Song Dynasty

12 Key excerpts on "Song Dynasty"

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  Harmony and War

  Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics

  • Yuan-kang Wang(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 THE NORTHERN Song Dynasty (960–1127)

  THE SONG dynasty is known for its extraordinary cultural achievements in literature, art, and philosophy. Confucianism was refined and reinterpreted, thereby giving rise to neo-Confucianism, which became the orthodox ideology for statecraft and elite education. Dieter Kuhn calls this period “the Age of Confucian Rule.”1 Cultural achievements aside, the Song made several advances in science and technology. The Song’s three great inventions—gunpowder, the compass, and printed books—would later have a profound impact on human history. The Song civilization was so ahead of the rest of the world that John K. Fairbank calls it “China’s greatest age.”2 However, in terms of military power, epithets such as “perennially weak and unable to rise” (ji ruo bu zhen) or “emphasizing civility and belittling martialism” (zhong wen qing wu) are habitually attached to the Song Dynasty. Unlike other Chinese dynasties, the Song never achieved military dominance and was instead threatened with the prospect of foreign invasion and even conquest. Because the Jurchens invaded and conquered part of the Song Dynasty’s territory in 1127, capturing two emperors, historians generally divide the Song period into the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) and Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279).

  The power structure during this period was largely bipolar. The sedentary Song Dynasty was under constant military threats from the nomadic Liao Empire to the north, which historian Jing-shen Tao describes as “the most powerful state in East Asia at the time.”3 (See map 3.1 .) According to one statistic, the Liao Empire had a strong cavalry force of 500,000 men, outnumbering the Song Dynasty’s 193,000 cavalry and infantry by more than two and a half to one.4 China was a “lesser empire” in the interstate system,5 but neither was powerful enough to dominate East Asia. Unlike other periods of Chinese history in which formal equality between China and its neighbors was ruled out, the Song-Liao diplomatic relationship was conducted as one between two equal states.6

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  A Brief History of Chinese Civilization

  • Conrad Schirokauer, Miranda Brown(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 130 Part Three ■ Late Imperial/Early Modern Period T HE SONG DID not equal the Tang in military glory or geographic extent, but this dynasty experienced changes in state and society, in the economy and in technology that profoundly affected China’s future while new departures in phi-losophy and art created a heritage of classic dimensions that for centuries to come inspired and challenged thoughtful people throughout East Asia. As always, these developments were interrelated but proceeded at different tempos. The Song is bisected by a major cataclysm into an earlier and a later period. Northern Song somewhat misleadingly designates the period 960–1126, when the dynasty ruled over both North and South from its capital at Kaifeng where the nearby junction of the Yellow River and a canal system linked it to the prosperous southeast. After the Northern Song, Kaifeng did not regain status as a dynastic capital, but the “eastward shift of the political center” 1 was irreversible. Southern Song applies to the dynasty after its loss of the North in 1127, when it was supplanted by the Jin, a state formed by the Juchen people from what is now Manchuria. With its “temporary” capital at Hangzhou in the lower Yangzi region, the dynasty occupied what by then was the economic heartland. The Founding The dynastic founder began as a general under what became the last of the Five Dynasties of the Tang-Song interregnum.

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  The Yijing and Chinese Politics

