China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978: New Approaches to the Southern Kingdoms 1032053623, 9781032053622

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of
Contents
List of illustrations
Preface
Glossary
1. Introduction
2. Semi-colonialization under the Tang: Setting the Stage for the Independent South
3. Politics in an Age of Division: North–South Relations and Interstate Negotiation
4. The Economies of the South
5. The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South
6. Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire
7. The Legacy of the Interregnum: Recruiting the Southern Elite, the Discourse on Civilization, and the Standardization of Values
8. Conclusions: The Holistic Legacy
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978

This book challenges the long-established structure of Chinese history around dynasties, adopting a more “organic” approach which emphasises cultural and economic trends that transcend arbitrary dynastic boundaries. It argues that with the collapse of the Tang court and northern control over the holistic empire in the last decades of the ninth century, the now-autonomous kingdoms that filled the political vacuum in the south responded with a burst of innovative energy that helped set the stage for the economic and cultural transformations of the following Song dynasty. Moreover, it argues that these transformations and this economic and cultural innovation deeply affected the subsequent model of holistic empire which continues right up to the present and that therefore the interregnum century of division left a critically important legacy. Hugh R. Clark is Professor Emeritus of History and East Asian Studies at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania

Asian States and Empires Edited by Peter Lorge, Vanderbilt University For a full list of available titles please visit: https://www.routledge.com/AsianStates-and-Empires/book-series/SE900. The importance of Asia will continue to grow in the twenty-first century, but remarkably little is available in English on the history of the polities that constitute this critical area. Most current work on Asia is hindered by the extremely limited state of knowledge of the Asian past in general, and the history of Asian states and empires in particular. Asian States and Empires is a book series that will provide detailed accounts of the history of states and empires across Asia from earliest times until the present. It aims to explain and describe the formation, maintenance and collapse of Asian states and empires, and the means by which this was accomplished, making available the history of more than half the world’s population at a level of detail comparable to the history of Western polities. In so doing, it will demonstrate that Asian peoples and civilizations had their own histories apart from the West, and provide the basis for understanding contemporary Asia in terms of its actual histories, rather than broad generalizations informed by Western categories of knowledge.

China, Korea & Japan at War, 1592–1598 Eyewitness Accounts J. Marshall Craig China’s Northern Wei Dynasty, 386–535 The Struggle for Legitimacy Puning Liu China's Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912 Perspectives and Approaches in the Investigation of Imperial Boundary Regions Daniel McMahon China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978 New Approaches to the Southern Kingdoms Hugh R. Clark

China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978 New Approaches to the Southern Kingdoms

Hugh R. Clark

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Hugh R. Clark The right of to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-05362-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05365-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19724-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249 Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of illustrations Preface Glossary

vi vii xii

1

Introduction

1

2

Semi-colonialization under the Tang: Setting the Stage for the Independent South

9

3

Politics in an Age of Division: North–South Relations and Interstate Negotiation

25

4

The Economies of the South

40

5

The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South

57

6

Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire

78

7

The Legacy of the Interregnum: Recruiting the Southern Elite, the Discourse on Civilization, and the Standardization of Values

86

8

Conclusions: The Holistic Legacy

100

Bibliography Index

109 119

Illustrations

Figures 0.1 Map of Southern Polities (approximate) 5.1 The Descendants of Zheng Zhuang

x 69

Tables 0.1 Southern Polities in the 10th Century 4.1 Census data, 742 versus 1080 4.2 Demographic Data from the Taiping huanyu ji.

x 45 47

Preface

The following essays address an understudied epoch in the history of that corner of East Asia we call “China.” This is the era known to orthodox history as the Ten Kingdoms, referring to a congeries of polities in the Yangtze basin and lands further south that controlled southern China through the interregnum that divided the Tang and Song dynasties. I will explain in later chapters why that is a misnomer; suffice it here to say that I shall argue that the role these “kingdoms” played through the years in question has generally been overlooked. These essays are my attempt to recognize the essential role they played in a range of economic and cultural developments that affected the cultural and political history China thereafter. The Introduction and Chapters 2 and 3 are published here for the first time; Chapters 4 through 7 and the Conclusions were initially published as a series of three essays in the Journal of Song Yuan Studies (citations in text). I present them here with minor modifications to limit repetition; most notably, the third essay has been divided into two chapters (Chapters 6 and 7), and the individual conclusions of each essay have been consolidated in the final Conclusion. The initial inspiration behind these essays was an on-going series of workshops on the Tang-Song Transition that have been convened by Robert Hymes (Columbia University) and Anna Shields (Princeton University). It has been a privilege to be included in these gatherings, but they presented an historiographical problem to me. Although I had never explicitly sought to define my own research in terms of that transition, in fact all my work has been built around the decades in question, where it has often played a central role in my discussions; a reader might check the numerous references to my own work among the works cited. It was, therefore, striking to me that the early papers in the workshop largely jumped over the interregnum decades. The fact is, the interregnum is complex and often poorly or even completely undocumented, and there are topics that simply cannot be explored. I felt, however, that it was important to demonstrate that the century does offer a range of topics that are accessible, that it was in fact a time and place that saw important social and cultural change, and that as a consequence it should not be overlooked. It is rarely sufficient, I will argue, to identify a phenomenon in the Tang and present contrasts with the Song, and then to consider the job done. Scholars should look into the interregnum decades as much as the sources allow because so much of what we see taking shape in the Song had roots or evolution in the interregnum. These chapters are intended to affirm that point.

viii Preface The text focuses on the south, which I define as the lands of the Yangtze River basin and below. This is a reflection of my prior years of scholarship on the history of southern Fujian province and the wider south from the late Tang through the Song; my background addresses the south. That is not to deny the important developments in the north, but they have been studied by other scholars: Wang Gungwu, Naomi Standen, and Richard Davis, for example, all of whom have worked on the interregnum north. But the north is another story for others to tell; its trajectory was in fact quite distinct from that of the south. I am confident that the southern focus of these essays does not detract from the wider importance of what they cover. A second point that requires clarification is what I define as the “interregnum century.” Ever since the earliest summaries of the years that separated the abdication of the last Tang emperor in 907 and 960 when Zhao Kuangyin (927–976) announced the Song dynasty, those 53 years have defined that separation. However, as I will emphasize, the Tang effectively ended in the 870s with the great rebellion associated with Huang Chao (835– 884). In 878 Huang abandoned his rebellion’s origins in the Huainan region and embarked on a cataclysmic sweep through the lands of the lower Yangtze River basin and then into the deepest south. In his trail he left a radically altered political landscape where the Tang court had almost no influence. Because these are the lands on which I will focus, I will cite 878 as the beginning of the interregnum. At the other end, Zhao Kuangyin, now the Emperor Taizu of the Song dynasty, began to systematically target the individual southern courts shortly after taking power, but it was a step-by-step process. Finally in 978 the last of the independent southern polities: the WuYue court based in Hangzhou and the QuanZhang autonomous satrapy in southern Fujian, formally submitted to the Song. Thus throughout the following discussion I will define the interregnum as a full century, 878–978. Lastly, a word about terms. The language of the world I will discuss was, of course, Middle Period Chinese. This presents two problems. First, as western scholars have engaged that world, a number of translations into our own languages have become standard. Because no translation is exact, however, and often I feel a standard English term obscures important aspects of the original Chinese, I will try to avoid translation of critical terms as much as I can without obscuring my argument. The second problem is derivative of the first. Sinitic scholars settled on a variety of terms to name the institutions they were dealing with. Most immediately, Chinese records routinely refer to the southern polities of the interregnum as guo 國, in contrast to the chaodai 朝代 that sequentially controlled the Central Plain, the vast alluvial plain east of the Taihang Mountain barrier that is also known as the “North China Plain,” and that has been formed by eons of flooding by the Yellow River. The common English translations are “kingdom” and “dynasty,” terms that obscure the very important hierarchical relationship between guo and chaodai, or simply dai, in Chinese. I will therefore endeavor to use the Chinese terms where I feel the English obscures an important aspect of that relationship.

Preface

ix

That only masks, however, a further problem. The polities that I will focus on did not always call themselves guo, with all the unstated implications of that term. As I will explain, some of the southern rulers such as those in Chu accepted a subordinate relationship to the northern dai; they were always selfreferentially guo. But others proclaimed themselves chaodai, a posture the northern dai never acknowledged. Nevertheless since the earliest narrative histories of the era that were compiled in the later 10th century the orthodox posture has been to describe all the southern polities as guo and to define their relationship to the northern dai as subordinate. Although this is an important semantic distinction to keep in mind, in order to minimize rhetorical confusion I will follow the historiographical norm and refer to the southern polities as guo. Before moving into the heart of my discussion, it is equally important to recognize what these essays do not intend to do. First, “the south” is a very broad term. From the full reach of the Yangtze basin to the deepest south, the southern guo embraced markedly varied cultures and traditions. Far western Sichuan, home to the successive Former and Latter Shu guo, had little in common with Guangnan, site of the (southern, or Guangnan) Han guo, just as the latter was far removed from events, traditions, and culture of Liangzhe, where the WuYue guo was located. Although all southern guo had to form some degree of relationship with the successive courts of the Yellow River basin, the acknowledged heart of Sinitic culture, they all to some degree shared, and all were bound together by a degree of economic partnership that was defined by the Yangtze River and its southern tributaries, through which even (Guangnan) Han guo in the far south1 was integrated via its continued role as the primary entrepôt of the South Seas trade that was sent north via those southern tributaries. Still, it is untenable to suggest there was a single, or even generally shared, “southern experience” through the interregnum. For multiple reasons, both historiographical and personal, the bulk of the following discussion will focus on WuYue as well as Min, the guo that loosely controlled Fujian, with digressions when useful to the successive Jiangnan guo of Wu and Tang, and occasionally to even broader reaches. While my focus, therefore, is not “the south” in its entirety, my point that there were important innovations either consolidating or emerging in the south remains viable. All evidence asserts that these were the guo that most successfully nurtured the transformations I will discuss. Second, although I define my discussion in terms of the interregnum, this is not intended to argue that the interregnum century mattered discretely. The southern guo emerged out of the Tang and flowed into the Song. I would question if there is any historical period that can be isolated from what came before or after, and I certainly would not make that argument for the period in question. It will be readily apparent in the following discussions that the themes I am discussing had roots in the decades, even centuries, before the interregnum and continued to develop for many decades after. My point is not that the southern guo need to be incorporated into our narrative as discrete entities without reference to a more extensive context. Rather, it is

x

Preface

that neglect of the guo is inadequate. Whether because studying them is difficult or the sources are scarce, historians have too often made the solipsistic yet default assumption that it is sufficient to note the roots of change in the Tang and their culmination in the Song. As a growing body of recent scholarship—my own as well as that of others—has demonstrated, the southern guo can be studied, and there were important things happening.2 Table 0.1 Southern Polities in the 10th Century Location

Guo

Founder

Dates

Jiangnan

Wu Tang

Yang Xingmi Xu Zhigao

902–937 937–975

Sichuan

Shu (Former) Shu (Latter)

Wang Jian Meng Zhixiang

903–925 935–965

LiangZhe Fujian Guangnan Hunan WuHan

WuYue Min Han Chu Jingnan

Qian Liu Wang Chao Liu Yin Ma Yin Gao Jichang

902–978 909–945 909–971 907–964 907–963

Figure 0.1 Map of Southern Polities (approximate)

Preface xi

Notes 1 Although the historiographical legacy has attached modifiers to several of the southern guo (i.e., “southern” Han), it is important to recognize that this was a post-interregnum convention that was developed to distinguish them from the earlier dynasties of the same name whose heritage both were consciously invoking. These modifiers were not self-referential. Clarity requires some distinction between, for example, the Tang courts of the Yellow River basin—both the great dynasty that preceded the interregnum and the Shatuo court of the tenth century— and the interregnum Jiangnan court based in the Yangtze basin. Neither the Jiangnan Tang nor the Guangnan Han referred to themselves as “southern,” so I will not identify them as such. Rather where clarity demands it, I will use the regional designations. I do this in order to emphasize the internal perspective. 2 Of my own work, see especially Clark (2007). Recent work in English includes Kurz (2011) and Wang (2011). There also is a growing body of similar work in China, including: Yang (1986), Zheng (1991), Ren (1995), Du (2001), Xu (2006), and Ng (2020).

Glossary

Important Terms and Names An Chonghui baya rice benji bi (impropriety) bingyao Jiangnan buzhuang Cai Xiang Chajiu ku chang (tax station) Chu (guo) Chen Hongjin Chen Qian Chen Yaozi Chen Yuanguang Chen Zheng Chen Zhu citang cu you wen Cuan Hongda Cuan Man di (emperor) Dong Yuan Du Jianhui Du Ling Du Mu Dushui yingtian shi Du Xunhe Du Yingzhi erjunzhe youyou qi jian fa (law) fang wu

安重誨 䆉稏 本紀 弊 並夭江南 簿狀 蔡襄 茶酒庫 場 楚 陳洪進 陳謙 陳堯咨 陳元光 陳政 陳鑄 祠堂 粗有文 爨弘大 爨蠻 帝 董源 杜建徽 杜稜 杜牧 都水營田使 杜荀鶴 杜應之 而君者優游期間 法 方物

Glossary xiii Fang Tingfan Fang Yansun fatang feng (wasp) fengjian Feng Juan fensi futu Ge Hong ge ming Goguryeo gong Goujian Gu Hongzhong Gu Quanwu Guanghua si Gushi ren Guangnan Gong She & Sheng Guo Rong guowang Guo Wei guannei Han (guo) Han Conduit Han Qi Han Wo Han Xizai yeyan tu Han Yu Hangzhou badu hua (transform) hua li huai (enclosure) Huainan liuhou Huainan xiaya Huang Chao Huangdi Huang Lan Huang Tao Huitu wu jiagu wen jian (industrial center) Jianfu yuan Jiangnan Jiangnan Canal

方廷範 方演孫 法堂 蠭 封建 馮涓 墳寺 浮圖 葛洪 革命 高句麗 公 勾踐 顧閎中 顧全武 光化寺 固始人 廣南 龔龔 & 勝 郭榮 國王 郭威 關内 漢 邗溝 韓琦 韓偓 韓熙載夜宴圖 韓愈 杭州八都 化 化黎 淮 淮南留侯 淮南押牙 黃巢 皇帝 黄瀾 黃滔 囘圖務 甲骨文 堅 薦福院 江南 江南河

xiv Glossary Jiangnan lu jiao hua jiao xiangyang zhe jimi zhou Jingnan jinjue jingshe jun guo junwang jun zi zhidao Kaiping ke hu li (ritual) Li Bian Li Cunxu Li Delin Li Gou Li Jing Li Xiaogong li yi Li Yu Li Yuan Liang LiaoMan Liu Bang liuhou Liu Ni Liu Congxiao Liu Yin Liuzhou Liu Zongyuan Luofeng Fu longzhou Lu Song min tian Ma Yin Man (ethnonym) Meng Zhixiang Mi Fu Min (guo) ming (mandate) Nanhu Zheng nanxuan nianhao nianpu

江南錄 教化 交相養者 羈縻州 荊南 進爵 精舍 郡國 君王 君子之道 開平 客戶 禮 李昪 李存勖 李德林 李覯 李璟 李孝恭 禮儀 李煜 李淵 梁 獠蠻 劉邦 留侯 劉尼 留從校 劉隱 柳州 柳宗元 羅峰傅 龍舟 盧悚 民天 馬殷 蠻 孟知祥 米黻 閩 命 南湖鄭 南選 年號 年譜

Glossary xv Ouyang Zhan pi (weir) pian ba puxi tu Qian Chu qidan Qian Liu Qin Zongquan qing (measure) Ran Zhaoze ren (empathy) rendao zhi zhun ruchen ruxue dao shang guo Shangqing dao shanzei Shatuo shen (spirit) shi (bushel) shi Manqiu Shi Miyuan Shi Jie shizhong shu (cooked) Shu (guo) shuitian shang … shu yuzha ci Songwai Man Song Zhiwen Sun En Tang (guo) tan yue Tian Xi tian (cosmos) tianming Tianshi dao tianxia Tianyou tianzi(li) wai guo wang (done) Wang Chao Wang Dan wangfan yu miman

歐陽詹 陂 偏霸 譜希圖 錢俶 祇泹 錢鏐 秦宗權 頃 冉肇則 仁 人道之準 儒臣 儒學道 上國 上清道 山賊 沙陀 神 石 世滿酋 史彌遠 石介 侍中 熟 蜀 水田 上 … 書御札賜 松外蠻 宋之問 孫恩 唐 檀越 田錫 天 天命 天師道 天下 天佑 天子(禮) 外國 亡 王潮 王旦 忘返於靡漫

xvi Glossary Wang Jian Wang Qinrou Wang Pu Wang Shenzhi Wang Yanjun wei (illegitimate） Wei Cen wenhua wenming wu (martial) Wu (guo) Wu Cheng Wudoumi dao wufu WuYue (guo) Xia Song xiafang pirang xiangyin li xiangyou Xiang Yu xingtai xin wugui chong yinci xin xing Xu Kai Xu Wen Xu Yanxiu Xu Xuan Xu Zhigao xuanbu xue bowu Yang Guang Yang Jian Yang Longyan Yang Pu Yang Shilin Yang Xuanzhi Yang Wo Yang Xi Yang Xingmi Yang You yaozei yi (heterodoxy) yin si Yin Zhu ying tang

王建 王欽若 王朴 王深知 王延鈞 偽 魏岑 文化 文明 武 吳 吳程 五斗米道 五服 吳越 夏竦 遐方僻壤 鄉飲禮 相友 項籍 行臺 信巫鬼重湮祠 新興 徐鍇 徐溫 徐延休 徐鉉 徐智高 選補 學博物 楊廣 楊堅 楊隆演 楊溥 楊士林 楊衒之 楊渥 楊羲 楊行密 楊侑 妖賊 異 淫祀 尹洙 影堂

Glossary xvii yingtian jun yiyi zhiyi yi zu Yu Jing Yuan Dezhao Yue (ethnonym) Yuhu Chen zhaigong zhang (measure) Zhang Chang Zhang (Dao)Ling Zhang Ji Zhang Jiuling zhaobao shilang Zheng Boyu Zheng Gao Zhengkai Zheng Sheng Zheng Xihan Zheng Yun & Zhen zheng tong zhi li yi jing bangguo zhong chen Zhu Can zhu hu Zhu Wen Zhu Youzhen zhuangyuan Zhuzi Fang zi (honorific) zi fen

營田軍 以夷制夷 藝祖 余靖 元德昭 越 玉湖陳 齋供 丈 張昌 張(道)陵 張繼 張九齡 招寳侍郎 鄭伯玉 鄭皋 正開 鄭生 鄭希韓 筠&震 正通 制禮以經邦國 忠臣 朱燦 主戶 朱溫 朱友貞 狀元 朱紫方 字 自奮

1

Introduction

The orthodox narrative of Chinese history is structured around dynastic periods. Although often heuristically useful, the dynastic approach minimizes periods of dynastic instability and turnover, periods that saw some of East Asia’s most important social and cultural change. These essays are devoted to one such period, the century-long interregnum that divided the Tang and Song dynasties. Although the breakdown of imperial authority that launched the century and the reconsolidation that restored it extend the interregnum well beyond the five decades embraced by the orthodox label Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–960), for much of that era China was divided between a weak imperial structure in the north and a collection of smaller polities that concurrently ruled across the south with varying degrees of stability and success. Such periods of dynastic breakdown and division are awkward, often poorly documented, and contrary to some of the underlying premises of that narrative, central to which is the presumed normality of what I shall call the “holistic empire.” The model for this empire was first established late in the third century BCE by the self-anointed “First Emperor,” who through force consolidated a fractious congeries of principalities that for roughly 500 years had competed for control of the Central (or “North China”) Plain. This plain, which has long been defined as the cultural heartland of the Chinese world, is centered around the lower stretch of the Yellow River that lies east of the Taihang Mountains. Having welded together these principalities under his authoritarian rule, which realized a long-held dream of both the political and cultural classes that derived from the vicarious memory of such unity in the “golden age” of the long ago, the “emperor” (di) then launched a campaign of conquest into the south. When he was finished, for the first time, an empire embraced the four major west–east river networks: the Yellow, Huai, Yangtze, and West, or Pearl, Rivers, that together drain the vast majority of the area we call “China.” Though the Qin dynasty that the First Emperor established was short-lived (221–206 BCE), following a brief civil war it was succeeded by the Han dynasty, which lasted in total for more than four centuries (206 BCE–220 CE) with a brief interruption at the beginning of the Common Era. Although DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249-1

2

Introduction

Qin, which was notable for its stringent social and political policies known as “Legalism,” is treated in the orthodox narrative with extreme distaste, Han is celebrated as one of China’s greatest epochs. Late in the second century CE, however, as the vigor of the imperial model waned, a pattern of rebellion that had been a constant undercurrent throughout the Qin/Han era gained unprecedented energy with the addition of millenarian overtones, leading to a dynastic collapse. The third century was an era of turmoil that included both holistic, but superficial, consolidation and regional division. Finally, early in the fourth century an onslaught of invasion from the northern peripheries chased the Jin dynasty imperial court that had briefly restored the holistic empire to the south. The court’s flight was joined by many of the leading families of the empire. Collectively they found refuge in the Yangtze River basin, a region that heretofore had never been thought to be civilized. For nearly three centuries, the era the orthodox narrative calls the Era of Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Yellow River basin and Central Plain were under the rule of non-Sinitic conquering peoples while a succession of self-professed Sinitic dynasties ruled in the south from their Yangtze basin refuge. This era of division was brought to an end when Yang Jian (541–604) proclaimed the Sui dynasty in 581 and through force forged a new era of holistic unity, bringing north and south together under one imperial administration. Looking backwards at that moment, however, an observer may well have asked if the holistic empire was not the aberration. Throughout the millennial sweep of history the holistic empire had only been in place for slightly more than four centuries. Unprecedented before the Qin/Han empire, the division that followed the collapse of Han holism had lasted virtually as long as the holistic empire. Through the intervening centuries a distinctive, hybrid culture had evolved among the cultural elite of the south, one that had Sinitic roots, but was strongly influenced by local traditions. As Arthur Wright observed decades ago, By the mid-sixth century a “southern” style of life had emerged… The [northern] immigrants by this time had found rice substitutes for their favorite millet-flour dishes. Modes of address, ways of greeting others had become sharply different from northern ways… Food and dress, as well as manners, likewise had their distinctive southern styles.1 This was a hybrid culture that drew as heavily on indigenous southern traditions, traditions that were not Sinitic, as it did on the Sinitic heritage of the immigrants who defined a new elite class. In addition to such essential features as language, the array of which across the south generally fell into either the Austronesian or Austro-Asiatic families in contrast to the SinoTibetan roots of the north, and diet, which was based on rice rather than the dry land grains including millet, sorghum, and gaoliang, as well as a bit of wheat, that were featured in northern cuisine, these included the distinctive

Introduction

3

southern approach to the numinous. As Ban Gu, in his monograph on the empire’s geography in the “History of the [Former] Han Dynasty,” wrote: The lands south of the Yangtze (jiangnan; i.e., the lands of the Man and Yue, the two generalized ethnonyms used by northern scholars to refer to the myriad distinct cultures of the south) are vast, … The people put faith in shamans and demons and embrace barbaric rites (xin wugui chong yinci).2 Underneath the hybrid culture of the social and political elite and beyond the urban nodes where the impact of Sinitic culture was strongest, the ancient and diverse indigenous cultures of the south persisted. There was an enduring southern identity that resented the imposition of Sinitic norms, manifested in a pattern of indigenous resistance.3 Often this was passively expressed in cultural heterodoxy, but sometimes it broke out in open rebellion. An example of the former is the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice (Wudoumi dao), a millenarian Daoist movement that evolved into the Way of the Celestial Masters (Tianshi dao). Although the Celestial Masters eventually came to an accommodation with Sinitic orthodoxy, in its initial manifestation this was a radical critique and a medium of indigenous identity. The movement emerged in the mountainous fringe of the Chengdu Plain in Sichuan, far to the west of the heavily Sinicized urban centers of the Lower Yangtze basin, as the Han dynasty began to unravel. As had happened across so much of the south, on the Chengdu Plain a hybridized elite culture had emerged during the centuries of Han control, but that culture did not penetrate into the mountains that surround the Plain; they remained the redoubt of pre-Sinitic indigenous cultures. Late in the second century a shaman named Zhang Ling (later Zhang Daoling) began to offer healing rituals in exchange for a tithe. Later hagiographies claim that Zhang was born in a remote corner of inland modern Jiangsu in the border region between the Central Lands and the culturally problematic world of the Nearer South, which raises questions about his own ethnicity. How or why he moved to the mountainous fringe of the Chengdu Plain, or even whether the tradition is valid, is unknown, but at the very least he had abandoned claims to Sinitic orthodoxy. As he attracted growing numbers, Zhang organized his followers into a theocratic state, which thrived in the politically fluid context of the early third century. Zhang’s autonomous theocracy folded into the post-Han order as his grandson and heir came to terms with the Cao family who had inherited Han legitimacy over the Central Plain. Celestial Masters evangelists, however, took the movement down the Yangtze where they carried on its shamanistic challenge to Sinitic orthodoxy. As the movement spread through the South it became a vehicle for a regionalist southern cultural autonomy in the face of the hegemonic discourse of the north. This autonomy could manifest in two ways: the resentment of the immigrant Sinitic population

4

Introduction

toward the northern elites who dismissed them as uncultured barbarians; and the resentment of non-Sinitic indigenes against Sinitic hegemony in all its forms. The former especially emerged in new forms of Daoism, most notably the Highest Clarity (Shangqing) movement that has its roots in the iconoclasm of Ge Hong (283–343). Michel Strickmann has said of Ge Hong that “he clearly comes at the end of an autonomous local tradition” of spiritualism that drew on indigenous southern traditions predating the fourth century influx of northern aristocrats.4 It was Yang Xi (ca.330–386), however, who presented the new movement, which Isabelle Robinet has called the reassertion of a distinctive southern tradition, through a series of texts that he claimed were revealed to him by a succession of Celestial Immortals.5 The Shangqing movement became a vehicle for the indigenous culture to counter the contempt in which the refugee northern elite held it. For many, however, the cultural challenge of movements such as Highest Clarity were insufficient responses; they turned to open rebellion. Sometimes it is quite certain the rebels were peasants of uncertain ethnicity who drew on mystical traditions that were inherently southern. In 376, for example, “Five Tigers” Zhang and “Six Roots” Lu, faced with the potent symbolism of an eclipse of the sun, rebelled; their uprising was quickly squelched, they were beheaded, and their followers eradicated.6 Other times the identity of the rebels is less certain. In 411 the garrison in Guangzhou abandoned the city following the death of its commanding officer. In response “mountain bandits” (shan zei)—vague, to be sure, but certainly pointing to the non-Sinitic indigenes who had retreated to the mountains of the interior in the face of Sinitic pressure for land—poured forth and took over the city, where they killed the remaining officials. They were wiped out within days.7 Uprisings such as these, which are a regular feature in the history of all premodern agrarian societies, were a nuisance. They were not, however, a threat to the new order in the South. Far more threatening, it would appear, was a pattern of rebellion that, while not overtly anti-Sinitic, was definitively anti-northern. The rebellion of Lu Song in 372 is an example. Lu, a “sorcerer bandit” (yao zei) who was inspired by the Celestial Masters movement, sought to restore a deposed emperor. When his effort was forestalled, he then led his band straight into the imperial palace before the usurper court rallied and defeated him.8 “Sorcerer bandits” are in fact a recurrent theme in the rebellions that erupted against the northern hegemony. Most appear to have been responses to particular grievances and, like Lu Song, not a threat to the established order. Occasionally, however, the challenge was both more enduring and the threat more real. In 303, for example, a tribal chieftain known to the Chinese as Zhang Chang rebelled.9 Beginning with a band of “several thousand” of his fellow tribesmen, Zhang Chang soon was joined by “rootless vagrants who were avoiding compulsory military service.” “Within weeks” his followers, drawn from throughout the central Yangtze valley, had grown to

Introduction

5

30,000. As his rebellion blossomed Zhang “announced in words of sorcery” that he needed a “‘sage’ to be our leader,” for which he recruited a bureaucratic functionary. He had the “sage” change his surname to Liu, invoking that of the Han dynasty ruling family, and claim to be a descendent of the Han emperors. Zhang then gave him the title “Phoenix Emperor” and proclaimed that like a phoenix the Han would rise again. In contrast to the rebellion of Lu Song, Zhang had advanced his to the point of invoking the cosmological and political symbols of imperial government. They adopted “crimson caps” and “used horse tails as beards,” which prompted officials to rant, “The sorcerer bandits are nothing more than a rabble of dogs and goats. With their red heads and furry faces they dance with knives and leap about with spears, but as weapons they are useless.” Over the next several months the court rallied its forces and finally regained control, but not before many thousands through the middle Yangtze valley, both indigenous nonSinitic peoples and Sinitic migrants, had registered their opposition to Jin rule. Lu Song and others manifested discontent from within the indigenized Sinitic elite of the South. Zhang Chang drew heavily on discontent among the indigenous, non-Sinitic population. Both represented a threat to the orthodox Sinitic order that had been brought to the south by elite refugees who fled the grasslands invasions. The most threatening and best documented uprising against the northern hegemony, however, was the rebellion of the “sorcerer bandit” Sun En (d. 402). Eight prefectures altogether followed Sun En in rebellion and slaughtered their magistrates. Within ten days several hundred thousand had rallied to him.10 In the following months and years, Sun led his followers on a campaign of vengeful terror along the coast in the Yangtze delta region and south as far as Hangzhou Bay.11 When the court dispatched forces to confront him, he simply fled back to the off-shore islands that were his refuge; when his opponents retreated, he reoccupied the mainland coastal regions. Sun En apparently drew his support heavily from the non-Sinitic indigenous peoples. For example, his forces are referred to as “wasps” (feng),12 a disparaging term that was a calculated reference to non-Sinitic southerners. Subtle hints of this include Sun’s invocation of Goujian, the ruler of the ancient Yue kingdom and an unlikely model unless he was appealing to the historical memory of the men he led, for whom Goujian might have evoked a sense of ethnic pride.13 Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that Sun relied on non-Sinitic support, however, is his apparent reliance on the nautical skills of his followers to build his naval fleet of “over one thousand ‘tower boats.’”14 On this one source comments, “The vessels were extraordinary. The ‘hundred surnames’ could not do this.”15 The “hundred surnames” is an ancient term the elite had long used to refer to the common mass in

6

Introduction

orthodox culture; it is unlikely that it would be used to refer to non-Sinitic masses, who lacked surnames. We can conclude, therefore, that the people who built Sun’s navy were not of the “hundred surnames”; they must have been non-Sinitic adherents. Although the era of holistic unity under the Sui/Tang empire (589–907) brought about major change in the south, it never resolved the tensions that distinguished it from the north that are manifest in these and numerous other, less-well documented uprisings. Northerners continued to view men from the south as uncultured, tainted by their close association with the indigenous barbarians, and the physical south as a land of cultural sloth and unimaginable danger. For example, the Tang poet Song Zhiwen (660–712) described the south thus: The steaming lakes make the waters boil; The heat from the mountains births clouds of fire. Apes leap about, now and again calling shrilly. Raptors circle above; none dare make a sound.16 Decades later Zhang Ji (ca.765–ca.830), in a poem commemorating the departure of a friend to take up office in the south, expressed similar disgust: So, so far away, a wandering guest… Surrounded by malaria, your body wasting away. A land of blue mountains and endless travel, Your hair will whiten and still you will not return. In the lands across the sea they fight on elephants, In the lands of the Man they use silver in the markets. One family, separated across many places. Who is it who will see the spring in the far south?17 It was, perhaps, the surviving corpus of Liu Zongyuan (773–819) that most fulsomely expressed the horror in which northerners held the south. In a letter to a colleague composed probably in 804 when he was in exile the remote uplands of Hunan where Sinitic settlers were few and indigenous peoples many, Liu expressed his loathing for the world that surrounded him: Yongzhou is far to the south of Chu; it is a land where there is no difference between the Zhuang and the Yue. When I am depressed, I go out and about. But as I go about, I find much to fear for through the wilds there are poisonous snakes and great wasps. Whether I look to the sky or regard the land, to walk but an inch is exhausting.18 Not only did Liu hate the land. He was discouraged that the indigenous southerners had little interest in the lessons he sought to teach. In the

Introduction

7

commemoration of the reconstruction of a Buddhist temple composed in 817 while in further exile in Liuzhou in the far southwest, he complained: The people of Yue believe in omens and that they can easily be killed. They reject the transformation of civilization (hua) and abuse human empathy (ren). Faced with severe illness they turn to shamans, who will divine with chickens. [To beseech the intervention of the gods] they will initially offer a small sacrifice. If that does not suffice, they will offer a sacrifice of middling size. And if that does not suffice, they will offer a grand sacrifice. If they are still not cured, they will take leave of their kin and make preparations for their death, concluding that “the gods will not prop me up.” Then they will cease eating, cover their face, and die. Consequently their houses turn to ruins, their fields go wild, and their livestock do not multiply. If you try to manage them with rituals, they respond with stubbornness. If you restrain them with punishments, they run away. They only acknowledge Buddhist mandala and serve the spirits.19 Comparable laments by southerners about northern condescension are few if any, yet there are hints. For example, when the great essayist Han Yu (768– 824) eulogized his examination classmate Ouyang Zhan (758–801), who had been the first native of Quanzhou in southern Fujian to earn a jinshi degree, he recalled: The land of MinYue is abundantly fertile. It is blessed with the joys of scenery and wildlife. Even though there have been cultivated men who understood literature and administration as well as anyone from the heartland (shang guo), heretofore none have been willing to go forth and serve.20 Han explained that Ouyang Zhan’s forebearers had held low-ranking district offices in Fujian, an allusion to a system known as “southern selection” (nanxuan), facilitated examinations under the Tang through which men from Jiangnan, Huainan, or Fujian were recruited to hold local offices in the south that were too remote and politically insignificant to appeal to northern scholars. Yet, though they had shown an orientation toward serving the court, they had not been “willing” to engage fully. Ouyang Zhan was the first among his peers in Fujian who we know took the imperial examination. We cannot know if that was because all prior aspirants had been tracked to the “southern selection” examinations or because they had been discouraged by the explicit northern condescension. The end result, however, was that southerners were marginalized, and that was because their culture was suspect. Nevertheless, at least since the reintegration of by the Sui/Tang dynasty in the middle of the first millennium CE orthodox history has taken the holistic

8

Introduction

empire as the norm, eras of division as aberrations. Illustratively, the eminent contemporary historian Wang Gungwu, in reissuing his pathbreaking study of the Five Dynasties of the interregnum north, retitled it Divided China: Preparing for Reunification, 883–947.21 It is the premise of the following essays, on the other hand, that “reunification” was by no means a given, that even as the Tang collapsed and a new era of division began, the holistic empire was not yet firmly established. On the contrary, I will argue, it was the resolution to the division of the interregnum in the later tenth and eleventh centuries that embedded commitment to the holistic empire in the scholarly and bureaucratic elite of the south and turned the empire from one that was dominated by the north into one in which the long-demeaned south took precedence.

Notes 1 Wright (1979), 50. 2 Han shu 28b: 141b. 3 The following draws very directly on Clark (2016), Chapter 2, “Northern Perceptions of the Pre-Sinitic South.” 4 Strickmann (1977), 8. 5 Robinet (1977), 115. 6 Qutan Xida, 9. 7 Songshu, 100:7b. 8 Jinshu, 8:23b. The fullest discussion of Lu’s plot is in ZZTJ 103:3260. 9 My account relies on ZZTJ 85:2680–2682; 2683–2684. 10 Jinshu 100:32a. 11 Jinshu 10:4a. 12 Jinshu 100:32b and ZZTJ 1111:3499. 13 Jinshu 100:32b. 14 ZZTJ 112:3524. 15 Jinshu 100:34b. 16 Song Zhiwen 宋之問, “Ru Longzhou jiang” 入瀧州江, (Yuding) QuanTang shi, 53:6a–6b. 17 Zhang Ji 張籍, “Song nan qian ke” 送南遷客, (Yuding) QuanTang shi, 384:4b– 5a. Schafer (1967), 21, offers an alternative translation. Schafer devotes his entire book to images of the south among Tang literati. While some loved it, to most of those he profiles it was hateful, a place of death. 18 Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元, “Yu Li Hanlin Jian shu” 與李翰林建書 Liu hedong ji 30:494–496, quoting from 494. 19 “Liuzhou fu Dayunsi ji” 柳州復大雲寺記, Liu hedong ji, 28:465–466. For a parallel translation, see Schafer (1967), 100. 20 Han Yu, “Ouyang sheng’ai ci” 歐陽生哀辭, Changli wenji, 22:3a. 21 Wang (2007), a reissue of Wang (1963).

