Portrait of Yang Guang, Emperor of the Sui Dynasty
In ancient times, when the emperor traveled, he had to be accompanied by an honor guard, and in order to show the prestige of the royal family, he decorated the guards' clothes and hats, flags, car drivers, umbrella covers, etc. with the tails and feathers of rare birds and beasts.
If the emperor advocated frugality, he might have reduced these decorations, but when he met an emperor who liked luxury, the local officials would be guilty.
As we all know, the Sui Dynasty Emperor Yang Guang was very happy and extravagant, arrogant and lascivious, and built a large number of civil engineering during his reign.
The Book of Sui records:
In March of the first year of Daye (605 AD), "the Edict ordered Yang Su, Nayan YangDa, and the general Master Yuwen Kai to build Tokyo, and to migrate to Yuzhou Guo Xiaju to live in reality." ”
Began to build the eastern capital of Luoyang City, "picking strange birds and strange animals and plants in the sea" to enrich the royal garden, and moved the world's rich merchants to Luoyang, Tokyo. Men and women were conscripted into labor and the Grand Canal was dug.
The Sui Dynasty Emperor toured the west of the 27 kingdoms
The Zizhi Tongjian records:
In the spring of the second year of Daye (606), the Sui Dynasty Emperor ordered the officials Shangshu Niuhong and other ministers to discuss the formulation of a "public opinion uniform and ceremonial guard system" to make "36,000 people in the yellow dragon, as well as the 36,000 people of the Yellow Dragon, the Empress's Halogen Book, and the Hundred Officials' Ceremonial Clothing", which required a large number of feathers to decorate, so they ordered the officials of various prefectures and counties to collect feathers from rare birds locally.
Under the leadership of the officials, the local officials drilled the woods, crossed the swamps, set up bows and arrows, spread the net, and captured the rare birds of land and water to satisfy the emperor's own selfish desires.
The Sui Dynasty Emperor's honor guard lineup is super luxurious, its scale is unprecedented, and the number of bird feathers that need decorative materials is extremely large.
Officials and people roamed the mountains and the wilderness, running day and night, and for a time the people's grievances boiled over, and the complaints were full of complaints.
In order to collect a large number of feathers, officials can be said to have exhausted the organs.
Exotic birds everywhere have suffered unprecedented disasters, with many birds injured or killed during the capture process to the point where they cannot feed their young birds, leaving large numbers of birds on the brink of extinction.
The Book of Five Elements records:
In the third year of Daye (607), the Sui Emperor made the birds in jiangnan almost all captured in order to "make feathers".
Some people in Wucheng County, Huzhou County, were covered with feathers, pretending to be big birds and catching birds in the mountains.
Part of Emperor Huizong's "Ruihe Tu" of Song Huizong
The man found a white crane in a hundred-foot-tall tree feeding its cubs in its nest, and the bird catcher could not reach the nest and was ready to cut down the tree with an axe.
The white crane knew that this person must catch himself to obtain feathers, afraid that humans would hurt his children, so he endured the pain of "plucking his hair with his mouth and putting it down." ”
The bird catcher picked it up and found that the length and size were exactly the same as the standards set by the government, so they gave up cutting down the trees.
This incident was hyped up by the officials of the government, as if it were a kind of auspicious omen.
Reading this account carefully, it is not difficult to find that the recorder tried to denounce the insatiable greed of the Sui Emperor in a fabled manner.