  Classical Commentary and Literati Activism in the Northern Song Period, 960-1127

  • Tze-ki Hon(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  5 I n the study of Song China (960–279), experts in the field tend to see the period as part of a long process of change dating back to the Tang Dynasty (67–907). This six hundred years of change, or the Tang-Song transition, is believed to have drastically altered the politi- cal, social, and cultural structure of medieval China, thereby laying the foundation for the following centuries until the end of the monarchical system in 9.¹ Politically, many scholars see the period as a continu- ation of the weakening of the Chinese state while Chinese society became increasingly powerful and variegated. For these scholars, this weakening of the Chinese state may have begun in the Tang, but the process definitely quickened when the Song court was forced to move in 27 from Kaifeng (in the Eastern Yellow River basin) to Hangzhou (in the lower Yangzi River area). For them, the relocation of the Song court signifies not only the transition from the Northern Song to the Southern Song, but more importantly, the further disintegration of the national polity and the concomitant rise of the local gentry as the real power holders.² The Tang-Song transition was equally dramatic with respect to technology and the economy. Many historians of the Song describe the period as full of rapid technological and commercial progress. There occurred rapid urbanization, the rise of a monetary economy, 1 The Northern Song Historical Context In the chaotic period of the Five Dynasties, an emperor was not an emperor, a father not a father, a son not a son. Even the human bonds governing older brother and younger brother, and husband and wife were completely destroyed. [During this time,] the prin- ciple of Heaven was almost annihilated. —Ouyang Xiu, Xin Wudai shi

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  Chinese Martial Arts

  From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century

  • Peter A. Lorge(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Jurchen, who had not expected to capture the Song capital, quickly shifted their efforts to destroying completely the remnants of the Song imperial house. One of the great patriotic heroes of Chinese history, a general named Yue Fei (1103–42), emerged in the ultimately successful struggle for Song survival. But the Song did not recover the north and remained deadlocked with the Jurchen at the line of the Huai River. Repeated major wars with the Jin did little to change things until, as happened before, a new power arose to the north of the Jin. Once again the Song court allied itself with the new power, the Mongols, and once again the object of their mutual hostility was duly destroyed. History continued to replay itself, though this time it took half a century for the Mongols to conquer the Song. While the Song held out for fifty years, the Mongols conquered enormous swathes of Eurasia, establishing the largest land empire in human history. The period between the Tang and the Song dynasties was first called the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in the eleventh century. Ever since then Chinese historians have generally neglected the period, summa- rily dismissing it as an aberrant time of disunion between great dynasties. Perhaps just as important, at least for modern historians, the period lacked a unifying political focus and is therefore extremely difficult to study. In terms of martial arts, apart from the extensive amount of fighting and many impressive warriors, the only innovation seems to be the appearance 114 The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms and the Song Dynasty of the iron spear, a metal-hafted spear of considerable weight. Yet the social and cultural changes that took place during this period were signifi- cant. In the first half of the tenth century, Türkic power in north China was destroyed and any other significant steppe elites were killed, driven off, or otherwise removed.

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  China Through The Ages

  History Of A Civilization

  • Franz Michael(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Ten A Chinese Renaissance: The Sung Dynasty

  WHEN THE GLORY of T'ang ended in military collapse there followed half a century of dynastic usurpations: the Five Dynasties, in reality no more than military dictatorships that controlled only part of North China. When China was again united under one dynasty, the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279), it was a much smaller empire and a more inward-looking country that emerged from the tribulations and agonies of the decades of the last years of T'ang and the interregnum. By the time of unification under the Sung, not only was a great part of the empire lost to nomad invaders from the steppes of Central Asia and the forests of Manchuria, but even a part of China Proper south of the wall remained in the hands of these intruders. The remaining smaller empire was continuously threatened by invaders, and eventually the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors conquered it all.

  It was under these external threats that Chinese culture turned inward, returning to a Chinese heritage in philosophy, literature, and political thought and in this contemplative process reached new heights in the field of art. It was a time of consummation of the Chinese tradition, a period called "the age of maturity," when artists and scholars produced works of enduring fame. The most famous Sung art was landscape painting, but also testifying to the advanced techniques and taste of the time was the perfection of form and exquisite simplicity of the white and greyish-green colored Sung porcelain. This cultural richness in art, literature, and the crafts had a parallel in the realm of philosophy and statesmanship where argument and practice explored the potentials of all dimensions of the Confucian world.