2

Semi-colonialization under the Tang Setting the Stage for the Independent South

Over the course of its history the word “colony” has meant several things. It derives from Latin colo-nia, which in turn derived from colo-nus, primarily meaning a farmer or cultivator. Derivatively, however, colo-nus came to mean a settler in a new land, in the sense that it referred to “a public settlement of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered country, where they, retaining their Roman citizenship, received lands, and acted as a garrison …; hence it was applied to the place so occupied.”1 Thus, as understood in the classical world of the Mediterranean, a colo-nia was a settlement of colo-ni in a foreign land where the indigenous people were potentially hostile. When European nations began to assert authority over distant corners of the globe in the latter half of the second millennium, it was this latter meaning that came to predominate: Colonies were far-away lands where small bands of Europeans either subdued indigenous populations as conquerors or displaced indigenous populations as conqueror-settlers. There was, however, an important addition, not one that had been entirely absent in the past, but which gained unprecedented importance to the later colonial enterprise: Colonies were valued for the wealth the colonizer could extract.2 The colonized, by extension, were economically subordinate to the demands and needs of the colonizer. It is these later meanings that can be applied to the lands of southern China, especially under the Tang dynasty. Interaction between the politics and culture of the Central Plain with those of the south did not begin with the Sui/Tang empire. Anthropologists have found material evidence to argue contact began even before the beginning of recorded history.3 In the course of the first millennium BCE, Chu guo, centered in the Xiang River that largely defines modern Hubei province and southernmost of the Zhou era kingdoms, was considered an important outpost of Central Plain civilization. Chu was regarded by the more orthodox states of the Plain as a buffer between them and the dangerously unruly cultures collectively known as Man that lay further south. A tradition that is widely repeated in the literature of the Plain even asserts that Chu was founded by a noble lineage from the Plain that was closely allied with the Zhou court, although this is dubious.4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249-2

10 Semi-colonialization under the Tang The holistic empire founded by the First Emperor late in the third century BCE brought north and south together in an unprecedented embrace, yet it was a false embrace for even within the holistic empire the south remained a land, a culture, even a people apart. As was noted in the Han dynasty text “Discourses on Salt and Iron”: Today the horses and soldiers from East of the Mountains who are guarding frontier Commanderies are isolated and remote. Their bodies are among the … Yue [a generic term for peoples of the southeast], but their hearts cherish their old mothers, who shed tears as their wives grieve.5 Through the four centuries of the holistic Qin/Han empire, however, there was a slow but real movement of population from north to south. By the beginning of the third century CE, when the holistic Han empire was unravelling, the impact of this movement was beginning to tell even as the population and culture of the south remained overwhelmingly indigenous. An elite stratum had emerged whose values and culture were rooted in those of the north and the corpus of texts through which northern scholars defined civilization. Yet following the abdication of the last Han emperor in 220, the underlying division was once again made manifest as the unitary holistic empire dissolved into three. The Wei dynasty (220–265) controlled the Central Plain while Shu (220–263) held the far west, centered on modern Sichuan. The south, based in the lower Yangtze basin, was held by Wu (220– 280), invoking an ancient name for the region that alludes to a non-Sinitic polity of the region. Although the Wu elite were culturally Sinitic, their heritage was overwhelmingly local. Under their Sinitic shell they were southerners.6 Except for a brief and ineffectual restoration of the holistic empire late in the third century under the Jin dynasty, the south remained separate for another three-and-a-half centuries before the holistic empire was restored by Yang Jian, who founded the Sui dynasty (581–618) and reigned as Sui Wendi (r. 581–604). In the interval the south had been transformed in profound ways. Faced with the turmoil that wracked the Central Plain, for example, the trickle of migration from north to south that had begun to affect the latter through the holistic Qin/Han empire gained new momentum despite the political fragmentation. Among the migrants anonymous common folk, seeking to escape the oppressive rule of the alien rulers and the unrelenting chaos that came with them, were no doubt a majority. The legend of the Four Surnames that is among the traditions of Fujian is illustrative. Early in the fourth century, the Jin court was forced to abandon its northern homeland by grassland invaders, ultimately finding refuge in the Yangtze basin.7 In conjunction with the court’s flight, the History of the Chen Dynasty records, immigrants surnamed Lin, Huang, Chen, and Zheng arrived in the Min River basin of northern

Semi-colonialization under the Tang 11 8

Fujian. Indeed through the centuries that followed these surnames were among the most prominent in the agriculturally-fertile river bottoms that define coastal Fujian. There is ample evidence that by the Tang if not earlier families with these surnames had become major landowners in all the major coastal river basins; by the Song each was represented by a well-established kin group with all the ritual paraphernalia that implied.9 But the initial immigrants remain almost entirely anonymous. Although the legend links them to the court, their anonymity and their final destination in Fujian argue on the contrary that they were common folk who took advantage of their northern heritage to carve out major landholdings and local power at the expense of the indigenous population, much as settlers of European heritage in North America, the Australian Outback, or Kenya were to do many centuries later. No doubt less numerous but with a much more public legacy were elite refugees who legitimately followed the Jin court in its flight. In the decades and then centuries that followed the flight of the court these men and their descendants played powerful roles in the politics of the south. Through the centuries of division, a claim to a lost elite status in the north—some of which doubtlessly were true but others equally doubtlessly were supported by falsified descent links—was a key to power in the southern courts.10 However, as links to their real or presumed northern roots receded into an ever more distant past, even these elites were increasingly embedded in the south, their home for a growing number of generations. The culture of the south, moreover, remained distinct. There was much that north and south shared, especially the classical texts on which political and social theory was based. However, even in areas of common interest such as Buddhism they grew apart. Northern Buddhism was primarily derived from transmission across the overland routes colloquially known as the Silk Road. Although the traditions of the Silk Road also influenced southern Buddhism, much of southern Buddhism was heavily influenced by the distinct schools that came via the maritime trade with Southeast Asia and beyond.11 Concurrently new literary forms and themes reflecting the land and environment in which southerners lived diverged from northern traditions.12 The most enduring contrast, however, was economic. While the alien regimes that governed the Central Plain were rooted in the extensive pastoral economy of the northern grasslands, for example, across the south an invigorated commercial economy based on intensive agriculture began to emerge. As northern refugees merged increasingly with their indigenous southern neighbors, together they began to develop contrasting trade structures. The south, for example, never developed the state-controlled markets that in theory were the only place in the north where merchants could pursue their business. Rather, across the south organic networks emerged, networks that placed open markets at natural nodes of communication such as river fords and bridges, where peasants could bring surplus crops to intersect with the

12 Semi-colonialization under the Tang growing riverine routes of trade and perhaps to purchase some of the finished goods: cookware, religious nostrums, fabric, even agricultural tools that were for sale. Even more fundamentally, the very crops on which the peasants of north and south relied were different, both in kind and in agricultural practice. Northern agriculture relied heavily on coarse grains such as millet and sorghum, with smaller amounts of wheat. Although these are extensive dryland crops, the unreliable and sporadic rainfall across the Central Plain and the river basins west of the Taihang Mountains required irrigation. Such labor requirements encouraged collective agriculture on large estates, an arrangement that in turn fostered a form of serfdom. Across the south, on the other hand, where rainfall is abundant, the primary grain and most important crop was rice, an intensive wetland crop. Because rice does best with wet roots, field preparation demands intensive labor on small plots, which in turn encouraged semi-private holdings worked by families making their own autonomous decisions. In contrast particularly to the dry land crops of the north, however, there is a payback: Labor invested is rewarded with higher returns. Furthermore, although the caloric and protein yield of an individual rice kernel is comparable to the dryland cereals, because the seed to yield ratio of rice—the number of harvested grain kernels produced by an individual plant—is so much greater than other grains, both the protein and caloric yield of a rice paddy was far greater than that from most dry land fields.13 Moreover, in much if not most of the south, paddy fields could be double, and even triple, cropped, either with multiple rice harvests, or perhaps more often with a rotation of crops. Even though each successive harvest had diminishing returns, the overall yield was greatly enhanced. Consequently, where northern peasants tended to live immiserated lives, southern peasants lived in an economy with agricultural surplus. In 581, taking advantage of a messy succession crisis in the reigning imperial line of the Northern Zhou, the last of the northern dynasties through the era of division, Yang Jian usurped power in the north and assumed the throne as Emperor Wen of the Sui dynasty. The usurpation was rationalized in traditional terms: The Zhou court was decadent, immoral, wasteful, and so the ruling Northern Zhou imperial house had lost the cosmic mandate. Yet there was always a more purposeful incentive. His intention, Yang professed, was to restore the glory of Han. He intended to restore the unitary holistic empire. As early as 581, as he engaged in securing control of the Central Plain, Yang asserted his ultimate goal was to “annex the South” (bingyao Jiangnan).14 Thus in 589, having overcome all resistance and secured his position in the north, he launched a coordinated attack on the Chen, the last of the southern dynasties, which fell with little resistance.15 Before the year was out, the unitary holistic empire had been politically restored, bringing an end to more than 300 years of division. Equally important, however, was Yang Jian’s plan to facilitate transfer of the vast wealth of the south, especially its agricultural bounty, to the north.

Semi-colonialization under the Tang 13 As part of the restoration of the glory of the ancient past, Yang undertook the restoration of the ancient imperial capital on the Wei River. The conundrum he faced was the inability of the hinterland of his new capital to support the city he had built.16 In 583, for example, faced with city’s empty granaries, Yang ordered prefectures across the north to send grain in order to stave off a looming disaster.17 For long term security, however, he needed access to the surplus of the south. In 587, as he prepared for the southern campaign, he was advised that “the land north of the Yangtze River is cold, so the harvest is late, but the paddy fields (shuitian) of the south are harvested early.”18 Although the advisor’s comment related specifically to how this would provide support for the planned invasion, the point that the early harvest in the south could do so while in the cold north “the harvest is late” emphasized as well the south’s agricultural bounty. The martial north needed the economic resources of the wealthy south to complete and sustain the restored holistic empire. As early as 584, the year after the dearth in the capital granaries, Yang Jian had commanded construction of a reliable water link between his new capital, located near the site of the ancient Han capital on the Wei River, which is prone to silting, and the Yellow River. Although Yang Jian’s goal was to facilitate shipping between the capital and the Central Plain, this became the first in a series of links between the Sui imperial capital and the breadbasket regions of the south. Yang Jian’s son Yang Guang (569–618), who succeeded his father as Emperor Yang (r. 604–618), furthered this goal by opening a series of canal and riverine links tying the Yellow River just east of the Taihang Mountains to the Yangtze delta and ultimately to the Hangzhou Bay, the two most productive agricultural regions under the empire’s control. These links have long been known as the Grand Canal, one of the most ambitious engineering projects in human history and a remarkable engineering feat. Ironically, however, the first step in this process had nothing to do with grain. Rather, in 605 Yang Guang ordered the shipment of “exotic goods and strange rocks, … precious woods and striking grasses, precious birds and wild animals” from “south of the Great River [i.e., Yangtze] and north of the Five Mountains [that divide southernmost Jiangnan from Guangdong]” to ornament a new palace. For this he ordered the mobilization of “more than a million” laborers to “open the Tongji Canal,” which provided a link between the Yellow and Huai Rivers. About the same time he further ordered construction of the Han Conduit to link the Huai and Yellow Rivers.19 Finally, in 610 Yang Guang ordered construction of the Jiangnan Canal, the final link between the Yellow River and Hangzhou Bay.20 With the completion of this leg, it was possible to ship by water goods from all the established productive regions of the south to the political and cultural centers in the north. As Mark Lewis has remarked,

14 Semi-colonialization under the Tang [T]he Grand Canal joined into a unified polity two regions [i.e., the Yellow and Yangtze River basins] that for four centuries had developed independently. This linkage became ever more important as economic and demographic growth made the south the most populous and the most productive region of China.21 In the years that followed the south was a critical source of men and material as Yang Guang marshalled his resources to invade the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo. As Sima Guang (1019–1086), the greatest historian of the eleventh century, rivalled only by Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), noted in his Zizhi tongjian, [In the fall of 611], the people from the regions south of the Yangtze and Huai Rivers were directed to use their boats to transport the rice from the Liyang and Luokou storehouses [located in Henan and Hebei respectively] to Zhuo Prefecture [a staging place for the invasion]. The boats were strung out bow to stern for over one thousand li.22 Although we know that granaries were strung along the canal network which sent supplemental assessments to the Sui capital region, we have no revenue data through which to assess in numbers how important the southern breadbasket had become. Nevertheless, empirical evidence argues strongly that it was during the Tang dynasty that the balance between north and south swung from merely supplemental to truly essential and exploitative, as both the economy and population of the south continued to expand. To illustrate, according to data collected by Robert Hartwell, in 609, twenty years after the Sui had conquered the Chen, less than one-quarter of the registered population lived the south. The next comprehensive data set compiled a century-and-a-half later on the eve of the cataclysmic An Lushan Rebellion found almost forty percent of the registered population was in the south.23 Census data from anywhere in the premodern world—to say nothing of such data today—is rife with problems; although China offers more extensive data than any other classical civilization, it is problematic in many ways to compare one census to another as methods of collection and criteria for enumeration changed. There are, moreover, several hidden variables in these data that should not be neglected. Most importantly, who was registered? This is a theme I shall return to in the chapters that follow; suffice here to note that registration of the indigenous southern peoples was a slow and sometimes difficult process. As the Sinitic demographic presence increased, however, especially in the major river valleys feeding the Yangtze basin from the south, more and more of the indigenous population accommodated to the culture northern immigrants brought with them and entered the registration rolls. This leads to two observations. First, because registration of the nonSinitic indigenous population was uneven and so incomplete, the overall

Semi-colonialization under the Tang 15 population of the south most likely remained greater, in many areas perhaps even substantially greater, than the registered numbers suggest. Second and derivatively, the apparent growth in southern population between the early seventh and mid-eighth centuries in part reflects the growing number of indigenous southerners who registered. Both points must be remembered, but neither refutes that north-to-south migration was a real and important phenomenon. Although this emerging accommodation between Sinitic immigrants and the indigenous population smoothed relations across much of the south, it did not lead to a parallel cultural accommodation with the north. In an effort to reach out to the defeated elite of the Chen dynasty, the last southern dynasty, Yang Jian had both welcomed Chen officials to his realm and extended a ten-year tax remittance across the south, policies that facilitated reintegration into a single holistic empire. However, when Li Yuan (566–635; the Duke of Tang, reigned as Tang Gaozu, 618–726) accepted the abdication of Yang You (605–619), a grandson of Yang Guang whom he had placed on the throne following Guang’s death in 618 as a step toward his own usurpation, this initiative toward accommodation was forgotten. From its founding in 618 until its final dissolution late in the nineth and early tenth centuries,24 the Tang empire subordinated the south to a northern power structure. As I shall discuss in the following chapters, by any measure of such power: among many we could cite examination success; official assignments; access to the imperial court; and marriage connections, men from the south, whether of emigrant northern or indigenous southern heritage, were marginalized. As Liu Zongyuan said of the indigenous people of the far southwest where he served his exile, “They reject the transformation of civilization and abuse human empathy” (cited in Introduction, note 19). To the Tang court and the political structure that supported it, the south was a source of critically needed material goods, especially grain but also a range of exotica including imports from abroad through Guangzhou, the empire’s most important port, access to which enhanced the prestige of the court and the powerful families that surrounded it. But the people of the south, be they the indigenous natives or the descendants of northern emigrants who had been seduced by southern wiles, had “rejected the transformation of civilization” and did not deserve to be in positions of power. In the following essays I will explore the methods whereby the Tang marginalized and subordinated the south. To conclude this chapter, however, let me return to its opening. In defining colonization, I pointed to two variables: First, colonies were established and ruled by conqueror-settlers who, second, saw their colony as a source of wealth. Both were true of southern China. For well over three centuries following the fall of the Han dynasty in 220, the Yangtze basin and lands to its south had been ruled by independent courts, but in 589 the Chen empire was conquered by the ascendant Sui. As explained above, Yang Jian’s approach to the conquered south was solicitous, but it was colored by paternalism. His own heritage came out of the

16 Semi-colonialization under the Tang northwest. “He was,” as Arthur Wright put it, “a typical north-western aristocrat of the sixth century.”25 Although his paternal lineage emphasized its Chinese roots, like all such families at the time, through the centuries of alien dynasties in the north Yang Jian’s forbearers had intermarried with the non-Chinese elites amongst whom they lived and whom they often served. Although his mother was ostensibly Chinese,26 Yang Jian himself married a woman of Xiongnu grasslands heritage. Unsurprisingly, as he assembled the ruling coalition of his new dynasty he surrounded himself with men who had assisted his usurpation of the throne in 581, most of whom were of like backgrounds. Again quoting Wright, “[Only] one man alone among [Yang Jian’s] top advisers had a full command of the Confucian heritage and was from the eastern [i.e., Central] plain.”27 By far the majority of his coalition was composed of military men who shared his northern background and a suspicion of the decadent south. Officials of the conquered Chen may have been treated respectfully, but they were not given positions of power. By 618, when Li Yuan usurped the throne and established the Tang dynasty, the south, even the indigenous southern cultures, had generally been incorporated into the holistic empire. Take, for example, the tale of Yang Shilin, whose family “for generations had been tribal chiefs among the Man barbarians” (shi Manqiu) in the Huai’an region (modern Anhui). In an expression of his non-Sinitic ethnic heritage, as the Sui unraveled Yang Shilin (no relation to Yang Jian) had directed the killing of the local Sui officials and taken control of the area. At the same time, however, in response to Li Yuan’s usurpation, Zhu Can, a mid-level regional Sui official, had rebelled against the new order. As Zhu’s force of 200,000 men swarmed the land, they devoured the stored grain and ultimately, having swept the land clean and lacking other supplies, they turned to devouring the people themselves. Facing Zhu’s depredations, Yang and other regional leaders rallied their own force and defeated him. At that point Yang Shilin was the most powerful figure in the Huai’an region; he would seem to have been poised to resist the reassertion of any imperial authority in the name of the Man tribes he led. Instead, rather than prolong his autonomy, on his own volition he led his forces to submit to the Tang prince Li Yao. In grateful acknowledgement, Li Yuan appointed Yang a prefectural regional administrator (xingtai).28 Similarly in 620 the Western Cuan Man people in the far southwest sent tribute to the Tang court as confirmation of their submission to Tang rule. As the Sui had unraveled, however, the tribal leader had led a rebellion. Unlike Yang Shilin, however, he had been defeated by the surviving Sui force, who promptly executed him. His sons were then enslaved and relocated. Once in power, however, Li Yuan had appointed the leader’s son Cuan Hongda as a prefectural magistrate and ordered him to return to his father’s home and properly bury him. It was this gracious gesture that led to the tribe’s submission, which they presented to Duan Lun, a native of Shandong and prefectural magistrate representing the court in this remote region. Four years later Cuan Hongda reaffirmed his loyalty to the Tang when he helped

Semi-colonialization under the Tang 17 Tang authorities put down a rebellion. Subsequently, “the Man and Yi commanders from the surrounding several thousand li saw the trend and submitted.”29 In each case leaders of non-Sinitic tribes accepted Tang rule, but in each case it was through subordination to a northern power structure embodied in the men to whom they gave their submission. Easy accommodation to the new order, moreover, was not universal; pockets of resistance occurred as well. For example, in 620 the Man chieftain Ran Zhaoze rebelled and took control of several prefectures. Li Xiaogong, a nephew of Li Yuan, responded, but his efforts bore no fruit. Li Jing, a major Tang general who was not related to the imperial family, then captured Ran, whom he executed, and took five thousand of his followers prisoner.30 In 648 the Songwai Man of western Sichuan rebelled, resulting in another vicious campaign resulting in the death or capture of “over one thousand” and forcing the survivors to flee “into the mountains and valleys.”31 A similar outbreak of local resistance occurred in the 660s among the Yue people on the southeast coast, in the border region between Quanzhou (Fujian) and Chaozhou (Guangdong) where Sinitic settlement was only just beginning.32 This uprising traced back to the early fifth century when Sun En led the indigenous population of the Hangzhou Bay region in a nativist rebellion against the Jin dynasty. Facing defeat, a band of rebels had fled south, ultimately finding refuge in Guangdong. There they tried to keep the rebellion going, but again they were defeated. In a final rejection of their defeat and the rising Tang power, however, the survivors fled back up the coast to the Quanzhou/Chaozhou border region, where the immigrant Sinitic population was effectively nil. There they found refuge “in the mountains and on the seas.”33 Yue Shi (930–1007), in his Comprehensive Geography of the Taiping Era, picked up events at this point. In 625 the regional commander representing the Tang court struck a bargain with the local tribal leaders, who accepted Tang authority in return for a reduced tax rate: “Their leaders … ordered their adherents collectively to desist from banditry. In 636 their lands were taxed for the first time at half the normal rate.” However, this did not put an end to the unrest. Within decades, as Sinitic settlement expanded and pushed the indigenous peoples deeper into the mountainous interior, settlers in the border region appealed to the court for protection against their on-going depredations. In 669 the emperor announced that because “LiaoMan,” a collective name for indigenous, non-Sinitic southerners, were disturbing the border area, he had ordered Chen Zheng (d. 677) to lead a band of armed men to put them down. The details get a bit hazy at this juncture, but it appears that Chen Zheng was a native of the Huai River basin, a region that sat midway between “northern” and “southern.” He apparently was serving as a commander of a Tang garrison in eastern Guangdong.34 In response to the emperor’s command, he led a force of roughly fifty men with their families

18 Semi-colonialization under the Tang into the contested area, where they settled as an occupying force. Within a decade Zheng died of natural causes and was succeeded as leader of the outpost by his son Yuanguang (657–711). Although we can imagine there was a current of hostility between the new settlers and the indigenous population, there is no record of specific conflict until 686, when “the Guangdong bandit Chen Qian united with the Man chieftains … and attacked Chaozhou.” Yuanguang led a successful campaign against the rebels, kicking them out of Chaozhou and back into the mountains, but the unrest continued for in 711 Yuanguang was killed in a skirmish in the interior uplands. An accompanying debate at court concluded that “remote places [such as the Quanzhou/Chaozhou border region] are uncouth and yet to be civilized (xiafang pirang).”35 Nevertheless there is no record of further disorder in the area. In a twist that echoes Tang frontier policy where indigenous tribal leaders were given hereditary authority, the apparently Sinitic Chen family governed the border region as magistrate for roughly another century.36 As the Tang order gained control across the south, policy toward the nonSinitic indigenous people combined Yang Jian’s imperial paternalism with new forms of control and oppression. Along the remoter fringes of the empire where Sinitic settlement was almost non-existent the court established “loose-rein prefectures” (jimi zhou), where indigenous political structures were left intact, albeit under ultimate northern authority; this was the outcome of Yang Shilin’s submission to the Tang. Where Sinitic settlement was present, however, the indigenous population was pushed away from the fertile agricultural lands that settlers desired, as happened on the Quanzhou/ Chaozhou border region. It was easy enough to marginalize and stigmatize the indigenous peoples, whose speech, customs, rituals, foods, clothing, and physical appearance were all distinct. More telling is what happened to those who claimed a Sinitic heritage. As I shall explain much more fully in the following chapters, southern scholars were notably unrepresented in the imperial examinations that increasingly became the route into successful bureaucratic careers. Rather, southerners were given a role in their own administration through “southern selection,” the facilitated examination system open only to southerners because they were deemed unprepared to compete with northerners in the official imperial exams. Through “southern selection” southern scholars were steered into careers in low-ranking local offices in the south. Invariably this placed them under the supervisory authority of men from the north who had gone through standard lines of recruitment. Just as the British many centuries later allowed the native peoples of South Asia a small degree of selfadministration, but always under the authority of colonial officials, so the Tang granted southerners a limited degree of regional authority, but under the supervisory authority of northerners. It was not impossible for a native southerner to find a place for himself in the formal bureaucracy of the early Tang, as the case of Zhang Jiuling

Semi-colonialization under the Tang 19 (678–740) illustrates. Zhang was a native of a mountain district in southernmost Lingnan, where his ancestors had lived for generations. Although his ethnicity is uncertain, he was a southerner at least by birth if not by heritage. Nevertheless he earned a “presented scholar” degree (jinshi) at the apex of the Tang examination system and rose to the highest levels of the Tang bureaucracy. But Zhang Jiuling’s very exceptionalism makes the point. For all his success, of the dozens of kinsmen listed in his family genealogy, only three earned “presented scholar” degrees and none left an imprint on imperial politics.37 Throughout the Tang, in fact, very few southerners had careers in the standing bureaucracy. As marginal as southerners were politically, the south itself was anything but. As broached previously, throughout the Tang the demographic balance between north and south was shifting. At first the shift was slow, a continuation of the steady flow that had been underway for centuries. As noted previously, between the census of the Sui dynasty dated 609 and that of the Tang generally dated 742, the registered population of the south had grown from about a quarter of the total registered population to about forty percent. Following the cataclysmic rebellion led by An Lushan in the mid-eighth century, however, growth throughout the south accelerated; by the time of the next comprehensive imperial census commonly dated 1080, 54% of the registered population was spread across the south. Even more impressively, the populations of the central Yangtze basin and southeast coast had grown more than five-fold, while that of the lower reaches of the river, including its extremely fertile delta region where the registered population was already substantial in the mid-eighth century, had more than doubled.38 Such pronounced demographic growth was reflective of a parallel evolution in economic productivity. This can be seen in several ways, some of which are partially tangential to this discussion yet all of which are relevant. For example, as has been mentioned previously, Guangzhou provided a window into the fabulously rich South Seas trade, a maritime network that linked the empire to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. This was a source of imported exotica: spices and medicinals, aromatics, and specialty woods used in both temple and palace construction, among a range of imports that enhanced the prestige of those who could afford them. In return, the empire exported silks and bullion,39 but the most valuable exports may have been porcelains and stonewares such as those found in the cargo of a vessel that sank early in the nineth century off Belitung Island in the Java Sea. The wreck yielded over 60,000 pieces, the majority of which were the product of porcelain kilns in Changsha (Hunan). In order to realize income from this trade as well as to regulate exports, the court established a trade superintendency in Guangzhou and required all vessels both coming from and going to abroad to submit to inspection. All incoming ships had to pay a tariff that fed court coffers.40 The rise and spread of local markets offer another perspective on southern productivity. The Tang had inherited a highly centralized system of

20 Semi-colonialization under the Tang government-controlled markets, one that officials initially attempted to extend into the south.41 In the long run, however, this was unsuccessful as a network of unregulated markets had evolved outside the official market system that was based on organic patterns of exchange at natural points of intersection such as river fords or mountain passes where traffic naturally funneled together.42 Among many reasons for this, the explosion of land under cultivation prompted by the unprecedented expansion in population across the south was central. The myriad river-bottom lowlands, extensive river deltas, and coastal plains of Jiangnan and Huainan as well as areas farther south opened the way for a wide diversity of crops that were not options farther north. Double and even triple cropping led to unprecedented yields. As population grew, even the uplands that separated the river basins began to be cleared and terraced, new land that was devoted especially to tea and orchards. As Denis Twitchett concluded, the great commercial cities that emerged especially in the Yangtze basin “became the regional centers of a growing network of small market towns and local markets in the countryside … By the ninth century a new economic hierarchy of settlements based on the regional marketing system was beginning to emerge, … adding a totally new dimension to the process of urban growth.”43 As critical as these developments were to both the regional economy of the south and the overall imperial economy, there is no doubt that to the court and the northern elite that surrounded it rice was the south’s most important product. Although the agricultural yield of the Central Plain remained an essential source of foodstuffs for the grain-deficit capital region on the Wei River until the court lost effective control of much of the Plain following the An Lushan Rebellion, among the elite rice increasingly displaced the dry land cereals that were the most important product of the Plain as the most desirable grain. Well before the Rebellion, the cost of shipping grain to the capital at Chang’an, west of the Taihang Mountains where the grain deficit was chronic, pushed the court to spend a growing portion of time in Luoyang, the “Eastern Capital” that lies east of the mountains on the Yellow River with direct access to the Sui canal system. Consequently it was a cheaper destination for the goods it transported, a growing percentage of which came from the south.44 Although rice reached the capital region through commercial networks, it nevertheless illustrates the extractive relationship between the politically dominant north and the economically thriving south. As others have explained, southern peasants commonly brought grain to the local tax station, where it would be converted into an equivalent commodity, generally cloth, that was easier to transport.45 The grain itself, however, would then enter commercial channels through which it would be sent north to feed the chronically grain-deficit capital region. In short, the north was increasingly dependent on supplies of southern grain. As Charles Peterson has written,

Semi-colonialization under the Tang 21 [Following the rebellion t]he provinces of the Yangtze and Huai valleys acquired a new and critical importance. Because of the limited control exercised by the central government elsewhere, this region, with its increasing population and great productivity, became the dynasty’s chief source of revenue. As a result the canal system by which the revenue was transferred to the capital, became the absolute life-line for the court, without which it was starved of supplies and of funds.46 The south, in short, supplied the capital region, in return for which it received political administration. The wealth of the south was essential to sustain the power of the north. Although the south by the nineth century was substantially more prosperous than the north, in no small part because of the north’s dependency on southern grain, the relationship between north and south was unequal. Even as the Yangtze basin and southeast coast, the two most prosperous regions of the empire, remained reliable sources of tax revenue, the systematic exclusion of southerners from the levers of power left the south at best loosely integrated into the unitary holistic empire. This can be illustrated by the eulogy Han Yu wrote for his examination classmate Ouyang Zhan that was quoted in the Introduction. Before turning to Ouyang, Han rhapsodized on his colleague’s home in Fujian: “The land of MinYue [i.e., Fujian] is abundantly fertile. It is blessed with the joys of scenery and wildlife.” Although exceptional for his examination success, Ouyang, Han wrote, was not alone: “there have been highly cultivated men who understood literature and governance as well as anyone from the Central Plain.” Having become the first scholar from Fujian to pass the imperial jinshi exam, Ouyang Zhan did “go forth and serve,” but he did not open a wide path for his fellow scholars from Fujian any more than Zhang Jiuling had for those from the farthest south. The alienation that is implicit in narratives such as this began to openly manifest in the middle decades of the nineth century when local and regional rebellion broke out in isolated locations across the south. The unrest crescendoed in the mid-870s when Wang Xianzhi (d. 878), a native of Yellow River basin on the edge of the Central Plain, launched a rebellion in the face of a spate of natural disasters. Soon he was joined by Huang Chao. Robert Somers has proposed that both Wang and Huang, as well as a host of others who joined the wave of rebellion in the 870s and 880s, were driven by a generalized anger at “the system” they encountered. Faced with multiple disturbances, natural disasters leading to poor harvests, and an inability to access the legal levers of power, they rebelled.47 Although Wang was cornered and killed in 878, Huang carried on in a campaign that swept through the south, disrupting local hierarchies and forcing new local leadership to the fore.48 Huang Chao was killed in 884, but not until he had rampaged through the south, led his army back to the north, and finally chased the emperor out of the capital region. Although the rebellion was defeated, the Tang court never

22 Semi-colonialization under the Tang regained its legitimacy or its authority. The empire dissolved into a plethora of armed bands that sought to fill the power vacuum Huang Chao had left behind. Many of those who led these bands were themselves veteran allies of Huang or other dissenters. Power in the Central Plain and Wei River basin, the ancient heartland of the north, was taken by Zhu Wen (852–912), who proclaimed himself the founding emperor of the Liang dynasty, the first of a succession of short-lived dynasties that controlled the north for the next five decades. Across the south, however, seven polities emerged: Wu in Jiangnan; WuYue around the Hangzhou Bay; Min in Fujian; Han (or “southern” Han) in the far south; Chu in Hunan; Shu (or “former” Shu) in Sichuan, and Jingnan at the juncture of the Han and Yangtze Rivers. These are the “southern guo” on which the following essays will focus. Was the relationship between north and south under the Tang a form of colonialism? If my definition offered at the beginning of this chapter stands, then I conclude unequivocally, “Yes.” The south was subordinate to the needs of the north. Although southerners had an opportunity to administer themselves through the “southern selection” system, they were almost always under the authority of northerners, of the men who represented imperial authority in Chang’an or Loyang, just as the native civil servants of British India or the legislators of colonial North America were beholden to the authority of their British governors and ultimately to the powers in London. When that imperial power collapsed, far from rallying around any effort to perpetuate the holistic empire, southern elites were quick to rally behind the separatist goals of men such as Yang Xingmi (852–905), founder of the (Jiangnan) Wu guo. Profound consequences followed, as the following chapters demonstrate.

Notes 1 Oxford English Dictionary Online (www.OED.com, accessed September, 2020). 2 Kenneth Pomeranz, in a seminal book on eighteenth and nineteenth century history, has explained Europe’s ascendance over China and the world explicitly in terms of the wealth the British extracted from North America; see Pomeranz (2000). 3 See Jiao (2007). 4 Sima Qian, Shi ji, 40:1a. 5 Yantie lun, 8:26b, translated by Holcombe (2001), 21, with minor adaptation. 6 It should be noted that as I am using it the term “southerner” masks some important differences. It included the myriad local and regional cultures and peoples of the south, but it also included those who had migrated from the north and adopted the south as their home. From the perspective of the educated elite of the north there was little to choose between the two, but among them the difference was important. See the relevant discussions in Clark (2016). 7 Charles Holcombe has argued that the “invaders” were actually non-Sinitic bands that had long been settled inside the empire’s boundaries, thus the narrative of external invasion is flawed; see Holcombe (2001), 116–128.

