The Sui and Tang dynasties were a particularly striking period in the history of Chinese civilization, and at the same time another era of "great unification" since the Qin and Han dynasties. Different from the brief unification of the Western Jin Dynasty, the unification of the Sui and Tang Dynasties was very deep in terms of both the length of time and the cultural and psychological level, and had the same unity as the Qin and Han Dynasties.
※ Sui and Tang Dynasties were the second "great unification" in Chinese history? ※
Sima Rui, the founding monarch of the Early Eastern Jin Dynasty, once said to Gu Rong, the leader of the Jiangnan clan, "Sending people to the land is often ashamed", which means that Sima Rui is often ashamed of himself for having fallen from the north to live in other people's land. Belonging to the same domain, as an emperor, why did he have such a sigh? It turned out that when the Eastern Jin Dynasty was established, the Western Jin Dynasty unified Sun Wu for about 30 years, and at this time, both the north and the south considered the Jin to be a conqueror. Sima Rui's words on other people's land refer to the homeland of Sun Wu in Jiangnan.
Since the Warring States period, the Qin Shang Martingale Transformation Law, as well as the other countries have changed the law, the Monarchs of the Central Plains have tried to continue along the line of consolidating monarchical absolutism, centralizing power, and weakening the power of the nobility. After Qin Shi Huang unified the world and established the Qin Dynasty, absolute monarchy, centralization, and bureaucracy became the three normal elements of the ancient Chinese political model and continued to influence for thousands of years. However, during the Three Kingdoms and Two Jin Dynasties, when the aristocratic forces took advantage of the Han-Hungarian War, the central government's financial resources were tight, and they wantonly concealed the household registration population, expanded their influence, and reoccupied the center of power in the form of the Hao family, becoming an important force hindering the imperial power.
At the time of the great unification of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, especially after the Sui Dynasty created and designed the imperial examination system, and the Tang Dynasty vigorously promoted the imperial examination, bureaucratic politics finally found a track suitable for its own development and had an institutional system that could be relied upon. The emergence of bureaucratic politics is conducive to consolidating the absolute monarchy and centralized power, and the scholars who have obtained promotion space by virtue of the imperial examination system do not have to worship the family door valve, and can be completely independent of the family door valve. These officials, who lacked a family background and came from a cold door or a common people, had power from the central imperial court and imperial power, and naturally supported the rule of the emperor and the imperial court. Therefore, during the Sui and Tang dynasties, whether it was cultural psychology, geographical territory, or social structure, China was quite different from the Wei and Jin Dynasties, which brought Chinese politics back to the normal state of the Qin and Han dynasties.
It should be noted that the formation of these three normal elements with regard to absolute monarchy, centralization and bureaucracy is interesting. It should be known that they belong to the inherent requirements of the development of monarchy and conform to the common characteristics of human civilization. However, compared with China, the development of monarchy in Western Europe has always faced a balance between two forces, making it difficult to achieve china's imperial autocracy. One is the power of the church, and the other is the power of the noble lords. In China, the unification of the roles of monarch and religious high priest has been gradually completed since the Yin Shang period, and the national monarch is a religious priest. In the Zhou Dynasty, this evolution became more pronounced, and the "Mandate of Heaven" attribute of Zhou Tianzi became more intense, but at the same time, the religious mystery began to fade and become more universal. So in general, there were no religious forces in Chinese history that were sufficient to counterbalance the absolute monarchy.
As for the power of aristocratic lords, both the Qin and Han dynasties and the Sui and Tang dynasties suppressed them, and the cultivation and construction of a complete bureaucratic system was the most important "magic weapon" for suppressing aristocratic politics. However, due to the difference in chronology, the great unification of the Sui and Tang dynasties has produced many situations that were not experienced in the Qin and Han dynasties, and thus has become more complicated. During the Qin and Han dynasties, the Central Plains ethnic groups and the Siyi had already had very frequent interactions, but the relationship was relatively simple, not as complex as in the Sui and Tang dynasties; in addition, the main cultural conflicts of the Qin and Han dynasties were reflected in the east-west contradictions between the Qin and Shandong six kingdoms, which was integrated with the political conflicts at that time. With the destruction of the Six Kingdoms by Qin, this series of problems have been solved. The Sui and Tang dynasties were different, and the ethnic culture and regional divisions at this time were more complex, continuing many historical relics since the Wei and Jin dynasties and the Southern and Northern Dynasties.
※ "Southern Dynasty": Manor system, conscription system, two tax laws, capital-based service?※
Regarding the origins of the prosperous era in the Sui and Tang dynasties, historians usually have two major views: "Southern Dynasty" and "Northern Dynasty Export", which are actually discussions of how Chinese society in the Sui and Tang Dynasties embarked on "great unification". From the perspective of the expansion direction of the historical territory, the process of evolution from the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Sui Dynasty was the Western Wei and Northern Zhou dynasties of the Northern Dynasties that first expanded or annexed the Northern Qi and Southern Dynasties bashu regions, and then the Sui Dynasty destroyed the Chen Dynasty and unified the world, so it should be the Northern Dynasty that conquered the Southern Dynasty. However, the Sui Dynasty and the early Tang Dynasty inherited the economic model of the southern dynasty manor system, and the socio-economic composition appeared different from the original Northern Dynasty. Later, during the tang xuanzong period, the "professional soldier" conscription system used by the Southern Dynasty replaced the "compulsory military service" government military system and military conscription system of the Northern Dynasty, and there was also a tendency to the southern dynasty in the way the military was composed.