  The ascent to power of the Chao family, founders of the Sung Dynasty, did not differ from that of preceding military rules. General Chao K'uang-yin, in charge of the army in the field against the Khitan in the North, was surprised one night in his tent by his officers, who woke him, wrapped around his shoulders a robe with the imperial colors, and proclaimed him emperor. Thus compromised, the general led his troops back to K'ai-feng, took the capital without a fight—removing the child emperor of the short-lived Later Chou Dynasty—and gave his new dynasty the name of Sung. What started out as but another military venture became, however, the least military civilian form of government of Chinese imperial history.

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  Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms

  • Peter Lorge(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The Chinese University of Hong Kong

    (Publisher)

  The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period was the culmination of decades, if not more than a century, depending upon one’s perspective on the late Tang, of increasing regional development at the expense of the center. Multiple rulers claimed to be emperors, and were able to interact with each other while maintaining their own titles. This reality helps put some perspective on the Song court’s ability and reluctance to acknowl-edge the Kitan ruler as an emperor in 1005. The Song imperial project Introduction · 7 had attempted to create and enforce an ideology requiring that there be only one emperor ruling a unified Chinese empire. Since 907, however, a multiplicity of imperial ideologies based in the same intellectual tradi-tion had allowed for a different discourse. Historians and moralists spent considerable effort in the eleventh century attempting to digest, or other-wise accommodate this uncomfortable reality. Indeed, it might not be too far wrong to suggest that this political/ideological issue was the starting point of the eleventh-century Song intellectual problematique. A fundamental shift had occurred that knocked the previous imperial worldview askew. Zhao Kuangyin’s 趙匡胤 (927–976) founding of the Song Dynasty in 960 did not immediately recreate an imperial center like that of the Tang. Decades of bloody warfare accompanied by similarly extensive ideolog-ical and administrative efforts gradually put most of the pieces of the empire together. Ruth Mostern’s discussion of the spatial organization of government administration clearly demonstrates both the differences between Song and Five Dynasties’ practice, and the incremental bureau-cratic ground war that extended central control to the provinces. 8 The ideological efforts extended through history writing, and formed the basis of the traditional historiography that has shaped the primary sources themselves.

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  Chinese City And Urbanism: Evolution And Development

  Evolution and Development

  • Victor F S Sit(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • World Scientific

    (Publisher)

  Song Renaissance and the New Urbanity 161 Fig. 9.1. Polities in China During North Song (AD 1111). 162 Chinese City and Urbanism: Evolution and Development number of people were forced to migrate to South China, laying waste much of the cultivable land in the North. In South China, though equally fragmented, peace generally prevailed as there was the absence of a distinctly more powerful and ambitious state that waged war over other states. In consequence, the economy in South China revived and developed. Data in the early years of North Song indicate that there were about 1 million households in North China, but in the South, there were 2.5 million. Social stability and economic growth in the southern states had led to revival of the rites, establishment of efficient administration through a system of civil servants, and the promotion and propagation of education, art and culture. As such, in the later half of the 10th century, the southern states of Shu and South Tang became China’s two cultural centers. The invention of wood-block printing, making tea, and the popularization of tea drinking and the Ci ( , lyrics or poetry, later became Song Ci ) in the Ten Kingdoms, laid the foundation of a new phase of civilization in the Song Dynasty. In North China, General Guo Wei founded Later Zhou (951–60 AD), the last of the Five Dynasties. Guo Wei was succeeded by his adopted son who started an ambitious plan to unify the whole of China. However, he died in his military expedition in North China. Mutinous troops of Later Zhou soon forced General Zhao Kangyin to “don the yellow gown” ( ), to found the new dynasty of the Song. Zhao carried on Later Zhou’s military campaign with great success. He used persuasion and conquest to subdue the weak regional polities of South China and the State of Shu.

