court, and finally had to start rebellion, but at that time the national strength of Northern Wei gradually weakened, and the strength was not as good as before. In addition, the strength of these military rebels is also getting stronger.
The Northern Wei officials no longer had the ability to suppress these rebellious rebels, so what to do, or did they just let them grow and develop? Therefore, the Northern Wei officials gave the loyal local powerful and powerful forces, and let them recruit troops and buy horses on their own to fight against these rebels who were in rebellion, but no one expected that blindly giving real power to the powerful forces would create a larger and more difficult military group to deal with. These military groups gradually got rid of the official control of the Northern Wei and developed into powerful and uncontrolled local separatist forces, one of the Eight Pillar States, Yuwen Tai, was the representative figure in the separatist forces, and at this time the Northern Wei had been divided into Eastern Wei and Western Wei, and the matter was not over In order to expand its own military strength, Yuwen Tai continued to gather local powerful and warlords to improve the military system and establish a huge organizational structure of the Eight-Pillar State and the Twelve Generals.
These eight-pillar states and the twelve generals were all generals, not only the commanders of the army, but also the core of the country's leadership, so the Guanlong clique, which had influenced Chinese history for hundreds of years, was formed. Due to the effective improvement of military strength and political strength, the intermarriage between the Guanlong nobles was intricate and complex, and by the end of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, they had become the de facto rulers of the world. At the end of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, due to the decline of the Yuwen family, Yang Jian, the Duke of Sui of northern Zhou, gradually became the spokesman of the Guanlong clique, why was it Yang Jian and not someone else? Here I have to start from Yang Jian's family power, in the previous we mentioned that Yuwen Tai established the Eight Pillar State and the Twelve Generals, and Yang Jian's father was Yang Zhong, one of the Twelve Generals, after Yuwen Tai's death, Yang Zhong helped his son Yu Wen jue establish the Northern Zhou regime, and Yang Zhong went through the four dynasties of Yuwen Tai, Yuwen Jue, Yuwen Yu, and Yuwen Yong.
Because of his great military achievements, he was awarded the title of Grand Sikong, a great general of the Pillar State, a hereditary Duke of Sui, Yang Jian lived under the shadow of his father since he was born because of his higher birth, so the young Yang Jian had a higher political starting point, not only that Yang Jian also had a great wife, Du Gushi, and DuGu's father was dugu Xin, one of the eight pillar states of the Western Wei Dynasty, that is to say, Yang Jian's father and father-in-law were both great nobles of the Guanlong clique, so after the death of Du Guoxin and Yang Zhong, Yang Jian gathered two powerful families. Therefore, the large family of the Guanlong clique decided to support Yang Jian as emperor, and it can be said that the reason why Yang Jian was able to establish the Sui Dynasty so easily was largely due to the unique identity of his father and father-in-law.
Since Yang Jian always represented the interests of the Guanlong clique, his power was often constrained by the Guanlong clique, and after Yang Guang ascended the throne, he tried to change this situation in which the Guanlong nobles restricted imperial power. So he thought of three methods: one was to open the examination and select talents through examinations to break the monopoly of talents by the nobility; the other was to launch a foreign war against the Turks and Goguryeo, hoping to send all these nobles to fight in order to weaken their strength; the third was to abolish the hereditary system of the guanlong clique's nobility, and the implementation of these measures weakened the strength of the Guanlong clique to a certain extent.
However, due to Yang Guang's haste in handling this matter, coupled with the excavation of the Grand Canal and the construction of the eastern capital Luoyang, which cost a lot of money, the lives of the people of the whole country were soon overwhelmed, and the economy gradually collapsed, so peasant uprisings broke out one after another in various places, eventually leading to the demise of the Sui Dynasty. Although the strength of the Guanlong clique was reduced, it was soon re-developed, and after the fall of the Sui Dynasty, the Guanlong clique lost its official legal representative, so the Guanlong clique urgently needed to find a new legal spokesperson, who was no one else, it was the later Tang Gaozu Li Yuan. Like The Sui Wen Emperor Yang Jian, Li Yuan's identity is also not simple, Li Yuan was born with a golden spoon, and he is also a veritable official of the third generation. Li Yuan's grandfather Li Hu (李虎), who was an official in Western Wei during the Western Wei Dynasty, was one of the eight-pillar generals of the Western Wei Dynasty, holding heavy troops to guard the side of the prince, and when he arrived in Northern Zhou, Li Yuan's father Li Xun continued to be an official, and the official was the governor of Anzhou, the general of the pillar state, and the duke of Tang.
When Li Yuan was seven years old, Li Yuan's father died, Li Yuan hereditary Duke of Tang, and after the Sui Emperor Yang Jian established a unified Sui Dynasty, Yang Jian needed the support of these clan door valves in order to sit firmly on the throne, so he adopted the most effective method of marriage with the clan. Yang Jian married Li Yuan's maternal aunt Dugu Jialuo as empress, and Li Yuan became a relative of the emperor and the state, Yang Jian had great trust and respect for Li Yuan, and Li Yuan was the grandson of Li Hu of the Eight Pillars State, the grandson of Du Guxin, who originally had a certain strength behind him. Now that he has become an imperial relative of the Sui Dynasty, his current strength is already comparable to that of Yang Jian at that time, so Li Yuan has naturally become the spokesman of the Guanlong Clique and the place where the Tang Dynasty was established. Due to the wars at the end of the Sui Dynasty and the measures of the Sui Emperor, the strength of the Guanlong clique had been greatly weakened, and the reason why they supported Li Yuan to ascend to the throne was to restore the influence of the Guanlong clique in the Central Plains through Li Yuan.
But what they did not expect was that Li Yuan had only been emperor for eight years, and the throne was taken away by Li Shimin, who valued both wisdom and talent, and Li Shimin knew that the existence of the Guanlong clique was always a threat to imperial power. Therefore, he decided to follow the strategy of the Sui Dynasty Emperor Yang Guang to weaken the strength of the Guanlong clique, abolished the hereditary system of guanlong clique aristocrats and selected talents through examinations, under this system, because the elderly Guanlong aristocrats all died one after another, and the descendants of the Guanlong aristocratic class were difficult to re-enter the ruling class and seize power, by the time of Emperor Gaozong of Tang, the originally huge Guanlong clique was only li jiazong's relatives. In the Wu Zetian period, due to Wu Zetian's wanton massacre of the Li family's relatives, the Guanlong clique, which had influenced China's history for hundreds of years, completely withdrew from the stage of history.
The Guanlong clique has been active in Chinese history for nearly two hundred years, and its existence is not meaningless, first of all, the emergence of the Guanlong clique shows that there was a military alliance in China at a very early age, and secondly, the existence of the Guanlong clique also promoted the emergence of the imperial examination system and gradually moved the society ruled by the Chinese aristocracy towards the mode of bureaucratic rule, and the emergence of the Guanlong clique also made China's political and cultural center. It shifted from west to east and from north to south, promoting the development of the Central Plains Continent. The key is that it also created two great unified dynasties, the Sui Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty, so the Guanlong Group still left a strong mark in the history of our country.