Page 134 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

7

The Sui and T'ang Dynasties

The Six Dynasties had been a period when new forms, ideas, and
values were first, and often tentatively, tried out—ideas which
could not find their fullest expression in those restless centuries
but needed an era of stability and prosperity to bring them to frui-
tion. Wen Ti, who founded the Sui Dynasty in 581, was an able
general and administrator who not only united China after four
hundred years offragmentation but also carried the prestige of her
arms out into central Asia. But his son Yang Ti squandered the re-
sources of the empire on palaces and gardens built on the scale of
Versailles, and on vast public works. These included a long section
of the Grand Canal, constructed to link his northern and southern
capitals, for the building of which over five million men, women,
and children were recruited to forced labour. These huge projects,
as a Ming historian put it, "shortened the life of his dynasty by a
number of years, but benefited posterity unto ten thousand gen-
erations." Combined with four disastrous wars against Korea,
they were too much for his long-suffering subjects, who rose in
revolt. Soon a ducal family of the name of Li joined the insurrec-
tion, and the Sui dynasty collapsed. In 617, Li Yuan captured
Ch'ang-an, and in the following year mounted the throne as first
emperor of the T'ang Dynasty. In 626 he abdicated in favour of his
second son, Li Shih-min, who then, at the age of twenty-six, be-
came the Emperor T'ai-tsung, thereby inaugurating an era of
peace and prosperity that lasted for well over a century.
T'ang culture was to that of the Six Dynasties as was Han to the
Warring States, or, to stretch the parallel a little, Rome to ancient
Greece. It was a time of consolidation, of practical achievement,
of immense assurance. We do not find in T'ang art the wild and
fanciful taste of the fifth century, which saw fairies and immortals
on every peak. Nor docs it carry us, as docs Sung art, into those
silent realms where man and nature are one. There is metaphysical
speculation, certainly, but it is that of the difficult schools of Ma-
hayana idealism which interested a small minority, and is ex-
pressed, moreover, in forms and symbols that touch neither the
114
Copyrighted material