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  How to Read Chinese Poetry

  A Guided Anthology

  • Zong-qi Cai(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  The latter period began with the invasion of the Jurchen armies in the 1120s and the consequent withdrawal of the Chinese court to the south and loss of the northern half of the empire to foreign rule. More important to our discussion than the military weakness of the Song, however, is the fact that it was during this period that book printing became widespread in China. Largely for that reason, the amount of writing that survives from the three hundred years of the Song surpasses by far that of any previous dynasty; probably it exceeds the total of all the previous dynasties. The amount of Song Dynasty shi poetry is staggeringly large. Some 200,000 poems survive, composed by nearly 10,000 authors. (Quantitatively, at least, shi is the major Song poetic genre, dwarfing in size the younger and less prestigious form of the ci [song lyric].) Very few people can have read all of the shi corpus. The quantity of shi poetry produced is so daunting that it was not until the end of the twentieth century that anyone set about to collect all of it. It required a national effort by a team of dozens of scholars in China and ten years of editorial labor to complete the project: Complete Shi Poetry of the Song (Quan Song shi). 1 The poetry of the preceding great dynastic period, the Tang, is by comparison more manageable and much better known. There has been a Complete Shi Poetry of the Tang (Quan Tang shi) since 1706—that is, for three hundred years—and it is less than one-quarter as voluminous. 2 The literary history and criticism of Tang poetry is well developed. The serious study of Song poetry as a whole is still in its initial stages. Nevertheless, it has long been fashionable, ever since the Song itself, for poets and critics to think of the poetry of the Song as stylistically distinct from that of the Tang, and to debate its merits relative to the earlier work

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  Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries and Human Geographies in Chinese History

  • Nicola Di Cosmo, Don J Wyatt(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  I have always found the unfaltering confidence with which my sinological contemporaries refer to the period from the dynastic founding by Zhao Kuangyin (Song Taizu) in 960 until the first complete year of the reign of Emperor Qinzong (r. 1125–7) as the Northern Song to be perplexing. As a group, following in the wake of untold previous generations of scholars, we have – without significant reflection or deliberation on the matter and almost purely by dint of the existence of the corresponding term that denotes it – assumed the existence of the Northern Song. Moreover, we have thereby become unwitting but active participants in an always potentially graver act of ascription only by imputation. We have – with even less caution and examination than we have come to subscribe to the notion ourselves – evolved to speak of the Northern Song as if it were as real to and accepted by those living during its span as it has become for us. But, in addition to its seeming to spring from nowhere, such a designation as Northern Song belies the fact that the Chinese citizenry of that era would neither plausibly nor willingly have ever referred to the reigning dynasty during their own time by that name. Despite considerable external pressures to do so, no individual of that time is likely to have ever overtly considered the dynasty under which he or she lived “northern,” for the designation Northern Song can only have arisen after the sudden and involuntary creation of the Southern Song (Nan Song). Moreover, even the Chinese of this subsequent and, at least in geographical terms, more legitimately termed Southern Song period persisted in regarding their displaced dynasty as the uninterrupted continuation of the original Song – with no thought, at least at first, to construing it as the beginning of a new epoch

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  Imperial China, 900–1800

  • F. W. Mote(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  6

  II. ON BEING THE EMPEROR IN TENTH -CENTURY CHINA

  The Chinese government, in all dynasties from the Qin in the late third century b.c.e. until the end of the Qing in 1911, was headed by a huangdi, a supreme ruler whose title we translate as “emperor.”7 His roles were many: he was the state’s sole legislator, ultimate executive authority, and highest judge. His pronouncements were, quite literally, the law, and he alone was not bound by his own laws. The emperor was ritual head of the state, analogous to the head of every Chinese clan or lineage, by which every person in society was bound to a surname and to family responsibilities. As the head of the imperial clan, he thus was a model for the maintenance of the atomized, family-based ancestor veneration that held priority among all the forms of religion in the society. And the emperor was held to embody and to have responsibility for upholding all the values of the society. But he was not expected to assume such responsibilities in an open, public manner. He did not interact personally with any sector of society, and did not play a significant political role in public life.

