Emperor Yang of Sui

Emperor Yang of Sui (隋煬帝, 569 – April 11, 618), personal name Yang Guang (楊廣), alternative name Ying (英), nickname Amo (阿摩), known as Emperor Ming (明帝) during the brief reign of his grandson Yang Tong), was the second son of Emperor Wen of Sui, and the second emperor of China's Sui Dynasty.

Emperor Yang's original name was Yang Ying, but was renamed by his father, after consulting with oracles, to Yang Guang. Yang Guang was made the Prince of Jin after Emperor Wen established Sui Dynasty in 581. In 588 he was put in charge of the overall command of the five armies that invaded the southern Chen Dynasty, and was widely praised for the success of this campaign. These military achievements, as well as his machinations in finding faults with his older brother Yang Yong, allowed him to become crown prince in 600 after Emperor Wen believed in the accusations against Yang Yong. After the death of his father in 604—a death that most traditional historians believed to be a murder ordered by Yang Guang, although they admit a lack of direct evidence—Yang Guang ascended the throne as Emperor Yang.

Emperor Yang, ruling from 606 to 618, committed to several large construction projects during his rule, most notably the completion of the Grand Canal. He caused the reconstruction of the Great Wall, a project which took the lives of nearly six million workers. He also ordered several military expeditions that brought Sui to its greatest territorial extent, one of which, the conquest of Champa in what is now central and southern Vietnam, caused death of thousands of Sui soldiers through malaria. These expeditures, along with a series of disastrous campaigns against Goguryeo (one of the three kingdoms of Korea), left the empire bankrupt and the people in revolt. With northern China in turmoil, Emperor Yang spent his last days in Jiangdu (江都, in modern Yangzhou, Jiangsu), where he was eventually strangled in a coup led by his general Yuwen Huaji.

Emperor Yang committed almost eight million people to constructing roads, palaces, the Grand Canal, the Great Wall and ships. The re-designing of Luoyang, designated as the eastern capital, alone consumed a quarter of that amount, and the building of the Grand Canal took up 2 million men. Equally manpower-consuming were the three expeditions against Goguryeo, each one needing about a million men.

Despite his accomplishments, Emperor Yang was generally considered by traditional historians to be one of the worst tyrants in Chinese history and the reason for the Sui Dynasty's relatively short rule. Thus the Sui Dynasty fell due to the lost wars against Goguryeo and inner conflicts because of increased tax and drafting for the Goguryeo-Sui Wars.