Semi-colonialization under the Tang 23 8 Chenshu, 35:486. A later tradition added four additional surnames: Zhan 詹, Qiu 邱, He 何, and Hu 胡. Whereas the four surnames listed in the Chenshu have long been very common, the latter four are very uncommon. 9 See Clark (2016), Part One, “Transitions,” where this is the central theme. See also the relevant discussions in Clark (2007). 10 See Clark (2016), Chapter 3, “The Sinitic Accommodation with the South.” 11 See, for example, Paul (1984). 12 Lewis (2009), 94–102, with references. 13 On this, consult the works of Francesca Bray: Bray (1984) and Bray (1986). See also Amano (1962). For a simple metric, see wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet#Comparison_with _other_major_staple_foods (accessed August 16, 2020). Bray (1986), 15, compares a yield of 3–4:1 for the dryland cereals to 75–150:1 for rice under traditional agricultural methods. 14 ZZTJ, 175:5438. 15 On the rise of Sui and campaigns to restore the holistic empire, see Wright (1979), 110–114. 16 On Yang Jian’s construction of a new capital near the ancient Han capital Chang’an in the Wei River basin, see Lewis (2009), 251–254. 17 ZZTJ 175: 5469. 18 ZZTJ 176:5492. 19 ZZTJ 180:5618. 20 ZZTJ 181:5652. 21 Lewis (2009), 255. 22 ZZTJ 181:5654. All sections of the southern canal system were explicitly built large enough to accommodate the imperial barges (longzhou) by which Yang Guang toured the south on trips that originated from his capital on the Wei River. Arthur Wright has portrayed Yang Guang as enamored of the south after he spent nine years as Governor-General in Yangzhou; see Wright (1979), especially 115–119. 23 Table 1, “Regional Distribution of Chinese Households, A.D. 2–1948,” in Hartwell (1982), 369. Following the macro-regional model developed by G. William Skinner, Hartwell divided his data into regions. Two regions were in the north: Northwest and North (Central Plain). He divided southern data into five: Lingnan, Southeast, Upper Yangtze, Middle Yangtze, and Lower Yangtze. There is no data for the Southeast (primarily Fujian) in the Sui figures. It should be noted that not all assessments of the relative weight of northern/southern population agree with Hartwell’s data, although his conclusions are largely accepted. 24 The last Tang emperor yielded the throne in 907. However, following the Huang Chao Rebellion (874–884) the court was never able to reconsolidate its authority. 25 Wright (1979), 57. 26 Suishu 79:1787. The identification in this passage rests on the claim that she was a Lü 吕 from the northeast, where the Lü were a prominent Chinese lineage. 27 Wright (1979), 71. The exception to whom Wright referred was Li Delin. 28 ZZTJ 187: 5838–5839. On the meaning of xingtai, see Hucker (1985), 246, #2598, where the author explains xingtai were “established temporarily at the beginning of the dynasty to administer each newly subjugated area.” 29 ZZTJ 188:5887 and 191:5990–91. Accounts such as this appear numerous times in the annals of the first years of the Tang; see ZZTJ 188–191 passim. 30 ZZTJ 188:5879–80. 31 ZZTJ 199:6255–56. 32 Note that terms such as Man and Yue are generalized ethnonyms used by northern scholars to summarily characterize the disparate peoples and cultures of the south. To describe an individual as either is akin to our contemporary

24 Semi-colonialization under the Tang

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

characterization of peoples and cultures of Central America as “Hispanic,” a generalized ethnonym that covers a wide range of local realities. For this and the following, see the relevant passages in ZZTJ and Yue Shi, Taiping huanyu ji (henceforth TPHYJ) 102:2b. See also Clark (2016), 40–44, with relevant citations. See Clark (1982), and Clark (2016), 117–122. Composite translation and summary of BMTZ 1:11–12 and MS 41:1012. Discussed in Clark (1990). On Zhang Jiuling and his wider family, see XTS 72c:2681–2707. See also the more extended discussion in Clark (2016), 55–59. Table 1 and Table 2, “Periods of Development of Chinese Macroregions, A.D. 2– 1948,” in Hartwell (1982), 375. See Twitchett and Stargardt (2002). Flecker (2005) and Heng (2014). There have been many discussions of the Tang market system in a range of languages, but see especially Twitchett (1966), drawing on Japanese scholarship. Though dated, it remains authoritative. See, for example, Chang (1961). Twitchett (1979), 29. See also Chang (1961), and Jiang and Zou (2010). On this challenge, see Twitchett (1970). See also Twitchett and Wechsler (1979), 277–278, and Twitchett (1979b), 355–356. See Twitchett (1970), 51–58. See also Wechsler (1979), 209–210. Peterson (1979), 486. See also Lewis (2009b), who quotes the poet Du Mu (fl. 830–852) in almost identical terms (p. 12). For both the patterns of unrest in the mid-eighth century and the Huang Chao Rebellion, see Somers (1979), especially 723–736. See Clark (2009), especially 133–158. See also Clark (2011), 47–78.

3

Politics in an Age of Division North–South Relations and Inter-state Negotiation

After three centuries of holistic empire under the Sui and Tang dynasties, late in the ninth century China entered a prolonged period of political division. In the north an unstable succession of polities known to orthodox history as the Five Dynasties emerged out of the rubble of the Tang dynasty to hold power over the ancient heartland, centered on the lower basin of the Yellow River that defines the Central Plain and the adjacent Guannei region defined by the basin of the Wei River. As heirs to the imperial legacy of the north, a legacy that had long been particularly linked to the Central Plain, these polities claimed the Cosmic, or “heavenly,” Mandate (tianming) with the panoply of ritual traditions that involved—a claim, it bears noting, that has been affirmed in the orthodox historical narrative ever since. Across the south, a different order took shape. Known in the orthodox narrative as the Ten Kingdoms,1 an array of polities emerged out of the disorder that enveloped the south in the last decades of increasingly nominal and fractured Tang rule. Although each of these polities was functionally independent, each had to negotiate a bilateral relationship with the succession of powers in the north. It is always historically problematic to point to a particular event or moment as the beginning of something. Some might well argue that the onset of the unravelling of the holistic Tang empire was the mid-eighth century rebellion led by the mercenary general An Lushan (703–757), when the empire was shaken to its core. Certainly the Tang court was never fully able to reclaim the legitimacy it had held through its first century and a half as some of the wealthiest provinces in the empire’s northeast remained functionally autonomous, beyond effective imperial authority. The restabilization and endurance of the diminished dynasty after suppression of An Lushan, when the court was chased out of its capital and left for a while virtually without resources, is striking. Without the resources of the northeast, the court’s economic resilience was challenged. Furthermore, throughout the years that followed unrest continued as a background noise. Nevertheless, it was not until late in the 9th century, in the face of drought and famine, that the pace and severity of rebellion once again challenged the dynasty’s survival. This culminated in the uprising associated with Huang DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249-3

26 Politics in an Age of Division Chao (835–884) that erupted in the mid-870s. After marauding across the landscape in the fertile lands between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, Huang encountered a series of setbacks that forced him to turn south. In 878 he marched his forces through western Jiangnan, making inconclusive feints toward such economic centers as Yangzhou and Hangzhou before he cut east to the coast, where he sacked Fuzhou. He reached the great port city of Guangzhou in 879. There in a fit of anger because he felt the court made him an insulting offer as an enticement to end his rebellion, he allegedly massacred as many as 120,000 foreign residents, mainly “Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians,” who together had made Guangzhou the most important port perhaps in all the world.2 He then headed back north, once again menacing the great economic centers of the southeast coast and lower Yangtze before breaking through the court’s defenses and forcing the emperor to flee behind the mountain screen that defines Sichuan where it had once sheltered from An Lushan. Huang was finally cornered and killed in 884, but the economic, demographic, and political landscape he left in his wake was irreparably altered. Tang survived in name, but the court’s legitimacy had been shattered. In the face of the very real power vacuum that resulted the landscape was overrun: by rebels who were driven by narrow dreams of wealth and power, and by men who allegedly exercised their own military power nominally in the name of the emperor. For more than two decades conflict was chronic, but out of it emerged a revised landscape. In 907 Zhu Wen, who for two decades had kept the Tang court alive even as he had usurped imperial authority, deposed the last Tang emperor and proclaimed the Liang dynasty (907–923). This was the first of a rapid succession of dynasties that governed the Central Plain between 907 and 960, when Zhao Kuangyin proclaimed the Song dynasty and set about restoring the holistic empire, which neither Zhu nor his successors in the north had done. It was, however, what transpired in the south after Huang Chao that is the focus of the present discussion. Tang authority in the Yangtze basin and lands to the south was already in decline even before Huang’s southern campaign. In his aftermath there was no overarching authority. Although the court continued to appoint civil officials, they were increasingly subject to the authority of a variety of forces that stepped into the vacuum to carve out regional polities. In Jiangnan, defined by the lower course of the Yangtze River and its Gan River tributary and which had been especially hard hit by Huang’s marauding army, Yang Xingmi built on a career as a local bandit to become the dominant force. In the area surrounding the Hangzhou Bay, Qian Liu (852–932) had led a local militia that had formed to successfully defend Hangzhou city from Huang and had gained recognition as the dominant local warlord. In Fujian, in the wake of another local warlord who unsuccessfully tried to claim control, lines of authority were completely shattered, leaving an opening for a band of refugees who had fled the decimation Huang had left in Huainan. Led by Wang Chao, these refugees, having first secured control over Quanzhou, the

Politics in an Age of Division 27 major urban center in the south, removed the last court-appointed prefect in Fuzhou and took control. In one of the most eventful narratives, Wang Jian (847–918), like Yang Xingmi, first comes to our attention as a local bandit. When Huang seized the imperial capital at Chang’an, Wang allied with forces loyal to the court and contributed to Huang’s defeat. In the convoluted politics that followed, however, he was demoted to a minor prefectural post on the Sichuan border. Realizing that the court was on its last legs, he broke away and consolidated an independent polity in Sichuan. By the end of the first decade of the tenth century seven autonomous polities had emerged across the south. Although each polity was distinct, there was one challenge all of them faced: How to relate to the northern dynasty, whose claim to the Cosmic Mandate was legitimized by its control of the Central Plain, the ancient imperial heartland. As is argued in the Preface, to provide a context to the following discussion some definition of terms is essential. More specifically, what was a wang 王? Equally, what was a guo 國? Or a di 帝 or a dai 代? At one level these are terms that all seem easy enough. A wang, as English speakers are all taught as we study the Chinese language, was a “king,” and a di an “emperor.” A dai was a dynasty, and a guo… well, a guo is a bit harder because the modern concept of “nation,” the standard rendering, is meaningless in bygone times, but a guo was ruled by a wang, so perhaps “kingdom” will do. All the standard English equivalents have meaning to an English speaker. Ultimately, however, all such translations confuse the point. Words, and the relationships that lie behind them, must be understood in their own context. Even by the Tang each of these words had a long history, both as words and as descriptors of relationships. So let me repeat: What was a wang? Although myriad early variants of the character appear in the oracle bones,3 where the word already appears to have had meanings linked to ruling, it is used in later sources in general reference to rulers and their abodes. The term appears in many passages in the classical texts identified with the Zhou. For example, among many possible citations from the Book of Documents, one of the Sinitic world’s most ancient texts with documents deriving from even the early decades of Zhou rule, is the observation: “It is said that the ‘Cosmic Son’ (tianzi) is the father and mother of the people. He is the wang of all under the cosmic umbrella (tianxia).”4 Likewise, the Book of Poetry, perhaps as a complete text a bit later than the Documents but certainly partially deriving from the early Zhou, records words of the Shang ruler to the conquered people of a minor polity called Jingchu: “Formerly, in the time of the accomplishments of [the Shang founding ruler] Tang, among the Di and Jiang [barbarians] there were none who dared not bring their offering, who dared not come before the wang.”5 The text does not specifically identify Tang by title, although in keeping with the Zhou era use of the word it clearly identifies the wang as a ruler. The term continues to appear widely in the literature of the latter half of the Zhou, the eras known as the Spring and Autumn and Warring States, but

28 Politics in an Age of Division often as the title of an aspirational figure rather than a specific historical person. In the Analects, for example, wang only appears seven times, always in reference either to an abstract idealized leader or to Wen-wang and Wuwang, the Zhou founders whom Confucius is said to have believed embodied the ideal. Rulers themselves are most often referred to as gong, a title normally translated as “duke.” Similarly, the fourth-century BCE Confucian interpreter Xunzi wrote: “Formerly among those who had a guo, those who ruled justly were wang, while those who ruled by trust were autocrats.”6 It is, however, the Rites of Zhou, dating from the early decades of the Han dynasty, that makes the most forthright statement: “Only wang can establish guo,”7 thereby establishing a direct link between wang and guo. And so to a second question: What was a guo? Like wang, guo is one of the oldest terms in the political discourse of the Sinitic world. In contrast to wang, however, there is only one glyph in the corpus of the oracle bones that is commonly identified as guo8; we might conclude, therefore, that it was far less central to the earliest eras of that discourse. Through the Zhou era, however, it became well-established that a wang ruled a guo, as the preceding quote from the Rites establishes. The Zhouyi, for example, an undated text that derives at least partially from the Zhou era, notes, “The Great Lord [i.e., wang, the apex title of the time] holds the Mandate. He establishes his guo and manages the households [i.e., regional lords through whom the Zhou wang ruled].”9 Writing at the height of the Warring States era that preceded the Han, Shi Jiao (ca. 390–330 BCE) said of the legendary emperor Shun: “As a first step Shun established a settlement. His next step was to establish a capital. His third step was to establish a guo.”10 Mengzi, who was roughly Shi Jiao’s contemporary, more explicitly linked wang and guo. Indeed, the opening passage of his text records an interview with Hui wang of Liang guo, who asked him: “As honored guest you have not considered a thousand li too far to come here, I dare think you have something that will be a benefit to my guo?” Hui wang then went on, “The administrations of the nearby guo lack the commitment I have given [to my own guo], yet the people of the nearby guo increase by no small number while my own people increase by much less. Why is it?”11 Similar linkages between wang and guo are rife in late Zhou literature. Thus a wang ruled a guo. But how did either relate to a di or a dai? Di is another ancient term, linked to well over one hundred glyphs in the oracle bones, where it referred to the supreme deity in the Shang dynasty pantheon.12 The oracle bones are replete with queries posed to Di: “Will Di perhaps send drought down upon us?” or “As for attacking the Qiong tribe, will Di provide us support?”13 By the Zhou era, however, the term had evolved a more secular meaning as the ruler of men. Mengzi, for example, wrote in reference to the legendary emperor Shun,: “From the time he was a plowman, a tiller, a potter, or a fisherman, until he was the di, there was nothing he could not learn from others.”14 It was Zheng wang of Qin (259– 210 BCE; reigned as Zheng wang 247–221 and as Qin Shi huangdi 221–210),

Politics in an Age of Division 29 however, who solidified the meaning for which di is best known. Following a decade of aggressive campaigning, he had united the guo of the Central Plain under his single rule. To assert his power, in 221 he took the title huangdi, which we might translate as “Illustrious Di.” Thereafter, huangdi was the title of the supreme ruler, or “emperor”; any other claim to the title di was definitionally spurious for there could only be one. Only the cosmic power tian was superior to the di. Thus only the cosmic power could legitimate the di. But the di was not considered divine; he was the secular ruler over all men, legitimated by the cosmic power but not deified thereby. Finally, a di reigned over a dai. In fact dai is perhaps the most diverse of all these words, for its meanings range broadly from the non-political “represent” or “replace” to the more political “era.” But as it relates to di it means “dynasty,” or perhaps more literally “the era of X,” and it stood in contrast to guo. If a wang ruled a guo, a di sat astride a dai. Or, by rearranging our terms, a di was superior to a wang as a dai was grander than a guo. This became most relevant in the course of establishing the Han dai, “the era of the Han” (206/202 BCE–220 CE). As explained by Michael Loewe,15 as the Qin dynasty unraveled in the last decade of the third century BCE, the leading contestants to succeed to the imperial power, Xiang Yu (232–202 BCE) and Liu Bang (ca. 256–195 BCE; reigned as Han Gaozu 202–195), permitted their generals to establish autonomous regional power bases on the peripheries from where they could offer their overlord protection. As Xiang and Liu consolidated their rival power, they allowed these power bases to consolidate as regional administrations under the immediate authority of the general but with ultimate loyalty to them. When Liu Bang, having defeated Xiang Yu, took the title huangdi in 202, he affirmed the autonomy of these regional administrations according to an ancient model of administration known as “divide and establish” (fengjian), sometimes translated as “feudalism.” As remembered in the Zuo Tradition, the origins, and so the legitimacy, of this model go back to the founding of the Zhou dynasty: “Long ago the Duke of Zhou lamented the discord of the preceding dynasties [the Xia and Shang]. Therefore he divided [his land] and established his relatives [as regional administrators] in order to provide a screen to Zhou.”16 Or, to use our terminology, though not his, Liu Bang designated the peripheral regions as guo and their rulers as wang, who took full autonomous responsibility for their guo. Although the relationship between the central court and outlying wang soon collapsed in rebellion, the initial settlement had established the relationship between the di and wang. The former ruled “all under the cosmic umbrella” (tian xia); the latter ruled a guo, defined as a specific territory, and did so by grant from the di. In the aftermath of the rebellions the Han abandoned the “divide and establish” model of regional administration in favor of a model that more nearly reflected the centralized model of the Qin. However, through the centuries that followed “divide and establish” became the default model defining the imperial center’s relationship to rulers of the

30 Politics in an Age of Division “outer guo” (wai guo), as courts that lay beyond the imperial court’s immediate administrative authority yet within the realm of the cosmic umbrella were known. This was the model that largely prevailed, even as the empire experienced profound change as a mish-mash of ruling cliques claimed the Mandate. Under the Sui and Tang dynasties, as a new sense of political stability was established, the title wang had two functions. First was to establish a theoretical relationship between the di and the rulers of the “outer guo.” For example, the Korean courts of Koryo, Silla, and Paekche routinely sent “local goods” (fang wu) to the Sui and Tang courts. In return for this tribute the courts granted the Korean rulers an array of titles, especially including wang, and acknowledged their realms as guo. Similarly, in 616 the Khmer Zhenla guo sent “local goods” to the Sui court.17 Although the text does not note any award of titles, the submission of “local goods” as tribute to the Sui and the categorization of Zhenla as a guo make clear this was regarded as another di/wang relationship, a relationship that was fully reaffirmed when the Zhenla court sent eleven elephants as tribute to the Tang court.18 Although the Korean courts were especially attentive to the rituals of the di/wang relationship, they were in fact autonomous. Their ritual subordination did not lead to political subordination. In addition the title guowang was awarded to Tang imperial princes, collateral members of the imperial family who relied on the court for their wherewithal. As Du You, writing late in the eighth century, noted in his encyclopedic Tongdian, the princes as guowang “were not actually awarded territory, but rather were given revenue from the imperial coffers.”19 So there was an essential difference between the wang of the “outer guo” and the imperial princes. Both were guowang, but only the waiguowang held territory. Because the imperial princes were stipended, moreover, they were much more clearly under the court’s control. If the waiguowang were ritually subordinated but politically autonomous, the imperial princes were subordinate in both vectors. Faced with the collapse of imperial authority and the rise of functionally autonomous warlords especially across the Yangtze basin and farther south in the last decade of the nineth century, the Tang court turned to this model in an effort to maintain a nominal authority, a move that established the pattern of north–south relations through the interregnum. We can illustrate this through two specific case studies. Like many who emerged in the chaos of the collapsing Tang, Yang Xingmi was a self-made man. His biographies describe him in his youth as a thug who used his gang to terrorize his natal village in the Hefei region of Luzhou.20 Taking advantage of the spreading turmoil prompted by the early years of the Huang Chao Rebellion in the 870s, Yang broadened his activities into general banditry. He does not enter the chronological record, however, until 883 when the court yielded to a de facto reality and appointed him magistrate of Luzhou.21 Over the next several years, as the court’s legitimacy was increasingly problematized and its authority correspondingly curtailed,

Politics in an Age of Division 31 he actively campaigned throughout the Huainan and Jiangnan regions, gaining control either through conquest or submission over a range of prefectures and emerging as one of the principle figures in the central and lower Yangtze basin. Notably, his base was territorial; he held territory, and his authority to do so was post-facto recognized by the court much as the territories of the Korean guowang were recognized. In 887 Yang proclaimed himself Commander of Huainan (Huainan liuhou).22 This led to a confrontation with Zhu Wen, who at the moment had the backing of the court. Shortly after Yang’s self-proclamation, “because Huainan had been in chaos for so long,” the court named Zhu the Military Commissioner of Huainan and Pacification Commissioner of the Southeast.23 Zhu then appointed a loyal subordinate to be the Commander of Huainan with the goal of freezing Yang, who he named him the Vice-Military Commissioner, out of the line of authority.24 Zhu’s power play backfired, however, and only months later in early 888 he had to back down and ask the emperor to name his rival Commander of Huainan.25 Again, this was a recognition of territorial control that the court lacked the ability or will to challenge. Yang’s growing power through the following decade prompted an array of potential rivals in 898 to appeal directly to the Tang court to order Zhu to lead a campaign against him. The court, however, in an about face from its earlier embrace of Zhu’s attempts to control Yang and manifesting its growing recognition that Zhu was the more pressing threat, refused.26 Yang had become instead a useful counter to Zhu’s own growing power. The following year, in confirmation of the court’s growing reliance on him, Yang was appointed Director of the Chancellory (shizhong), perhaps the most powerful civilian post in the Tang administration.27 Finally, in 902, the emperor “personally bestowed” the title Wu wang, granting Yang autonomous authority over the entire lower Yangtze basin.28 Yang was already acting as an independent force, naming his own commanders to local and regional administrative positions. The imperial grant of the royal title wang was a de jure recognition of the reality on the ground. In short, Yang was now the recognized overlord of the most economically productive region of the empire. He was a wang, beholden to but only ritually subordinate to the Tang di. The Wu region of Jiangnan was his. The court had resorted to the ancient “divide and establish” model. Granting the title wang to Yang was a last-ditch attempt by the court of stave off both the growing power of Zhu Wen and its own demise. It was, moreover, not unique, as we can see in the parallel rise of Qian Liu.29 Like Yang, Qian first emerged as a village thug. Faced with Huang Chao’s threat to Hangzhou, he enrolled his band in a regional militia force to protect the area; following the rebellion he arrested the militia leader and gained control himself. Subsequently the court awarded him an ever more impressive array of titles, as it had Yang, culminating in 902 when he was named the junwang of Pengcheng prefecture. This was a stipended post, but with the revenue

32 Politics in an Age of Division generated by 20,000 households it was a very rich one.30 In the nine-rank hierarchy of noble titles, moreover, a junwang was subordinate only to a guowang. In contrast to the latter, however, a junwang was stipended; he did not receive a grant of territory, as Yang Xingmi had that same year. Although surviving texts do not state that Qian was dissatisfied as a junwang, actions perhaps speak louder than words for almost immediately he was named Yue wang; in a note Sima Guang added: “He was promoted (jinjue) from junwang to guowang.”31 He too was now a guowang with a territorial base based on the wealthy territory surrounding the Hangzhou Bay. Like Yang, he was now ritually subordinate to the Tang di but politically his own man. In its final attempt to avoid complete collapse the court thus resorted to an ancient model of a hierarchal political decentralization. In recognizing both Yang Xingmi and Qian Liu as guowang, the intention was to cast them as allies of the court against the growing power of Zhu Wen. In Sichuan, Wang Jian, who had established a similarly independent power, was also promoted from junwang and proclaimed Shu wang in 903. Although his peripheral position left him less central to the court’s attempt to stave off the power of Zhu Wen, he too was recognized as the autonomous ruler over a given territory.32 If the goal was to recruit allies to assist in defense of the dying dynasty, however, the premise was mistaken. The significance of this is that by naming the southern lords guowang, the court defined them as autonomous rulers bound to the central court only by the rituals that bound wang to di. The court was, in fact, acknowledging that the southern courts were effectively outside its direct control. Furthermore, the di/wang relationship between the northern court and the courts of the south continued to unfold in the following years. The Tang court formally abdicated in 907, yielding imperial authority to Zhu Wen. In one of his first acts as huangdi, Zhu Wen then named Ma Yin (853–930), who had carved out his own sphere in Hunan, Chu wang.33 Nor did it stop there. In 909 “the Fujian Military Commissioner Wang Shenzhi was enfeoffed (feng) Min wang and the Guangdong Military Commissioner Liu Yin (833–910), was enfeoffed Nanping (jun)wang.”34 In short, within two years of taking the imperial title Zhu Wen had recognized all six of the major regional players of the south as wang. Although Liu Yin was nominally only a junwang and so theoretically stipended rather than granted territory, in fact his realm was so distant from the Liang court with so much autonomous territory in-between, the distinction was moot.35 As the new order of north and south settled into place, the southern rulers gradually became more bold. As early as 907 Wang Jian, already recognized as Shu wang, announced his intention to take the imperial title; he even sought to recruit others to jointly seek restoration of the Tang, an effort that was soundly rejected.36 Concurrently, one of Qian Liu’s closest allies throughout his rise urged Qian to attack Zhu Wen, claiming: “Even should your effort fail, you can always retreat to Hangzhou and Yuezhou, where

Politics in an Age of Division 33 you could proclaim yourself ‘Eastern Di.’” Although Qian was intrigued by the suggestion, he doubted his ally’s purposes and rejected the initiative.37 Instead he appealed to Zhu Wen to recognize him as WuYue wang, which he did, also in 907, thereby formalizing Qian’s autonomous authority over the central coast.38 Thus through the first decade following the Tang abdication the northern court recognized five guowang and one junwang with the territorial autonomy of a guowang across the south. One, however, had proclaimed himself di. The ritual recognition by wang of their subordination to the di was essential to the “divide and establish” political structure. This challenged the legitimacy of the Liang di at its core. It was a step the northern court could not recognize, yet it was also a step the Liang court could not forestall. The autonomy of the southern courts is well illustrated by the calendar. Determining the calendar, especially announcing the inauguration and names of the reign periods (nianhao) through which the dynastic center tracked dates, was uniquely an imperial prerogative that manifested the center’s link to the cosmic power. Proclamation of a reign period, and so of an independent calendar, was a declaration of subordination directly to the cosmic power and independence from any other authority. Central to his own assertion of the imperial mandate, on deposing the Tang court Zhu Wen promptly proclaimed his own era, which he called Inaugurating Peace (Kaiping, 907–911), thus laying claim to the calendar. In theory, every court that had accepted designation as wang from the di, including the wang of the “outer guo,” ought to have immediately adopted the new era as well. In an assertion of their own autonomy, however, the wang of “outer guo” had often played a dual game. In communications with the imperial courts they used the imperial reign period. For their own calendar, however, they declared their own period. For example, the Later Paekche kingdom (901–936), rulers of a piece of the Korean peninsula through the early years of the interregnum, declared its own domestic Beginning of Good Government (Zhengkai) reign period, a name that the kingdom kept for its own purposes throughout its brief existence even as the courts of the Central Plain to which they remained nominally beholden went through a series of reign periods. In like manner, none of the principle southern guowang took the reign names of the imperial court. Yang Wo (886–908), who had succeeded his father Xingmi as Wu wang on the latter’s death in 905, and Qian Liu, in a rejection of Zhu Wen’s legitimacy, continued to use the Cosmic Protection (Tianyou) reign period, the last of the Tang. Wang Jian went even further. In 904, before Wang had taken the imperial title for himself, Zhu Wen had assassinated Zhaozong, the penultimate Tang emperor; in the name of the dead emperor’s successor, Zhu then proclaimed the Cosmic Protection era. Wang Jian, however, refused even to recognize this, sticking to the last reign period of Zhaozong and so rejecting any hint of Zhu Wen’s legitimacy.39 Finally and fittingly, when he took the imperial title Wang proclaimed his own era in a final rejection of Zhu’s legitimacy and proclamation of his own mandate.

34 Politics in an Age of Division If many of the southern rulers used the calendar to assert their independence, however, several maintained proper di/wang diplomatic, or “tributary,” relationships, a point that Ouyang Xiu made very pointedly in his revised History of the Five Dynasties, where he quoted an exchange with an unidentified inquisitor: “Although the Ten Kingdoms were certainly not part of the zhong guo [i.e., not under the direct rule of the di], nevertheless they were enfeoffed via the Mandate [of the zhong guo] and they used the reign periods of the zhong guo when they presented tribute” (emphasis added here and below).40 This prompted Ouyang to reflect on whether the Ten Kingdoms were analogous to the “yi and di” barbarians: “If you address the tribute missions [of the southern guo] as you address those of the yi and di, then you firmly analogize them to the yi and di.”41 His inquisitor persisted: “The yi and di and Ten Kingdoms are not part of the zhong guo. How could one then write of the enfeoffments and tribute missions of the yi and di and not write of those of the Ten Kingdoms?”42 Ouyang’s point in fact was to analogize the southern kingdoms to the yi and di, as he summarily referred to the “outer guo.” All the rulers had accepted a formal investiture as wang from the di of the zhong guo. The hierarchy of terminology placed them all outside the zhong guo. Ritual, however, compelled all wang, be they “inner” or “outer,” to send tribute to the di. In point of fact, not all the southern guo did send tribute. The Shu court took advantage of its relative isolation to avoid formal relations, tributary or otherwise, with the northern court; there could, after all, be only one true di. The Yang family of Wu had a more complicated response. In 908 Xu Wen (862– 927), who had established himself as the most powerful official in Wu, engineered the assassination of Yang Wo. Although he permitted Wo’s brother Yang Longyan (897–920; r. 908–920) to assume Wo’s title as Wu wang, henceforth Xu Wen was the real power. Moreover, he wanted Yang Longyan to take the imperial title as Wang Jian had done. Longyan, however, was unwilling to do so. In 919 Xu again challenged Yang Longyan to take the imperial title, and again he declined. However, to forestall Xu’s increasingly apparent imperial ambitions, Longyan declared his own reign period, adopted “imperial ritual” (tianzi li) at court, named his father “Illustrious Ancestor” (Taizu), an honor traditionally bestowed only on the founding emperors of imperial dynasties, and announced that “gold succeeds earth,” an allusion to the cycle of the Five Elements, according to which Tang had been earth.43 Although all were steps that were tantamount to proclaiming himself di, Xu Wen and later his adopted son and successor Xu Zhigao (889–943) continued to pressure Longyan and his successor Yang Pu (900–939; r. 920–939) to break fully with the northern court and take the imperial title. They refused and ties continued: “From the time that Li Cunxu [885–926; founding emperor of the Latter Tang, r. 923–926] overthrew the Liang, officials had gone back and forth [between Wu and Tang] without a break.”44 Although Sima Guang did not say so, as representatives of a wang at the court of a di we must assume the Wu officials who went north bore some nature of tribute.

Politics in an Age of Division 35 In the course of 927, however, both Li Cunxu and Xu Wen died; Xu Wen was succeeded as the de facto ruler of Wu by Zhigao. Pressured by the latter, Yang Pu then acceded to Xu Wen’s wish and declared himself emperor; he further granted posthumous imperial rank to his predecessors beginning with Yang Xingmi.45 Thus early in 928 when Zhigao sent an envoy to the Latter Tang court, relations between the two courts did an about face. Suspecting that Yang Pu, acting on behalf of Zhigao, “had violated ritual,” which Sima Guang defines as “to declare himself emperor,” the Tang official An Chonghui deputed his own subordinate to go to Wu to investigate. When that official was refused an audience, An’s suspicions of Xu Zhigao’s intentions were confirmed and both courts broke all ties. In summary, as the interregnum moved through the middle decades of the Five Dynasties the southern courts had adopted two postures. Two of the principle rulers had declared themselves di, a step that also taken by Liu Yan of Guangnan Han guo, who declared himself huangdi in 917,46 Wang Yanjun of Min (d. 935), Wang Chao’s son and successor who announced plans to declare himself huangdi in 932, and Meng Zhixiang of [Latter] Shu guo (874– 934), who declared himself huangdi in 934 as soon as he broke with the northern Tang court and proclaimed the renewal of Shu.47 But others, most notably the Qian family who ruled WuYue and the Ma family in Chu, stuck to the ritual norms of the di/wang relationship. They continued to send tribute to the northern court. When Li Cunxu overthrew the Liang court and established the (Later) Tang, Qian Liu even reaffirmed his subordinate relationship through a rapid dispatch of tribute to the new ruler.48 So what can we conclude from all this? To begin, let me lay out a premise: As I have argued elsewhere, for all the moves toward integration of the empire through the centuries leading to and through the Tang, in fact many—maybe even “most”—across the south had maintained a separate cultural and ethnic identity right up to the interregnum.49 Indeed, until the restoration of the holistic empire in the late sixth century by the Sui, the lands occupied by the southern courts had been independent of northern control for all history but for the four centuries of the Qin/Han holistic empire when a political unification was imposed that left almost no cultural imprint below the elite. Although the array of distinct indigenous cultures across the Yangtze River basin and lands further south was vast, this legacy of difference between north and south was shared and was a critical factor across the south as the Tang unraveled. When Zhu Wen claimed the mandate from the Tang, the emergent elite of the south seized the opportunity to reassert a political separation between north and south that reflected the enduring cultural separation. Although the pre-Sinitic indigenous cultures remained strong at a local level, by the late Tang the elites across the south were quite thoroughly immersed in orthodox Sinitic culture; indeed, many had never known anything else. Consequently, even before the formal abdication of Aidi, the last Tang emperor, the newly-autonomous courts adhered to the framework of

36 Politics in an Age of Division Sinitic political cosmology. Their political autonomy was only marginally compromised by the rituals of the di/wang relationship that cosmology prescribed. Consensus remained that there should only be one di; even as the Tang unraveled, the one and only di was appropriately based in the Yellow River basin, the historic heartland from where Sinitic civilization had emerged. Zhu Wen’s claim to the mandate, rooted as it was in that heartland, had a wealth of tradition to draw upon for its legitimacy. Thus as a new order took shape across the south the southern rulers, who had largely immersed themselves in the Sinitic tradition, were initially content to receive a mandate as wang—they were content, in other words, to exercise their authority within the framework of the ancient “divide and establish” system. However, in contrast to the long-standing Tang framework according to which domestic wang were stipended imperial princes whose legitimacy was familial, political legitimacy in the south was built on autonomous control of territory; the lords of the “divide and establish” territories were not subordinate, stipended officers dependent on the imperial court but fully autonomous rulers of their own domains. In the hierarchy of Sinitic tradition they were akin to the autonomous rulers of Koryo, of Zhenla, and of any other court that accepted the ritualized di/wang relationship. Although the initiatives of wang such as Wang Jian in Sichuan and Liu Yan in Guangnan to declare themselves di challenged tradition, the enduring di/ wang relationship between the northern courts and southern guo such as WuYue and Chu offered a plausible path forward toward local autonomy and de facto independence from the northern court. Notably, when Guo Rong (921–959), the second emperor of the (Later) Zhou, the last of the northern Five Dynasties (r. 954–959), seized the Huainan region from Jiangnan Tang in 958, Li Jing (916–961; r. 943–960), the last of the Tang rulers, abandoned the imperial title and accepted reenfeoffment as wang.50 But territorial wang such as those on the Korean peninsula had always been de facto independent rulers. Wang were expected to adhere to the ritual acknowledgment of the suzerain authority of the di through regular tribute missions and official acceptance of the imperial calendar, all of which the several Korean wang did, and to adhere to the cultural norms of civilization that had long been defined by the northern heartland where the authority of the di was unchallenged. They otherwise functioned independently. In short, through the interregnum a version of the long-standing system of di/wang relations that for centuries had structured relationships between the imperial court and the waiguo was extended to include the guo that had emerged across the south, each of which was now de facto an independent, or “wai,” guo in the manner of Koryo or Zhenla. In the end, of course, the path to southern autonomy within the political cosmology of the Sinitic world was aborted. Even if Li Jing was initially permitted to abandon his pretensions to the imperial title and to maintain a constricted authority as wang, the authorities in the north were already deep into planning a full restoration of the holistic empire. As Sima Guang wrote,

Politics in an Age of Division 37 “[Guo Rong] was constantly exasperated by the limits to the area that had been under imperial control since the rebellion of Huang Chao … Without a break he stuck to his intention to overcome opposition throughout the realm.”51 In response to Guo Rong’s lament that “Wu and Shu, as well as the Khitan and Northern Han, all resist my instructive authority. We have been unable to blend them together [i.e., to restore the holistic empire],”52 in 955 Wang Pu (d. 959) presented the first policy statement outlining a plan for a southern campaign that focused on the (Jiangnan) Tang guo. The emperor, Sima concluded, embraced the plan “with joy.”53 Through the years that followed, Guo Rong and then Zhao Kuangyin (r. 960–976), who established the Song dynasty in 960 following Guo Rong’s untimely death and the coronation of a child as his heir, pursued the plan initially outlined by Wang Pu. One by one the southern guo were either conquered or surrendered in the face of the northern forces. When Qian Chu (948–978; r. 947–978), the last autonomous wang of WuYue, and Chen Hongjin (914–985), autonomous warlord of a remnant corner of the collapsed Min guo in southern Fujian, surrendered to the Song in 978, the interregnum and the possibility of southern autonomy were ended. But that should not negate the significance of what had happened. For a brief period the possibility that China would evolve on a path analogous to that followed across post-Classical Europe, a path toward a multi-state system, albeit within the framework of Sinitic political cosmology, across which core cultural values were shared was real. It would never be a real possibility again.

Notes 1 This is in fact a misnomer as across the south there were never more than seven “kingdoms” at any one time. Successive regimes in Sichuan and Jiangnan are counted separately, plus one “kingdom” lay far to the northwest and represented a very distinct experience. 2 Abu Zayd Hasan al-Sı-ra-fı- (2017), 30. One needn’t take literally the figure 120,000 recounted by Abu Zayd to realize that the alien population in Guangzhou was a large and significant force. 3 The etymology website Hanziyuan identifies 270 variants of the character in jiagu wen, as the oracle bone script is known; see https://hanziyuan.net/#%E7%8E%8B (accessed June 3, 2019). 4 Shang shu, “Hong fan” 洪範 #7. 5 Shi jing, “Shangxun” 商頌, “Yin wu” 殷武 #2, adapted from the translation of James Legge reproduced at the same site. 6 Xunzi, “Wang ba” 王霸 #2. As we shall see below, Mengzi is an exception; his text routinely identifies by name the rulers of guo as wang. 7 Zhou li, “Tianguan zhongzai” 天官冢宰 #1. 8 See https://hanziyuan.net/#%E7%8E%8B (accessed June 3, 2019). 9 Zhou yi, “shi” 師, #7. 10 Shi Jiao, second scroll 卷下 #111. 11 Mengzi, “Liang Hui wang shang” 梁惠王上, #1. 12 See https://hanziyuan.net/#%E5%B8%9D (accessed June 5, 2019).

