The Sui & Tang Dynasties: A Love Story/History Nexus/Tang Dynasty/Chinese History

The Muslim Empire spread up from Arabia, over towards the land that used to belong to Rome that IT spread down to Egypt and North Africa. IT became an enormous empire. But far to the east was an even bigger empire, the Empire of China that I in ancient times, China had been ruled by one emperor. But over time, China had divided into two different countries, the North and the South. People in the North and the South did not like each other. Southerners insisted that the Northern Imposter. And Northerners thought that people in the South were ignorant and crude point one Northerner wrote. The South is hot and infested with bugs. People and animals live together, like frogs and toads in the same hole. People in the South like the company of fish and turtles, but they do not know anything about art and music. Yang Qian was a general in the Northern Army that he led the soldiers of the North down to attack the Southern King and his army. The South fought back, but the Northern Army was too strong to resist. Soon, Yang Qian controlled both North and South that I in 581, Yang Qian became the new emperor of China. Yang Qian's rule over China was the beginning of a new dynasty. Do you remember what a dynasty is that IT is one family that rules a country for years and years? Yang Qian founded the Sui dynasty to rule over one, United China. Yang Qian wanted to keep Northern and Southern China together, but he had a problem in China. Wide, deep rivers run from the West all the way over to the sea in the East. Travelers who wanted to go from the North down to the South had to cross the Yellow River. And anyone who wanted to go from the South up the North had to cross the Yangtze River. These rivers were hard to get across, especially in the spring, when floods made them even wider and wilder. If people from the North and people from the South could not meet, talk to each other and trade with each other, China might divide again. So when Yang Qian's son Yangdi became the next Sui emperor in the year 604, he decided to dig a new river that ran from North to South between the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers. This new river would be called the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal took years to dig by hand. Yangdi needed money to build it, so all of the families in China had to pay their taxes 10 years ahead of time. The emperors also forced millions of people to work on the canal. Every man between 15 and 50 had to spend months digging and building, and every family had to send one woman, one child, and one old man to work on the canal too. Finally, the canal was finished. The emperor Yangdi decided to go for a ride on it to celebrate. He took his family and all the members of his court with him. IT took 62 boats to hold them all, and since Yangdi did not want to row, he forced workers to pull his boat with ropes that IT took 80,000 men to pull all of those boats. The Grand Canal did make it easier for the people of China to go from South to North and back again. Now merchants could sail up and down the canal with rice, pottery, and other goods. Some families even lived on boats. They ate and cooked and slept on boats. The mothers of these canal families tied bamboo life jackets onto their babies until they learned how to swim. But the Grand Canal also made the people of China angry with the emperors of the Sui. Many people died building the canal because they had to work hard without much food, in cold and in damp, all year long. Families had become poorer because men had been forced to build the canal instead of tending their farms and doing their own work. Everyone hated the extra taxes. And Yangdi did not stop with the Grand Canal that he also built huge palaces for himself and his court, and ordered his people to work on making new roads and large ships that would help him to become more powerful than Ayanal. Yangdi forced 8 million Chinese to work on his building projects. Finally, the Chinese people rebelled against Yangdi and killed him. Yangdi was the last real Sui emperor. His grandson Gongdi tried to rule in his place. But before long, angry noblemen forced Gongdi to give up the title of emperor. After only 3 emperors, the Sui dynasty had ended. The Sui rulers had kept China together but had lost their throne. Yangdi, the last real Sui emperor, had treated the Chinese people like his slaves that he forced them to pay high taxes and to work on the Grand Canal and his palaces and roads without pay. The next king of China, Li Yuan, did not make the same mistake. Li Yuan became emperor of China in the year 618. He knew that an emperor who rules Hungary, unhappy people won't last for very long, that he wanted the Chinese people to be prosperous and contented. So, he spent money on making cities stronger and cleaner that he decreed that. The people of China could follow any religion they wanted that he encouraged merchants in China to trade with the people of India and Byzantium. Li Yuan founded a new dynasty, the Tang dynasty. The Sui dynasty only lasted for 40 years but the Tang dynasty lasted more than 300 decades. Do you remember the golden age of India? The Indian golden age was a time when India was rich and at peace and when the people of India created beautiful art, music and stories. The 300 years of the Tang dynasty were the golden age of China. The Chinese learned how to print books by carving the words into wooden blocks and dipping the blocks in ink. That way they could print the same pages over and over again, instead of writing each page out by hand. Chinese jewelers made beautiful, delicate jewelry with green jade, creamy pearls and gold strands beaten so fine that they were no thicker than threads. Artists painted beautiful pictures on silks and sculpted graceful figures from pottery. They learned how to drain the sap from special trees called lacquer trees, color it black, red, gold and green and paint it onto wood and cloth. The lacquer dried into a hard, smooth surface like a beautiful, medieval kind of plastic. The Chinese people became wealthier. Babies of rich people ate out of lacquer bowls with lacquer spoons. Many families were rich enough to eat fancy food, like ice cream made from rice and milk. And 24 different flavors of dumplings to eye in the early Middle Ages. Most other people ate with their fingers, but the Chinese ate with carved and lacquered chopsticks. They dressed in silks trimmed with jewels. The sleeves of men's coats were so wide that the tailors had to sew weights into the cuffs so that the sleeves would not flap around and get in the way. And the richest women of all wore skirts made out of the feathers of 100 different birds. Chinese scientists thought that China could become even richer if they could learn how to make gold. So they spent years combining different metals and chemicals, trying to figure out how to made another discovery by mistake. When they mixed charcoal with two chemicals called salt peter and sulfur, they ended up with a black powder that exploded. The Chinese had invented gunpowder. Soon they learned how to use it in rockets made out of hollow bamboo tubes, in a wonder that the Tang emperors became richer and more powerful. They built four long walls around their beautiful capital city, Xi'an. Each wall had three gates in it. Only the emperor could use the middle gate in each wall. The palace of the emperor had 20,000 musicians and entertainers living in it. Point one Tang emperor even brought 100 dancing horses to his court. The horses wore gold and silver halters and had jewels woven into their manes. When musicians played, the horses bent their legs up and down, nodded their heads in time to the music and reared up and down. After the emperor's reign was over, the dancing horses were sold to the army. Point one day, the soldiers decided to have a party out in the stables. When they started to play music, the horses began to dance. The soldiers were terrified. They thought that the horses were possessed by evil spirits and chased them out of the stable with brooms.