In terms of the culture and history of Eurasia, it is as if a light had been switched on. The impact of the new dynasty was such that, even far away in the Mediterranean world, the last historian of late antiquity, Theophylact Simocatta, writing in Constantinople in around 630 CE, on the eve of the Arab conquests, wrote about China’s reunification, ‘in the time of our emperor Maurice under the Sui emperor Wen, with their conquest of the rival Chen dynasty in southern China, ‘when the northerners crossed the Great River [Yangtze] southwards.’
