The Sui get short shrift in historical surveys. Their brief empire was soon eclipsed by their successors, the Tang, but until the dynasty over-reached itself on the military front in Korea and burnt out, two of its three emperors could claim considerable achievements. Until his death in 604 Yang Jian himself - Emperor Wen - was an active ruler who took the best from the past and built on it. He simplified and strengthened the bureaucracy, brought in a new legal code, recentralized civil and military authority and made tax collection more efficient. Near Xi'an his architects designed a new capital, Da Xing Cheng (City of Great Prosperity), with a palace city, a residential quarter of 108 walled compounds, several vast markets and an outer wall over 35km round - quite probably the largest city in the world at that time. After Wen's death in 604, Yang Di elbowed his elder brother out to become emperor. Yang improved administration, encouraged a revival of Confucian learning and promoted a strong foreign policy. But his engineering works - or rather the forced labour needed to complete them - have left him portrayed as a proverbially "Evil Emperor", principally for ordering the construction of the two-thousand-kilometre Grand Canal to transport produce between the rice bowl of the southern Yangzi to his capital at Xi'an. Half the total work force of 5,500,000 died, and Yang was assassinated in 618 after popular hatred had inspired a military revolt led by General Li Yuan.