Sui dynasty

And it's, my research says...

It's believed to have started in China during the Sui dynasty, which was 581 through 618 A.D.

Oh, just a few years ago.

Oh yeah, it was like last year.

But this state of division went on for, you know, from the early fourth century through the late sixth century.

And then finally, North and South became unified, came together again by this, you know, often referred to as the conquest dynasty, the Sui dynasty.

And the Sui itself was kind of short-lived.

um you know just a couple of decades and it was overthrown uh you know there was a huge chaos again you know civil war all over the place and then finally the sui was replaced by the tang dynasty and that's you know like the han dynasty tang is just a you know glorious kind of age um you know that went on for almost you know about 300 years or so So usually this period I just quickly described, my book mainly focuses on the fifth and the sixth century, so 200 years, and mostly focused on the south, on the southern regimes or dynasties, even though, you know, the second half of the book, you know, basically shifts the focus on the south you know, people who basically poets, writers, you know, kind of after the Houjin Rebellion, you know, broke out in mid sixth century, they were often were captured, were sought refuge, and so they went to the north.

Yeah.

But, you know, after, you know, well over 200 years of division, you know, people from different parts of this, you know, kind of now, you know, different dynasties, different regimes, different kind of loyalties, you know, different roots and backgrounds, you know.

So suddenly they say, oh, it's unified, you know, and now we're all in service of this unified, you know, kind of unifier, the Sui dynasty and so on, you know.

But those people, you know, they are still kind of, in many ways, they were the living witnesses of the divisions and of the hostilities, of the civil wars or the wars, you know, interstate wars, you know.

along with Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden, and it was obliged to take steps to diminish its military capabilities.

On September 8th, 617, rebels led by the Duke of Tang, Li Yuan, defeated an imperial Sui dynasty army by luring it out of the city of Huoyi in northern China.

The victory left Li Yuan preeminent among the many nobles who were in rebellion, and the following June he had himself crowned Emperor Gaozu of the new Tang dynasty.

The Tang ruled China for almost 300 years, from 618 to 907.

Some regional dynasties maintained or repaired sections of the wall relevant to their own particular territories and threats.

The short-lived Sui dynasty, which briefly reunified China in the late 6th and early 7th centuries, undertook some war repair and construction projects of its own, mobilising large labour forces in a manner reminiscent of the original Qin effort, though on a smaller scale and for a shorter duration.

The Tang dynasty, which followed the Sui and ruled for roughly three centuries, presents a particularly interesting case in the story of the war, because for much of its history, the Tang dynasty simply did not need it in the same way earlier dynasties had.

Tang China was, for long stretches of its history, a confident, expansionist, cosmopolitan empire whose military and diplomatic reach extended well beyond the old Qin and Han wall lines, deep into Central Asia.

Something of the early history or pseudo-historical records of Formosa, my Chinese Formosan fellow voyager on the Osaka Shosen Kaisha steamer, also told me.

It seems that the first mention in Chinese records of the island is in the Sui Shu, the history of the Sui dynasty, which lasted from AD 581 to 618, according to Occidental reckoning.

At that time, Chinese historians and also geographers believed Formosa to be one of the Lu Zhu group, that long chain of tiny islands which dot the sea from the south of Japan to the north of Formosa, like stepping stones, or, as they more strongly reminded me when I first saw them, like the stones of Hopa my thumb dropped from his pocket when he and his brothers were carried away into the forest, that they may find their way back home.

According to early Chinese historians, the aboriginal inhabitants of Formosa up to about the 6th century AD were a gentle and peaceable people, making no objection to Chinese settlements on the coast of the island.

Then, in about the second half of the 6th century, as nearly as Oriental and Occidental systems of reckoning time can be correlated, the beginning of the Sui dynasty, there swept up from somewhere in the south bands of fierce marauders who conquered the west coast of the island and drove the surviving aboriginal inhabitants into the central mountains.

A little later, in about the 7th century, the Chinese historian Ma Duanhui says a Chinese expedition went to Formosa with the intention of forcing the new inhabitants to pay tribute to China.

This, however, these new inhabitants of Malay origin presumably refused to do.

With this I strongly agree, as regards different races living on the same continent, the different races of Africa being a case in point, or even as regards people living on neighboring islands.

So you could spend a whole lifetime on just a sliver of the entirety of topics that we're going to be touching on today.

You know, some people spend their whole academic career just focusing on the Sui Dynasty, or as we'll be talking, I'll be making my claim, the Tang Dynasty being one of my favorites, often referred to as the golden era of Chinese history.

And we are trying to not only just hit you on the high spots of each dynasty, but take you from basically 4,000 years of history all the way up to the present day CCP.

So we'll see how it goes.

And this is when the Taoist monastics, seeing the Buddhist monastics, Taoist monastics become concentrated on immortality practices.

as I mentioned before.

And so it's during this period before the Sui Dynasty and its brief consolidation before the Tang that Taoism and Buddhism essentially become the Taoism and Buddhism we generally think of in China.

So, those are some of the important aspects, I would say, at least from a religious historical perspective of this period regarding the Northern Way, the 16 kingdoms, and that stuff.