It is recorded in the Book of Changes:"Shengde is a great cause, wealth is a great cause, and a new day is Shengde. ”In 604 AD, Yang Guang, the second emperor of the Sui Dynasty, ascended the throne and changed the name of the year to "Daye", and the emperor's grand cause officially kicked off. **10,000 Fans Incentive Plan
Speaking of Yang Guang now, what everyone knows best is his nickname "Emperor Yang of Sui", and later generations will evaluate himExcessive immorality, murder of fathers and mothers, great joy. In addition to the cover, this guy has committed all the crimes in the Criminal Law: "Seeking Brother", "Adulterous Mother", "Killing Father", "Hidden Brother", "Defying the Sky", "Abuse of the People", ......This person has already been nailed to the pillar of shame of the ancient emperors, and even the shame of the pillar of shame.
But if you think about it, there are many irrationalities in these culpabilities. Yang Guang set the name of the year "Great Cause", which is to achieve a great cause. He was also determined to "copy the rules of the Qin and Han dynasties", which meant that he wanted to learn the martial arts of the Qin Emperor and the Han Dynasty and realize the unification of the world. Secondly, Yang Guang is the second son of Emperor Wen of Sui Yang Jian, in that society of primogeniture, Yang Guang's accession to the throne itself will be opposed by many people, if he does those outrageous things, it will be even more unfavorable for him to rule the country, realize his political ambitions, and become the first emperor of the ages.
Moreover, most of the culpabilities accusing him by later generations lack historical evidenceIn the Book of Sui compiled by Wei Zheng in the Tang Dynasty, Yang Guang's crime of killing his father was never mentioned. You must know that Tang Taizong Li Shimin has fully learned the lesson of Yang Guang's failure, he and his father have reformed Yang Guang's life, and they are determined to show the world that he is completely different from Yang GuangBut he himself forced his father to abdicate, and killed his two brothers in Xuanwumen, and he didn't say anything bad about Yang Guang. In the official history, only "Zizhi Tongjian" records that Yang Guang has these crimes, but ** is still some wild history. It can be seen that the stigmatization of Yang Guang by later generations has ulterior motives.
If you make a ranking of the degree of absurdity of ancient Chinese emperors, then Yang Guang will not be ranked at all, Qin Shi Huang (built Afang Palace to enjoy happiness, and also built the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang).Tang Xuanzong Li Longji (this person robbed his son's wife) and the emperors of the Ming Dynasty can be ranked in front of him, and the Wanli Emperor has been lying flat and pretending to be dead for longer than Yang Guang's reign. But if he is more diligent in government, Yang Guang can be ranked in the top few.
At that time, Yang Guanggang ascended the throne, and his younger brother Yang Liang rebelled in the Shandong region (east of Taihang Mountain). But the message of the rebellion was delivered to Chang'an only a month later. Although the rebellion was quelled, this incident shocked Yang Guanghu's bodyYang Guang realized that Chang'an, as the capital, was too remote to even manage the Shandong region effectivelyThe remote southern region is even more difficult to manage. And Luoyang is a good place, located in the plain, and located in the center of the world, it is really a big road leading to Luoyang. So after quelling the rebellion, he ordered the capital to be moved to Luoyang. Later, the Tang Dynasty also inherited Yang Guang's initiative and established the eastern and western capitals, and Wu Zetian lived in Luoyang for a long time during his reign.
Yang Guang's second thing was to dig the Sui-Tang Grand Canal. The Sui Dynasty ended the confrontation between the north and the south for two or three hundred years since the end of the Western Jin DynastyAt that time, the southerners thought that the northerners had been ruled by the Hu people for so many years, and they all became barbarians, and looked down on the northerners;The northerners thought that the southerners were the descendants of the Chen Dynasty and looked down on each other. Yang Guang should strengthen communication between the north and the south, and be able to quickly deploy personnel and materials, the so-called "if you want to get rich, you must first build roads". Therefore, the Sui-Tang Grand Canal, which starts from today's Beijing in the north, passes through Luoyang, and reaches Hangzhou in the south, is the best choice.