38 Politics in an Age of Division 13 Translated by Robert Eno, in Chinese Religions in Practice, edited by Donald Lopez (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 46 and 47. 14 Mengzi, “Gongsun Chou shang” 公孫丑上 #8. 15 Michael Loewe, “The Former Han Dynasty,” in the Cambridge History of China, volume 1, “The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220,” edited by Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 103–222. 16 Zuo Zhuan, “Lord Xi 24th year” 僖公二十四. 17 Suishu, 4:90. 18 Ming jili 30:9b. 19 Tongdian 19:28b. 20 See XTS 188:5451–5461, XWDS 61:747–752, and Wu (1983), 1:1–30. On this and below, see also Clark (2011), 47–78. 21 ZZTJ 255:8290. Yang is described as the “Huainan xiaya,” a semi-official policing office that he had earned for his “bravery” in confronting rebels. 22 ZZTJ 257:8364. At this time, as both the “basic annals” (benji) chapters of XTS and the ZZTJ record, several of the contestants across the collapsing empire proclaimed themselves Commander (liuhou). Thus Yang’s self-proclamation was very much in keeping with the tenor of the moment. 23 ZZTJ 257:8366. 24 ZZTJ 257:8371. 25 ZZTJ 257:8373. 26 ZZTJ 261:8513. 27 ZZTJ 262:8543. 28 ZZTJ 263:8573. 29 The following draws on Clark (2011) and Clark (2009), 140–143. 30 JWDS 133:1768, XWDS 67:838 and ZZTJ 263:8574. 31 XWDS 67:839 and ZZTJ 263:8575. 32 ZZTJ 264:8613. 33 ZZTJ 266:8674. 34 JWDS 4:68. 35 There was one additional southern polity, Jingnan, a small independent principality at the juncture of the Han River with the Yangtze that is today the megalopolis of Wuhan. The ruler, Gao Jichang (858–929), had been a general under Zhu Wen, who appointed him the Commander of Jingnan; see Taiping guangji 266:5a, which says the appointment was made in the last years of the Tang, and ZZTJ 266:8680, which says it was in 907. Neither Gao nor his successors in Jingnan, which survived as an in dependent polity until conquered by the Song in 963, were ever named wang. 36 ZZTJ 266:8675 and 8685. When Wang broached the idea with his civil and military advisors, they cautioned: “Although our Lord remains loyal to the Tang, the Tang is dead.” 37 ZZTJ 266:8676. The ally was Luo Yin, not to be confused with Liu Yin, the Nanping junwang. 38 ZZTJ 266:8680. 39 ZZTJ 266:8675. 40 XWDS 71:881. 41 XWDS 71:881. 42 XWDS 71:881. 43 ZZTJ 270:8843–44 44 This and below from ZZTJ 276:9013. 45 ZZTJ 276:9011 and XWDS 62:3b.

Politics in an Age of Division 39 46 Liu recognized that he was the only southern ruler not promoted to wang. In 916 he petitioned for the title, but was refused. Liu then denounced the northern court as illegitimate and broke all ties. His assumption of the imperial title followed. 47 ZZTJ 270:8821, 277:9073, and 278:9102 respectively. 48 XWDS 67:840. Because The Qian family never rejected the legitimacy of the northern courts, they along among the southern rulers earned the praise of Ouyang Xiu; see XWDS 67: 843–44. 49 This has been the theme of much of my most recent work. See especially Clark (2016), Clark (2018), and Clark (2020). 50 ZZTJ 294:9583. 51 ZZTJ 292:9524. 52 ZZTJ 292:9525. 53 ZZTJ 292:9525–27. Wang Pu’s proposal to attack the south has been translated by Peter Lorge (2013), 111–112. Lorge further discussed the debate in the Zhou court that produced Wang Pu’s proposal in Lorge (2015), Chapter 3, “The pivot of the tenth century” (accessed on Google Books, January 8, 2019; no pagination).

4

The Economies of the South1

By the late ninth century, after more than two-and-a-half centuries in power, the Tang dynasty was losing its Mandate. As early as the 850s local unrest had begun to evolve into real rebellion. This growing pattern culminated in the cataclysmic uprising led by Wang Xianzhi and Huang Chao that uprooted the court and upset regional hierarchies throughout the imperial core between 874 and 884. Although the court, following the vanquishing of Huang Chao, returned from its refuge in Sichuan to Chang’an, the ancient capitol, its power in the now-desolate city was effectively broken. The dynasty endured as a hollow shell until formally deposed by the bandit rebel Zhu Wen in 907, but its effective end had long been accomplished. With the collapse of the imperial center the empire broke apart. Through the last two-plus decades of nominal Tang authority the landscape was overrun by autonomous warlord armies. Some aspired to replacing the Tang, while others had much more limited aims, perhaps best defined as simple predation. This disorder marked the beginning of a century long interregnum that divides Tang from Song. For the next several decades, until the holistic empire was more-or-less restored by the Song in the latter half of the tenth century, the south was divided among a network of coexistent polities known as the Ten Kingdoms, a point that has been made in previous chapters. In a pattern that was established even in the immediate aftermath of the Song restoration, the southern guo have been among the least appreciated and least studied eras in the long history of East Asia. Xue Juzheng (912– 981), whose History of the Five Dynasties (Wudai shi, later known as the “Old” history [Jiu wudai shi]) was accepted by the court in 974, applied the word guo to the sequence of courts that ruled the Yellow River basin between Tang and Song, but his cursory treatments were limited to biographies of their rulers, whom he characterized as “illegal usurpers.” Ouyang Xiu, in his Historical Records of the Five Dynasties (Wudai shiji, known more commonly as the “New” history [Xin wudai shi]), was more generous. Though he established a pattern that has been followed by China’s historians ever since that focuses on the successive courts that ruled the Central Plain in the north and places the southern courts at the end of the work as a footnote to the era, each of the southern courts was granted a full scroll along with an annual DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249-4

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chronicle (nianpu). It was Ouyang, in fact, who standardized the term “ten guo.”2 Historians since, both traditional and modern, have routinely treated the interregnum century, both north and south, as a final chapter in otherwise thorough histories of the Tang. Rarely has the era been considered worthy on its own merits, and even more rarely as the introductory chapter to the eras that followed.3 Ouyang is also responsible for categorizing the southern courts as guo rather than dai, or “dynasties,” the term applied to the northern courts by Xue Juzheng and used by Ouyang and scholars ever since. The semantics cannot be understated. Ouyang was deeply concerned with the issue of legitimate transmission (zheng tong), a theme he wrote about more than once.4 Of the Liang dai, the first of the northern dynasties, and its successors Ouyang wrote: “The Liang has long been despised throughout the land. Furthermore, from the Latter Tang [that followed] and on all have despised the Liang as illegitimate (wei).”5 Yet Liang, in a precedent followed by all the northern dai, had proclaimed a new calendar, and it was these calendars that historians beginning with Xue Juzheng have used to date the era: The moral legitimacy of the northern dynasts may have been questioned, but not their political legitimacy. They carried on the calendrical legacy of their predecessor. They were dynasties. Many of the southern guo also proclaimed their own calendars, but no orthodox historian believed they had that privilege. In a passage quoted in the preceding chapter, Ouyang emphasized their subordination: “Although the Ten Kingdoms were certainly not part of the zhong guo [i.e., not under the direct rule of the di], nevertheless they were enfeoffed via the Mandate [of the zhong guo] and they used the reign periods of the zhong guo when they presented tribute.” He further analogized them to the non-Sinitic cultures of the empire’s periphery: “If you address the tribute missions [of the southern guo] as you address those of the yi and di, then you firmly analogize them to the yi and di.” This was a powerful statement, for Ouyang, following the lead of Xue Juzheng, was defining legitimacy. Only the dai held the “cosmic mandate,” the ultimate political sanction that could only be transferred from di to di except in an “overthrow of the Mandate” (ge ming).6 It was this mandate that granted the dai the right to proclaim a calendar. As a mark of their subordination, all guo were expected to use the calendar of the dai. The dai in turn granted regional legitimacy to the guo by granting their rulers the right to call themselves wang. Thus, although Ouyang distinguished the southern courts from the Yi and Di, who were theoretically unworthy of even this, his point was that they were part of a greater order that was arrayed around the northern courts. The historiographical consequence was that the south was marginalized. History starts at the center, and the dai, no matter how ephemeral or morally questionable, were the center. The guo were peripheral and of lesser importance. The marginalization of the southern guo has, moreover, persisted even into the work of modern historians. Nevertheless, the interregnum represents a critical bridge between the last gasp of early imperial aristocratic society

42 The Economies of the South and the meritocratic society that emerged through the late imperial era. The decades of the interregnum across the south, in short, was a time when a great deal happened. A comprehensive assessment of the era must look at a range of themes: regional political identity, religion, and kinship come to mind. This chapter, however, is going to focus on only one theme: economics. I hope to show that far from being a “time of no significance,” the interregnum century was in fact characterized by vibrant and expanding economies across the southern guo that set the stage for the well-known economic revolution of the Song.7

Some History “Aihu (Alas)!” wrote Ouyang Xiu: After Tang lost its authority, across the realm [outcasts with] brands on their faces and shaved heads took advantage of the times, raiding and trading. [Wearing the] robes of princes and officials’ caps, [they stood] intimidating and massive.8 Ouyang may have had a political purpose in dismissing the southern guo as the product of the disreputable, but as some of the preceding discussion should make clear, his point has merit. The order that distilled out of the chaos of the 880s and 890s featured a very unsavory cast or rogues and villains. The men who established the southern guo came from the social underclass, but each used the turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the Tang to rise to positions of regional power. Each was accompanied by compatriots who together established a new regional elite. It would be misleading to say the south was stabilized. Each guo had its own range of problems. The ruling family of Min in Fujian consumed itself in conflict that included every form of “–cide” imaginable: regicide, patricide, matricide, fratricide, to say nothing of eliminating nephews, queens, and other relations for which no obvious “–cide” exists. By the later 940s Min guo had dissolved, its northern and western territories taken over by WuYue and Tang respectively; only an autonomous warlord realm based on Quanzhou—a region that had never been fully integrated into the Min polity—retained its identity. If Min was the only guo to actually disappear before the final decade of the interregnum, however, the ruling order of Wu in Jiangxi was displaced by new dynasts who claimed the Tang royal surname Li and renamed their polity Tang, while in Sichuan the first, or “Former,” Shu was displaced by the second, or “Latter,” Shu. There was conflict between Min and Han, and endemically so between Chu and all its neighbors, who regarded Chu as the weakest of the guo. Such turmoil, one might anticipate, would attract the attention of the northern dai. That for several decades it did not was a product of a combination of factors, most notably perhaps the on-going ethnic and political

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intermingling of the Central Plain and lands to the north that has so central to the work of Naomi Standen.9 It was not, in fact, until the consolidation of power by the Later Zhou (951–959) that a concerted campaign to reestablish the territorial Tang empire commenced in earnest, a campaign that appears to have been motivated primarily by desires for territorial aggrandizement.10 We might suspect that the Zhou would have succeeded and we would talk of the Zhou reunification of the empire had not the dynamic and aggressive second emperor Guo Rong (921–959; r. 954–959) died too soon, leaving a child as his heir. The vacuum this opened was filled in 960 by Zhao Kuangyin, a regional military commander under the Zhou who engineered a coup and pronounced the Song dynasty. The Later Zhou had laid the foundation of reunification. Zhao Kuangyin and the Song armies completed it. Jingnan, a family principality at the juncture of the Han and Yangtze rivers that is today the WuHan megalopolis, recognized Song authority in 963. The Chu guo of Hunan surrendered in 964, and the Latter Shu in Sichuan in 965. In 971 Han guo of the farthest south surrendered, followed in 975 by Tang guo in Jiangxi. The last autonomous territories: WuYue guo in Liangzhe and the QuanZhang warlord satrapy in southern Fujian, were both preparing to formally submit in 976 when they received word of Kuangyin’s death. Both awaited the completion of succession rituals and then formally submitted in 978. The south was once again integrated into an holistic empire under northern authority, but this was a very different integration than had been accomplished before. Although there were periods when north and south were once again separate, notably the extensive occupation of the north by the Jurchen and the Mongols in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the south never again defined itself apart from the unified empire. The southern guo may have been short-lived, however they were not inconsequential. To make this point, the present chapter will focus on the economies of the southern guo, with a particular focus on Wu/Tang, WuYue, and Min.

The Economies of Regional Guo Although the lands of the Yangtze basin and beyond had long been dismissed as barbarian and backward by scholars of the Yellow River basin, there had in fact been important centers of economic sophistication across the south from the earliest recorded history. For many centuries, indeed millennia, the coastal ports of the far south had been tied together in a maritime trade network centered on Panyu (modern Guangzhou). Similarly, by the early 1st millennium CE the regions defined by the Yangtze delta and Hangzhou Bay had become important centers of grain production, a development that had prompted the rulers of the mid-millennium Sui dynasty to open the Grand Canal for grain transport from south to north. It is the economic transformation of the latter half of the Tang, however, that is most relevant.

44 The Economies of the South As Denis Twitchett demonstrated in work that built on the outstanding Japanese scholarship of the post-War period, through the latter half of the Tang dynasty across the lands of the Yangtze basin and below an organic market system had emerged—markets that were a response to natural patterns of trade rather than the state-mandated, highly restricted market networks of the imperial heartland to the north.11 The spread of these markets in the late eighth and through the ninth century was a reflection of and an engine to an expanding economy. As Twitchett wrote, “The late eighth and ninth centuries were an era of burgeoning prosperity for the merchant class” of the Yangtze basin.12 The economic growth across the southern guo during the interregnum rested on this foundation. Through much of the ninth century, despite the travails that increasingly afflicted the empire, the economy of the south continued to expand as measured by empirical criteria such as the emergence of new market centers, expanding overseas trade, and demographic expansion. Without a doubt this was interrupted by the march through the south of the rebel army led by Huang Chao in the late 870s. Although Huang’s most famous depredation as he swept through the south was the slaughter of foreigners in Guangzhou, he had in fact already left major devastation in his wake as his army passed through northern Jiangxi and brushed past the urban epicenters of the Hangzhou Bay and northern Fujian. It was the shambles that followed that opened the way for the various regional usurpers to claim power in the 880s and 890s.13 Through the last decades of nominal Tang rule conflict continued to embroil much of the Yangtze basin as a congeries of regional warlords competed with each other and with forces more deeply rooted in the Huainan region allied with Qin Zongquan (d.889), a leading rival of Zhu Wen to inherit the Tang Mandate in the aftermath of the Huang Chao Rebellion. Nevertheless by the turn of the Tenth century a new order had begun to coalesce, and with that a growing pattern of prosperity. One of the driving factors was immigration: Across the south the newlyindependent courts benefited from an influx of new settlers who had fled the turmoil of the north and found safety in the south. The easiest way to see this is with gross if imprecise demographic data. For example, Robert Hartwell compared the census of 742, the last reliable Tang census, to that of 1080, arranged according to G. Wm. Skinner’s macroregions (see Table 4.1). The data are imprecise, not the least because the two sets are separated by more than three centuries and no doubt reflect population movement that occurred outside the parameters of the interregnum, but also because they do not exactly parallel the regional divisions of the southern guo, yet they are striking. From a low of 54% in the Upper Yangtze region centered on Sichuan and the successive Shu guo to highs of 373% in the booming regions of the Middle Yangtze that includes the realms of Wu/Tang guo and Chu guo and 437% along the Southeast Coast that centers on Fujian and the realm of

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Table 4.1 Census data, 742 versus 1080 Region

Tang population data (742)

Song population data (1080)

% increase

Lower Yangtze Middle Yangtze Upper Yangtze Southeast Coast Lingnan

1,257,000 923,000 1,206,000 286,000

2,609,000 4,362,000 1,860,000 1,537,000

households households households households

108% 373% 54% 437%

691,000 households

103%

households households households households

341,000 households

Min guo, every region that was to become the southern guo experienced significant, if not dramatic demographic growth. What is hidden in such gross data are patterns. Migration from the northern heartland to the realms of the southern guo was neither a single nor a continuous event. There were moments of heightened movement interspersing stretches of general stability; those moments, however, have to be identified empirically because we lack the micro-data that would reveal them. Such evidence, however, suggests that there were two distinct peaks of migration. The first occurred in the later decades of the eighth century in the aftermath of the An Lushan Rebellion. Before the rebellion demographic mobility had technically been illegal. Through detailed registers that recorded both demographic and land-holding data, peasants were at least theoretically tied to their land and forbidden to leave it. The rebellion uprooted vast numbers—annoyingly vague but it is impossible to be more precise. The potential mobility of this population was enhanced by destruction of the very registers that had tied them down, and to uncountable numbers the greater security and renowned prosperity of the south beckoned. Although this movement is noted in numerous contemporary accounts, we can see it most evidently in the aforementioned expansion of rural marketing networks across the south in the later eighth and ninth centuries. Growing demographic density accompanied by the collapse of the strict state control of markets that had been the rule through the first century-and-a-half of the Tang rule opened the way for new demands on markets that that expansion reveals. A second peak was prompted by the turmoil in the last decades of the Tang and into the era of the interregnum. This prompted a significant number of elite refugees, men with accomplished backgrounds who fled to the south and served the southern guo and who left behind records of their contributions. But these are small numbers; although these displaced elites had an important cultural effect, it was the unrecorded migration of much larger numbers of unheralded refugees that had an important economic impact. For lack of data we can’t reliably see this in expanded marketing networks, as we can see in the aftermath of An Lushan, but we can see it in a quirk of Song demographic data, the division of registered households

46 The Economies of the South between “resident” (zhu hu) and “guest” (ke hu). Although the debate over the precise meaning of these terms and even whether they were applied consistently across the empire has gone on for decades, what seems clear and most relevant to this discussion is that “guest households” were regarded as transient, impermanent, “new-comers.” Although this designation could in fact be applied for generations, there is no evidence that it was applied before the tenth century. Households that were classified in early Song data as “guest households,” therefore, must have received that designation in the tenth century. In light of the uncertainty over exactly who was registered as a “guest household,” however, it would be risky to assume all were recent arrivals. It is, for example, entirely plausible that as households of indigenous, non-Sinitic peoples accepted the Sinitic order and registered they would be counted as “guests.” It is equally plausible that economically marginal members of the late Tang Sinitic communities such as landless tenants may have been registered as “guests.” Yet, in light of the frequent link in Song courses between “guest” registration and migration, we would surely not be wrong to conclude that many were indeed recent immigrants. Of course such data is only useful if it can be reasonably assumed to reflect interregnum patterns; the 1080 data that Hartwell used, for example, offer little more than highly impressionistic evidence about the interregnum. We are fortunate, therefore, to have zhu/ke data from the immediate time of the Song reunification in the Comprehensive Geography of the Taiping Era, a geographical treatise prepared to celebrate the newly reunified empire dated to ca. 980. Yue Shi, the author, organized his text around prefectures (zhou or jun), and for every prefecture he included the available data on population, which varied from prefecture to prefecture. Some preserved no data; others recorded only very generalized numbers that do not pretend to precision. Many, however, include the mid-eighth century data that come from the last reliable Tang census, conducted in the Kaiyuan era (713–741), as well as undated but much more recent zhu/ke data. Because Tang had not established the zhu/ke distinction, these last data cannot be earlier than the interregnum nor later than the earliest decades of the Song when the Comprehensive Geography was compiled. They are, in short, the most reliable indicators of interregnum demographic trends that we have, and collectively they provide some very interesting insights. Because both space and necessity preclude a comprehensive discussion, I will focus on the data from the territories of the WuYue and Min guo (see Table 4.2). Despite some obvious problems, these data do suggest some insights. Most obviously, in the key coastal prefectures such as Hangzhou, Wenzhou, Fuzhou, and Quanzhou, as well as several of the critical inland prefectures such as Muzhou and Jianzhou, registered population had surged since the Kaiyuan data was collected: nearly three-fold in Fuzhou and Zhangzhou, fully three-fold in Suzhou and Hangzhou, almost 350% in greater Quanzhou, and an astonishing six-fold in Jianzhou in northwestern Fujian. What is most telling, however, is the percentage of registered

The Economies of the South

47

households that were classified as “guests.” The several prefectures for which there is no zhu/ke data and the problematic numbers for the WuYue capital of Hangzhou and the inland city of Muzhou do not offer reliable data. But for those with full data the results are striking. The overall growth in population is a striking affirmation of the generalized impression we can derive from Hartwell’s figures. That of Hangzhou and Suzhou, for example, had expanded threefold since the mid-eighth century, while the registered population of Quanzhou and Xinghua on the Fujian coast had grown by 349% and that of Jianzhou in the Fujian interior by six-fold! Table 4.2 Demographic Data from the Taiping huanyu ji. WuYue:

Kaiyuan

zhu

ke

[zhu+ke]/ Kaiyuan

Su (91:3b):

19,500

27,889

7,306

299%a

Hang (93:3a):

86,258

161,600

8,857

303%

Chao (94:2b):

59,000

zhu + ke

38,748

65%

n/a

n/a

Mu (95:2b):

22,700

zhu + ke

12,251

54%

n/a

n/a

Xiu (95:6a):

part of Su

zhu + ke

23,052

Yue (96: 2b):

64,100

zhu + ke

56,491

Heng (97:2b)

27,100

zhu + ke

Mu (97:7a):

14,300

33,982

Ming (98:2b):

42,400

Tai (98:6a): Wen (99:2b): Chu (99:8a):

n/aa

ke/zhu 26%

ke/ [zhu+ke] 18%

insignificant

n/a

n/a

88%

n/a

n/a

19,859

73%

n/a

64

230%

18,718

16,803

84%

21,000

17,499

14,442

16,100

16,082

24,658

19,700

zhu + ke

25,086

n/a insignificant

89%

47%

152%

83%

45%

253%

153%

61%

127%

n/a

n/a

Min: Fu (100:3a):

34,080

48,805

45,670

277%

94%

48%

Jian (101:3a):

22,770

46,637

43,855

608%b

94%

49%

Shaowu (101:8b):

part of Jian

34,391

13,490

n/a

n/a

n/a

Quan (102: 2b):

31,600

32,056

44,525

349%c

139%

58%

278%

n/a

n/a

Zhang (102:5b): Ting (102:8a): Xinghua (102:10b) a

d

15,000

zhu + ke

41,662

4,680

19,730

4,277

n/a

n/a

n/a

part of Quan

13,107

20,600

n/a

n/a

n/a

Includes Xiuzhou zhu & ke Includes Shaowu zhu & ke c Includes Xinghua zhu & ke d TPHYJ records identical numbers for Zhangzhou and Tingzhou. I have argued elsewhere (see Community, Trade, and Networks, 53–54) that the number that is recorded must apply to Tingzhou. When Chen Hongjin 陳洪進, the last of the QuanZhang warlords, submitted to the Song he supplied registers with 151,978 households. The 41,662 households I record for Zhangzhou are the difference between that number and the 110,316 households counted in Quanzhou and Xinghua. The number is, admittedly, open to question. b

48 The Economies of the South It is the zhu/ke data, however, that is most relevant. With the exception of Suzhou, in each prefecture for which data survives, roughly 50% of all households were registered as “guests.” Even if we cannot draw absolute conclusions, the large number of households registered as “guests” combined with the dramatic surge in the registered numbers in so many locations mark a dramatic increase in the registered population. In combination with the anecdotal evidence of a surge of immigration across the southeast, it is reasonable to conclude that many were recent arrivals. Moreover, similar data can be demonstrated in Jiangxi and Huainan, the lands of the Wu/Tang guo. The demographic face of the south was transformed during the interregnum, and immigration from the north was at the center of the transformation. Modern economic theory posits that expanding population should translate into an expanding economy. This assumes, however, that there are opportunities for the larger population to find work—it was this trap that led Mark Elvin several decades ago to posit what he called the “high-level equilibrium trap” as a way to explain China’s economic stagnation in the late imperial period when, he posited, expanding population was not finding available opportunity.14 In a pre-industrial economy such as southern China in the tenth century, when the land trap that Elvin alleged lay far in the future, there could be three such opportunities: more productive arable land, trade, or industry. In fact there is evidence of all three. The productive capacity of land can by improved either by expansion or improvement, and both occurred. Throughout the coastal southeast, where extensive drainage and canalling had already occurred, an important focus was on maintaining and improving the already expansive network. For example, Zhu Changwen (1039–1098), in his Continued Illustration of Wu Prefecture (1084), observed that WuYue guo established an Officer of Waterways and Agriculture (Dushui yingtian shi) “to manage water issues.”15 The great Northern Song statesman and scholar Fan Zhongyan (989–1052) expanded on this: In the days before Liangzhe had returned to our dynasty [i.e., in the days of WuYue guo] there was an Agricultural Corps (yingtian jun) in Suzhou enrolling 7–8,000 men. The corps specialized in matters pertaining to the fields such as channeling rivers and building dikes in order to avoid flooding.16 This was later echoed by Fan Chengda (1126–1193) in his Account of Wu Prefecture (1192), where he commented that under WuYue guo “[as there had been in Tang] there were still those who commanded the clearing of waterways” in order to prevent flooding and limit drought.17 We don’t hear of similar official structures in Min guo, but there are numerous records referencing attention to and expansion of existing networks as well as several new projects. In Fuzhou, for example, West Lake, which lay outside the metropolitan Houguan district and had originally been

The Economies of the South

49

developed in the early fourth century as a source of water for livestock and irrigation, was expanded under the Min guo ruler Wang Shenzhi (d. 931) from roughly ten li (ca. 3+ miles) in circumference to over forty li (or over ten miles).18 In Changle district, also in Fuzhou, Peach Bottom Pond, which irrigated fields with an assessed yield of one-thousand bushels (shi), was excavated privately by an officer of the Min court.19 And in Fuqinq district of Fuzhou the Great Pond, with a seawall extending over one hundred zhang (a bit more than thirty meters), was constructed by “a Min king” (Min wang) to control tidal flooding and open new land with an assessed yield of 3,600 bushels.20 Further down the coast in the satrapy of the QuanZhang warlords there were similar projects. Along the lower reach of the Jin River in Quanzhou, for example, Chen Hongjin directed construction of the Chen Dike. Although the dike, which claimed a large piece of marshland that marked the mouth of the river, has long since been swallowed up by progressive expansion of reclaimed land, its significance is marked by the retention of the name for the coastal flats on the south side of the Jin River mouth. Chen also oversaw the restoration of the Cosmic Waters Enclosure (huai). As explained in the fifteenth-century BaMin tongzhi, this had first been excavated in the Tang because “the fields bordered the sea and had been saline.”21 Local sources specify other projects that were constructed by the inland guo: In Sichuan under the (Former) Shu guo the Tongji Dike was expanded to provide irrigation to an additional 15,000 qing (ca.200,000+ acres);22 Gao Jichang, the Jingnan satrap, diked as much as 30 miles at the juncture of the Han and Yangtze Rivers;23 in Chu, “because there are many springs in the mountains east of Tanzhou, the Ma Family constructed dikes to collect water and thereby provide irrigation to 10,000 qing.”24 There are in addition numerous projects that are only vaguely dated but which almost surely were constructed either during or in the years immediately surrounding the interregnum. The projects of the coastal lowlands reclaimed land from the shallow seas that front the southeast. Behind the narrow coastal perimeter, however, the land rises sharply; in these inland regions diking and channeling wasn’t the challenge so much as carving and terracing. No such projects are explicitly date to the interregnum, or indeed to any moment in time, yet peasants must have been building terraces for generations before Cai Xiang (1012–1067) wrote that “the levelled fields with their baya rice merged with the blue clouds.”25 In short, working the land, expanding the arable, wrestling land from tidal incursions, and carving the sides of mountains was an on-going project throughout the interregnum. But expanding and improving arable land was only one way to expand output. New and improved crops were also an opportunity, and one of the most important imports of the pre-modern era must have arrived during or immediately around the interregnum. This is Champa rice. It is impossible to know exactly when the Champa strain arrived on the southeast coast; it

50 The Economies of the South certainly could have been on either side of the interregnum itself. The earliest reference to Champa rice is an edict of the Song emperor Zhenzong (r. 998– 1022) dated 1012 directing the distribution of Champa rice from Fujian to prefectures in Jiangxi, Huainan, and Zhejiang.26 It seems clear, therefore, that by the beginning of the eleventh century—within a generation of the submission of WuYue guo and the QuanZhang satrapy to the Song—the Champa strain had become a fixture among the peasants of Fujian. In all probability, therefore, it had arrived on the southeast coast several decades earlier. Although in yield and quality Champa rice was considered inferior, its ability to flourish in a variety of conditions, its resistance to draught, and its shorter growing season made it a staple. No doubt the baya rice that Cai Xiang saw growing up and down the terraced hills of Xianyou was Champa rice.27 Finally the southern guo encouraged production of an array of crops that already were well-established in local agronomies but which were now promoted by the individual states as sources of revenue. Several imposed monopolies over the tea trade, which was used as a leveraged commodity in trade and diplomacy with the north. Chu guo, which may have depended more than any other guo on tea revenues, even established a monopsony office, the Recovery Bureau (Huitu wu), to “recover” profits lost in the tea trade with the north.28 Many areas across the south fostered development of sericulture. Chu guo, for example, ordered that taxes be paid in cloth rather than cash: “Soon,” Sima Guang tells us, “looms were flourishing among them.”29 Sima makes the same point about Wu guo: because the court urged people to pay taxes in cloth rather than cash or rice, “the lands of Huai were fully planted, sericulture was widespread, and the state grew rich and strong.”30 As must be true of any pre-modern economy, agriculture was the core of all the southern economies, but trade was also important. Indeed, all the economies of the southern guo developed an unprecedented reliance on trade. As the rise of local markets in the Tang discussed earlier makes clear, local trade was already a developed feature of the southern economies by the dynasty’s latter stages. An 859 description of Peach Forest Market in the hills behind Quanzhou on the west fork of the Jin River, for example, described “a great city… The standard here is for prosperous households, honest officials, trained servants, and bounteous harvests. Boats and carts entire the town in droves and everywhere there is gaiety.”31 Similarly a description of Lesser Stream Market, located on the east fork of the Jin River, written during the interregnum itself, described “stores that are arranged in order, trading what they have for what they have not. The laborers and artisans are all secure in their work.”32 Both markets served an inland area where a nascent mining industry was attracting settlers; hyperbole notwithstanding, the authors, proud but otherwise little-known “village men,” described communities that were routinely engaged in the kind of local exchange that must have been typical and that continued to expand through the interregnum.

The Economies of the South

51

The continued growth of these and other market communities in the greater Quanzhou area was confirmed when all were established as districts (xian) in the course of the interregnum decades.33 Local trade was economically important; many of the markets are known to us because they were established in the ninth century as rural tax stations (chang) or industrial centers (jian), statuses that were subordinate to districts but which reflected their economic significance as nodes of exchange. But there was interregional and international trade as well. Links between the Pearl River estuary in the far south that had long been an import entrepôt in trade around the South China Sea and the rich cultural centers of the north through the inland river routes of the Gan and Xiang Rivers were already ancient and wellestablished by the Tang. Similarly the Yangtze River provided a well-established east-west route of long heritage. Moreover, although both routes served local and interregional trade, they also fed into international trade as well. There is a range of anecdotal evidence that points to the role of international trade and its link to the regional economies of the southern guo. Xue Juzheng, in his Jiu Wudai shi, observed of Guangzhou, the ancient city that for so many centuries had already been a critical port in the maritime trade routes of the South China Sea34 and which served as the capital of Han guo, that its merchants “amassed the precious goods of the Southern Sea that they traded to the west for the valuable goods of Qian (i.e., modern Guizhou) and Shu (modern Sichuan)… and regularly traded with merchants from the north.”35 Although Xue’s comment points to a revival under Han guo, Guangzhou’s role in the South Seas trade had been severely damaged when Huang Chao’s rebel army seized the city in 878 and slaughtered thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of South Seas merchants and their resident families. The resulting vacuum had provided an opportunity to aspirant ports along the coast such as Quanzhou, Fuzhou, and Mingzhou (Ningpo). Merchants had begun to visit Quanzhou and its excellent anchorage as early as the eighth century, but the city itself was yet insignificant and its links to the consuming centers to the north where the imported goods were destined were inconvenient. Nevertheless, the anonymous Wuguo gushi, compiled shortly after the Song consolidation, observed that the “trading ships of the southern barbarians never failed to stop,” and adds that Wang Yanbin, who autonomously governed the port from 904 to his death in 930 and used revenues from overseas trade to underwrite his administration, was called the “treasure-summoning secretary” (zhaobao shilang).36 Quanzhou’s role through the interregnum is reinforced by Yue Shi, who included “spices and medicinals of the overseas trade ships” among the local products of Quanzhou in his Taiping huanyuji.37 Up the coast in Fuzhou, capital of Min guo, under Wang Shenzhi “revenues [from foreign merchants] daily grew richer.”38 Finally, in 920 Qian Liu of WuYue, whose territory included the port of Mingzhou that served his capitol at Hangzhou, sent gifts of rhinoceros horn and coral, goods from the South Seas trade, to the Khitan.39

52 The Economies of the South The coastal guo also maintained an active exchange with Japan and Korea. Silla, one of the Korean Three Kingdoms, sent several missions to Fuzhou in a sustained effort to cultivate ties, while the rival Koryo kingdom sent three bronze images of the Buddha and a small wooden stupa to the Luohan Temple in Fuzhou.40 It may have been Japan, however, that was the most important northern destination. Wang Xinxi has counted seventeen exchanges, both for trade and diplomacy, between WuYue guo and Japan41; one can only guess how many merchants crossed to the kingdom that are not recorded. Such evidence, however, is anecdotal. The discovery of two wrecks in the Java Sea gives us at once both a fuller yet more narrowly-focused picture. The so-called “Belitung wreck,” found in 1998 off Belitung Island between southeast Sumatra and western Borneo, has provided amazing evidence of both interregional and international trade, albeit from several decades before the interregnum itself. The ship, a dhow that based on construction has been definitively identified as originating in the Gulf of Arabia in the western Indian Ocean, contained a massive cargo of Chinese ceramics, including one that is explicitly dated 826; the consensus among scholars who have studied the cargo is that the ship sank shortly thereafter and so is most literally evidence of the first half of the ninth century.42 Much about the wreck remains a mystery: If, as many surmise, it was carrying goods from China to western Asia, why was it near Belitung Island, well off the logical route through the archipelago region? Where was it heading, and Where had it picked up its cargo? For this essay, however, it is the last question that is relevant. By far the majority of the ca. 60,000 pieces that were recovered were the product of kilns in Changsha (Hunan) and certainly could have been shipped via the inland river routes to the Pearl River estuary and on-loaded there. However, as Derek Heng has argued, two arguments weigh against that. First, the sheer bulk of the cargo would have been awkward to transit across the mountain ridge from southern Hunan into Guangdong; the riverine route to Yangzhou, a well-established entrepôt where a large community of overseas traders was based, would have been far less challenging and equally accessible. Second, other goods, albeit a small portion of the whole, were from kilns located on the southern edge of the Central Plain. It seems unlikely that these would have been shipped via those inland routes to Guangzhou; far more plausibly, Heng argues, they too went via the Yangtze.43 Heng concludes that the vessel must have begun its voyage at one of the ports of the central coast; Yangzhou would seem likely, but aforementioned Mingzhou, on the south shore of the Hangzhou Bay, is also a possibility. Because another small portion of its wares were the product of kilns in the Guangzhou area, it must have stopped there, as was required by Tang trade laws, before heading out into the South China Sea. Despite the unresolved questions, the Belitung wreck demonstrates conclusively that by the mid-ninth century the region that was soon to become Chu guo had developed links both to the coastal ports and through them to

The Economies of the South

53

international trade. The Changsha bowls that constitute by far the largest part of the cargo include designs that were intended to appeal to West Asia, much as export porcelains in the late imperial period adopted designs to appeal to European consumers. It was not by chance, in other words, that this cargo wound up on a vessel headed in that direction. It is less clear what might have gone upriver in payment, although logic might suggest it was the imported goods of the foreign merchants. It is the second wreck, known in scholarship as the “Intan wreck,” that completes this picture. This wreck, which lies on the seabed close to the southeastern corner of Sumatra just north of modern Jakarta and not very far from the Belitung wreck, was first professionally excavated in 1997 after an undated prior discovery by local fishermen. Like the Belitung wreck, it is impossible to be certain when this vessel sank—because wrecks are just that, after all, their demise is too often unclear. However, lead coins dated 916 from Han guo present the earliest date and most analyses agree it cannot have been later than the late tenth century; in all probability it sank sometime during or immediately after the interregnum.44 Unlike the Belitung vessel, which is clearly from the Arabian Gulf, the Intan vessel in construction is definitively of Southeast Asian provenance. Also in contrast to the Belitung vessel, which to all appearances was engaged in long-distance trade spanning the India Ocean and nearer Pacific, the Intan vessel apparently was a regional vessel working the ports of the South China Sea. Its cargo, a mix of Southeast Asian and Chinese ceramics, coins, and silver ingots as well as regional items including glassware and bronze items described as “Javanese bronze fittings with grotesque animal mask motifs” contrast with the nearly uniform cargo of the Belitung vessel.45 In his analysis of the wreck, Denis Twitchett was particularly focused on the Chinese ingots and coins. The coins were all minted by Han guo, conclusively demonstrating a trade link between that guo and the archipelago regions of the South China Sea. The ingots, in contrast, were incised with their point of origin and wrapped in a thin silver wrapper on which further information about origin was incised. Together the inscriptions prove that the silver was from the southern reaches of Chu guo. Twitchett proposed an admittedly speculative but persuasive scenario to explain how silver ingots from southern Chu wound up on a vessel in the Java Sea. Hunan, the core of Chu guo, he notes lacks salt and has traditionally imported salt from farther south, i.e., Lingnan, or Han guo. The Chu state, Twitchett suggested, carried on a Tang practice of collecting taxes in silver, which then, in the form of ingots, was used by the Chu government to purchase salt from Han, salt that in turn could be sold through monopsony offices for a profit to the court. The Liu family that ruled Han guo had a notorious taste for the luxury goods of Southeast Asia, especially incense and spices; plausibly they used the revenues from the sale of salt to Chu to purchase the goods they desired, which in turn introduced the ingots into the Southeast Asian trade networks and so into the hold of a ship that sank in the Java Sea.

