Emperor Gaozu of Tang
Li Yuan founded the dynasty that became the Chinese golden age and was removed from it by his own son within eight years. He was a hereditary duke and a garrison commander in the north, related by marriage to the ruling house, and he was fifty-one and comfortable when the Sui dynasty destroyed itself. Its second emperor had rebuilt the Grand Canal, rebuilt the Great Wall and invaded Korea three times, each with levies of hundreds of thousands of conscripts and labourers, and by 615 the north was in open revolt. Li Yuan was sent to suppress rebels and concluded, under pressure from his second son, that the safer course was to become one. He marched on the western capital in 617 with a Turkish alliance behind him, installed a puppet child emperor, and took the throne himself the following year when the Sui emperor was strangled by his own guards. It took another seven years of campaigning to destroy the other contenders, and most of that fighting was done by his son. His administration outlived the family drama. He kept the Sui structures and made them work: a legal code that became the model for Japan, Korea and Vietnam, land allocation to peasant households in return for tax and military service, the examination system continued, a reformed currency. Then in 626 the son who had won the wars ambushed and killed his two brothers at a palace gate, presented his father with the bodies and a demand, and Li Yuan abdicated within two months and lived nine more years as a retired emperor with no function. The dynasty he founded lasted nearly three centuries and the century that followed his abdication is the one the corpus narrates as its height.
- Lived: 566 CE – 635 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
