ABSTRACT
The Sui conquest of Chen in 589 restored a political unity to all of the Chinese cultural area, north and south, that had not been seen since the early years of the fourth century. This reunification was accomplished by military means, but the Sui rulers Yang Jian (Emperor Wen) and his son and successor Yang Guang (Emperor Yang) did not rely entirely on force of arms to hold their new empire together. The first Sui emperor introduced a more centralized system for the recruitment of government officials, one that brought new talent into government service and began to make systematic use of written examinations to evaluate candidates for office. Although the top echelon of the Sui administration continued to be dominated by men of the same northwestern aristocracy that had run the Northern Zhou state, men from all regions of the empire occupied lower-level offices and came to identify their own interests with the new dynasty. Emperor Wen promulgated new legal and ritual codes for the entire empire, and engaged in various forms of symbolic and ideological propaganda to build support for his regime. He expressed support for traditional Confucian norms of virtuous behavior and promoted Confucian scholarship, and gave limited encouragement to Daoism as well. Above all, however, Emperor Wen, himself a devout Buddhist, sought to use the Buddhist faith shared by his subjects in both north and south to knit the realm together and legitimate his own rule. He appealed to Buddhist principles, sponsored the establishment of a large number of new Buddhist temples, and sought to present himself to his people as a Ćakravartin king – a divinelyordained Buddhist ruler – all while establishing tight government control over the Buddhist clergy.1
