Reunified Empires 51
Zhou. By 589, forces loyal to Yang Jian had eliminated all remnants of
the Northern Zhou ruling elite, including fi fty-nine princes and their
families. That same year they overwhelmed Jiankang, the capital of
the southern kingdom of Chen, and conquered the Yangzi River val-
ley, bringing north and south under one central government, the Sui
dynasty, for the fi rst time since the fall of the Han in 220.
To set up a successful dynasty over both north and south was any-
thing but simple. In three decades that were as dramatic as the Qin
conquest of the Warring States, the Sui armies and civil government
brought to China a much higher degree of military unity and political
integration than the country had ever known before. Yang Jian took
the reign title Wendi, “the cultured emperor,” suggesting that he well
understood that cultural factors were as important as military ones in
unifying north and south. In addition to his effi cient armies, he had
capable ministers who justifi ed his every move in terms of the Confu-
cian classics and the beliefs and practices of Daoism and Buddhism.
They described in detail the sins of both the Northern Zhou regime and
the southern rulers of Jiankang and promised to bring peace, stability,
and prosperity to the land with the assistance of Heaven’s Mandate.
Sui Wendi implemented the equal-fi eld system of the Northern Wei
dynasty throughout the empire. Every able-bodied male owed the state
one month of labor per year, and the Sui now mobilized millions of
laborers to reunite and reconstruct the Great Wall on the northern and
western borders. Even more important for the future of the empire, they
drafted hundreds of thousands more to construct the Grand Canal, fi rst
linking the city of Yangzhou south of the Yangzi River with Luoyang
and eventually extending farther southward to Hangzhou and north-
east to a point near today’s Beijing. The fi nished canal, extending twelve
hundred miles, was forty paces wide and deep enough to accommodate
boats carrying fi ve hundred to eight hundred tons. The Grand Canal
ensured the steady fl ow of taxes paid in grain from the prosperous
south to the seat of government in the more arid north.
Sui Wendi also ordered the building of a grand new capital at
Chang’an on the site of the Western Han capital. The city was laid
out in a rectangular grid, with the imperial palace at the center of the
northern side. The remainder of the U-shaped city was divided into 108
wards, 106 for residences and two for markets to be conducted under
strict government supervision. The entire city was surrounded by a fi ve-
meter-high wall of pounded earth that extended almost six miles from
east to west and more than fi ve miles from north to south. Although
Chang’an remained a relatively empty walled expanse during Wendi’s