At the same time, Yang Guang personally led his troops across the Qilian Mountains and incorporated the present-day Qinghai region into China's territoryThis is something that no one has done before. At the same time, Yang Guang once again opened up the Silk Road, and the exchanges between China and the West were once again active.
The worries of the world are worried, and the joys of the world are happy. For the unification of the world, Yang Guangzhen can be regarded as an emperor on horseback. Yang Guang has only been emperor for a total of 14 years, and he spent eight of those years outside. Either he was inspecting the localities and commanding at the front, or he was on his way to these places.
In the fifth year of the Great Cause, the construction of the Grand Canal was nearing completion. This project, which mobilized millions of people across the country, and even women were requisitioned to dig canals, was so laborious and costly, coupled with a series of other large-scale construction projects, not only did not make the Sui Dynasty's rivers go down, but was a scene of vitality and competition. In the early period of Yang Guang's reign, he reduced taxes and fees many times to benefit the people's livelihood, but the first fiscal revenue did not decline but increased. This is due to the fact that the active policy of benefiting the people has promoted the rapid growth of the population. Before Yang Guang began his conquest of Goguryeo, the number of ordinary families registered in the Sui Dynasty was close to 9 millionAnd the country's population is also moving towards the 50 million mark. On the other hand, the "rule of Zhenguan", which is known as the first prosperous era in China, the land reclamation in the Zhenguan era was only one-third of that of the Sui DynastyAfter Li Shimin's reign of 17 years, the number of households counted by the imperial court was less than 3 million, the population is less than 20 million, less than half of the year of the Great Cause.
This was partly due to the depopulation and desolation of land due to the wars of the Sui and Tang dynasties. But the more important reason is that Tang's ability to govern the grassroots is not as good as that of Sui. If the people can't bear the state's harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes, they will go to the local family and become the subjects of the family, so that they will not be counted in the national population, and they will not have to pay taxes to the state, and their land will become the land of the family family, and they will no longer have to pay land tax。In this way, the family continued to carry out land annexation, becoming a local powerhouse, causing the chaos of the division of feudal towns in the late Tang Dynasty. If Yang Guang knew that he was stronger than his successor, he would definitely say "the needle is not poked".
If the Sui Dynasty can have an emperor like Yang Guang, it should be regarded as a fierce man from the sky and has picked up a treasure. But why was Yang Guang so diligent, but the Sui Dynasty perished under Yang Guang?
The biggest failure of Yang Guang's life should be the three expeditions to Goguryeo. Since the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the land of the Central Plains has always been a situation of division and war. The Liaodong Peninsula, which lives in a remote corner, sees that you are all in such a mess, and the end of mixing with you will only be that if you have a sip of soup to drink, I will have a bowl to wash, so I should engage in ethnic autonomy. Liaodong turned out to be a part of China, and in Yang Guang's view, recovering Liaodong would be a significant part of his great cause.
After the chaos in the Central Plains, Goguryeo, a small regime in northeast China, took the opportunity to arbitrarily annex the land of Liaodong, picking soft persimmons and pinching them, and soon became a hegemon. Goguryeo is different from those nomads in the north, it is a country modeled after the Qin and Han systems, it has established a centralized system internally, has its own bureaucratic administrative team, and can organize and mobilize a large number of ** army. Goguryeo is not large, but it has great ambitions. As early as the time of Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty, Goguryeo often encouraged the nomads in the north to invade the Sui Dynasty together, so that the later Tang Dynasty emperors also wanted to eliminate Goguryeo, and others were not allowed to sleep soundly under the couch.
Goguryeo's small movements continued, which made Yang Guang overwhelmed. I ignored you because we had to clean the house before inviting guests, but if you had to come uninvited, then I would give you a gift. Yang Guang knew in his heart that the continuous construction of the people had exhausted the people. He once promised his ministers that after conquering Goguryeo, he could put his swords and guns into the warehouse, and let the people rest in Nanshan.
Everyone thought that they would be able to live a comfortable life after a while of hardship, after all, the Sui Dynasty was a dimensionality reduction blow to Goguryeo. But no one expected that the first battle to conquer Goguryeo would be lost.