54 The Economies of the South Of course this is all at best reasoned speculation, but there are some concrete lessons to be learned. It is clear from the inscriptions on the ingots that they were indeed from southern Hunan. They are undated, however, so one might argue that they could have been cast soon after the assertion of Song control across the Chu guo realm in 963, yet it is unlikely that the Song reunification in short order restructured interregional trade connections. Unless one were to argue, counter to the accepted interpretation, that the Intan wreck occurred substantially later, then whatever trade links led Hunan silver into the Intan vessel’s hold must reflect interregnum trade patterns. In short, the coins and ingots provide very solid evidence of on-going trade between Chu/Hunan and Han/Lingnan and from these guo into the networks of the South China Sea. But the evidence does not stop there. Although Twitchett was focused on the metalwares, he also referenced ceramics, which he divided into four clusters: over forty specimens of “trumpet-mouthed jars with cream/white glaze” from the Ding kilns of Hebei in northern China; “numerous shallow porcelain bowls” from the Fan Chang kilns of southern Anhui; “a range of stoneware pots” from the Yue kilns of Zhejiang; and finally “simple earthenware pots” of undefined origin. Twitchett proposed that the vessel had visited Guangzhou before heading into the South China Sea, a speculation that seems almost certain given the coins and ingots. The ceramics, however, complicate the narrative, for like those on the Belitung vessel they could have entered the oceanic trade networks either through the Yangtze or the Pearl River. Either way, however, they do attest to a pattern of trade that crossed the boundaries of guo and anticipated the extensive interregional trade of the Song. It is quite clear that trade in all its varieties was essential to the fiscal wellbeing of the southern guo. Finally, then, what was traded? As is certain from the contents of the Intan wreck, precious metals, especially gold, were one item. Except for iron bars that were apparently for ballast in both the Belitung and Intan wrecks, however, the metalwares the latter yields were largely in precious metals.46 But as early as the Tang many more ores were being mined across the south, especially iron, and copper, and all these found their way into trade. According to an oft-cited passage from a genealogy of the Liu family of Quanzhou, at the time of Liu Congxiao (906–962), first of the two late interregnum warlords, a variety of finished goods in copper and iron were exported through Quanzhou as well as ceramics.47 By the mature Song we know that Quanzhou, in common with other ports, was sending items such as common cookware: woks, chopping knives, etc., to the insular and archipelago regions of Southeast Asia.48 If we can grant any credibility to a late imperial genealogy, then we can conclude that the craft production of such goods was already important to the southern economies through the interregnum. Already by the later Tang, however, as the Belitung wreck demonstrates, the most important export item was ceramics, as they were to remain for

The Economies of the South

55

many centuries thereafter. Ceramic production was already well-established throughout the south in the Tang and southern kilns remained prominent throughout later centuries; production was not new to the interregnum. But the regional ceramic industry appears to have undergone considerable growth. In particular, evidence points to expanded production of the famous Yue-ware celadons of the Shanglin Lake area outside Mingzhou (Ningbo) and the bluish-white porcelains of the Fanchang kilns in Anhui,49 both of which were producing very high quality wares. At the same time, very likely in response to the growing access to maritime trade links through both Quanzhou and Fuzhou, kilns throughout coast Fujian were producing large quantities of lower-quality ware intended both for everyday use and for export.50

Notes 1 Originally published as Clark (2016b), with minor editorial modification. 2 On this, see Kurz (2003). See also Ouyang (2004), “Introduction.” Readers should note that there never were ten guo at any given moment. In the south Jiangnan and Sichuan both had successor kingdoms—Wu and Tang in the former, and Former and Latter Shu in Sichuan. The so-called tenth guo was the Northern Han regime in Shanxi; its experience was dramatically different from any of the southern guo and so it is omitted in the following discussion. 3 A notable exception is Twitchett and Smith (2009). 4 See “Zheng tong lun san shou” 正統論三首, Wenzhong ji 16:1a–11b and the extensive discussion in juan 59. See also QSW, vol. 17, juan 729: 703–715. 5 XWDS, 2:21. 6 In contemporary usage this term is a compound translating the English word “revolution.” However, historically it meant “to overthrow (ge) the mandate (ming) from below.” Thus the terms are a verb and a noun, so I render them separately. 7 For a discussion that considers some other dimensions of the era, see Clark (2012). See also Clark (2009). 8 XWDS, 61:747. See also Ouyang (2004), 467. 9 See especially Standen (2007). Owen Lattimore arguably was the first to explore this relationship in his monumental Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Lattimore, 1940). For a discussion that carries the theme into the late imperial era, see Rawski (2015). 10 See especially the speech of Wang Pu, in which Wang urged Guo Rong to recreate the Tang empire, ZZTJ 292:9525–26. 11 Twitchett (1966). 12 Twitchett (1979), 29. Although there has been much work, especially but by no means only by Chinese scholars, since Twitchett wrote these two essays, it has not changed his central conclusions. Relevant comments and citations can also be found in McDermott and Shiba (2015), especially pp. 321–385. 13 See Clark (2011) for a more detailed discussion. 14 Elvin (1973), 298–315. 15 Wujun tujing xuji, 3:1b. 16 Fan Zhongyan, a:14b–15a. 17 Wujun zhi, 19:10a. 18 MS 3:76. 19 Sanshan zhi, 16:4b.

56 The Economies of the South 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

BMTZ, 22:455. BMTZ 22:465; MS 8:190. SGCQ 40:597. SGCQ 100:1430. Songshi, 173:4183. Cai Xiang, Duanming ji, 6:11a. Song huiyao jiben, “shihuo” 食貨63:164b. The standard work in English on Champa rice in China, although dated, is Ho (1956); more recently, see Bray (1984). Morohashi, et al. (1957–60), vol 8, 637, entry 25368, explains that baya was not the name of a strain but of a quality of rice. Thus it does not refer to anything specific. ZZTJ 266:8702. (Former) Shu had the “Storehouse for Tea and Wine” (Chajiu ku), but its purpose is less clear; see ZZTJ 279:9125. ZZTJ 274:8832. ZZTJ 274:8832. Sheng Jun 盛均, “Taolin chang ji” 桃林場記, in Yongchun zhou zhi, 15:1b. Zhan Dunren 詹敦仁, “Chujian Anxi xian ji” 初建安溪縣記, in Gujin tushu jicheng, 1051:50b. Although the text is undated, other information places Zhan Dunren in the interregnum. I have discussed these markets in Clark (1992); see also the relevant passages in Clark (1991). On Guangzhou’s long role in the South China Sea trade, see Wang (1958). JWDS 135:1808. Wuguo gushi, b:9b–10a. TPHYJ 102:3a. SGCQ 95:1377. Liao shi, 2:16. The diplomatic missions are recorded in XWDS 68:852, while the bronze Buddhas and the stupa are referenced in the (Daoguang) Fujian tongzhi (道光) 福建通 志 264, cited in Zhu (1984), 162. Wang (2004). There have been many essays, both scholarly and popular, devoted to this wreck. As examples of quality scholarly discussion, see Guy (2010), and Flecker (2000). Heng (2014). See also Zhu (1992). Zhu emphasizes Yangzhou’s critical role as the juncture between the Grand Canal and Yangtze Rivers. On the excavation of the Intan wreck, see Flecker (2005). See Twitchett and Stargardt (2002). The exception would be the iron coins minted by the Han guo. Twitchett, however, proposes these may have been the trading currency of crewmembers rather than exports per se. Liu shi zupu 留氏族譜 (undated Qing dynasty manuscript; collection of the Quanzhou Museum), cited in Xu (2006), 235. Both the thirteenth-century Zhufan zhi 諸蕃志 and fourteenth century Diaoyi zhilüe 島夷誌略 have multiple references metalwares among the items exported from Quanzhou; see also Shiba (1968), 139–140. “Earliest compartment kiln and bluish white porcelain found at Fanchang, Anhui Province,” Chinese Archaeology/Kaogu (May, 2015), accessed at http://www.ka ogu.cn/en/News/New_discoveries/2015/0507/50172.html (January, 2017). See Xu (2006), 216–219.

5

The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South1

The vast territory that I am defining as “the south” embraced a wide variety of local and regional cultures and customs, languages, and social hierarchies. As I have summarily described in Chapter 2, through the Tang the south experienced the initial stages of what was to be a far-reaching demographic and cultural transformation. The critical juncture in this transformation was the mid-Tang An Lushan Rebellion, following which every region of the south experienced major expansion in the number of registered households. Even before that rebellion, census data recorded sizable populations in the Yangtze basin. Robert Hartwell, who in his seminal essay on transformation between mid-Tang and late Ming collated demographic data from the midTang 742 census recorded in the Comprehensive Geography of the Taiping Era according to William Skinner’s macroregions, found that by the mideighth century already there were over a million registered households in the Lower Yangtze macro-region and just under a million through the Middle Yangtze macro-region.2 In contrast, however, only a quarter million households were registered in the Southeast Coast macro-region centered on modern Fujian and only slightly more in the deepest south in the Lingnan macro-region. Of course, all census data, even today, has embedded biases. In the case of imperial Chinese records, including notably those of the Tang, only “registered” households were counted. In areas such as modern Fujian, the upper reaches of the Yangtze tributaries, and the deepest south, where many indigenous communities remained, most households were presumably outside official registration and were not counted. We have no way of knowing what their numbers were. The registered population in all these regions experienced major expansion following the An Lushan Rebellion, which had unsettled vast regions of the north and prompted major population movement. As northern households fled the chaos toward the comparative stability of the south, the institutions of the imperial bureaucracy followed, leading to more intense administrative oversight and, one ought to assume, more thorough registration of heretofore neglected households, a group that must have included both immigrant Sinitic households who by one means or another had evaded registration as well as heretofore overlooked indigenous populations. DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249-5

58 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South Nevertheless, whether by immigration or by more extensive registration, the growth in numbers between the 742 census, the last Tang census that is generally considered reliable, and the Song, is striking. Hartwell, using the 1080 census for comparison, found the registered population of the Lower Yangtze had doubled. Far more striking, however, is that the population of both the Middle Yangtze and Southeast Coast had grown four-fold. An even more revealing picture, however, can be found in the prefectural data recorded in the Taiping huanyu ji, which was compiled almost immediately after the Song reconsolidation of the empire. The registered households in the prefectures corresponding to the WuYue guo, embracing the shores and hinterland of Hangzhou Bay, grew from 392,158 to 523,287, or just over 30%. In empirical contrast, the number of registered households in the prefectures corresponding to the Min guo of Fujian grew nearly fourfold, from 108,130 to over 408,805. The remarkable contrast between these increases, however, cannot be taken at face value. The Liangzhe region had experienced considerable war and chaos in the last years of the Tang, when the army of the late Tang rebel Huang Chao swept through the area and caused extensive upheaval. Even if the population of these prefectures had grown through the latter half of the Tang, as it no doubt had, it is likely that these numbers had dropped considerably by the beginning of the interregnum as a result of mortality and out-migration. Thus the implied expansion of only 30% probably undercounts the real population growth over the century. Conversely, Fujian was largely spared any turmoil; there is no reason to believe its population would have dropped in the late Tang. There is even evidence of immigration from the Hangzhou Bay region.3 However, as explained above the eighth-century figures undoubtedly omitted significant numbers of indigenous people. The interregnum Min guo very likely exerted stronger control over the indigenes, which surely included registration. Thus the implied fourfold growth probably exaggerates the actual expansion. Yet expansion there was, and dramatically so.4 The point of this is that across the three centuries between the An Lushan Rebellion and the consolidation of the Song imperium the south experienced an important demographic transformation. What had remained through the latter half of the Tang a frontier had become essential to a unified empire. In the preceding chapter I made this point in terms of economics. In the discussion that follows I hope to show that it was also the case in terms of both society and culture.

Social Change between the Later Eighth and Later Tenth Centuries Like every holistic dynasty that had preceded it, the Tang dynasty was a northern dynasty: It was established by a family with a long heritage in the north; its two capitals were in the north; its bureaucratic, cultural, and military leadership were almost exclusively northern. When the court punished bureaucrats, it banished them to the south—preferably the deeper south,

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which was an alien, unfamiliar, and dangerous environment where they were expected to die, as many did. As has been explained in Chapter 2, in a very real sense the south was a colony. The north, for example, depended on the south for natural resources, especially grain. The short-lived Sui dynasty (589–618) that preceded the Tang had constructed the Grand Canal specifically to facilitate the shipment of surplus grain collected as taxes from the Yangtze basin to the capital, an extraction route that the Tang court relied on as well. To facilitate this exploitation, northerners staffed the most important offices of the regional and local bureaucracies of the south. They registered the population, if not very effectively, collected taxes, although one might guess there was more that might have been collected had the population been more effectively registered, and brought what oversight the court deemed necessary. Meanwhile, “unoccupied” southern land was settled by an increasing number of northern emigrants, displacing the indigenous peoples who could only respond with violence or resignation. Although the Tang has long been regarded as the time when the civil service examinations began to revolutionize, and rationalize, the system of recruitment into the imperial bureaucracy, southerners had very little access to officeholding. Astonishingly few southerners had earned the highest degrees before the late eighth century, when refugees from the northern turmoil had begun to transform southern demographics and the southern relationship to the imperial order. Through the entire course of the Tang, only thirty-seven men from the prefectures that were to constitute the interregnum Min guo earned degrees. Overwhelmingly these men were from the drainage basin of the Min River in northern Fujian centered on Fuzhou, emphasizing the marginality of more peripheral regions, including the growing port cities of southern Fujian such as Quanzhou. In Lingnan, the region that was to become interregnum Guangnan Han, there were only thirty-three successful candidates, and again the concentration of successful candidates from Guangzhou is striking. Even the prefectures controlled by the interregnum WuYue guo centered on Hangzhou Bay, already by the Tang the most “civilized” area of the south, produced only seventy-two degree winners out of an empire-wide overall total through the Tang of over 6,500, hardly more than one percent of the total!5 Yet, the south had to be administered. Because so few northerners were actually willing to serve in the south, the Tang devised an alternative recruitment system. “Southern selection” was constructed around a facilitated examination that debuted late in the seventh century, as Ouyang Xiu explained in his New Tang History: In 675 the Commanders of the Five Regions of Lingnan and Qianzhong (eastern Sichuan) sought to recruit honorable men, but they lacked talent as officials. So [the court] dispatched inspectors to conduct a supplemental selection (xuanbu), which was called “southern selection.”

60 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South Thereafter whenever there was flood or drought in Jiangnan, Huainan, or Fujian, Supplemental Selection Officials were dispatched to select individuals.6 From this limited beginning the “southern selection” system expanded to fill multiple administrative needs. “Graduates” of the “southern selection” supplemental examinations were eligible principally for low- to mid-ranking appointments at the district and prefectural level across the south; this was not a path to high-ranking imperial office. The family of Ouyang Zhan is illustrative. He was the first native of Fujian to earn a jinshi degree through the official imperial examination, and was among the very small number of southerners who gained entry to elite society in the capital, albeit on the fringes. He was, in addition, a “classmate” and colleague of Han Yu, who eulogized him and praised his family: “[His ancestors] had lived in Min for generations, and all before him had been officials in MinYue [the southeast coast], serving as assistant prefectural magistrates and district administrators.”7 These are the kinds of offices that are not noted in records such as the late imperial local gazetteers that provide so much information but so little about earlier times; unsurprisingly, therefore, there is no independent record that Ouyang’s family had held such posts. Yet these are precisely the offices that the Tang filled through “southern selection.” Well before Ouyang Zhan earned his degree, his ancestors apparently had used the supplemental process to establish themselves among the elite of their community, but this was a position they had been unable to project to an imperial level. The corollary, of course, is that by the early to mid-Tang, clusters of local elites that to some degree were engaged with the civil culture of the Central Plain appear to have coalesced at nodal points across the south. We don’t know very much about them. For example, were the ancestors of Ouyang Zhan recent déclassé migrants who in the manner of early European migrants to North America took advantage of highly fluid social hierarchies to establish themselves as members of the elite? Were they refugees from the turmoil of the north who brought with them long-standing elite status? Were they “civilized”—or to use the Chinese argot, “cooked” (shu)—indigenes who simply transferred an inherited social hierarchy to a pseudo-Sinitic status? There are hints of all three possibilities, but in reality we know nothing except their emergence. Broadly, this trend was characteristic across the south. As I have explored elsewhere, a complex and multi-layered elite had emerged in the south through the centuries since the fall of the Han, and it persisted into the Tang. This elite was composed of: (a) descendants of indigenous cultures who had adapted to the dominant Sinitic hierarchy, especially in the most prosperous regions of the Yangtze River valley; (b) descendants of declassé northern immigrants who had migrated to the south, especially during the centuries of division that followed the Han in a successful search for land and economic opportunity; and (c) descendants of northern families who had fled the

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Central Plain and formed the administrative core of the Southern Dynasties during the era of division.8 Although tensions existed among all three groups, by the Tang they had come to a general accommodation amongst themselves that stood in contrast to the northern-based imperial and bureaucratic elite of the Tang. In that climate, even local and regional elites in the wealthiest, most culturally sophisticated regions of the south were marginalized in the cultural world of the north; this was plausibly a significant factor in the break-up of the holistic empire that defines the interregnum century. As a range of scholars under the tutelage of Denis Twitchett demonstrated many decades ago, the south remained one of the most important and reliable sources of imperial revenue in the tumultuous decades following the An Lushan Rebellion, when so much of the imperial core in fact resisted court authority and contributed little or no revenue.9 Yet the south received little benefit for this loyalty, and many officials of the regular bureaucracy given assignments across the south continued to decline to even take up their posts. Tang authority across the south collapsed almost immediately in the aftermath of Huang Chao’s rebellious march across the region between 878 and 880.10 The guo that emerged in the vacuum were established by a cadre of disreputable scallywags. In all the southern guo, followers of such men— followers who themselves had déclassé backgrounds, and who had abandoned their natal homes because there they had no prospects of social advance—took advantage of opportunity to reposition themselves as elites. Many failed to sustain their social transition, but others consolidated their new status for generations to come. Qian Liu, for example, led the Eight Battalions of Hangzhou (Hangzhou badu), a militia group formed to defend the city from local unrest even before Huang Chao’s arrival but which he subsequently used to consolidate regional power and form WuYue guo. The Qian family, which survived the full extent of the interregnum century, was virtually unique among the ruling families of the south. Most succumbed to fratricides, patricides, regicides… For all the prosperity of the south, it was not a good time to be a ruler! But the Qian not only survived the interregnum. They carried on in the decades, even centuries, the followed, appearing regularly on the Song examination lists and among the leading scholars and officials of the era. Not surprisingly, Qian Liu leaned heavily on his fellow militia as he organized his rule, and here the story is more mixed. As Qian Liu campaigned to consolidate his power, the appropriately named Gu Quanwu (n.d.), or “All About the Military” Gu, was among his most prominent generals, yet he seems to have left no legacy; some biographies suggest that he took the Buddhist tonsure.11 Conversely, Du Ling (n.d.), also among Qian Liu’s leading generals, passed on his stature to his sons and grandsons, among whom his youngest, Du Jianhui (863–950), who served as Chief Counselor to Qian Liu, was most prominent.12 Throughout the Song, moreover, Du remained a prominent surname on the examination lists of the Zhejiang

62 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South region and several gained important bureaucratic positions, although there is no notation in the surviving record to tell us who, if any, was descended from Du Ling. Among the most complex legacies of the interregnum was the “men of Gushi” (Gushi ren) who were so prominent in Fujian as alleged followers of the Wang brothers who established the Min guo. The brothers and their followers alike all claimed to have been native to Gushi district of Guangzhou (modern Anhui). Although Min, like other interregnum guo such as Jiangnan Wu and Chu in Hunan, was established by invasive outsiders, the Wang brothers, of whom there were three, are not known to have been déclassé thugs. Instead our sources describe them as local landowners in the Gushi region who had fled when threatened by a local warlord in the aftermath of Huang Chao’s uprising.13 We have no way of knowing how many retainers fled with them, nor if they had any idea where they were going. What we do know is that after a year of wandering along roughly the same path followed by Huang Chao less than a decade earlier, they entered Fujian in 885, leading a band that allegedly numbered several thousand. It is likely that most of this band had joined when the brothers were leading their followers through regions that had so recently experienced the turmoil and devastation caused by Huang’s notoriously destructive army; it is probable, in fact, that few were really natives of Gushi. Yet in the decades that followed, myriad kin groups across Fujian claimed to have had Gushi roots; a link to the Wang brothers, real or imagined, was obviously thought to be socially beneficial. Ironically, there is little evidence that the Gushi migrants themselves played important roles in the Min guo. The Wang brothers relied heavily on the pre-interregnum elite of Fujian, as well as on a handful of refugees with backgrounds in the late Tang bureaucracy, while many of the real “men of Gushi” appear to have disappeared from history. As Aoyama Sadao demonstrated many years ago, most who claimed to be descended from the “men of Gushi” were, in fact, impostors.14 Some, however, used their links to the migration to position themselves for the first time in their family histories as local elites. The Fu of Luofeng, a small village in Xianyou district on the central Fujian coast, are a good example. Although it is impossible to be absolutely certain, the Fu very likely had been part of the Gushi migration. Rather than serve in the administration of the Min guo, however, their own records indicate that they focused on land acquisition through the interregnum century before emerging as scholars and bureaucrats in the eleventh century and after.15 Yet, each of the southern guo demanded a ruling class, and here is where the interregnum marks a significant transition. All the southern guo took advantage of the turmoil that continued to destabilize the north through the decades of the interregnum to recruit men who had already established themselves in the imperial elite. These were men such as Wu Cheng (n.d.), the grandson of a Tang official and son of a Tang jinshi, and Yuan Dezhao (n.d.), whose father had been a high-ranking official under the Tang, both of

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whom rose to the highest pinnacles of the WuYue kingdom; Du Xunhe (846–904), said to be the illegitimate son of Du Mu (803–852) but best known as an accomplished poet who earned a jinshi degree under the Tang and went on to serve Yang Xingmi in Wu;17 or Han Wo (844–923), a prominent literatus and jinshi graduate of the late Tang who found refuge under the protection of Min.18 Although these refugees were very important in the administrative and social hierarchies of the southern guo, for many their refuge in the south was a temporary solution to a social crisis; their heirs returned to the north in affirmation of their northern heritage when a holistic empire with an initial northern bias was restored by the Song. Others, however, such as the Zhuzi Fang of Putian, the metropolitan district adjacent to Xianyou district on the central Fujian coast, stayed put. The Fang in fact exemplify the complex notion of north versus south and the relative meaning of “northern” by the last decades of Tang rule. Fang Tingfan, the patriarch of the Zhuzi line, was a native of the Hangzhou hinterland in modern Zhejiang. He was, however, descended from a line of officeholders, most likely graduates of the “southern selection” system, and the family had gradually established a position in the regional elite. The consolidation of the family’s relationship to the wider elite of the Tang was accomplished by his father, who had earned merit with the court for service against Huang Chao. Fang tradition claims that he was granted a position in the imperial Censorate and so became part of the imperial elite.19 Through the last years of the Tang, Tingfan held a succession of imperially-appointed district positions that culminated with the district magistracy in Putian where, faced with the collapse of the Tang imperium in the 890s, he chose to settle. He fathered six sons, all of whom served the interregnum Min court. Most significantly, the Zhuzi Fang established themselves as one of the most important kin groups of the entire empire. Throughout the Song they appear regularly on the lists of successful examination candidates and regularly intermarried with the empire’s most elite families. The Zhuzi Fang may have made one of the most successful transitions from social marginality to empire-wide elite status, but they were only distinct in the degree of their success. Taking advantage of the administrative demands faced by the regional guo, many families stepped into the regional elite as they developed new traditions of bureaucratic service. Several of the southern guo, most notably (Jiangnan) Tang, established their own examination system, although complete lists of graduates do not survive, so we cannot know certainly how important that was.20 A small number of southerners even earned degrees through the irregular examinations of the northern dynasties. Mostly, however, the southern bureaucracies were staffed by men who entered service through connections; such men may not have been scholars, but they were bureaucrats. As the interregnum evolved into the reintegrated Song, therefore, there was a significant body of men who had developed a

64 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South taste for the prestige that bureaucratic service provided, and who were no longer simply local or regional elites. They had become members of a tradition that valued bureaucratic service above all options that heretofore had not been widely shared. Illustratively, in his eulogy for his friend and colleague Ouyang Zhan quoted above, Han Yu had observed: “Even though there have been highly cultivated men [in Min] who understood literature and administration as well as anyone from the North (shang guo), there has never been anyone who was willing to go forth and serve.”21 The interregnum changed this. In the aftermath of the interregnum, men from the heretofore marginalized south were “willing to go forth and serve.” The payoff, however, was not immediate. Men from the southern guo can be found on jinshi lists almost from the very beginning of the Song, in some cases even before their guo had officially submitted to Song rule, but initially the numbers were small. For example, according to the jinshi list of the eighteenthcentury Zhejiang provincial gazetteer, between 966—when Huang Lan was the first from Liangzhe to earn a jinshi under the revived exam system twelve years before Qian Chu, the last WuYue ruler, accepted Song rule—and 989, a period covering six examination cycles, only six men are recorded as having earned jinshi degrees. Thereafter there were multiple successful candidates almost every examination cycle; by the early eleventh century during the reign of Emperor Zhenzong’s reign, Liangzhe was routinely represented by ten or more successful candidates in every cycle. A similar tale can be told of Fujian: only twenty-two men had earned the jinshi degree through the first four decades since the region submitted to the Song in 978. Then suddenly, in the examination cycle of 1034, the circuit produced twenty-four successful candidates; if that number remained unusually high, in fact thereafter every examination cycle produced multiple successful candidates. Of course we cannot say that all these men were spurred to their success by the interregnum; such a simple correlation would be unsupportable, and indeed there were many factors that underlay the rise of southerners. But that’s not the point. Coming out of the era of division, the academicallytrained and administratively-oriented elites of the southern guo were prepared for a dramatically different relationship to the imperial system. They were now willing to “go forth and serve.” There were many reasons for this, but the upshot was dramatic. If the Tang had been a northern dynasty, through the eleventh century the Song evolved into a southern one. Long before the court had to flee the Jurchen invasion and relocate in the south, southerners had become the center of political power. And with political power came cultural influence.

Cultural Innovation between the Later Eighth and Later Eleventh Centuries Commonly, when historians think of cultural change between the late Tang and mature Song, they focus on the movement we know today as neo-

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Confucianism—a term, it bears noting, that has no direct equivalent in Chinese. Of course this focus reflects a reality: the intellectual revolution that the term embraces absorbed a vast amount of cultural and intellectual energy and set the direction of Chinese elite culture for centuries to come. The origins of this revolution were in the north, with men such as Liu Zongyuan and Han Yu. As it matured through the eleventh and twelfth centuries it more and more took on a southern cast, exemplified by figures such as Ouyang Xiu, Lu Jiuyuan (1139–1193), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200). At the time of the interregnum, however, these developments lay in the future. To the men who were defining culture across the south through the interregnum there were more pressing issues of a very practical nature, especially regarding the definition of kinship. Before turning to this, however, a body of less practical but no less important cultural innovations that were rooted in the court of the Jiangnan Tang deserve a brief overview. The Jiangnan court was among the wealthiest of the southern courts. Moreover, it left a legacy as the most refined court of the south—refined, but also probably decadent, a theme that allegedly was immortalized by the court painter Gu Hongzhong (937–975). Gu is said to have been a favorite of Li Yu (937–978, r. 960–975), the last Jiangnan Tang ruler. The most famous work connected to him, The Illustrated Night Revels of Han Xizai (Han Xizai yeyan tu), has long been read as a searing indictment of debauchery in the home of Han Xizai (902–970), a close associate of Li Yu and one of the most powerful figures in the last years of the court. There are many variables in this story, not least that some question whether it is Gu’s work at all or a mid-Song painting that has been retrospectively attributed to him.22 It is well-documented, however, that the scroll was in circulation by the Southern Song, when the prominent minister Shi Miyuan (1164–1233) added his own seal. Whether the Jiangnan Tang court was truly as decadent as the scroll portrays, however, is less important than the portrayal itself: within decades if not sooner, it was widely believed that the Jiangnan court embraced opulent decadence. The court and its society had been extremely wealthy. Though questions remain about the true provenance of the painting, Gu was one of a number of painters patronized by the Jiangnan court whose work featured human figures. Parallel to Gu, however, was a school of monumental landscape painters, notable especially for the work of Dong Yuan (c. 934–c. 962) and his students.23 Dong Yuan did not “invent” landscape painting, which had a venerable tradition even before the Tang, but he developed a distinctive approach known as the Southern School that had an important influence on later landscape tradition, including the great landscapes of the Song and Yuan. The Northern Song critic Mi Fu (1051–1107) wrote of his work: Dong Yuan’s painting, plain and natural, is completely different from paintings of the Tang dynasty… It is the divine class of the recent age, incomparable in its lofty character… In his representations of streams,

66 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South bridges, and fishing bays with overlapping islets and beaches, [he] depicts scenes typical of Jiangnan.24 The culture of the Jiangxi court extended broadly into art and literature, including poetry, most notably the ci poetry of the emperor Li Yu.25 In all these arenas the Jiangnan literati had a lasting legacy. There is one other contribution to later Chinese culture, however, that deserves mention: footbinding. The actual origins of footbinding in fact are hard to decipher, as Dorothy Ko has explained.26 It is significant, however, that for many centuries tradition has attributed it to dancers who were performing for the aforementioned Li Yu. Allegedly he believed that binding dancers’ feet made their body movements more alluring, a tradition that is entirely in keeping with the sensual decadence that he is said to have promoted. Although the truth of this explanation cannot be proven and is doubted by many, the fact that for so long the origins of footbinding have been attributed to the Jiangnan court testifies to the traditions with which it has long been associated. As Edward Schafer demonstrated, the south was considered a land of exotic but dangerous fascination.27 As such, it was plausibly the source of such an exotic custom. Painting, literature, body imagery… all have been important features of Chinese culture, and the Jiangnan court contributed to each. But the most enduring and significant innovation to emerge from the interregnum south may be a new definition of kinship. Kinship, of course, is universal, but its definition is culturally specific. The rituals of kinship in the Sinitic world, especially the body of ritual that is so often called “ancestor worship,” are as ancient as the very roots of Chinese culture. In keeping with the premises of ancient Sinitic culture, perhaps most cogently addressed by Confucius but hardly originating with him, these rituals were very strictly defined by class. Much of the corpus of kinship ritual that today is considered “Chinese” was historically proscribed, by tradition if not law, to all except the elite. There are, however, two distinct but overlapping innovations that came out of the interregnum south that challenged the age-old proscriptions.

