Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty: His Life, Times, and Legacy. By Victor Cunrui Xiong. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. xiii, 357 pp. $24.95 (paper).

In his much-heralded book The Sui Dynasty, Arthur Wright reminded us that while Charlemagne failed, the rulers of the Sui dynasty succeeded and recreated empire in China, a form that has, for good or ill, endured to the present. A full thirty years have passed since Wright's death, and little has been done since then on this subject in Western languages. It is thus a real delight to see Vincent Cunrui Xiong step into the breach with Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty: His Life, Times, and Legacy, a substantial addition to the ongoing research.Emperor Yang, or Yangdi, was a younger son of Yang Jian, the Chinese prime minister of the non-Chinese Northern Zhou dynasty (535–80) who seized the Chang'an throne in 581 to establish his own Sui dynasty and then went on to reunify China. Yangdi would be the second and last real emperor of this important but short-lived ruling house and the one blamed for its demise. Xiong begins with a chapter devoted to Yangdi's childhood and youth, detailing his struggle to become heir apparent, his putative act of parricide, and his enthronement. The second chapter discusses Yangdi's reign, emphasizing his abuse of the fisc with massive spending, the criticism this provoked from powerful holdovers from his father's days, and Yangdi's disposal of these men. In the third chapter, Xiong explores how military adventures in Korea (Koguryô) and overuse of corvée labor for huge infrastructural projects led to a rising tide of popular rebellion and “The Collapse of the Sui.”Xiong's book is organized in a manner that somewhat resembles the standard dynastic histories, and these three chapters of annals are followed by seven treatises on subjects such as bureaucracy, economics, and religion, which make up more than two-thirds of the book. He begins with infrastructure. Chapters 4 and 5 describe Yangdi's building of an alternative Sui capital on the Luoyang ruins, his vast network of new canals, and construction of temporary palaces for use in elaborate tours of the realm. In the next four chapters, Xiong turns to Yangdi's treatment of institutions: bureaucracy, law, economic policy, and his relationships with the Buddhist and Daoist religious establishments. Chapter 10 is a brief sketch of foreign relations, and in an epilogue, Xiong sums up his arguments and offers a mild critique of Naitō Konan, suggesting that, in Yangdi, we see already the centralizing tendencies attributed by Naitō to later ages.This is an ambitious effort, which, in several of the topical chapters, provides abundant information on important features such as transportation, bureaucratic reform, and church-state relations. But much of the time, Yangdi is simply lost in the mass of detail. On the basis of the book's title, I had expected a more substantial, chronological narrative tracing this turbulent life as it passed through this turbulent age: born under the non-Chinese Northern Zhou dynasty to a non-Chinese mother, Yangdi saw his father seize the throne when he was twelve, plotted against his brothers to gain his father's favor, killed his father, and took the throne when he was thirty-five, finally dying at the age of forty-nine, his robe splattered with the blood of his decapitated son. All these events are mentioned, but Yangdi remains a flicker on the screen.More importantly, this life needs to be set in clearer context. Although we are told on page 8, “Following a chapter on the Yang family and the rise of Yangdi's father, Part I provides a narrative account of the life of Yangdi,” I could not locate such a chapter. We are never really told quite who the Yang were or what they came out of. It may have been assumed that the reader has read Chen Yinke or Arthur Wright. If not, the reader (a specialist in medieval European history, perhaps) will not have a clear sense of the Guanlong (or Chang'an) bloc of militarized, aristocratic, ethnically mixed families—of which the Yang were a part—or fully comprehend the complexity of the relationship between the Sui and Northern Zhou. The reader will not understand why this insecure man would ruin his regime with failed efforts to display himself as a warrior king while at the same time struggling to extract himself from the political and military stronghold that had taken shape under Northern Zhou at Chang'an. In the book's protracted discussion of Yangdi's move of the capital to Luoyang from out of that frontier military center (not until Tang was Ch'ang'an the center of the world), there is barely a whisper reminding us that just over a century before, the Northern Wei lord Xiaowen (r.471–99) had done much the same thing, for much the same reasons: to escape the domination of generals in militarized borderlands, and ease transportation of wealth extracted from the richer Chinese lands that lay south and east.On page 3 of the introduction, Xiong points out the tendency to focus on the Tang and to leave Sui as unstated background. I will cautiously suggest that the author does much the same for the dynasty under discussion, leaving as “unstated background” the social and political welter of which Sui was fundamentally still a part. And in this writer's opinion, we cannot fully understand Sui politics, policies, or personalities without placing them in that broader context. The general reader needs a few defter, broader strokes to understand this age. Nevertheless, Xiong serves the medieval China specialist well, richly fortifying our understanding of important aspects of the state in early seventh-century China by gathering, summarizing, and expanding on a huge body of data. Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty is a worthy contribution for those studying this period of Chinese history.