  There were two kinds of restraints on the Chinese emperor’s seemingly boundless authority: those were ideological and practical. Ideologically, China’s rulers, some more effectively than others, were constrained by Confucian norms and the values perpetuated by the scholar-official elite of society. In these respects his authority, while enormous, was not unchallengeable, especially in matters of ethics and of principle that were defined by scholarly interpretations of the past. It might indeed take a brave person to challenge an emperor, who, if he insisted, would prevail. Yet there were many throughout history who had the courage to challenge their rulers on grounds of tradition and classical learning, or in matters of ethics. Song Dynasty emperors were unusually broadminded in respecting their scholar-official associates in governing, but they too were despots, whether benign or tyrannical, depending on temper and other contingent circumstances.

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  Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation

  • Barry C. Keenan, Henry Rosemont(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianism The intellectual movement known as Neo-Confucianism, begun in the eleventh century, developed one of the most sophisticated formu-lations of self-cultivation in the history of humanistic education. After looking at its historical background, I will treat the three components that made its doctrines new: (1) the reshaping of what constituted the Confucian canon of texts; (2) the metaphysical assumption that there are underlying principles existing independently of the knower, in all things, affairs, and our innately good human nature; and (3) an elaborated program of self-cultivation. The remarkable Song Dynasty synthesis of these three components defining how to live humanely changed organically within the institutions of imperial China until the fall of China’s last dynasty in 1911. Historical Background: Classical and Imperial Confucianism Confucius (551–479 BCE) witnessed the death throes of aristocracy in ancient China. His teachings called for an aristocracy of moral merit or talent to replace the anarchic feuding of small states that was begin-ning the Warring States Period (479–221). But instead the Qin (pro-nounced “chin”) state, which gave China its name in the West, gobbled up its competitors “as a silkworm consuming mulberry leaves.” The political philosophy of legalism that enabled the first emperor of Qin to force unification in 221 BCE explicitly rejected the system of aristo-cratic inheritance, but it was unlike Confucian doctrine in its reliance upon ruthless authority. While politically chaotic, the Warring States Period was so cultur-ally productive that it became informally called the Period of the One Hundred Schools of Thought. The political and social disruptions of the many contending states brought forward a number of thinkers, most of whom were wrestling with the confusion of a disintegrating

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  Voyages in World History, Volume 1

  • Valerie Hansen, Ken Curtis(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  360 Chapter 12 China’s Commercial Revolution, ca. 900–1276 religions, like Daoism and Buddhism, while others, like the spirit mediums, tended to work on their own. Believing that evil spirits caused illness, many people con-sulted religious specialists, such as exorcists, in the hope of curing sick family members. Buddhist monasteries offered many women a place where they could go unac-companied by men and listen to Buddhist texts recited aloud (see Chapter 8). Thousands forswore marriage and became monks and nuns living in monasteries and nunneries. Male clerics outnumbered women six to one during the Song Dynasty. Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and the World Beyond D uring the Song Dynasty, as the commercial revolution led to technological breakthroughs, particularly in ocean exploration, the vastness of the larger world became apparent to educated Chinese. Chinese navigators continued to modify their designs for ships, whose large wooden construction profoundly impressed Ibn Battuta (see Chapter 11), and mapmaking also improved. Foreign trade with surrounding powers played an important role in China’s commercial revolution. Anyone traveling to Vietnam, Korea, or Japan in the thir-teenth century would have seen signs of Chinese influence everywhere: people using chopsticks, Buddhist monasteries and Confucian schools, books printed in Chinese, and Chinese characters on all signposts and government documents. Chinese bronze coins, or local copies, circulated throughout the region, forming a Song Dynasty currency sphere. But Vietnam, Korea, and Japan also had their own distinctive political structures and their own ways of modifying the collection of institutions, laws, education systems, and religions they had adopted from the Tang (see Chapter 8). Although Chinese ships traveled to Southeast Asia and India as early as the fifth century, they stayed close to the coastline because they did not have compasses.

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