Ritual Space Although designated space for collective veneration of ancestors has been a key part of Chinese kinship practice for centuries, through the multi-century era known as “the Southern and Northern Dynasties” that separated Tang from Han, the right to have shrines for ancestral rituals was limited by sumptuary law to high-ranking families under the regulations of the NineRank System. As early as the Han, in fact, officials such as Gong Sheng (68 BCE–11 CE) and Gong She (60 BCE–7 CE), whose travails are recorded in Ban Gu’s Han shu, could fall afoul of such regulations.28 Nevertheless, as Yang Xuanzhi (sixth century) wrote in his memoir of Luoyang: “Following the death of the [Han] Emperor Ming (r. 58–75) a spirit hall (qidan) was built

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by his grave. Thereafter the common people built stupas (futu) by their graves.”29 The right of the dead to have ritual spaces for use by their descendants may have been defined by law, but it was hard to enforce and frequently ignored. The Tang did away with the Nine-Rank System as a formal register of social hierarchy. Nevertheless legal restrictions on ritual space continued. Families with men of official rank might build “grave cloisters” (fensi), shrines staffed by small numbers of monks located at the site of graves.30 Commoners were permitted to assemble at gravesites, but more formal spaces such as grave cloisters remained culturally problematic. Although later scholars reacted negatively to any challenge to ritual orthodoxy, popular practice began to change in the interregnum. The Nanhu Zheng family of Putian district in Fujian are an example.31 By the time of the interregnum, the Zheng were well-established among the elite families of the central Fujian coast. Kin tradition claimed that their progenitor settled in Putian district early in the fourth century in conjunction with the flight of the Jin dynasty court from its original base in the north to Jiankang (modern Nanjing). As I have explained earlier, however, this was a common but never fully substantiated claim among the regional elite of the late Tang. In fact, Zheng Qiao (1104–1162), the author of the Comprehensive Record (Tong zhi) encyclopedia and a Nanhu Zheng himself, claimed in a preface he wrote for an early edition of the Zheng genealogy: Our ancestors initially settled in Houguan district of Fuzhou. [Later], as gentry households fled to the south to escape troubles, [three brothers] … left Houguan… and proceeded to together to South Lake Mountain in Putian where they settled by the graves of our ancestors.32 Neither Zheng Qiao in his preface nor any other family record provides any dates to these events, but the reference to “gentry households” who fled troubles points strongly to the mid-eighth century. The reference to the “graves of our ancestors” establishes that even before the three brothers relocated their kin had already established some nature of presence in the Putian area. Turning again to kin tradition, the three brothers are said to have given land to an itinerant monk to establish the Temple of Illuminated Transformation (Guanghua si), which remains today the principal Buddhist temple of Putian. There is, however, an obvious flaw in this tradition. According to an inscription composed by Huang Tao (d. 911), one of the very few natives of Fujian to earn a jinshi degree under the Tang (in 895) and a prominent scholar who was patronized by the interregnum Min court, the Temple of Illuminated Transformation was established by the otherwise unknown Zheng Sheng in 558, a date that is also cited in temple documents.33 As I suggest above and have argued in more detail elsewhere, the three brothers cannot have settled in Putian earlier than the eighth century, by which time

68 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South the temple was apparently long-established.34 The tradition that claims they were the founders is wrong. In fact, what the brothers must have established was a grave cloister, which was a very real, if not obviously intentional, challenge to orthodoxy. Through the later Tang, like so many of their peers among the emerging regional elite, the Zheng focused on building wealth and power through the acquisition of land. Reclamation projects such as the Yanshou Weir (pi) were opening tracts of highly productive new land in the Putian region, and the Zheng apparently took advantage of the opportunity this provided.35 Using this wealth, moreover, the Zheng sustained their close relation to the Temple into the early interregnum, as is recorded in a text dated 912 that is preserved in its records (see Figure 5.1): In the third year of the Kaiping era of the Liang dynasty (909), the benefactor (tan yue) and Regional Commander Zheng Yun and his brother Zhen selected a field with an annual yield of 900 strings of cash that had been purchased by their deceased father Gao [a grandson of the middle brother Zheng Zhuang; see Figure 1]… and donated it to the Temple of Illuminated Transformation in order to provide lights and prayers for eternity in honor of their deceased father and their mother Lady Chen. Moreover, when Master Gao was alive he had donated over sixty plots of diked and terraced land to the temple to the temple to underwrite the annual commemoration of the brothers Lu, Zhuang, and Shu on the anniversary of their deaths with a vegetarian feast (zhaigong).36 This short text then concludes: “[Yun and Zhen] then asked that a tablet be placed in the Memorial Hall (ying tang) that sits aside the Great Hall.” Clearly by the late Tang, the Nanhu Zheng were developing a designated space for ancestral veneration. This space was inseparably linked to Buddhist conceptions of sacred space and the rites were Buddhist rites. This was not an ancestral shrine (citang) as such shrines came to be understood in the centuries to yet to come. Nevertheless, although located within temple precincts, the space was separate from the temple’s main hall; this was space that was dedicated entirely to commemorating Zheng ancestors. Establishing such a space was clearly in conflict with the sumptuary limitations that had been followed for centuries. This was the kind of space that a family such as the Zheng, a family that for all its local notability lacked the recognized qualifications, should not have legally established. Finally there is an extract of a text attributed to Zheng Xihan, a ninthgeneration descendant of Zheng Zhuang and 1053 jinshi, that is preserved in a genealogical preface dated 1169. In a slight but significant variation on the last line of the 912 text, Xihan wrote: “[Yun and Zhen] then placed a tablet in the ancestral shrine (citang) adjacent to the Great Hall in order to pass on to later generations the depth of their history.”37 Taken at face value, this is

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Figure 5.1 The Descendants of Zheng Zhuang

the earliest reference to the shrine as an ancestral shrine. Of course we must be aware of the possible anachronisms that may intrude into the transmission of ancient documents. The text in question is preserved in a Qing genealogy, by which time the ancestral shrine was well-established in the repertoire of kinship ritual in Fujian, as elsewhere. Thus the use of the term may only reflect the perspective of a much later era. Nevertheless, even as the shrine was left within the sacred precincts of the temple, subsequent developments increasingly emphasized non-Buddhist rituals. Most explicitly, a genealogical preface compiled in 1353 explains that Zheng Boyu (jinshi 1034) and his mother oversaw a restoration of the shrine. The date of this restoration is uncertain, but as it occurred after Boyu had retired from office, which he did sometime in the 1040s, it certainly couldn’t have been earlier than the middle of the eleventh century. It is very likely, however, that it occurred in conjunction with the undated genealogical preface of Zheng Xihan. The preface explains that Boyu and his mother donated several fields [to underwrite the performance of ritual]. Every year they made offerings on the dates of their ancestors’ death and on the fifteenth day of the first month. The monks prepared the ritual goods and the descendants would pay obeisance. These were non-Buddhist rituals of ancestral veneration; the only role for the temple’s monks was to assist in their preparation. Apparently the monks

70 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South protested, for at some point before the Northern Song-Southern Song transition they destroyed the Zheng shrine and threw the inscriptions “into the spring;” we can only assume it was because they objected to their marginalized role and the increasingly non-Buddhist, even secularized nature of the ritual.38 Regardless of the reasoning for this desecration, this apparently is why the stele, upon which Zheng Xihan’s text must have been inscribed, was lost. The Zheng lineage was not alone among the regional elite in establishing dedicated space for ancestral veneration. A very similar story, for example, can be told of the Zhuzi Fang kin group of Putian who have been introduced earlier. Unlike the Zheng, who appear to have resided in the Putian region for several generations by the late Tang, the Fang were new arrivals. But soon after their arrival in Putian in the last decade of the ninth century, they too established a discrete space for the veneration of their ancestors within the precincts of the Temple of Illuminated Transformation. In an inscription commemorating the Zhuzi ancestral shrine composed in 1265, Liu Kezhuang (1187–1269) recalled: Fang Tingfan [the “first ancestor” of the Zhuzi line whose relocation to Putian has been mentioned above] … wanted to construct a spirit hall (jingshe) to honor his ancestors and unite his kin, but he was never able to do so… [His six sons] agreed to combine their efforts to realize their father’s plan. They inquired about unoccupied lands from officials and purchased a plot in the southern monastery [i.e., the Temple of Illuminated Transformation] in order to fulfill their efforts, and so the Hall of Sacrificial Fortune (Jianfu yuan) was established. [Each son donated land], and in all the fields yielded fifty-nine piculs valued at over 7,000 cash.39 There are obvious differences between the Fang shrine and that of the Zheng. To begin with, Fang Tingfan’s goal, fulfilled by his six sons, had been to establish a “spirit hall.” Like the shrine of the Zheng, this was established with a sacred ritual purpose. Moreover, whereas the Zheng established a grave cloister, Tingfan’s ancestors had not been buried in Putian; his goal, therefore, had been to facilitate the passage of physically remote ancestors through their afterlives via Buddhist ritual. Nevertheless, like the Zheng he had intended his shrine to “unite his kin.” To do so and to fulfill Tingfan’s hopes, his sons like the Zheng established a distinct space where they could gather. To facilitate the continuation of commemorative rituals they, like the Zheng, established an independent endowment. The hall may have been in sacred space and dedicated to sacred purpose, but its function was to perpetuate a shared lineage identity among Tingfan’s descendants. Like the Zheng hall, the identity of the Fang hall evolved over time. Liu Kezhuang continued in his inscription: Formerly offerings were made to Fang Tingfan, his father, and his grandfather, as well as to the founding ancestors of the Six Branches [i.e.,

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Tingfan’s six sons]; these were done in the Dharma Hall (Fatang)… On the fifteenth day of the first month and the Feast of All Souls [fifteenth day of the seventh month], the descendants of the Six Branches, numbering several thousand, gathered in deference. Liu did not explain when the rites evolved in this direction; obviously if there were “several thousand” descendants, he was referring to multiple generations after Fang Tingfan and his sons. However, by the time he wrote his inscription the Fang had confronted a crisis: the temple itself was going broke. He explained that Fang Yansun (1213–1276) repaired the shrine and gave his own resources to sustain it, and then admonished his kin: [The temple] is the site for offering Buddhist prayers to our sagely ancestors. However, at the time of the rites, some among the most honored of our kin go to the temple for their prayers; they do not go to the ancestral shrine (citang). Henceforth, therefore, following the prayers and the burning of incense, everyone is to go to the shrine to make sacrifices. The monks will contribute the libations and provide the labor. Between the onset of the interregnum, when the Fang had established a discrete space within sacred precincts for religious rituals, and the later Southern Song, the way the Fang understood their shrine had evolved. By the latter, although the importance of Buddhist rites to some was recognized, those rites by themselves did not suffice. Regardless of participation in those rites, everyone was expected to attend the non-Buddhist ancestral rites conducted in the shrine, which Liu Kezhuang notably referred to as an “ancestral shrine.” This evolution by itself is not extraordinary; it has long been recognized that ancestral shrines were a feature of orthodox kinship rites by the Southern Song. What is notable is the trajectory not only of the Fang shrine but also that of the Zheng shrine. Regional kin groups were establishing dedicated spaces for collective ancestral veneration as early as the late ninth century. How those spaces were understood evolved, but from the onset they challenged orthodox kinship rites. As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere, there are further examples of similar trajectories among other kin groups.40 Evidently a process had begun in the last decade of the Tang, when imperial authority across the south was already deeply compromised if not already nonexistent, that set the stage for the evolution of the ancestral shrine as it came to be understood by the Southern Song and thereafter.

Family Records: The Genealogy The second area of cultural innovation during the interregnum was in the compilation and maintenance of family records. This is the genealogy, a record that today is a central part of family and kinship identity about which a similar narrative of experimentation and standardization can be told. Like

72 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South dedicated spaces for ancestral rites, genealogies are in fact an ancient piece of China’s cultural assembly. Driven by the extremely complex systems of inheritance and succession used by the royal family of the Shang dynasty in the second millennium BCE, genealogical records that defined the critical lineage sequences emerged as an essential record. Although inheritance and succession sequences became less complex under the Zhou, elite families allegedly continued to maintain such records; Sima Qian tells us that he used them to compile the genealogical records of elite families as he compiled his Shiji.41 The great age of elite family genealogy, however, was the centuries of division between the fall of the Han and An Lushan’s mid-eighth century rebellion that so completely disrupted everything upon which the first half of the Tang had relied. As explained above, throughout the multi-century era known as “the Southern and Northern Dynasties” that separated Tang from Han, access to political power was largely defined by the Nine-Rank System, under which families were ranked according to inherited social prestige and assigned office and found marriage partners accordingly. This was noted by Zheng Qiao in his Comprehensive Record: Down to the Sui and Tang there were registers (buzhuang) for high officials and ancestral charts tables (puxi tu) for families. The selection of officials was based on the registers, while marriages between families were based on the tables.42 As Mark Edward Lewis elaborated, genealogical records were critical to the Nine Ranks system: [D]uring the Northern and Southern Dynasties … [genealogical] records became a universal feature of elite families, and any who imitated them. They allowed lineages to identify their members, and members to secure the prestige of belonging to an eminent line. The state used genealogies to determine who could receive privileges based on family background.43 Although the Tang officially did away with the Nine-Rank System, the social hierarchy it affirmed continued to influence marriage alliances among highranking aristocratic families.44 Because these families continued to restrict those alliances within their own narrow network, it remained essential to know who belonged. This in turn perpetuated their need for genealogies. Until An Lushan’s rebellion caused the families to scatter across the empire, therefore, the genealogy remained a tool for extended kinship identification, which remained a central concern of the elite. In addition to fostering the widespread elite migration discussed earlier, the rebellion undermined both the geographic and social integrity of these families. As their members scattered, moreover, they lost the ability to sustain their genealogical records. Thus at the very moment when such records may have helped to sustain the ancien

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regime, the ability to maintain them crumbled. As Ouyang Xiu lamented in a letter to Wang Shenfu: In former times there were often upheavals but the genealogical records of the elite were unbroken. From the Five Dynasties to the present, however, family after family has lost theirs, for they do not take seriously the rules of orthodox conduct, and their customs are without substance.45 David Johnson has called what ensued a “disruption of the genealogical tradition.”46 To Johnson, however, as to many scholars who have studied it, this disruption endured until the Song. In fact, the initial steps of the revival of the genealogical tradition and of the reconceptualization of its purpose took place during the interregnum. To explain that, however, we need a bit more background. Legal and customary tradition had limited the ways whereby families could recognize kinship across generations. For example, since ancient times kinship had been defined by the “five generations of mourning” (wufu). Beyond five degrees of kinship only elite families routinely maintained kinship identity through collective ritual, an identity they traced to a “first ancestor” in an often dubious if not outright fictitious past. As the social world of the south consolidated in the unsettled aftermath of the An Lushan Rebellion, these customary limitations were increasingly disregarded. As the Tang entered its final collapse and families were facing an uncertain future all across the empire, many of the extended kin groups of the south who had abandoned their northern homes in the face of An Lushan’s uprising were also reaching their fifth generation since they had migrated. In such an environment, when social hierarchies were increasingly fluid and unsettled, the security and mutual support that extended networks could provide were deemed increasingly important. The artificiality of the orthodox limit of five generations was less useful than the common identity derived from a “first ancestor.” To explain this I will focus my discussion on Fujian before offering evidence that this evolution was not restricted to Fujian but occurred fairly widely across the south. To begin, let me revert back to the conclusion of the text that is preserved in the records of the Temple of Illuminated Transformation dated 912 that I have quoted earlier: “[Zheng Yun and his brother Zhen] asked that a tablet be placed in the Memorial Hall.” This was followed by the observation of their descendant Zheng Xihan, who observed in the lost eleventh-century preface to the Zheng genealogy quoted in the 1169 preface: “[Yun and Zhen] placed a tablet in the ancestral shrine… in order to pass on to later generations the depth of their history.” Recall that this tablet was prepared in conjunction with the commitment by the brothers Yun and Zhen to underwrite “lights and prayers for eternity in honor of their deceased father and their mother Lady Chen.” Already their father Gao had arranged for the commemoration of “the brothers Lu, Zhuang, and Shu on the anniversary of

74 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South their deaths with a vegetarian feast.” In short, the tablet was intended to record the history of the local Zheng kin group; it was, in all probability, an ancestral chart tracing descent from the “first ancestors” down to the generation of Yun and Zhen—the fifth generation, as is shown in Figure 5.1. This was the point beyond which the “first ancestors,” the brothers Lu, Zhuang, and Shu, may have slipped into forgotten oblivion as they receded beyond the fifth generation, an oblivion that would have led to the fracturing of collective Zheng identity. The Zheng were not alone among their peer kin groups, although their efforts may be the most reliably documented. A twentieth-century genealogy of the Yuhu Chen lineage of Putian, for example, records that Chen Huai, who was contemporary to the brothers Zheng Yun and Zhen, “built an ancestral shrine and compiled genealogical records” with a preface by Weng Chengzan, a well-documented 896 jinshi.47 Like Yun and Zhen, Chen Huai was a fifth-generation descendant of the “first ancestor.” A similar tradition is maintained by the Luofeng Fu, who have been introduced above. According to Luofeng records, Fu Shi, the “first ancestor” who very likely had been part of the Gushi migration and who had settled in Quanzhou, fathered eight sons. Following his death the sons scattered; having donated their Quanzhou domicile to a monk in exchange for land in Luofeng Village, Shi’s widow and the fourth son, Fu Renyi, settled there. The Fu have since preserved a text identified as a “genealogical preface” that is allegedly dated 989. The text claims that Renyi “was able to continue the records of our ancestors… He hung an inscription in the eaves [of his eldest brother’s house] in order to provide a record for the spring and autumn sacrifices.”48 The Fu were not confronting the potential dissolution of shared identity that threatened both the Zheng and the Chen. The threat they faced was much more immediate. Following their father’s death, the brothers had scattered and risked losing their common identity; in fact, three of the brothers, two of whom apparently moved far away and a third of whom made his living as a fisherman and was dropped from later kin records for social reasons, totally disappear. Fu Renyi, we can assume, was seeking to forestall further fracturing by maintaining a shared identity among the remaining five brothers and their families. This does not exhaust the evidence. For example, after seven generations in Putian, most likely about the end of or shortly after the interregnum century, the Yanshou Xu “compiled a family genealogical chart.”49 The Puyang Lin present an especially interesting case. Although their kin had been settled in the Putian region possibly since the early Tang, sometime in the later eighth century a branch had moved to adjacent Fuqing district of Fuzhou. Nevertheless, both branches continued to recognize their shared kinship; the earliest genealogy, which must have been compiled about the same time as the Yanshou Xu in the years immediately after the assertion of Song hegemony, was compiled by the Fuqing branch. The Puyang branch did not compile their own record until 1088.50

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These early records should not be confused with the complex texts we have today. Most—maybe all—were simple charts outlining patrilineal lines of descent beginning with a “first ancestor.” Their purpose was straightforward—as Zheng Xihan put it, “to pass on to later generations the depth of their history,” commonly but not exclusively at the point when the wufu model of mourning would have led to a fracturing of shared identity. Commonly they were accompanied by an introductory text, referred to in later sources as “prefaces” (xu), that were written by locally prominent individuals such as the aforementioned Weng Chengzan. As none survive, we can only guess how nearly they resembled the later genre of genealogical prefaces, but there is no reason to assume they were radically different. Nor was this a pattern that was limited to Xinghua Commandery, of which Putian and Xianyou districts comprised the larger part. Chen Zhiping, in a recent study of the genealogical tradition in Fujian, has identified several works of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries from across the modern province, but especially in the wealthy prefectures of the Min River basin in northern Fujian.51 Looking beyond Fujian, in 1043 Han Qi (1008–1075) of Xiangzhou (modern-day Henan) provided a preface to the “family works” (jia ji) in which he explained that his family records had been scattered in the turmoil of the collapsing Tang; his ancestor Ling had devoted his life to reassembling what he could “so it could be passed on to sons and grandsons.” Unfortunately, those “sons and grandsons” had not valued Ling’s work and it too had been lost. Han Qi had regathered what fragments he could and assembled them into the work he prefaced.52 Han Qi did not provide a date for Han Ling, but the gaps in time argue that he could have been no later than the early Song, and may well have lived closer to the onset of the interregnum. At about the same time Yu Jing (1000–1064) of Shaozhou (modern-day Guangdong) wrote a preface for his family genealogy; notably, he explained that he was the fifth-generation descendant of his “first ancestor who had migrated to Shaozhou from Shaowu prefecture” in northwestern Fujian.53 Likewise, Xu Yuan (985–1057) of Xuanzhou (modern-day Anhui) compiled a “generational chart” (shici tu) of the Xu “so that my sons and nephews and their descendants no matter how many generations pass nor how far they scatter will know their origins and not forget.”54 The evidence is scattered, yet persuasive. Just as heretofore déclassé kin groups began to experiment with designated space for ritual through the last years of the Tang, across the interregnum, and into the first decades of the Song, they were seeking to preserve memory of their genealogical unity through text. These efforts set the stage for the evolution of an approach to genealogical record-keeping that saw the emergence of records much more akin to the complex records characteristic of the later imperial era. I argue, admittedly on slim evidence, that the motive behind this was a concern that kin could aid each other and thus that sustaining shared kin identity beyond the orthodox five generations was important.

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Notes 1 Originally published as Clark (2017), with minor editorial modification. 2 Hartwell (1982), Table 1. The relevant numbers are reproduced in Chapter 4, Table 4.1, “Census data, 742 versus 1080,” with citations. 3 I discuss this in Clark (2007), Chapter 2, “The Composition of Elite Kin Groups in the Mulan River Valley.” 4 I have explained some of the reasoning behind this argument in Clark (2016b), 8–13. 5 I have compiled this information based on late imperial gazetteers. See Guangdong tongzhi, 31.3a–6b, Fujian tongzhi, 33.2a–9a, and Zhejiang tongzhi, 123:10b–14b. 6 XTS 45.1180. 7 Han Yu, “Ouyang sheng’ai ci,” Changli wenji, 22:2b. 8 See Clark (2016), especially Chapters 2 and 3. 9 See especially Peterson (1979), 464–560, including citations. See also the relevant discussion in Twitchett (1970). 10 See, for example, Clark (2009), 133–205. 11 SGCQ 84:1221–22. 12 Zhejiang tongzhi, 171:6b–7a. 13 I have addressed the Wang family in several essays, but see Clark (2007), 48–50; much of the following discussion draws on this as well. 14 Aoyama (1962). 15 See Clark (1995). Evidence suggests that the focus on land acquisition pursued by the Fu was in fact a very common strategy among the “men of Gushi;” see especially Clark (2007), Chapter 2. 16 See Fan Jiong and Lin Yu, WuYue beishi, 4.23a–23b & 28b–29a. 17 JWDS 24.6b; SGCQ 11.1a. Although Du served Yang Xingmi as the latter consolidated his authority in Jiangnan, he did later rebel. 18 Han is among the most widely commemorated figures of the interregnum with numerous biographies; see especially XTS 183.10a–14b. 19 Fang tradition is summarized in Liu Kezhuang, “Fangshi Nanshan Jianfu ci beiji” 方氏南山薦福祠碑記, Houcun xiansheng daquanji, 93.8a–11a. The following discussion derives from Clark (2007), 61–62. 20 Johannes Kurz briefly addresses the Jiangnan Tang examinations and reaches a parallel conclusion; see Kurz (2011), 69–70. 21 Changli wenji 22:2b–3a. 22 The painting and the several ways of reading it have been discussed in Lee (2010). 23 Dong Yuan’s contribution to the landscape genre is featured in almost all books on Chinese art, but see especially Hearn and Fong (1999). For a critical assessment of Dong’s work, including James Cahill’s argument that Riverbank is a forgery, see Smith and Fong (1999). 24 Mi Fu, Hua shi 7a, translated in Hearn and Fong (1999), 28. 25 See most notably Daniel Bryant’s translations in Bryant (1982). 26 See Ko (2005), especially Chapter 4, “From Ancient Texts to Current Customs: In Search of Footbinding’s Origins.” 27 Schafer (1967). 28 Han shu, 72:3080–86. Ban Gu only refers to the “two Gong” as “colleagues” (xiangyou), but they shared a character in their honorific names (zi) suggesting a close kin relationship as well. 29 Yang Xuanzhi, Luoyang jialan ji, cited by Chikusa Masa’aki, “So-dai funji ko-” 宋 代墳寺考, in Chikusa (1982), 113. I follow Chikusa in interpreting qidan as “spirit hall.” 30 Discussed by Chikusa (1982), 241–300. 31 The following draws on my discussion in Clark (2007), 264–68.

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32 Zheng Qiao’s comment survives only as a quotation in an untitled preface dated to 1169, compiled by Zheng Donglao 鄭東老, in Nanhu Zhengshi dazongpu, no pagination. 33 See “Pushan Lingyan si beiming” 莆山靈巖寺碑銘, in Huang Tao, Puyang Huang yushi ji, 299–304. Because there is no other record of Zheng Sheng, we only speculate that he was an ancestor of the three brothers. However, empirically such a speculation seems warranted and strongly supports the idea that the Zheng were linked to the temple from its founding. 34 See Clark (2007), 344–45n5. 35 On the Yanshou Weir, see Clark (2016), 122–30. 36 “Guanghua si tanyue Zheng shi shetian beiji” 光化寺檀越鄭氏舍田碑記, in Ding and Zheng (1996), 6–7. The 1169 preface referenced above adds that the donation of Zheng Gao was to benefit his parents. This text also explains that the tablet was placed “in the ancestral shrine (citang) adjacent to the Great Hall in order to pass on to later generations the depth of their history.” 37 Zheng Donglao, in Zheng Shimin, ed., Nanhu Zhengshi dazongpu, no pagination. 38 Zheng Min 鄭敏, “Nanhu shan Zhengshi citang ji” 南湖山鄭氏祠堂記, in Ding and Zheng (1996), 73–74. Min explains that the original stelae bearing prior inscriptions were destroyed. Although there were efforts to recreate the older texts, Zheng Min felt they were inadequate. 39 This and the following quotes come from “Jianfu yuan Fangshi citang ji” 薦福院 方氏祠堂記, in Liu Kezhuang, Houcun xiansheng daquanji, 93.8b–9a. 40 See Clark (2007), Chapter 7. 41 Sima Qian, Shi ji, 31.1445. 42 Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi 25.439a. 43 Lewis (2009), 181. There are, in fact, numerous studies of the Nine-Rank System and its social impact. A good source for further references is Grafflin (1981). 44 There have been several studies in English that have addressed this question, but see especially Johnson (1977). Tackett (2017) also has relevant information. 45 Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修, “Yu Wang Shenfu lun shipu tie” 與王深甫論世譜帖, QSW 17:699:101–2; translated by Johnson (1977b), 58. 46 Johnson (1977b), 51. 47 Puyang Yuhu Chenshi jiacheng, “Shixi” 世系 43a. 48 Fu Qi 傅期, “Yangshan zupu xu” 陽山族譜序, in Nan’an Fushi zupu, “Xu” 序, 3a. 49 Xu Duo 徐鐸, “Xushi Song chongxiu pu xu” 徐氏宋重修譜序, in Yanshou Xushi zupu, “Jiu xu” 舊序, 3a–4b. 50 Lin Ying 林英, untitled 1088 preface, in Xihe Linshi zupu, 6a–6b. 51 Chen (1996), especially 4–6. 52 Han Qi 韓琪, “Hanshi jiaji xu” 韓氏家集序, QSW 20:853.332–33. 53 Yu Jing 余靖, “Xiapei Yushi shipu xu” 下邳余氏氏譜序, QSW 14:567.25–26. 54 Xu Yuan 許元, “Xushi shici tu xu” 許氏世次圖序, QSW 10:392.89–90.

6

Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire1

The preceding chapters have explored the significance of the interregnum century (878–978) that divides the Tang and Song dynasties. This chapter addresses the legacy of the period as it developed through the opening decades of the Song dynasty and particularly through the reigns of the Song dynasty emperors Taizong (976–997), Zhenzong (997–1022), and Renzong (1022–1063). This and the following chapter demonstrate that the interregnum was the last time that the area embraced by the holistic Chinese empire could have evolved instead as a multi-state system akin to Europe. Although political unity would collapse from time to time thereafter, the idea that the holistic empire—an empire that embraced the drainage basins of the Yellow, Huai, Yangtze, and West Rivers as well as the coastline from Manchuria south as far as modern Guangdong and even to the Red River basin of modern Vietnam—could permanently fracture was no longer viable.2

The Interregnum Century, 878–978 As has been explored in the opening chapters, the reality of the age-old divide between the north and south openly reemerged when the Tang unraveled late in the ninth century. From the time Huang Chao embarked on his destructive rampage through the south in 878 until WuYue and the QuanZhang warlord satrapy, the last independent polities of the south, submitted to the Song imperium in 978, the north lost control over the south. While the Yellow River basin that defines the Central Plain and the ancient cultural heartland endured an unstable succession of warlords and short-lived dynasties, the Yangtze valley and lands further south were split among a number of regional polities that echoed ancient divisions. As the new order in the south consolidated in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, seven polities emerged: Wu, WuYue, Min, Han, Chu, Shu, and Jingnan. With the sole exception of Han, each of these polities took ancient regional or local place names as their self-designation. As was outlined in Chapter 2, in the final death throes of his mandate, the penultimate Tang emperor Zhaozong (867–904; r. 889–904) attempted to recruit allies from among the competing warlords and so regain control over the south by DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249-6

Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire 79 awarding royal titles to the emerging winners of the warlord struggles. Beginning in 902, the emperor “personally bestowed” (shang … shu yuzha ci) the royal title wang on most of the increasingly independent rulers across the south, a de jure recognition of the reality on the ground.3 Both Tang in its dying throes and the following Liang drew on ancient models of “divide and establish” (fengjian) as a way to claim to be overlords of the holistic empire. Although none of the southern rulers initially claimed the imperial mandate of the Tang, by the end of the first decade of the tenth century the rulers of all except Jingnan, by far the smallest and militarily weakest of the seven defined almost entirely by the juncture of the Han and Yangtze rivers, had been designated wang by the northern court, and several had taken the imperial title itself on their own initiative. By naming the southern lords wang they were defining them as autonomous rulers bound to the central court only by the rituals that bound wang to huangdi. They were, in fact, acknowledging that the southern courts were effectively outside their direct control. It is equally true that the southern rulers considered themselves separate from the Central Plain. They were not regional representatives of a distant central power; they were their own independent central powers, exercising all the ritual and authority that came with that, as has been illustrated in Chapter 3 regarding the usurpation of the imperial prerogative to define the calendar. In proclaiming their own reign periods, the southern rulers were following the precedent set by “outer guo” such as Paekche, Silla, and Japan, all of which had long kept their own calendars. Yet all had maintained a relationship with the imperial authority of the Central Plain. Tang emperors had asserted their primacy, naming all three rulers guowang, and so putting the ruler of each “outer guo” in a subordinate position. Yet the Tang court recognized that each had a de facto independence, as their independent calendars made manifest. Whether consciously or not—and that is an issue that could be debated— the southern courts in their own way echoed this model. For some, in fact, elevation from wang of a guo (i.e., wang of Wu guo) to the more formal guowang (i.e., guowang of Wu [guo]) marked an important, if semantic, distinction. Guowang was the title held by the rulers of the “outer guo.” For example, in 923 as the Turkic forces of Li Cunxu mounted their campaign to take power in the Central Plain, Zhu Youzhen (888–923), known to history as “Last Emperor of Liang” (r. 913–923), bestowed the title on Qian Liu. As recounted by Sima Guang, Qian then “established his guo, adopted the rituals of an emperor, called his residence a royal palace, and called his entourage a court.”4 Holding the title guowang was clearly regarded as a significant distinction. Of course, as was outlined in Chapter 3, to many of the southern rulers neither wang nor guowang was sufficient. When Wang Jian’s advisors in Shu told him “You were loyal to Tang, but the Tang is done (wang),” arguing that he owed no subordination to the Liang court in the north, that nobody had

80 Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire a superior claim to the Cosmic Mandate, he launched plans to take the imperial title itself. Most other southern rulers followed. Within a decade of the final collapse of Tang the southern guo functioned quite autonomously within a multi-court (or “multi-state”) framework. Although there were moments when southern rulers, either alone or as a group, pondered whether to attack one or another of the northern courts,5 in fact there was no concerted effort to do so. Similarly, once the interregnum order had settled down the northern courts accepted the order in the south. The 920s and 930s, however, saw two significant challenges to the settled order, first in 925 when the (Later) Tang successfully invaded Sichuan and defeated the forces of (Former) Shu guo. The northern court nominally controlled Sichuan for a decade before Meng Zhixiang broke away and established the (Latter) Shu guo, claiming the title huangdi with imperial ritual.6 By far the more important challenge, however, came out of Jiangnan, where Xu Zhigao deposed the Yang family in 937 and proclaimed his own court. Although an adopted son of Xu Wen who was resented by Wen’s natural sons, Zhigao had inherited Xu Wen’s power over the Wu guo on the latter’s death in 927. As has been explained, Xu Wen had long urged the Yang rulers to take the imperial title; faced with their reluctance to do so, Sima Guang tells us, Wen and Zhigao “had long planned to accept the abdication [of the Yang family].”7 For a decade Zhigao martialed his power against Yang Pu, last heir to the throne of Wu guo, who finally gave up and invited him to take the throne. What makes this transition so significant is what Zhigao then did. Initially he kept the Xu surname that had been given him by Xu Wen. But he had a greater vision, which he set about putting in place following Wen’s death: He intended to present himself as the legitimate heir to the legacy of the Tang dynasty. Through a problematic line of descent, he claimed to be a fifthgeneration descendent of the Tang emperor Xianzong (r. 805–820), and thus a member of the Tang imperial family.8 He then changed his surname to Li, the surname of the Tang royal family, with the personal name Bian, and in 939 he changed the name of his guo to Tang. The implications of this went far beyond simple name changes. By 939 the (Later) Tang in the north had been pushed aside by the (Later) Jin; thus there was no current court that invoked the Tang directly: “The Tang mandate was not just to rule a kingdom, a piece of the whole. The Tang mandate was to rule the entire empire.”9 In making such a direct claim to the Tang legacy, Xu Zhigao/Li Bian was the first ruler of a southern guo to make a sweeping claim to the so-called “mandate” (ming), the cosmic source of imperial legitimacy. Although each of the southern guo invoked the Tang cultural legacy, only (Jiangnan) Tang guo dared to claim to be heir to the legacy of imperial holism.10 In the immediate, the consequences of this were limited. As Johannes Kurz has argued, despite his assertions Xu Zhigao/Li Bian, as the (Jiangnan) Tang huangdi Liezu (r. 937–943), was loath to challenge the order he inherited.

Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire 81 Although his officials urged him to act on the mandate he had claimed, after one disastrous campaign north of the Huai River “[h]e never again followed the advice of his officials to make war on his neighbors.”11 His son Li Jing was different, and the difference was telling. His ascent to the Tang guo throne coincided with a moment of wider political instability. The rule of the Wang family in Min guo (Fujian) collapsed in fratricidal squabbling, leaving a vacuum that Li Jing promptly took advantage of. Tang troops seized the inner prefectures, prompting the WuYue guo to seize Fuzhou, the Min capitol. Likewise the Chu court in Hunan entered a period of instability prompting an attempt by Li Jing to take over that guo as well. These were not the first instances of conflict among the southern guo.12 What prior campaigns had not envisioned, however, was an attempt to restore a holistic empire uniting the Yellow and Yangtze River basins; rather, they had been regional conflicts intended to resolve disputes between the southern courts. Li Jing was the first southern ruler who, the records suggest, had a grander vision. Xu Xuan (916–991), whose no-longer extant “Record of Jiangnan” (Jiangnan lu) was probably the first history of (Jiangnan) Tang guo, observed that “from the very beginning [Li Jing] intended to manage all four directions.”13 In 947 a power vacuum opened on the Central Plain as the Khitan, who had controlled northern politics for several years, withdrew to their native grasslands. Han Xizai, whose lavish lifestyle is immortalized in “The Night Revels of Han Xizai,” then urged Li Jing to take advantage of the opportunity: “If my Lord wishes to restore the legacy of your ancestors, now is the time. Should you wait … until there is restored rule on the Central Plain, it won’t be so easy.”14 And soon after the (Later) Zhou had succeeded (Later) Han in the north in 951 the courtier Wei Cen requested that he be named the military commissioner of Weibo “after My Lord has settled the Central Plain.”15 Unsurprisingly, Li Jing’s aspirations caught the attention of the northern court. Guo Wei, the founding huangdi of the (Later) Zhou (r. 951–954), was focused on consolidating his northern frontier; there is no record that he had turned his attention to the south. Guo Rong, who succeeded as the Emperor Shizong (r. 954–959), did. As Sima Guang wrote, “The emperor was constantly exasperated by the limits to the area that had been under imperial control since the rebellion of Huang Chao … Without a break he stuck to his intention to overcome opposition throughout the realm.”16 In response to Guo Rong’s lament that “Wu and Shu, as well as the Khitan and Northern Han, all resist my instructive authority (shengjiao). We have been unable to blend them together (i.e., to restore the holistic empire),” Wang Pu (d. 959) presented the first policy statement advocating a southern campaign in 955. Wang outlined a plan of attack that focused on the (Jiangnan) Tang guo. The emperor, Sima concluded, embraced the plan “with joy.”17 In the years that followed, led first by Guo Rong and the ever more competent armies of the (Later) Zhou and then by Zhao Kuangyin, a prominent general under Guo Rong who established the Song dynasty in 960 when the

82 Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire Zhou throne passed to a child emperor and inherited Guo’s policies, the south was step by step reincorporated into the holistic empire.18 The process culminated in 978 when Qian Shu, last of the independent wang of WuYue guo, and Chen Hongjin, warlord of the QuanZhang satrapy in southern Fujian, submitted to the new dynasty. Although a slice of territory in the far north remained under the control of the Khitan empire, the holistic empire was restored across the south.