After the Anshi Rebellion, the tax system of the Tang Dynasty replaced the rent adjustment system by the "Two Tax Law", and even the methods of remuneration such as "peace employment" and "payment of capital for military service" were closely related to the Southern Dynasty. The so-called "peace hire" refers to the official hiring of craftsmen at market prices. Do not underestimate this change in the Sui and Tang Dynasties, you must know that since the Western Zhou Dynasty, industrialists and merchants have always been attached to the official government (after all, in ancient China, the agricultural natural economy, self-sufficiency model occupied the main body, commercial demand is not strong enough), so there has been a long-term phenomenon of "industrial and commercial food officials", so there is a hundred workers system, and the official government has set up a separate household registration to control the craftsmen for generations to specifically solve the needs of the official government's construction and other aspects. This "semi-free" state even limits the scope of marriage and activities of business practitioners. Because of this, with the economic development of the Southern Dynasty, the replacement of the hundred labor system by "peace employment" is undoubtedly a kind of progress.
Similar to "he hiring", "paid for service" is also a humanized system design derived from the Southern Dynasty. It allowed the people to be exempted from servitude by paying money, which promoted the long-term retention of the economic vitality of the Southern Dynasty, which undoubtedly had a positive role in promoting. In addition to the economic and military system, the Sui and Tang dynasties also attached importance to literature from the Southern Dynasty of that year, and it is necessary to know how much the poetry and song of the Southern Dynasty are not known to dump the Northern Dynasty. Therefore, many scholars believe that the prosperity of the Sui and Tang dynasties was closely related to its Southern Dynasty.
※ "Northern Dynasty Export": Juntian system, Prefectural military system, three-chief system?※
Although there is a lot of discussion about the "Southern Dynasty" of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, and policies such as the conscription system, the manor system, the two tax laws, the peace employment, and the service of the capital are all derived from the Southern Dynasty, these are the products of different stages of historical development of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, and the promotion effect on the prosperity of the early Sui and Tang Dynasties is debatable. In particular, the two-tax law and the conscription system were only developed and popularized in the middle of the Tang Dynasty. Therefore, many scholars believe that the Northern Dynasty is a greater existence for the historical development of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, and it is on the basis laid by the Northern Dynasty that a strong bureaucratic system has emerged and gradually stepped out of the door valve politics since the Wei and Jin Dynasties.
Mr. Chen Yinke once commented on the unification of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, believing that it was "taking the blood of the barbaric essence of the outside world, injecting it into the decadent body of the Central Plains culture, removing the old stains, restarting the new machines, expanding and restoring, and thus creating an unprecedented world situation." This narrative objectively reflects the inheritance of the Sui and Tang Dynasties to the Northern Dynasty's bravery and good war, and shows the characteristics of the era when the Sui and Tang dynasties attached equal importance to culture and martial arts. After a long period of strife in the Sixteen Kingdoms, the population of the north was depressed for a long time, and the land was sparsely populated, which prompted the Northern Dynasty, which had a light historical burden, to make many institutional creations, such as the implementation of the equalized field system to meet the peasants' desire to "cultivate their land".
Of course, as the population grows, the average field system will eventually disintegrate. However, it is precisely because of the existence of the Juntian system that it cooperates with the military system of the Western Wei, Northern Zhou and even the early Sui and Tang Dynasties, maximizing the comprehensive efficiency of human and material resources. On the one hand, it ensures the country's military resources, and on the other hand, it greatly reduces the financial burden of the central government, after all, relying on the juntian system, their clothing, grain and grass, horses, armor, etc. are all self-supplied. In addition, during the reign of Empress Feng of Northern Wei, the "three-chief system" was used to replace the "suzerainty system" once practiced by the Xianbei tribes, and the power of the imperial court penetrated downward into the rural grassroots through neighbor chiefs, li chiefs and party chiefs, which strengthened the imperial rule to a certain extent. Later, the rural management model with the three-chief system as the basic blueprint was inherited by the Sui and Tang Dynasties.
Of course, there are many opinions about who is the source of the prosperity of the Sui and Tang dynasties in the era of the great unification of the Southern and Northern Dynasties. However, from the Tang Dynasty's admiration for "both culture and martial arts", we can simultaneously glimpse the imprints of both the southern and northern dynasties. It should be pointed out that in addition to the Southern Dynasty and the Northern Dynasty, the Hexi Corridor area, which had been in a marginal area for a long time during the Wei and Jin Dynasties and the Southern and Northern Dynasties, because it was far from turmoil, instead jumped from a cultural desert to a culturally developed place, and in the Sui and Tang Dynasties, it fed the Central Plains from the Long Right, which cannot be ignored.
In summary, compared with the great unification of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, there are more complex factors in the background of the times than the great unification of the Qin and Han Dynasties. During the Sui and Tang dynasties, it was necessary to deal with ethnic relations, cultural integration, territorial and psychological unity, and the results were more thorough than those of the Qin Dynasty. The prosperity of the Sui and Tang dynasties had both the characteristics of "southern dynastization" and the phenomenon of "northern dynasty export", as well as the existence of cultural feedback in the Hexi region. These characteristics and elements have joined the unified and mixed culture of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, becoming independent of the unity, inheriting the past and the future, and creating one of the great causes of Chinese civilization.