As the saying goes, "He who dies is good in his words." "The tyrants of the human population are also afraid when they are faced with life and death. In the face of dozens of major crimes committed by the rebels, Yang Guang had to say before he died: "I really bear the people!" Therefore, he did not want to be humiliated by the blade, so he untied The White Aya, and was hanged to death. The emperor killer was Yuwen Shu's son Yu Wenhua, who helped him seek the throne.
This "negative" word tells how much bitterness an emperor has in his heart. It can be said that he really failed the people, and for his own eager heart to make meritorious achievements, he spent his whole life in the construction of civil engineering, digging long trenches, yingdong capital, opening canals, building dragon boats, and swimming in the river capital, and even more enslaving millions of people. According to statistics, in just 8 years, he has built 22 major projects, and the manpower, material resources and financial resources paid for this are countless.
So, as a generation of monarchs, what kind of emperor was the Sui Dynasty Emperor?
The earliest evaluation of the Sui Emperor was Li Shimin. Once, after reading the Collected Works of the Sui Emperors, he told the people around him that the Sui Emperor had said: "Recognize Yao Shun's exploits and deny the atrocities of The Sui Dynasty, but why did he do the exact opposite from beginning to end?" Wei Zheng replied, "Emperor Jue was arrogant and self-conscious, so he recited the words of Yao and Shun, and as a servant and a servant, he did not know it, and even perished." ”
Li Shimin agreed with Wei Zheng's analysis very much, and after that, this ordinary conversation between Jun Yichen and His Majesty invisibly laid the evaluation of Yang Guang by posterity. History is always very cruel, there are great founding monarchs, there are great lords of ZTE, but there is no great king of the fallen country, and people's evaluation of the king of the fallen country is mostly negative. It is indeed rare to be able to stand in a very fair position and objectively evaluate a king of a subjugated country.
In fact, Yang Guang, as the last emperor of the Sui Dynasty, was not a faint and incompetent emperor.
According to the incomplete summary of contemporary historians, Yang Guangzong has created many "firsts in history":
For the first time, the Grand Canal was excavated;
For the first time, the world's oldest surviving stone arch bridge, known as a "milestone in civil engineering";
For the first time, a defensive palace and alarm were created, and the world's earliest medical school "Taiyi Administration" was created and the most exquisite library in ancient times;
For the first time, unprecedented cultural construction was carried out, and thousands of cultural classics were sorted out;
For the first time, more than 25,000 miles of traffic trunk roads were built in China, and an unprecedented water and land transportation network and water conservancy irrigation system were built in China;
For the first time, it opened up a territory that was "too far away from the Qin and Han Dynasties" and surpassed the Tang Emperor and song ancestors;
For the first time, the emergence of Buddhist sects was fostered, and the process of sinification of Buddhism began;
For the first time, there is a world-leading record of traumatic intestinal anastomosis surgery;
For the first time, the "Ten Evils" clause was abolished in law;
Abolition of the goods entry tax for the first time;
The first exemption from women's taxation kicked off the abolition of the women's poll tax;
For the first time, the church system was established for future generations and the world's largest theatrical performance team at that time;
For the first time, the "SifangGuan" was set up in Kyoto to manage ethnic minorities, and the ideological policy of "mixing one Rongxia" and the families of various ethnic groups was put forward, and the county system was extended to the western regions;
For the first time, under the policy of opening up to "no separation from Huayi", we solemnly received envoys, businessmen and students from dozens of countries, and carried out unprecedented economic and cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries.
These "firsts in history" all occurred during the 14 years of Yang Guang's reign, and it can be said that the impact on China's dynastic history of more than 1,300 years after that can be described as very far-reaching.
However, it is such an emperor, and most of the time we evaluate him as a tyrant and a subjugated king.
Historian Hu Ji said: "We can almost say that what Qin Shi Huang did, the Sui Emperor probably did, but he did not burn books to pit Confucianism; we can also say that what the Sui Emperor did, Tang Taizong probably also did, but Tang Taizong did not dig the Grand Canal." However, Qin Shi Huang and Tang Taizong both had the reputation of 'one emperor in all eternity', but the Sui Emperor fell into a notoriety of scorn from all generations. ”
In fact, for Yang Guang to go down to Jiangnan many times, outsiders think that it is the king of a country who wants to go down to Jiangnan to find beauty. But many people do not know that it was a way for him to win the hearts and minds of the people of Jiangnan, alleviating the resentment and suspicion in the south, and breaking many political and cultural barriers between the southerners who became loyal to the Sui subjects. As we all know, the establishment of the Sui Dynasty depended on the Guanlong aristocratic clique, so after Yang Guang took the throne, he deliberately introduced the shi clan forces in Jiangnan and suppressed the Guanlong aristocratic clique. Therefore, among the anti-Sui forces, in addition to the peasant uprising, there was also a collective rebellion of the Long aristocratic clique.
Then, you will surely ask: "Even if the Sui Dynasty Emperor builds a large number of civil engineering projects, it will only increase taxes and servitude on the peasants, and it will hardly affect the interests of the nobility?" ”
So, why did the aristocracy rebel en masse?
Originally, during Yang Guang's reign, he founded the JinshiKe, which replaced the Jiupin Zhongzheng system, so that middle- and lower-class landlords and even poor children could enter the career path through studying for examinations, thus cracking down on the monopoly politics of the Hao clan.
This practice, although it affected China for more than 1300 years, until the abolition of the imperial examination at the end of the Qing Dynasty. But at that time, the imperial examination system deprived the Guanlong aristocratic clique of hereditary privileges and shook the chain of their interests as nobles. Therefore, it caused serious dissatisfaction among these nobles and laid the groundwork for the rebellion of the Guanlong noble group in the later period. Yang Xuangan, Li Mi, Li Yuan, several major uprisings at the end of the Sui Dynasty, the leaders were all from the Guanlong aristocratic clique.
In this way, Yang Guang's establishment of the Jinshike opened a door for poor children to enter the career, making the "carp jumping the farm gate" no longer a fantasy. However, this good thing that Yang Guang did to benefit thousands of generations brought himself great trouble in the end, making himself the king of the subjugated country and carrying the notoriety of thousands of years.
The fourteenth year of Daye (618), the last year of the reign of the Sui Emperor. More than 100,000 guards and soldiers who accompanied the south finally raised a fire and attacked the palace. At this point, the Sui Dynasty collapsed, and Yang Guang became the king of the fallen country in the true sense.
In fact, looking back on Yang Guang's life, he has done countless good things, but because his competitive spirit is too strong, all things have become a deadline to complete. Huge projects, at any cost, have created the appearance of harsh government and tyranny, and only then have historians of all generations evaluated him as deviant. Now that history has gone far, should our evaluation of Yang Guang be objective?
Resources:
【Book of Sui, Volume III, Emperor Ji No. 3, Zizhi Tongjian, Sui Ji)