The Politics and Culture of a Return to Holism: Politics and the access to authority Contrary to the common historiographical narrative that focuses on the chaos of the interregnum in the aftermath of the Tang abdication in 907, the preceding narrative proposes that a deceptive stability had in fact settled in across what had been the holistic empire, both in the north and the south. While a succession of short-lived polities controlled the northern core centered on the Central Plain, they shared a common framework. Although they followed one another as rival contestants gained power, their successive claim to legitimacy was based on control of the Plain, for eons the political and economic core of the imperial order even when the capitol lay to the west in the Wei River basin, the region that has traditionally been known as guannei (“within the pass,” alluding to the lands beyond the Tong Pass that separates the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River). In 925 (Later) Tang dai had briefly upset the order it had inherited from (Later) Liang dai when it invaded Sichuan, deposed the Wang family that had ruled (Former) Shu guo, and restored northern authority. The prior order was soon restored, however, when Meng Zhixiang broke with the Plain and restored the independence of Sichuan as the (Latter) Shu guo. The congeries of polities that ruled in the south experienced a similar stability, coexisting both among each other and in their relationship to the northern dai despite occasional friction and regional conflict. This order endured until the 940s when the Min guo collapsed in an orgy of assassination and usurpation, setting the stage for both (Jiangnan) Tang guo and WuYue guo to lay claim to pieces of Min territory. Tang guo then pursued its expansionist campaign by turning west and invading Chu guo. By the early 950s, however, the south had again settled into relative stability. The Min guo was gone, divided between Tang guo, WuYue guo, and the QuanZhang satrapy under the warlord Liu Congxiao. Chu guo meanwhile had regained its independence from Tang guo and returned to a quasi-stability under a succession of military figures who had previously served the Ma family. Benefitting from the hindsight that History provides, we perhaps can say that it was unrealistic to believe the southern polities could spin off and realize a trajectory that was enduringly fractured and independent, as had happened in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. But to contemporaries that was not so evident. At least into the mid-tenth century the

Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire 83 possibility that the South was going to follow a path that would lead to something more closely resembling Europe: competing polities that shared underlying cultural assumptions without political unity, was perceived as real. If we take 920 as a given point from which to reflect, to a native of the Min guo of Fujian, the Han guo of Guangdong, or the WuYue guo of Liangzhe, the restoration of holistic empire was neither a given nor, by many, even desired. It was the clashing aspirations of Guo Rong and Li Jing, therefore, which led to an unresolvable destabilization of the interregnum order and an end to the consolidation of a multi-state order across the south. Li Jing’s aspiration to take over the north was clearly articulated by Han Xizai in 947 (see above). Johannes Kurz has argued that under Guo Rong “the Zhou had grown very attentive of their southern neighbor’s expansionist politics,” an interpretation that is certainly consistent with Guo’s expressions of frustration and Wang Pu’s 955 memorial, though lacking direct support in any document. Kurz concludes that this compelled the northern court to focus on confronting the challenge Li Jing represented.19 If the initial Zhou thrust was focused on Tang guo territory in the Huainan region that lies north of the Yangtze, the goal from the beginning of the campaign in late 955 was to entirely eradicate the threat represented by (Guangnan) Tang guo. As Wang Pu had outlined months earlier, the best approach was a flanking operation through Sichuan and into the deeper south, a campaign that necessarily led to the restoration of holistic empire. If the transition from Zhou to Song interrupted the campaign, it did not forestall it. The holistic empire that Zhao Kuangyin/Song Taizu and then his brother Zhao Kuangyi/Song Taizong (939–997; r. 976–997) restored, however, existed in a very different world then that the Tang had lost a century earlier. In contrast to its position in previous eras of holistic empire, as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, by 978 and the completion of unification the south was no longer marginal. A decisive majority of the population in the empire now lived in the south. Moreover, whereas the north was stuck in an economic rut, the interregnum century had witnessed economic expansion and cultural innovations across the south.20 Trade, both among the southern guo and between those on the coast and the maritime world beyond, had flourished. Local magnates had invested in land reclamation projects that expanded arable land. New crops, notably Champa rice but also increasingly important commercial crops such as luxury fruits, cotton, and sugarcane, were transforming agriculture, embedding more and more of the rural population in a market network oriented toward profit. Industrial production in areas such as ceramics and shipbuilding offered new opportunities to non-agricultural populations and fostered the expansion of cities. As the new Song dynasty consolidated its control, access to the wealth of the south was essential to the restored holism. A return to a multi-state order that would leave the potential tax revenue of the south beyond the reach of northern polities was likely to condemn the Song to the fate of the preceding

84 Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire northern dai—a short-term consolidation based on military power followed by yet another turnover when the charismatic founder was succeeded by someone who lacked the military’s support. Although the challenges to the restored holism were many and it is an enduring credit to Kuangyin and his brother Kuangyi that they managed so well, there were two that were critical to maintaining control over the south. First, it was essential that the new dynasty gain the support of southern elites who otherwise might lead a revanchist effort toward a restoration of the multi-state order. Second, the cultural divide that had always set the south apart and on which southern independence had been based had to be resolved. Neither happened overnight, but the fact that both did in time is the central legacy of the interregnum.

Notes 1 Originally published as Clark (2020), 1–17, with editorial modification. 2 I have opted to use the term “holistic” advisedly to address those eras when the empire embraced the three main west-east river basins: Yellow, Yangtze, and West, a status that was first achieved by the Qin empire late in the third century BCE. In fact the idea of “holistic” empire is at least as ancient as the Qin and was maintained by all Chinese dynasties regardless of their physical size; there was only one huangdi. See Pines (2012), especially Chapter One, “The Ideal of ‘Great Unity.’” Chinese historiography, however, has long assumed that once the Qin had incorporated the Yangzi basin and lands to the farther south these were intrinsically part of the empire, and that is what I mean by the term. For an alternative definition of holism, see Nicholas Tackett’s discussion of the “circumscribed square” outlined in the Book of Documents, in Tackett (2018) and the prior comments in Tackett (2017) 150–151. 3 ZZTJ 263:8573 and following passages. 4 ZZTJ 272:8880. Notably, after consolidating power as (Later) Tang Zhuangzong, Li Cunxu denied the privileges of co-equal rule that Qian Liu had adopted and told him to get back in line; see ZZTJ 273:8926. 5 See, for example, ZZTJ 266:8675, 266:8676 6 The breakdown of (Later) Tang control of Sichuan is traced through ZZTJ j. 277–278 and XWDS j. 64. On Meng’s adoption of the imperial title, see ZZTJ 278:9102. 7 ZZTJ 9103. 8 There are conflicting narratives behind this claim, although all trace back to Xianzong. For a summary, see https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/李昪 (accessed September 3, 2018). 9 Clark, (2009), 167. 10 A parallel observation is made by Johannes Kurz; see Kurz (2011), and more recently in Kurz (2016), especially pages 24–25 where he reviews recent Chinese scholarship on the issue. For a different and less sweeping assessment, see the arguments in Li (2018). Drawing on a close analysis of the anonymously compiled Diaoji litan 釣磯立談, Li describes (Jiangnan) Tang as a “peripheral hegemonic state,” or pian ba, a term with an extensive history going back at least to the Lüshi chunqiu that is traditionally dated to 239 BCE, and develops a theory of a “limited Mandate of Heaven” to describe the claims of Li Bian and his successors. Although Li Bian’s claim to the Mandate was never recognized either by his contemporary world or later history, in light of the comments of Xu Xuan, Han

Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire 85

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20

Xizai, and Wei Cen cited in text below I believe Li Cho-ying underestimates the significance of what he did. Kurz (1997), 31. See Clark (2009), 163–171. Quoted in NanTang shu, 4:6b. The most thorough discussion of Tang guo plans to conquer the north is Kurz (2016). ZZTJ 186:9338. ZZTJ 290:9466–67. ZZTJ 292:9524. ZZTJ 292:9525–27. Wang Pu’s proposal to attack the south has been translated by Lorge (2013), 111–112. Lorge further discussed the debate in the Zhou court that produced Wang Pu’s proposal in Lorge (2015), Chapter 3, “The pivot of the tenth century” (accessed on Google Books, January 8, 2019; no pagination). The (Later) Zhou and Song campaigns have been summarized several times in English. See Worthy (1976), Standen (2009), and Kurz (2011). Kurz (1997), 36, citing the biography of Han Xizai in Lu You, 12:49. Without explicitly contradicting Kurz, Lorge has taken a slightly different approach, focusing on debates within the Zhou court over a northern versus southern strategy; see Lorge (2015), Chapter 3. This is a central theme of Clark (1991). For an outstanding overview of some of the most notable features of the Song, see Hymes and Schirokauer (1993), and Hymes (2015).

7

The Legacy of the Interregnum Recruiting the Southern Elite, the Discourse on Civilization, and the Standardization of Values1

As has been explained previously, southern elites had been excluded from political authority in all preceding eras of holism. To the northerners who controlled the imperial bureaucracy the south was too alien; they were lost in its hostile and bizarre environment, as Liu Zongyuan, Han Yu, and so many others had lamented. At the same time, the number of southerners who successfully participated in the Tang imperial examinations was negligible. Beyond the view of the examination system and the men it produced, however, local and regional elite networks had flourished across the south throughout the Tang; these were the networks that had fed the “southern selection” system and nurtured the cultural innovations discussed in the second of these essays. As crucial as use of these networks had been for sustaining the veneer of imperial control, the restricted authority granted to officials who served through “southern selection” confirmed their marginal position. Real authority rested with men dispatched by the imperial center to oversee the local networks, even as these officials resented their assignments and many never even went. The relationship between the southern elite and the administrative bureaucracy was transformed through the interregnum. Although all the southern guo employed refugees from the north, often men who had earned degrees and held office in the imperial bureaucracy of the Tang and who were valued for the experience they brought, across the south every guo relied heavily on indigenous networks, often drawing on men who had no prior bureaucratic experience. Rulers such as Yang Wo (Wu), Ma Yin (Chu), and Qian Liu (WuYue), who had gained power through military might, drew on their allies and subordinates to staff their administration; these were men who shared the de classé social background of their rulers. Wang Chao (Min) and Wang Jian ([Former] Shu) relied heavily on networks of local landowners, men whose families had most likely served for generations through “southern selection” but who had otherwise had little or no connection to the formal bureaucracy.2 Whatever the relationship had been between these men and bureaucratic service, however, once in civil office many found satisfaction in the rewards it offered. By the end of the interregnum, every guo had a coterie of families who had developed a heritage of office-holding that they sought to sustain under the new order. DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249-7

The Legacy of the Interregnum 87 Although some of the most prominent southern officials were brought directly into the Song bureaucracy,3 on a wider scale this did not translate immediately into prominence under the Song. There was initial resistance to the upstart southerners among the northern elite who had propelled Zhao Kuangyin to the throne. For example, Zhao Yanwei (1163 jinshi), a descendant of the Song imperial family with a decidedly northern heritage, in his Notes from the Cloud-Covered Hill, quoted an anonymous but “talented ancestor” (yi zu) who criticized the very idea that a southerner could serve as chief minister or leading general: “Although a man’s talent does not depend on where he is from, nevertheless chief ministers come from Shandong and generals come from Shanxi.”4 More concretely, when the emperor Zhenzong wanted to appoint Wang Qinrou (962–1025), a native of Jiangxi, to the chief minister’s post, Wang Dan (957–1017) spoke up in opposition: “I observe that your predecessors never entrusted the land to a southerner.” In the face of Wang Dan’s criticism, Zhenzong initially withdrew Qinrou’s nomination, although it ultimately went forward.5 Gradually, however, southerners gained traction in the Song bureaucracy, and in the process transformed the structure of the political, cultural, and academic elite.6 Perhaps the most visible, and certainly the most quantifiable, measures were in the examinations. As mentioned earlier, several of the southern guo had experimented with their own examinations. Moreover, throughout the interregnum, but especially after 960 and consolidation of the Song imperium in the north, a small number of southerners had travelled north in pursuit of degrees. But neither the southern guo nor the northern dai had ever recognized examination credentials as the sole or even most important criterion for office. Under the Song, however, the examinations quickly became the most respected pathway to an official career. There were always numerous ways into the bureaucracy, but an examination degree was by far the most valuable, and soon was an essential requirement of the highest offices. Perhaps there were lingering doubts about the academic merit of southern scholars among the northerners who controlled the examination process. Perhaps the inexperience among the southern elite bred a fearful unfamiliarity with a system most had never engaged. Or perhaps many among the southern elite were reluctant to accept the Song imperium and so boycotted the opportunity the exams presented. Or maybe they truly were not academically ready. Whatever the reason(s), southerners were slow to engage with the examinations. As I summarized previously, between 966, when Huang Lan was the first from Liangzhe to earn a Song jinshi, and 989, Liangzhe Circuit, which by the middle decades of the Northern Song had become one of the most important sources of successful examination candidates, produced only six successful candidates through the six examination cycles, including several since Qian Shu had submitted to the Song imperium. By the reign of emperor Zhenzong, however, Liangzhe was producing ten or more jinshi graduates with every cycle. Similarly, Fujian, which like Liangzhe

88 The Legacy of the Interregnum was to become one of the most important sources of successful examinees, had produced only twenty-two successful candidates between 978, when the QuanZhang satrapy accepted Song authority and thus brought closure to the interregnum, and 1034. Then abruptly twenty-four men earned jinshi degrees in one cycle. Another measure of southern access to and success at the examinations is the list of zhuangyuan, the honorific title bestowed on the top graduate in each cycle. The Southern Song miscellany A Record of Sorghum Dreams lists thirty-seven men who earned this honor.7 Beginning with Chen Yaozi (970– 1034), a native of Sichuan who earned the honor in 999, a total of seventeen men from across the south were recognized as zhuangyuan, a clear measure of success in the examination culture of the Northern Song and refutation of northern skepticism. Not only did southerners gradually gain prominence in the examinations, but they were increasingly able to translate their success into political authority. There is no better example than the erstwhile reformer Fan Zhongyan (989–1052) and the cadre of men who surrounded him in the 1030s and 1040s. Fan was a native of Suzhou, arguably the epitome of southern culture. He earned a jinshi degree in 1015 and began to climb the bureaucratic ladder almost immediately. He is best known for the reform program he proposed in 1043 to the emperor Renzong, who briefly granted full authority over the government to Fan and his colleagues, including Ouyang Xiu from Jizhou in Jiangxi, Xia Song (985–1051) from Jiangzhou in Jiangxi, Yu Jing (1000–1064; 1024 jinshi) from Shaozhou in Guangdong, and Cai Xiang from Xinghua Commandery in Fujian. Equally importantly, in addition to his coalition of southerners Fan earned the support of northerners such as Han Qi (1008–1075; 1027 jinshi) and Yin Zhu (1001–1074; 1024 jinshi) from Henan and Shi Jie (1005–1045; 1030 jinshi) from Shandong.

Discourse on Civilization and the Standardization of Values Fan Zhongyan and his reform movement represent an early yet short-lived apogee of southern power. However, as the contemporary Taiwan scholar Chen Yiyan has demonstrated, through the following years and decades the shift toward southern empowerment was broad and defining.8 As southerners gained prominence and power in the bureaucracy, their commitment to the holistic empire was similarly defining; in a very real sense the empire had become theirs. But the men who gained such political authority recognized that this was only half the challenge. As long as the south embraced regional perspectives and local traditions that confronted the orthodox norms of imperial culture, there was always the possibility that the centrifugal forces that had rent the empire before would reassert themselves and that the holistic empire would once again fracture. Thus confronting these tendencies became a parallel challenge. I have previously referred to the result as the “Discourse on Civilization.”9

The Legacy of the Interregnum 89 At the crux of this discourse is the concept of “civilization.” In contemporary Chinese the term is commonly translated as wenming, like “civilization” a term with deep roots in classical tradition. However, whereas “civilization” is rooted in the Latin civilis, defined as “of or pertaining to citizens” and reflecting the classical Mediterranean focus on the city as the locus of culture and thus civilization, a literal parsing of wenming would be “to be illumined through wen.” In time the term came to be paired with wenhua, another term with deep roots in classical culture. Usually translated today as “culture,” wenhua literally means “to be transformed by wen,” and here the problem with our translations becomes evident. Unlike the English term “civilization,” “culture” is morally neutral—a distinction that has been adopted in contemporary Asian scholarship as well. But historically and intrinsically wenhua was not a morally neutral term. Culture is the social manifestation of wen, and wen carries a heavy moral value. The crux, obviously, is how to define it. In the classical discourse wen meant many things: literature, writing, language, civil values, in contrast to martial (wu) values. Holistically the term might be thought of as “that body of tradition and ritual that defined civilization.” To embrace wen is to embrace those qualities that make one civilized; to embrace wen, therefore, is to be civilized.10 Conversely, if these values are not central to one’s identity, one is not civilized. In the aftermath of the interregnum, when memory of the decades of division was very real and the viability of the holistic empire was as yet in doubt, when many across the south remained attached to long-standing pre-Sinitic “uncivilized” values, a consensus emerged among the elite that a unifying body of shared assumptions about civilization was necessary. Wen, often paired with orthopractic ritual (li) through which wen was made manifest, was central to the discussion that evolved.11 In assessing this discourse, the aforementioned Xu Xuan, who held prominent office under (Jiangnan) Tang guo, is a good place to begin. Although we can only trace his family back one generation, it appears that Xu was the product of a well-established southern family. His father Xu Yanxiu (n.d.) earned a jinshi degree late in the Tang and held minor posts in the Wu guo bureaucracy. Yanxiu was recalled as an “eclectic scholar” (xue bowu), however, a phrase that suggests he was not committed to the normative values of wen.12 Xu Xuan and his brother Xu Kai (920–974), in contrast, were considered far more orthodox, as Ouyang Xiu, among the greatest definers of that orthodoxy, recalled: In the context of the war-torn chaos of the Wudai, the Way of academic scholarship (ruxue dao) died. Yet the two brothers were able to exert themselves (zi fen). Thus they were famous at the time. When the Central Plain was bedeviled by war and in all directions usurpers had taken power, when everyone lived in oppressive persecution without respite, only Jiangnan had a semblance of culture (cu you wen), and the two brothers easily swam through it all (erjun zhe youyou qi jian).13

90 The Legacy of the Interregnum When (Jiangnan) Tang guo was encircled by the Song military and confronted with imminent defeat, Xu Xuan had counselled his lord Li Yu to yield. For this he was praised by Zhao Kuangyin, now the emperor Taizu of Song, as a “loyal official” (zhong chen). Under the Song he successfully transferred his prominence in academic circles and played a leading role in the compilation of such major works as the Taiping guangji, Taiping yulan, and Wenyuan yinghua.14 Throughout his career, both with Tang guo and later with the Song, Xu was passionately committed to protecting wen. He believed this could only be accomplished through attention to the writing itself, as he explained: The Way of the Gentleman (jun zi zhidao) … is enacted through words. Enacting [the Way of the Gentleman] far and wide is through wen. Therefore, extolling wen across the generations is something to be esteemed.15 He was, moreover, a great believer in orthodox social hierarchy, itself a social manifestation of wen. For example, in an essay entitled “On Service and Seclusion” he wrote: Food is the lord of the common folk (min tian), and therefore agriculture is the base of administration. Craftsmanship produces goods, and trade circulates what we have for what we lack for all under the Cosmos. These three occupations [i.e., peasant, artisan, and merchant] work cooperatively together (jiao xiangyang zhe). Scholars do not provide anything to these three categories. How is it that without doing anything, they receive their nurturing? As it is thus, [scholars] are their lords and the teachers.16 Xu Xuan’s perspective was that of a southerner, but he was deeply concerned about the propagation of wen across all social or class lines: “extolling wen across the generations is something to be esteemed.” However, (Jiangnan) Tang was the most orthodox of the southern guo. Although the court claimed authority as far as the upper reaches of the Gan River that for centuries has defined western Jiangnan and was long a redoubt of loosely-“civilized” indigenous peoples, the heart of Tang guo was the lower reaches of the Yangtze River basin, the most thoroughly “civilized” region of the south. Other voices came from the more culturally diverse regions that were far more representative of the cultural diversity, or “heterodoxy,” of the south. They spoke far more passionately and directly about the need to inculcate both wen and li in regions and among peoples who had yet to embrace them. For example, Tian Xi (940–1003) was a native of Sichuan who grew up under the (Latter) Shu guo before moving to the capitol region around Kaifeng following the defeat and absorption of his guo into the Song imperium.17 In an essay urging the restoration of the village wine-drinking ritual (xiangyin

The Legacy of the Interregnum 91 li), an ancient civil rite that celebrated learned accomplishment in the ritual classics, he noted: I have heard that sages … defined ritual in order to manage the courts and the guo (zhi li yi jing bangguo)… Yet though the Five Rituals are practiced at court, among peoples who live in remote regions (lit. “distant people”) some will never witness them. Though the six musical forms may be played in the [imperial] Ancestral Hall, among the people who live in remote regions some will never hear them… Thus the Village Wine-Drinking Ritual was created to be performed in the village schools in order to cause people to easily come to know [the rites and music].18 Ritual, according to Tian, is the vehicle through which normative behavior is taught. If “the people who live in remote regions,” those who lived in Tian’s native Sichuan for example who were unlikely to ever witness the rituals of the court or hear the music with which they were paired, they could easily master the rites if they were taught the ancient wine-drinking ritual. After centuries of inconsistency, Tian argued, the Tang had restored proper ritual, including the wine-drinking ritual which was adopted as a civil ceremony conducted at the local level both to affirm social order and to honor those who were eligible to sit for the capital examinations19: [Tang] illuminated the many rituals and wen was spread throughout the prefectures and the guo (jun guo20), which has given local officials the means to transform the masses (hua li). Finally he observed, “man’s possession of wen is the great Way of ordering and regulating. If one has this Way then one can use government to effect transformation [to wen] through instruction (jiao hua).”21 In contrast to Xu Xuan, whose commitment to preserving wen echoed a commitment to promoting orthodoxy that was broadly shared through the academic culture of the early Song,22 Tian Xi was quite explicit in the urgency of spreading normative culture, or wen, to those who had yet to learn it. If the restored holistic empire was to cohere, then standardizing cultural norms was essential. Otherwise the “prefectures and guo” would “slip back into unrestrained extravagance” (wangfan yu miman).23 Tian’s focus on ritual, however, was hardly unusual and is echoed by a range of scholars who came after him. Perhaps the most famous passage comes from Ouyang Xiu. After a lamentation about the debased wedding rituals practiced even by the elite, he complained: Today even among the famous scholars, the great lords, and the ancient lineages, there are none who do not act this way. Alas! Even the literati do not know ritual and propriety. They follow the customs of the locals and rustics, and most do not even know they are doing something wrong.24

92 The Legacy of the Interregnum “Alas,” he complained, “they have rehearsed the shell without grasping the meaning. They have forgotten the roots while sustaining the branches.”25 Ouyang, from Luling district in the middle reaches of the Gan River in Jiangnan, was truly a southerner by birth, and the heterodox rituals he had witnessed in his culturally complex home influenced him deeply. He was, for example, appalled at the appeal of Buddhism to the masses: “In the times of Yao and Shun and the Three Dynasties [i.e., Xia, Shang, and Zhou] imperial government had corrected instruction in ritual and propriety (li yi) across all under the Cosmos.” Buddhism, which flourished across his native south, had corrupted this: “Imperial government has lost its way, and ritual and propriety are no longer.” If Buddhism could be confronted and ritual and propriety restored, then, he explained: At times when the peasants are not working their fields and could rest, they can be taught through the rites. Thus they will know the rites of hunting as they hunt in their fields, they will know the rites of marriage as they procure their wives, they will know the rites of mourning as they experience death and burial, and they will know the rites of their village as they gather together to eat and drink. This is not only to guard against chaos, but is the means to teach them and cause them to know the worthy and lowly, the young and old: these are the great relations among people.26 Tian Xi had argued that ritual was the path to normalization of wen. Ouyang Xiu, however, went a major step further: teaching the “great relations among people” was “to guard against chaos,” for if the common people—not the educated elite such as himself who had invested in the new dynasty, but the “peasants who work the fields”—accept the rites they will not undermine order. They too will embrace the new order. Xia Song, whose link to Fan Zhongyan has been mentioned above, was even more explicit about the clash between wen and debased folk practices. Xia was a native of De’an district in Jiangzhou (Jiangnan West), a remote hinterland district in the heart of the Yangtze River basin, on the southwest shore of the Boyang Lake—exactly the kind of place that had long lain beyond the influence of the normative values of wen. Perhaps it is indicative of De’an that Xia never earned a jinshi degree. He was, however, known for his extremely broad education and had a long career in the Song bureaucracy. He combined offense at the debased folk practices with which he was familiar with his own passionate commitment to wen. In several essays he argued against tolerance of heterodox behaviors. In an essay titled “On Curbing Illicit Rites,” for example, he lamented those who would “besmirch deities in favor of demons, with the support of sorcerers,” practices that were emblematic of the indigenous cultures of the south among which he had grown up, and urged that they be actively suppressed: “Throughout history illicit rites (yin si) have been prohibited.”27 Going even further, in his “Ode

The Legacy of the Interregnum 93 on Extending Wen,” written in 1035, he argued: “It is through knowing wen that one can regulate the high and the low, manage the peripheral guo, normalize rites and music, and reform customs. Therefore, study the classics to provide a vessel for wen, and establish schools to provide the hall for wen. This plants the roots of correct guidance.” Without such normalization, he warned, there would be “chaos.” Because the Song had restored wen, “the Man and Yi barbarians have submitted and all under the Cosmos pay allegiance.”28 Li Gou (1009–59) was also alarmed by local practice. His natal home, Jianchang Commandery, lay in the remote eastern highlands of Jiangxi, near the Jiangxi/Fujian border. Like Xia Song’s home in De’an district, this was very much the kind of area where indigenous southern customs continued to hold sway. And like Xia Song, Li’s response focused on the importance of rites, about which he wrote seven essays in 1032. The opening line of the first asks: Why is the discussion of rites by the sages so important? I responded, “The rites are the standard for the Way of Men (rendao zhi zhun); they have been essential to instruction across the ages.” As for how the sages managed all under the Cosmos or how the court cultivated morality or rectified the mind, nothing comes before the rites… Whether food and drink, clothing, housing, vessels, husband and wife, father and son, old and young, lord and minister, superior and inferior, teacher and friend, visitor and guest, dead and mourned, sacrifice and offering, these are the foundations of the rites.29 In other words, without proper attention to rites society will be disordered. Through the essays that followed, Li established that the rites were the wellspring from which all other features of civilization arise: “Music, punishment, and governing all stem from the rites… Thus throughout the ages, [even if sages] only talked of rites, such that the people were unaware of music, punishment, or governing, yet they would all be there and [the sages’ advocacy] would make the people utilize them. Thus rites are first, and music, punishment, and governing all stem from them.”30 Finally, in the fifth of his essays Li wrote: “Someone asked, ‘Can there be music, punishment, and governance that lacks [proper] ritual?’ I answered, ‘What a good question! The dissolute but seductive noises of the various barbarians confuse their performers and lead to intimacy between boys and girls. They produce facetious humor and turn things inside out. They move peoples’ eyes and ears and cause turbulence in peoples’ well-being. Given all this, this is music that lacks [proper] ritual.’”31 Although Li only rarely used the word wen, his point was that through proper application of rites, the all-encompassing body of human interaction that the culture of wen defined as emblematic of civilization, civilized behavior would result, the “seductive noises of the various barbarians” would no longer “confuse their performers,” and there no

94 The Legacy of the Interregnum longer would be inappropriate “intimacy between boys and girls.” He concluded: “one controls heterodoxy (yi; by definition, the not-wen and the source of the chaos both Ouyang Xiu and Xia Song so feared) with the rites.”32 However, unlike Ouyang Xiu, who embraced Luling, his natal place, and routinely signed himself “Ouyang Xiu of Luling,” Li Gou described his natal home in uncomplimentary terms: It had a “disappointing” reputation, and among those “unfortunate enough” to be assigned to serve there, no more than “one or two out of ten” actually came. It was a land of “rebellious” barbarians that was plagued by malaria and miasmic poisons—plagues, one might project, that reflected the not-wen culture of the people. Late in the 1040s an otherwise unknown Mr. Zhang “had the misfortune of actually arriving” to serve as magistrate.33 His task was to restore the magistrate’s office, which Li Gou compared to a grass hut. A year later Mr. Zhang had been replaced by Mr. Wu: “The scholarly gentlemen said Lord Wu had advanced through the study of wen, which benefitted his administrative methods. His father and brothers had all been great officials, and he most certainly was not unperceptive. He governed as an erudite, and was suitably focused on rites.”34 Li Gou, in short, regarded his natal district as a cultural backwater populated by uncultured not-wen people. It was the challenge met by men such as Mr. Zhang and Lord Wu, who brought the values of civilization with them, to transform such unfortunates through education (jiao hua), to guide them by rites, and so to purge them of the ills that plagued them. Li Gou added one further thought about the century of division. After outlining his belief in the role of ritual behind the holistic empire, he explained: The south-facing lord (i.e., the emperor) divided the land in order to rule… There was no one who prioritized unification. The people knew what their lord prioritized, so thereafter they took the honor of their wang and the words of his officials in the same way. Now it has been several generations since the lords were deposed and the empire restored. Those with power have been weakened and those with prestige have lost it.35 Divided empire, he asserted, was done. The holistic empire, the empire unified by rites, had been restored. Yu Jing, who has been introduced above as one of the allies in Fan Zhongyan’s reform movement, was similarly concerned about displacing heterodoxy with normative values in an area dominated by indigenous tradition. Yu was a native of Shaozhou, located deep in the uplands on the border between modern Hunan and Guangdong. Like Ouyang Xiu’s Luling or Li Gou’s Jianchang, Shaozhou lay well beyond the “civilized” core, deep in the region of the so-called “loose-reign” prefectures where the Tang and then the Song granted a large measure of self-governance to indigenous

The Legacy of the Interregnum 95 peoples. Xunzhou was remote even in comparison to Shaozhou, and it embraced the “not-wen” values that so concerned Yu and his colleagues. Yu asked, “how could the people pursue transformation [to wen values]?” Expressing his concern about the inculcation of the normative values of “the Sages,” between the 1040s and 1050s Yu wrote a series of essays commemorating the establishment or restoration of prefectural schools in heretofore culturally heterodox areas: Xunzhou (1047); Hongzhou (1036); Raozhou (1046); and Leizhou (1063).36 He lamented in 1036 that “the rites are lost when [the people] rely on shrines [i.e., deities] and ignore education [that is, the learning of the Sages].” The goal of the new schools, he wrote in 1047, was “to celebrate transformation and embrace the Sages”; “transformation” (hua), it would have been clear to all, meant “transformation through wen.” Du Yingzhi, the prefect in Xunzhou who oversaw construction of the school that Yu celebrated, observed, “Although the mingjing and jinshi exams have long been used to find the worthy, no one from this prefecture has been on the lists. Education has not come here.” thus was to promote “transformation” of those who had not yet embraced the normative values. Education was to transform those who had never shared the normative values of “civilized” culture, and thereby make them part of the larger imperial project. Finally we can turn to Cai Xiang, a native of Putian district in Fujian. Cai earned his jinshi degree in 1030. He was far from the first native of Putian to do so, but that year he was one among nine in the first surge of successful examinees from the district.37 Like his fellow southerners Xia Song and Li Gou, moreover, Cai had a career that took him to the capital, all of which is a reflection of the growing integration of southern scholars into the bureaucratic elite and commitment to the holistic empire discussed above. As his official career flourished, he associated both politically and socially with a range of prominent individuals, including Ouyang Xiu, who wrote his funerary inscription,38 and Fan Zhongyan, who was his mentor in capital politics. In keeping with the ethos of Fan’s reform movement, Cai Xiang’s writings betray a major concern with the material welfare of common folk— especially in his native region of southern Fujian where an onerous head tax from the interregnum decades that had been abolished elsewhere persisted.39 At the heart of Cai’s concern, however, was his belief that there had been a cultural imbalance between the civil and the martial, of wen and wu. He argued that this had destroyed the Tang and had continued to plague the interregnum dynasties, the dai, of the north. It had begun to be addressed in the more stable southern guo, and had finally been resolved by the Song. Cai was troubled by the on-going tensions along the northern frontiers and convinced that only through eradication of improper relationships among people and with the cosmos could order and stability, and so the prosperity of the people and the empire, be maintained. He was, consequently, deeply concerned about restoring the proper order to society. In an undated essay celebrating a new appointment for a colleague (n.d.), for example, after blaming

96 The Legacy of the Interregnum the inability of the interregnum dai to establish order over the undue power of the military, which had “taken the land and usurped the wealth,” Cai lauded the Song for putting power in the hands of “scholar officials” (ruchen) under whom peace and prosperity could be restored.40 As he explained in a series of related essays, the Song deserved praise for restoring the authority and respect of the emperor, two virtues that had been lost during the chaos of the interregnum century and reflected the proper order and hierarchy of things. Like so many of his southern colleagues, Cai saw rites as key to cultivating wen. In the first of a series of essays devoted to “the needs of the state,” for example, he wrote: “[The legendary rulers of the ancient past] created rites and music in order to rectify the peoples’ nature and overturn their erroneous minds. In this way they diminished their crimes and led them away from punishment.” This had been lost through the ages, and despite the efforts of the Tang as well as the founding rulers of the Song, “the customs of the Four Directions have yet to hear of the rites and music and still use law (fa).” “Law,” as any scholar would have known, invoked the despised policies of the Qin dynasty when Legalism displaced the normative values of civilization with draconian laws; “law” was the cultural opposite of ritual and the manifestation of society’s failure to teach ritual. Rites, Cai maintained, had become “confused,” and he urged the emperor to oversee their rectification: “Simply use the old ways to establish today’s rites.”41 If rites were clarified, all would understand, the people’s behavior would be rectified, law would be unnecessary, and the empire would enjoy a renewed stability. In this spirit, Cai praised the orthodox priorities of colleagues who put their filial obligations ahead of bureaucratic careers; he singled out Chen Zhu, a fellow native of Xinghua who put his career on hold to mourn his mother.42 He was especially concerned, however, with restoring balance in popular belief and practice. He had no problem turning to orthodox spirits (shen) when the occasion demanded it—for example, to beseech rain at times of drought or to help control tidal waters when overseeing construction of a new bridge.43 However he chastised the “people of Fujian” for their reliance on heterodox shamanistic exorcisms over proper medical treatment: “It is common in Min that a doctor will be on the left and a shaman on the right [i.e., given priority]. The families of the sick rely on shamans with reverence, and only call on doctors twenty or thirty percent of the time. Thus there is little tradition of [proper] medicine.”44 This is echoed in the funerary inscription Ouyang Xiu composed on his friend’s death: “[Xiang] commented, ‘Impropriety (bi) is important here!’ So he issued commands to ban it. Because treating of diseases by shamans and the prescription of noxious medicines that kill people cause heartache, so they are prohibited.”45 The restoration of proper ritual was not the central theme in Cai’s writing that it was for others. In one undated essay, however, most likely composed after he had served in Quanzhou where he found culture to be most debased, he addressed it directly:

The Legacy of the Interregnum 97 When I served as prefectural magistrate, I would conduct the spring rites at the Confucian Shrine. The scholars of the prefecture would gather to cooperate in my effort, and the elders would gather at the foot of the hall. I would invite them to sit, and explain, “You are the elders. You have witnessed the administration of many magistrates. Among the countless families in the prefectures where I have served, there have some with good nature and others with bad, and everything possible inbetween. What magistrate does not wish that his administration promote the good and dispel the bad? I would promote morality, using ancient times as the standard… But only you, the people, can truly feel concern [about local moral standards]. [Only you] can root out evil and deceitfulness; [only you] can uphold the good and prevent the bad; and [only you] can effect a peaceful separation between the strong and the weak.”46 In short, Cai would affirm the social hierarchy in both the normative use of space, placing the local scholars around him and the elders among the common people in the privileged space just below, and in the social charge he gave the elders: The magistrate can set the standard, but only the people can accomplish the morality. These are the thoughts of only six men, yet together they point to a shared concern. All six were southerners; either they or their immediate ancestors had worked under one or another of the southern guo. Yet all had gained prestige and authority under the restored holistic empire; by engaging that empire they had rejected the autonomy of the preceding century and embraced the holistic model. Each saw a threat to that holism, however, in the enduring heterodox customs of their natal places, in the failure to standardize cultural norms among the common people. Each feared the enduring heterodoxy drawing on the not-wen customs of the south; though none said as much, heterodoxy provided a framework through which a return to regional autonomy could arise. Each therefore argued for the essential task of “the educational transformation” (jiaohua) of the common people through wen and the practice of li. These were the foundations of orthodoxy and holism; mastering them provided a shield against heterodoxy and division. Their promotion of the orthodox cultural tradition against regional heterodoxies is as much a part of the story of Chinese identity and cohesion as the definition of “us versus them” that was coming to define the empire’s political and ethnic relations across its northern frontier.47

Notes 1 Originally published as Clark (2020), 17–43, with editorial modification 2 On the networks of the founders of the southern guo, see Clark (2011). See also the more focused discussion of the “men of Gushi” in Clark (2007), 47–54. 3 See, for example, the discussion in Zhang (2016), 175–217, which focuses especially on Xu Xuan, to whom our discussion will return below. 4 Zhao Yanwei, j.10, #45.