During the first battle against Gao, the Sui Dynasty felt that this was just an enemy that could be defeated easily and with the beating of gongs and drums. I, a soldier of the Great Sui, destroyed the Chen Dynasty in the south, attacked Hulu in the north, and conquered Qinghai in the west, what are you Goguryeo? Such a mentality led to the generals of the vanguard to make the mistake of leaning to the left and rushing forward, and almost all the officers and men of the Sui army who went out to fight were annihilated.
The unwilling Yang Guang organized the Second Crusade a year laterJust when the monarch of Goguryeo had been forced to jump into the sea, the Sui Dynasty itself began to fight in the nest, and some nobles began to rebel. Yang Guang could only scold "God doesn't help me" while retreating. Although the rebellion was resolved, Yang Guang once again lost the opportunity to recover Liaodong.
In the era of cold weapons, fighting a war is a battle for manpower, and whoever dies first will lose. For the expedition, not only the front line needs manpower, but also logistics support is inseparable from manpower. The war was a real meat grinder, and the Sui Dynasty used more manpower to attack Goguryeo than it had done all the civil engineering projects it had done before.
Under such a war of attrition, the weaker Goguryeo naturally couldn't hold it first. When Yang Guang conquered Liaodong for the third time, Goguryeo said: You are amazing, you are high, your great cause has been accomplished, I will bow my head and call it a minister.
Although the Sui Dynasty won face (in fact, Goguryeo did not really surrender, Yang Guang later held a commendation meeting to unify the whole country, and called Goguryeo people to participate, and people ignored him).But the country was dragged down. The common people raised their arms and shouted: "The world has been suffering for a long time", and they rose up one after another。As soon as the gate valve clans saw this situation, their DNA moved, "the emperor will take turns to sit, and he will come to my house next year", and the story of "three horses eating together and one trough" is still fresh in their memories, and they have rebelled. Yang Guang was later killed by the rebels in Jiangdu. The Sui Dynasty, which ended China for nearly 300 years** and achieved unification, fell in just thirty-seven years.
There is a little thing that has to be mentionedAfter the rebels killed Yang Guang, they found a tricky question, where to bury this guy? Previous emperors such as Qin Shi Huang and Liu Bang began to repair the mausoleum after boarding the plane, and some people did not repair it until they died. And they found that Yang Guang had been engaged in civil engineering everywhere all his life, and in the end he didn't even repair his own cemetery, good guy, what can I do? In the end, they had to bury Yang Guang in a courtyard of the Jiangnan Imperial Palace, and it was not until Li Yuan established the Tang Dynasty that he dug it out again and moved a nest.
Why would such a monarch with mixed merits stigmatize him in later generations? During Yang Guang's reign, he wasted state resources without restraint, liked to be extravagant and wasteful, and engaged in some formalismEven during the attack on Goguryeo, he specially called all the kings of the vassal states of the Sui Dynasty to form an observation group to visit the battle.
All of his actions are contrary to the traditional Chinese Confucian spirit of frugality and povertyMan should control his desires in moderation and should not be consumed by them. During the Southern Song Dynasty, this kind of thinking reached its peak, and developed into what Cheng Zhu Lixue said, "preserving heavenly principles and destroying human desires". It's natural for you to eat when you're hungry, but if you have to eat meat, you're shameless. Later generations of geographers had to find a negative model representative to teach everyone a lesson, and found that Yang Guang's case was really vivid and lively, laborious and wasteful, extravagant and wasteful, and self-righteous, so they added some oil and vinegar, and there was the Sui Yang Emperor we know today.
Yang Guangwei was the last emperor of the Chen Dynasty, Chen Shubao's nickname was "Yang".Taken from the "Book of Zhou": "Go to the far away people to say Yang, good inner and far away courtesy, good internal lazy government and Yang, wanton labor and spirit." ”Yang Guang would never have thought that Li Yuan, who had taken his own life, would give him this word as well.
Li Yuan later reburied Yang Guang in Leitang, Yangzhou. In front of his tomb is the Grand Canal, which he called for. This emperor, who has been running for the "great cause" all his life, can now lie in front of the Grand Canal and quietly appreciate his "great cause".