98 The Legacy of the Interregnum 5 SS 282:9548. It bears noting that Wang Dan and Wang Qinrou were politically opposed to each other, predisposing Dan to object to this nomination. On their opposition, see Lau and Huang (2009), 274–277. 6 This is a point that has been recognized by many, but perhaps the most systematic examination is Chen (1977), a prosopographic survey of the political elite through the Northern Song dynasty (960–1126). 7 Wu Zimu, juan 17, “zhuangyuan biao” 狀元表. 8 Chen (1977), especially 64–87. 9 See Clark (2016), Chapter 4, “Social Innovation in the Eleventh Century and the Debates on Civilization.” 10 The most authoritative discussion of wen in English is Bol (1992). Even if I emphasize a narrow aspect of the term, my debt to this outstanding work is profound. 11 For useful discussion of the meaning of li and its link to civilization, see Holcombe (2001), 41–44. 12 SGCQ 11:152–153. The phrase xue bowu can mean either “to study random things” or “to study the natural world.” Neither is entirely consistent with wen. 13 Ouyang Xiu, Wenzhong ji, 143:13a–13b. 14 See his official biography in SS 441:13044–49. Bol (1992), 156, identifies Xu as “the greatest Five Dynasties scholar to find a place at the Song court.” 15 Xu Xuan, “Gu Bingbu shilang Wang gong ji xu” 故兵部侍郎王公集序, QSW 22:196, borrowing from Bol (1992), 157, with adaptation. 16 “Chuchu lun” 出處論 (QSW 23:207); see also “Junchen lun” 君臣論 (QSW 23:209–210), “Chichuan lun” 持權論 (QSW 23:210–212), and “Shichen lun” 師臣 論 (QSW 23:212–213), all of which affirm the importance of hierarchy. 17 SS 293:6639. 18 Tian Xi, Xianping ji, 2:1a-1b. 19 See You (2004), 261–266. 20 The compound junguo is a standard term for “the empire.” In this case, however, I believe that Tian intends the two terms to be read distinctly, thus my translation. 21 Xianping ji, 2:9b, adapted and expanded from Bol (1992), 148. 22 See, for example, Ebrey (1991). 23 Xianping ji, 2:9b. 24 Ouyang Xiu, Guitian lu, b:22a, translated in Ebrey (1989), 284, with alterations. 25 XTS 11:307–09, from Bol (1992), 193, with adaptation. 26 Ouyang Xiu, Wenzhong ji, 17:2b. 27 Xia Song, “Jin yin si” 禁淫祀,Wenzhuang ji, 13:15a. The term si 祀, which alludes to “religious” rites, loosely defined, stands in contrast to li 禮, which are “civil” rites, again loosely defined. There is much overlap between the two, but li, as the performative side of wen, cannot be “illicit.” 28 “Guangwen song” 廣文頌, Wenzhuang ji 24:3b-4a. 29 “Li lun di yi” 禮論第一, Xujiang ji 2:1b. 30 “Li lun di wu” 禮論第五, Xujiang ji 2:12b. 31 “Li lun di wu” 禮論第五, Xujiang ji 2:11b–12a. 32 Xujiang ji 6: 17a. 33 “Jianchang jun zhijun ting ji” 建昌軍知軍廳記, Xujiang ji 23:2b–3b. 34 “Jianchang zhijun ting ji,” 建昌知軍㕔記, Xujiang ji 23:2b–3a. 35 “Jianchang jun yimen ji” 建昌軍義門記, Xujiang ji 23:3b–4b. 36 Yu Jing, “Xunzhou xincheng zhouxue ji,” Wuxi ji, 6:1a-2b, reproduced in QSW 569:53–54; “Hongzhou xinzhi zhouxue ji,” Wuxi ji 6:2b-4b, reproduced in QSW 569: 54–55; “Raozhou xinjian zhouxue ji,” Wuxi ji 6:5a-6b, reproduced in QSW 569: 55– 56; and “Leizhou xinxiu junxue ji,” Wuxi ji 6:6b-7b, reproduced in QSW 569:57. 37 See Clark (2009), Appendix 1, “Examination Numbers, Putian and Xianyou Districts, 980–1274.” In the next official examination cycle in 1034 there were 24 successful jinshi candidates from Putian.

The Legacy of the Interregnum 99 38 Ouyang Xiu, Wenzhong ji 35:2b-7b. 39 Cai discussed this in many places, but see especially “Qi jianfang ZhangQuan zhou Xinghua jun renhu shending mi zhazi,” Duanming ji, 26:5a–6a. 40 “Song Ma Chengzhi tongpan Yizhou xu,” Duanming ji 29:6b–7b. Ma Chengzhi appears in the work of several other Northern Song scholars who were linked to Fan Zhongyan (see, for example, Su Shunqin, “He Ma Chengzhi gumiao,” Su xueshi ji 6:4a), there is no further identification. 41 “Guolun yaomu” 國論要目#1, “Ming li” 明禮, Duanming ji 22:1a-2. 42 This theme is echoed in several texts, but see for example “Chen diancheng songxing shixu” 陳殿丞送刑詩序, Duanming ji 29: 13b-14b. 43 See, for example, the sequence of prayers entitled “Jishen wen” 祭神文, Duanming ji 36:14a-17a and “Wan’an du shiqiao ji” 萬安渡石橋記, Duanming ji 28:21b-22a. 44 “Sheng huifang houxu” 聖惠方後序, Duanming ji 29:14b-16a. 45 Ouyang Xiu, “Caigong muzhiming” 蔡公墓誌銘, Wenzhong ji 35:4b-5a. 46 Duanming ji, 29: 9a. 47 See Tackett (2017), for which this is the central theme; see also Yang (2019).

8

Conclusions The Holistic Legacy

In the Introduction I explained that my intention has been to demonstrate the importance of the interregnum century, and particularly the southern guo, to the larger course of East Asian, or specifically “Chinese,” history. If, however, the accomplishments of the century were a blip in the narrative, an interesting and even innovative era but one that left no legacy, then I would have failed in my goal. To finish, therefore, I must demonstrate that the Tang-Song interregnum has a legacy that was transformative. The accomplishments of the southern guo were not blips in the historical narrative, but represent a fundamental shift in history, one that finally legitimizes the geopolitical concept of “China.”1 Was the interregnum a time, as Ouyang Xiu bemoaned in a passage quoted earlier, when “across the realm [ruffians with] brands on their faces and shaved heads [both signs of criminal conviction] took advantage of the times, raiding and trading”? Certainly! Ouyang’s lament was a plausible description of the many of the men who established the southern guo. Yet these were not, in the end, the men who defined the character of the southern guo. Even the rough-hewn founders included in their retinues men with accomplished cultural backgrounds. Battle-hardened founders such as Wang Jian of (Former) Shu guo and Wang Shenzhi of Min guo relied on such stalwarts of the late Tang civil culture as Feng Juan (850 jinshi), whose grandfather had served the Tang court as President of the Board of Personnel, and Han Wo, who had earned a jinshi degree before the Tang court collapsed and was regarded as the intellectual force behind the Min court. Ma Ling, in his History of the Southern Tang issued in 1105, observed: “When the Wu guo was first stabilized, local officials were all of military background… Only Xu Zhigao was fond of scholarship. He welcomed those who practiced Confucian ritual… His administration was humane and attracted men from far and near.”2 Even if Ma Ling’s claim was exaggerated, every court could boast of prominent scholars who had fled the turmoil that wracked the north and found refuge in the southern guo. The combination of martial vigor and civil caution cultivated a climate across the southern guo that fostered economic growth. Of course the south was not without its problems: Min guo, though it claimed some of the most DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249-8

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prosperous regions of the south, was chronically unstable and never truly united; both (Former) Shu and Wu were displaced, the former by invasion and the latter in a palace coup. Chu was routinely regarded as weak and attracted the predatory attention of all its neighbors, yet somehow endured until overwhelmed by the rising Song. Yet by all empirical measures the economies of the southern guo expanded—not in a way that we can quantify, but based on a broad array of impressionistic data: population grew, cultivated land expanded, new crops spread, new kilns were established. Why was this so? And what can it tell us about continuity across the long sweep of the Tang–Song Transition? Of course the general stability of the south cannot be dismissed as an explanatory factor, but the south had been stable for long periods before without comparable development; that alone cannot be enough. Perhaps most importantly, in the aftermath of the An Lushan Rebellion in the mid-eighth century, when the first large-scale influx of refugees from the turmoil of the north arrived, a new kind of economy began to emerge across the south. As explained earlier, the Tang had inherited a strongly state-controlled economic model from the preceding centuries: market opportunities were legally limited to state-supervised market quarters in the urban centers; tax policy meant that commercial opportunity was limited and spatial mobility was restricted, especially for the agrarian population. In the course of the rebellion, however, the land registers, which had tied individuals to specific plots of land and so had been the primary means by which the state restricted mobility, were largely destroyed. Without records of who belonged where, the state lost the ability to limit mobility, which in turn released the population from the bonds of registration and prompted the large wave of migration. As migrants settled across the south, they found themselves beyond the effective overview of the imperial state and thus freed of the restraints imposed by the older statist approaches to market management. Freed, they developed networks of trade focused on new urban centers that emerged in response to the organic stimulus—centers that grew at critical nodes of communication such as fords and bridges or the intersection of roads and canals. In contrast, therefore, to the older urban network of the north, which had prioritized administrative needs over commercial and forced the latter to accommodate, this network was driven by commercial priorities.3 The point is, across the south even before the collapse of Tang authority a newly energized economy was already taking shape. When the Tang collapsed a multi-state system emerged across the south. Each of these states had an economic strength: Wu and WuYue controlled the lower basin of the Yangtze River and the Hangzhou Bay, both already well-established as economic powerhouses with large cities and extremely productive agricultural resources; Min, despite its poor soils and rough terrain, had two developing port cities, and Han had the Pearl River estuary, long the premier port of the continental periphery; Chu and Shu were already established as centers of tea and porcelain production.

102 Conclusions Arguably all could have survived on their own, but none did; as the southern economy had evolved through the later Tang, the regions of the south had evolved cooperatively. The middle reaches of the Yangtze basin and further Sichuan, the areas that became Chu and Shu, shipped their porcelains, tea, and rice, down the Yangtze for distribution both through the emerging centers of the lower basin and for shipment to the great urban centers of the north. The farthest south, the region that became Han, as well as the emerging ports of Min similarly transferred the goods imported from the South Seas to the Hangzhou Bay and Yangtze for further distribution. The Jiangnan region controlled by Wu was an entrepôt to all these goods, and possibly already a source of rice to places such as the Min port cities, a role it was certainly playing by the mid-11th century. It may have been too early to refer to a “national” market, but in advance of the Tang collapse the several regions of the south played off each other’s strengths to their mutual benefit. This continued through the interregnum as merchants crossed the political boundaries, which they apparently were able to do easily and frequently.4 Merchants, in fact, became vital couriers in the diplomacy of the day, carrying messages between the southern guo. between those individual guo and the courts to the north, and even to the Khitan court that orchestrated so much of the politics of the Central Plain. In short, trade networks that had been established through the Tang continued to flourish, to the benefit of all involved. These transformations that had begun in the later Tang underlay the ongoing economic expansion across the south, an expansion that, as is well known, continued unabated in the decades and centuries that followed.5 Among many consequences, a critical one was that the unified empire was never again dominated by the north; indeed, the transformation of the south that began in the latter half of the Tang and accelerated through the interregnum drove the “discourse on civilization,” discussed in Chapter 5, that transformed the relationship between elite culture and the innovative and often heterodox south. To echo Ouyang Xiu, “Aihu”! The southern guo represent a critical bridge between the statist structures of the Tang and the open, meritocratic culture of the Song. They constitute neither a pause nor a regression, but an era of expansion and innovation. If both Sui and Tang had treated the south as a colony, extracting from its growing wealth the goods they desired while giving very little back, they also set the table for a far-reaching economic expansion. As Denis Twitchett and his students demonstrated, the policies of the Sui and Tang eras allowed southerners room to experiment and innovate, to escape the heavy administrative hand that constrained organic economic growth in the north. However, much more then economic expansion went on across the south. It was a fertile era of innovation in both social hierarchies and kinship practice. Scholars have long recognized that among the most important outcomes of the Song examination system was to open a path for social

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mobility. What has too often been overlooked, however, is that the southern guo themselves were laboratories for mobility. Although none appear to have developed an institutional framework to foster this, all the guo relied on “newly-risen” men who had surmounted déclassé backgrounds and joined elite circles.7 Having done so, these men were pressed to find ways to sustain their new status. Affirmation of extended kin identity through designated ritual space and genealogical records, each of which violated both de jure or de facto orthodoxy, was central to their solution. Just as the reintegrated Song had to accommodate to the economic power of the south, so too did the new dynasty have to accommodate to the cultural innovations that came from the south. Scholars of northern heritage such as Ouyang Xiu and Sima Guang may have resisted the challenge to orthodoxy that new ideas of ritual space and genealogical records presented,8 but as southerners gained social power and mobility brought new families into scholarly circles, the utility of these innovations that came out of the southern guo pushed aside orthodox resistance. Ouyang Xiu may have lamented “Aihu.” He didn’t approve! Yet the southern guo represent “a critical bridge” between an era when southern elites and southern culture were marginalized in a world dominated by northerners to an era when the empire was southern. New patterns of social mobility also evolved during the interregnum. The Tang, like the eras before it, was not a time that was comfortable with social mobility. Nevertheless across the south a new network of elites was already taking shape. This provided the men who were given limited official recognition through the “southern selection” recruitment system, and these were the men who filled the administrative structures of the southern guo. It was the descendants of these men, moreover, who had largely taken control of the empire by the reigns of emperors Zhenzong (r. 998–1024) and Renzong (r. 1024–1064). The Song is renowned for the degree of social mobility that occurred, but the roots of the phenomenon lie in the interregnum century. These are important legacies, and easy to point to. But it is another legacy on which I want to focus these concluding thoughts. In Chapter 2 I argued that throughout the Sui/Tang era the “the south was a colony.” This is not a new idea. More than half a century ago Miyakawa Hisayuki engaged it, albeit from a very traditional perspective that focused on “assimilation” and avoided the concept of colonization, and most recently it has been addressed by Nicholas Tackett.9 Yet surprisingly few have recognized or acknowledged how central colonization was to the history of China’s south. If “colony” is to some degree a mutable term, as a political term an indispensable part of any definition is administrative control of one area by representatives of another. Colonies, in other words, at some level are not self-ruled. Two corollaries have commonly followed. First, the culture of the colonized, indeed the very people of the colony, have been deemed inferior; if the colonizer is civilized, then by definition the colonized are uncivilized. Even should they accept the culture of the colonizer, the colonized remain

104 Conclusions marginal and suspect: No matter how Anglicized, a native of South Asia could never be an Englishman, nor could a Yue or Man be “Chinese” until the suspect background was long forgotten. Second, colonies have commonly been economically subordinate to the ruling entity; rather than their own self-interest, colonies have served the economic interest of the colonizer. Through the preceding discussion I have demonstrated that all such criteria applied to the relationship between north and south throughout the Tang. Under the holistic empire of Sui/Tang, when very little economic product flowed from north to south, the imperial court relied on the Yangtze River basin as a source of grain and wealth. Additionally, through the Tang the south emerged as a prime source of luxury goods, both imported and domestic, both agrarian and manufactured, and as a critical source of tax revenue. As the southern economy grew, the court’s reliance on the south increased manifold. Throughout the Sui/Tang era, however, southern economic power was not matched by cultural or political power. The south had culturally had a different heritage than the north, one that drew on distinct non-Sinitic ethnic and cultural traditions. To northerners such as Liu Zongyuan who found themselves exiled to the south, it was a hostile land filled with dreadful miasmas and dangerous flora and fauna. Equally alienating, northern exiles found southern culture uncouth and barbaric, overly reliant on ghosts and shamans, and alarmingly ecstatic and divorced from the secular concerns that were central to the northern perspective. As Liu complained in a text dated 817 and quoted in the introduction: The people of Yue believe in omens and that they can easily be killed. They reject the transformation of civilization and abuse human empathy … If you try to manage them with rites, they respond with stubbornness. If you restrain them with punishments, they run away. They only acknowledge Buddhist mandala and serve the spirits.10 Liu, like his fellow exile and longtime colleague Han Yu, had a paternalistic affection for the indigenous people among whom he lived. To him they were children, enthralled by cultural nonsense; they were not peers. Their culture was inferior, and their embrace of their inferior culture rendered them inferior as well, in need of the paternalistic guidance he and his northern colleagues provided. One is reminded of words such as those of Louis-Antoine GarnierPagés, who wrote in 1838 in celebration of the assertion of French imperial authority in Algiers: “Colonization is the most laudable form of conquest; it is the most direct means to propagate civilization.”11 Cultural attitudes such as this limited the opportunity of southerners to join the Tang bureaucratic elite. Even in the post-An Lushan decades when southern economic power was at its peak southerners had almost no opportunity to contribute to or influence the imperial bureaucracy. However, drawing on the ancient formula “use the barbarian to control the barbarian”

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(yiyi zhiyi), and responding no doubt to the resistance among the northern elite to service in the south, the Tang had established the “southern selection” recruitment system whereby local posts across the south that were not filled by exiles were most often filled by men recruited through this supplemental system. The result was not altogether unlike the British administration of its North American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when colonial legislatures such as those in Virginia and Massachusetts gave their citizens a real measure of political authority, albeit subordinate to the ruling power in London. Although local officials appointed through “southern selection” likewise were technically subordinate to magistrates appointed by the court, many of the latter avoided so much as even going to their assignments, and those who did commonly reacted with the alienation expressed by Liu Zongyuan. All too often this left the actual administration of southern localities in the hands of southerners themselves: “use the barbarian to control the barbarian”! One must be wary of pushing analogy too far, and certainly the differences between eighteenth and nineteenth century European imperialism and that of the Tang a millennium earlier are at least as salient as the parallels, but it is striking that in both contexts the tensions generated by the colonial relationship resulted in a break between ruled and ruler. Like Europe’s imperial powers a millennium later, who recognized that reasserting authority over their rebellious American colonies was too taxing at a time of regional and domestic upheaval, the northern dai for nearly a century accepted the autonomy, if not actual independence, of the southern guo, albeit within the framework of what had become accepted hierarchy of court-to-court relations. As one succeeded another, the initial four of the five northern dai had their own domestic and regional concerns that long took precedence over any thoughts of restoring the holistic empire. The restoration of the holistic empire launched by the (Later) Zhou and completed by the Song is the critical distinction that provides the framework to what I argue is the most important legacy of the interregnum. To revert to the European analogy, when the Roman imperium across so much of Europe was broken in the middle centuries of the 1st millennium, the break was essentially permanent. Later restorations of empire across Europe were ephemeral; the European multi-court system became the norm. When, however, the Song, in a step never fully realized in post-Roman Europe, restored the holistic empire, the economic and demographic power of the south was radically different than it had been ever before, and certainly vastly greater and more essential than the power of post-imperial northern Europe. Access to the resources of the south was essential for the endurance of the new regime. There were two challenges to this end. In order to ensure northern authority over the south, it was essential that the new dynasty gain the support of southern elites who otherwise might lead a revanchist effort toward a restoration of the multi-state order—an order, it bears recalling, that at least through the 930s and 940s, only a single generation earlier, was acceptable to

106 Conclusions both north and south. If we forget this at the distance of a millennium, it was not forgotten in the early decades of the Song. Second, the cultural divide that had always set the south apart and which underlay southern independence had to be resolved. As Charles Holcombe has ably explained, Sinitic civilization had always assumed that all peoples could learn the values of civilization, all could learn wen and li.12 But just because these values could be learned did not mean all had learned them. The uneducated barbarous peoples of the south needed to be taught. Neither happened overnight, but the fact that both did in time is an essential part of that legacy. The Song examination system provided southern scholars an open avenue into the imperial bureaucracy. There was no “southern selection.” Supplemental avenues such as the facilitated examination through which frustrated examinees could by-pass the standard jinshi examination were open to all on an equal basis. The protection privilege through which relatives of middle- and upper-level bureaucrats could gain low-level appointment and the privileges that accrued thereby without any examinations initially benefitted the northerners who dominated the early Song bureaucracy, but the balance swung as southerners more and more gained the privilege for themselves. By the reign of the emperor Renzong (1022–1063) southerners were fully integrated into the imperial administration. The corollary, and the other half of this legacy, is that as southern scholars gained administrative legitimacy they also developed a commitment to the holistic imperial order and the orthodox culture it embodied. A growing chorus of voices denounced the heterodox traditions of the south. It is too simple to conclude that the south was “northernized.” When possible, indigenous southern traditions were accommodated.13 But increasingly those traditions that could not be accommodated were denounced as heterodox; heterodox traditions did not disappear, but they were constrained.14 The upshot was a new relationship between north and south with a shared commitment to the holistic empire.15 Indeed, the central, overriding legacy of the interregnum is that a multi-state construct dividing north and south was never again considered to be a feasible conclusion. This is not to say that the holistic empire was never again broken. From its beginning the Song was in a constant struggle to restore or maintain control over its peripheries. Throughout the interregnum decades the Khitan people had played an active role in the affairs of the north. Even after north and south had been reunited, the Khitan retained control of the so-called Sixteen Prefectures, a small but strategically important slice of territory along the line of the Great Wall. After several totally unsuccessful attempts at taking this territory, the Song acknowledged Khitan rule.16 Far to the west the Tangut people similarly capitalized on the vulnerability of the interregnum dai to gain control of the Ordos and Gansu, which led to several equally unsuccessful revanchist campaigns.17 Neither conflict, however, challenged the holistic unity of the Central Plain, the core of the north, and south. That unity was shattered by the

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Jurchen invasions in the early twelfth century, after which north and south remained separate until forcefully united by the Mongols more than a century later. But it is through these decades when “China” was divided between the remnant Southern Song in the south and the conquest dynasties of the north that the embrace of imperial holism becomes most manifest. When north and south were divided after the Han dynasty, there were inconclusive efforts to restore the holistic empire.18 When north and south were divided after the Tang dynasty, there was little initial effort to restore the holistic empire. But when north and south were divided by the Jurchen conquest of the Yellow River basin early in the twelfth century, militant revanchism, driven in large part by the ascending Neo-Confucian movement, drove the remnant Song repeatedly, and disastrously, to seek to reclaim the lost land.19 Although there was contention within the Song bureaucracy over the appropriate response to the Jurchen conquest of the ancient Sinitic heartland, and the Song court did reach a formal peace agreement with the conquerors that forestalled further Jurchen encroachments, the Song elite was never fully resigned to the separation. This, I argue, illustrates the ultimate legacy of the interregnum. Interregnum elites in both north and south had been open to the possibility of a multi-state system within the geo-political construct we call “China.” Whether as a nominally unified southern empire as had existed in the centuries between Han and Sui or as a body of regional independent courts as had existed in the interregnum, this had been a real option. The elite of the northern dai, many of whom were ethnically non-Sinitic and bore no heritage of unity with the south, was deeply involved with the affairs of the grassland frontier to the north. For multiple generations they simply were not interested in reclaiming the holistic model of Qin/Han and Sui/Tang. Among the southern elite this was a reflection of their exclusion from access to cultural or political legitimacy in the centuries before. But following the restoration of the holistic empire and the removal of the social and cultural barriers that had limited their opportunity, the southern elite embraced the holistic model just as the northern elite accepted them. A multi-state system was no longer acceptable, and never would be again. Resolving the tensions that had made the interregnum possible resolved the nature of the empire. Finally, is this a “legacy,” as I propose, or simply an accommodation to the reality after several decades of successful Song rule? The distinction, I think, is false. Without a doubt the southern elite had accommodated to the reality of the Song and had adopted a new orientation toward the holistic empire. But they did so as they remained fully cognizant of era of division that had occurred; it is essential to bear in mind, after all, that to the scholars of the reigns of Taizong and Zhenzong the interregnum of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers was recent and unforgotten. The concerns expressed by Xu Xuan and others were rooted in that memory and an reluctance to return to it. The scholars of the south had embraced the holistic model of empire in a way they never had before. The commitment these

108 Conclusions men expressed toward the holistic empire and the cultural premises on which it was rebuilt was they legacy they all shared of the era of division that had preceded.

Notes 1 Although this is not the place to argue this point fully, there is a tension between how we understand the term “China” today, as both a cultural and geopolitical reference, and what it might mean when applied to the long ago. Because at the core of my approach is the idea that geopolitical “China” wasn’t fully affirmed until the Song dynasty, as I have explained in Chapter 5, I find the term anachronistic when applied to earlier times. 2 NanTang shu, 1:3a. 3 This process was explored several decades ago by Denis Twitchett in work that has yet to be replaced. Though much of his work is related to the issue, see especially his magisterial Financial Administration Under the T’ang Dynasty (Twitchett, 1970) and “The T’ang Market System” (Twitchett, 1966) More recent work English-language that has built from Twitchett’s insights include Clark (1991) and Marmé (2005). There is an extensive literature in Chinese and Japanese, but note especially the relevant passages in Shiba (1968 and 1988). 4 I have discussed much of this in Clark (2009), but see also Hino (1941 and 1941– 1942). 5 For a recent and provocative analysis, see Liu (2015). See also McDermott and Shiba (2015). 6 The Song examinations he been the subject of numerous studies in a range of languages, but among the most accessible is John Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 7 The term “newly-risen” (xin xing [pronounced shinko- in Japanese]) was introduced by Aoyama (1962). 8 See, for example, Ebrey (1991). 9 Miyakawa (1960) and Tackett (2014), passim. See also the relevant if indirect discussion in Holcombe (2001), Chapter 3, “Civilizing Mission: Conceiving East Asia,” 30–77. 10 “Lizhou fu Dayun si ji”柳州復大雲寺記, Liu hedong ji 28:465–466. 11 Quoted in Charbonneau (2008), 32. 12 Holcombe (2001), Chapter 3, “Civilizing Mission: Conceiving East Asia,” 30–77. Shao-yun Yang (2019) has challenged the culturalist definition of Sinitic identity 13 See the discussion in Clark (2016), especially Part Two, “A Local Model of Cultural Accommodation.” 14 On the tension between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, see Kojima (1991). See also von Glahn (2004). 15 In a recent essay that offers a distinct yet complementary perspective, Ng Paksheung has argued that the northern scholars of the early Song were hostile to southern scholarship, specifically that of Jiangnan Tang; see Ng (2020). 16 See Smith (2009), 20–24. 17 See McGrath (2009) and Levine (2009). 18 Although there were several attempts to forge a reunified empire in the fourth century, thereafter the southern empires were embroiled in domestic conflicts that deflected any further reunification attempts; see Lewis (2009), 62–73. 19 See Tao (2009), Gong (2009), and Davis (2009).

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Abbreviations (full citations under “sources”)

BMTZ ESKQS HJAS JSYS JWDS MS QSW SGCQ SS TPHYJ XTS XWDS ZZTJ

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Index

An Lushan, and An Lushan Rebellion 14, 19, 20, 25–26, 45, 57–58, 61, 72–73, 101, 104 Austronesian 3 Austro-Asiatic 3 Ban Gu 3, 66 Belitung wreck 19, 52–53 Cai Xiang 49–50, 88, 95–97 calendar 33–34, 36, 41, 79 Celestial Masters 3, 4 Central Plain viii, 2, 3, 9–13, 16, 20–22, 25–27, 29, 33, 40, 43, 52, 60–61, 78, 79, 81, 82, 89, 102, 106 Champa rice 49–50, 83; see also “rice” Chen Hongjin 37, 49, 82 Chen Yuanguang 18 Chen Zheng 18 Chengdu Plain 3 Chu guo (907 – 964) ix, 6, 22, 35, 36, 42–43, 44, 49–50, 52–54, 62, 78, 81, 82, 101–102 Chu guo (Zhou dynasty) 9 colony (colo-nia/colo-nus) 9–22, 59, 102–105 dai (era) viii-ix, 27–29, 41–42, 82–84, 87, 95–96, 105, 106, 107 demography, see “migration,” “population,” and “registration” di (emperor, see also “wang”) 1, 27, 28–30, 32–36, 41 Di (barbarian) 27 Di (deity) 29 “Discourses on Salt and Iron” 10 “divide and establish” 29–30, 31, 33, 36, 79

Dong Yuan 65–66 drainage, see “land reclamation” examinations, imperial 7, 15, 19, 21, 60, 61, 63–64, 86–88, 102, 106; see also “southern selection” Fan Zhongyan 47, 88, 92, 95 Fang (Zhuzi) 63, 70–7 fengjian, see “divide and establish” First Emperor, see “Shi Huangdi” “Five Tigers” Zhang 4 Fu (Luofeng) 62, 74 Gao Jichang (Jingnan) 38 (n.35), 49 Ge Hong 4 genealogy (zupu) 19, 54, 67, 69, 71–75 Goujian 5 Guangzhou 4, 15, 19, 26, 43, 44, 51, 53, 54, 59 Gu Hongzhong 65 guo (kingdom) viii-x, 27–30, 33, 34, 36, 40–42, 43, 79, 91, 93; see also “’outer’ guo,” “zhong guo” Guo Rong (Later Zhou) 36–37, 43, 81–82, 83 guowang, see “wang” Gushi, men of, see “Men of Gushi” Han (dai), see “Qin/Han” Han guo ix, 35, 43, 51, 53, 56 (n.46), 83 Han Wo 63, 100 Han Xizai 65, 81, 83 Han Yu 7, 21, 60, 64, 65, 86, 104 Hartwell, Robert 14, 23 (n.23), 44, 46, 57–58 Heng, Derek 52 Highest Clarity Daoism 4

120 Index holistic empire 1–2, 6, 7–8, 10–22, 25, 26, 35, 36–37, 40, 43, 58, 61, 63, 78–84, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 97, 104–107 Huang Chao (Rebellion) viii, 21–22, 26–27, 30, 37, 40, 44, 58, 62, 63, 78, 81 Immigrant/immigration 2–3, 10–11, 14–15, 44–48, 57–58, 60–62, 85 Intan wreck 53–55 Jingnan 22, 38 (n.35), 43, 49, 78–79 junwang, see “wang” Kurz, Johnannes 80, 83 land reclamation and drainage 48–49, 68, 83 (Later) Tang 35, 80, 82 Li Bian, see “Xu Zhigao” Li Cunxu 34–35, 52, 79 Li Gou 93–94, 95 Li Jing (Tang guo) 36, 81, 83 Li Yu 65–66, 90 Li Yuan 15–17 Liu Bang (Han Gaozu) 29 Liu Congxiao 54, 82 Liu Yin (Guangnan) Han 32 Liu Zongyuan 6–7, 15, 65, 86, 104, 105 Lu Song 4–5 Man (ethnonym) 3, 6, 9, 16–18, 93, 104 maritime trade: with South Seas 11, 19, 43, 51–52, 55, 83; see also “Belitung wreck” and “Intan wreck” markets 6, 11–12, 19–20, 44–45, 50–51, 83, 101, 102 “Men of Gushi” 62, 74 Meng Zhixiang 35, 80, 82 Min guo ix, 22, 32, 37, 42, 43, 44–45, 46, 48–49, 51, 58, 59, 60, 62–64, 67, 79, 81, 82–83, 97, 100, 101–102 Min River 10, 59, 75 MinYue 7, 21, 60 “mountain bandits” 4 Nine-Rank system 66, 72–73 North China Plain, see “Central Plain” Ouyang Xiu 14, 34, 40–41, 42, 59–60, 65, 73, 88, 89, 91–92, 94, 95, 96, 100, 102, 103 Ouyang Zhan 7, 21, 60, 64 “outer” guo 29–30, 33–34, 79

population (gross data) 10, 14–15, 19–21, 44–48, 58–59, 83, 101 porcelain 19, 37, 53, 54, 55, 101–102 Qian Chu 37, 64, see also “WuYue wang” Qian Liu 26, 31, 32, 33, 35, 51, 61, 79, 86 Qin/Han (guo and dai) 2–3, 5, 10, 12, 13, 15, 28–29, 35, 60, 66, 72, 107 QuanZhang (satrapy] viii, 43, 49, 50, 78, 82, 88 Ran Zhaoze 17 Registration (household) 14–15, 46, 57–58, 101 rice 2, 12, 14, 20–21, 23 (n.13), 49–50, 84, 102 ritual space 66–74, 103 Robinet, Isabelle 4 Rome/Roman Empire 9, 82, 105 shaman (wu) 3, 7, 96, 104 Shangqing dao, see “Highest Clarity” Shi Huangdi (or “First Emperor”) 1–2, 10, 28–29 Shizong (Zhou dai), see “Guo Rong” Shu (Former & Latter) guo ix, 22, 32, 34, 35, 37, 42, 43, 44, 49, 51, 78, 79–80, 81, 82, 86, 90, 100, 101, 102 Shu (Three Kingdoms) 10 Sichuan, see “Former/Latter Shu” Sima Guang 14, 32, 34, 35, 36–37, 50, 79, 80, 81, 103 “Six Roots” Lu 4 Skinner, William 23 (n.23), 44, 57 social mobility 173–174; see also “examinations” (Song) Taizu, see Zhao Kuangyin Song Zhiwen 6 “sorcerer bandit” 4, 5 South China Sea, see “maritime trade” southeast coast (place and microregion) 17, 19, 21, 26, 44, 49–50, 57, 58, 60 southern selection (nanxuan) 7, 18, 22, 59–60, 63, 86, 103, 105, 106; see also “examinations” (Southern) Tang, see Wu/Tang guo Standen, Naomi viii, 43 Strickmann, Michel 4 Sun En 5–6, 17 Taiping huanyuji, see “Yue Shi” Tang Gaozu, see “Li Yuan”

Index Tan guo, see “Wu/Tang guo” Taihang Mountains viii, 1, 12, 13, 20 Tea 20, 50, 101–102 Tianshi dao, see “Celestial Masters” Tian Xi 90–92 trade ix, 11–12, 19, 44, 48, 50–55, 83, 90, 101–102 see also “maritime trade” and “markets” tribute 16, 30, 34–35, 36, 41 Wang Chao (Min) 26, 35, 86 Wang Gungwu viii, 7–8 Wang Jian (Former Shu) 27, 32, 33, 34, 36, 79, 86, 100 Wang Pu 37, 81, 83 Wang Shenzhi (Min) 32, 49, 51, 100 Way of the Five Pecks of Rice 3 Wei (Three Kingdoms) 10 Wei River (or “basin”) 13, 20, 22, 25, 82 Wright, Arthur 2, 15–16 Wu/Tang (Jiangnan) guo 9, 22, 31, 33, 34–35, 37, 42, 43, 44, 48, 50, 62, 63, 78, 79, 80–83, 84 (n.10), 89–90, 100, 101, 102 Wu (Three Kingdoms) 10 Wudoumi dao, see “Way of the Five Pecks of Rice” wufu (“five generations of mourning”) 73 WuYue guo viii, ix, 22, 33, 35, 36, 37, 42, 43, 46–47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 78, 81, 82–83, 86, 101

121

Xia Song 88, 92–93, 94, 95 Xu Wen 34–35, 80 Xu Xuan 81, 89–91, 107 Xu Zhigao (Li Bian) 34–35, 80–81, 84 (n.10), 100 Xue Juzheng 40, 41, 51 Yang Guang 13–14, 15, 23 (n.22) Yang Jian 2, 10, 12–13, 15–16, 18 Yang Longyan 34 Yang Shilin 16–18 Yang Xi 4 Yang Xingmi 22, 26–27, 30, 32, 33, 35, 63 Yang Wo 33, 34, 86 Yu Jing 75, 88, 94–95 Yue (ethnonym or guo) 3, 5, 6–7, 10, 17, 23 (n.32), 32, 104; … celadons 54–55 Yue Shi 17, 46, 51 Zhang Chang 4–5 Zhang (Dao)ling 3 Zhang Ji 6 Zhang Jiuling 18–19, 21 Zhao Kuangyi (Song Taizong) 83–84 Zhao Kuangyin (Song Taizu) viii, 26, 37, 43, 81–82, 83–84, 87, 90 Zhaozong (Tang) 33, 78 Zheng (Nanhu) 67–70 Zheng Qiao 67, 72 zhong guo 34, 41 Zhu Can 16 Zhu Wen 22, 26, 31–33, 35, 36, 40, 44 Zupu, see “genealogy”