Song China Shared Power with Strong Northern States

Prologue: Chenqiao, 960

The news arrived on New Year’s Day. Khitan horsemen from the north, it was said, were riding south together with the army of Northern Han, a small kingdom in the mountains of Shanxi. The court at Kaifeng had good reason to be frightened. Its emperor was a little boy, perhaps six or seven years old, who had come to the throne only months before when his father, a strong and ambitious ruler, died suddenly of illness. Someone had to march north and meet the enemy.

The court sent its most trusted soldier, Zhao Kuangyin, commander of the palace army. He was in his early thirties, a soldier who had risen by fighting, and the troops liked him. Within days his army left the capital and stopped for the night at Chenqiao, a post station a short march northeast of Kaifeng.

That night officers moved from tent to tent. The emperor is a child, the official history has them say; if they risk their lives against the enemy, who will ever know what they did? Before dawn a crowd of armed men gathered outside Zhao Kuangyin’s tent. According to the official account, Zhao had drunk heavily the night before and was still asleep. His officers woke him, threw a yellow robe—the emperor’s color—over his shoulders, and bowed to him as the Son of Heaven.

The same account insists that Zhao refused at first and gave in only when it was clear the soldiers would not take no for an answer. Then, it says, he made them swear not to harm the boy emperor or his mother and not to loot the capital. The army turned around. That same day it was back inside Kaifeng, the young emperor had “yielded” the throne, and the north had its sixth ruling house in fifty-three years. Zhao Kuangyin named it Song, after the region where he had held his military governorship. History remembers him as Emperor Taizu, the “Grand Progenitor.”

Was the drama real? Historians are doubtful. Song’s own court historians wrote the story, and a founder dragged onto the throne looks far better than one who grabbed it. The report from the north may have been exaggerated to get the army out of the city.¹ But either way, the basic fact is clear. Song began exactly the way the five dynasties before it had begun: soldiers chose a new emperor.

That is what makes the rest of the story surprising. The five dynasties before it lasted, together, barely half a century. Song lasted 319 years, in a world where it was never the only power. To its north stood states with their own emperors, armies, scripts, and capitals—states Song repeatedly tried and failed to defeat. How did it survive so long without controlling all the land it claimed?

The answer comes in two parts. At home, Song made sure no general could do to it what Zhao Kuangyin had done to the Later Zhou. Abroad, it learned to live among equals.

Act I: The Age of Generals

Five Dynasties in Fifty-Three Years

The Tang dynasty ended in 907, when the warlord Zhu Wen, once a lieutenant of the rebel Huang Chao, forced the last Tang emperor to abdicate. His Later Liang lasted sixteen years. Then came the Later Tang (923–936), the Later Jin (936–947), the Later Han (947–951), and the Later Zhou (951–960). Historians call this the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms: five regimes followed one another in the north, while about ten regional kingdoms, most of them in the south, ruled at the same time.

The names are less important than the pattern. Each northern dynasty was founded by a general with an army behind him. A ruler’s greatest danger was usually not a foreign invader but his own commanders, because the throne belonged to whoever held the troops. Rule by such commanders—warlords, men whose armies gave them political power with little central control—had begun in the late Tang, when military governors turned their provinces into nearly independent states. After 907, nobody was strong enough to stop it.

The south was a different world. Kingdoms such as Wuyue around Hangzhou, Southern Tang at Nanjing, and Later Shu in Sichuan were often richer and more peaceful than the north, and their courts patronized painters and poets. The last Southern Tang ruler, Li Yu, is still remembered as one of China’s great lyric poets. Division did not stop Chinese civilization. It meant that no single court controlled it.

A Kingdom Hands Away Its Walls

One event of these years shaped the next two centuries. In 936 a general named Shi Jingtang wanted to overthrow the Later Tang. He asked for help from the Khitans, a powerful people from the grasslands of what is now eastern Inner Mongolia. Their leader, Yelü Deguang, sent cavalry, and Shi Jingtang became emperor of the Later Jin. The price was high. Shi called himself the Khitan ruler’s “son,” promised regular payments, and handed over a strip of north China that Chinese courts had long considered part of their own realm: the Sixteen Prefectures, in the northern parts of modern Hebei and Shanxi, including the city that is now Beijing.

Those prefectures mattered because of their terrain. They held the mountains, passes, and line of the Great Wall that had guarded the north China plain against northern horsemen since before the Han. When Shi Jingtang’s successor tried to break free in the 940s, Khitan armies invaded again and again. Early in 947 Deguang entered Kaifeng itself and proclaimed a dynasty with a Chinese-style name, the Great Liao. Resistance drove him back north, and he died on the way, but the lesson was plain. Whoever held the Sixteen Prefectures held the door to north China.

The Yellow Robe

The last of the Five Dynasties, the Later Zhou, came closest to ending the age of generals. Its second emperor, Chai Rong (r. 954–959), reorganized the palace army, took the lands between the Huai and the Yangzi from Southern Tang, and in 959 marched against Liao, winning back two of the Sixteen Prefectures. Then he fell ill and died at thirty-eight, leaving a small child on the throne. Six months later came the night at Chenqiao. Zhao Kuangyin, who had commanded Chai Rong’s palace army, now faced a problem no northern ruler had solved in fifty years: how to keep his own generals from doing what he had done.

A Cup of Wine

The most famous answer is a story, set in 961, a year after the yellow robe. Taizu invited the senior commanders who had helped him take the throne, among them his old comrade Shi Shouxin, to a banquet at the palace. When the wine had gone around, the emperor sent the servants out and grew gloomy.

Primary source, retold

In the version told by the eleventh-century historian Sima Guang, Taizu says he has not slept peacefully since becoming emperor. The generals ask why. Who, he replies, would not want to sit where he sits? They protest that no one would dare. He answers that he trusts them, but what if their own officers, hungry for rewards, one night throw a yellow robe over one of them? Then they would have no choice. The generals kneel in tears and ask what to do. He advises them to give up their commands, take good land and houses, enjoy music and wine with their families, and live out their lives without suspicion between ruler and minister. The next day they all report sick and resign.

— Paraphrased from Sima Guang, Sushui jiwen (late eleventh century), and Li Tao, Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian (twelfth century)

Later writers summed up the scene in a famous phrase, bei jiu shi bing quan: “a cup of wine to release military power.” Historians treat it as partly legendary. The full scene first appears in accounts written long after the event, and it is a little too neat. But the outcome is real. Within a few years Taizu had retired or reassigned the senior generals of his generation, rewarding them with titles, estates, and marriage ties to the imperial family. Not one of them rebelled.

Control the Commanders, Protect the Dynasty

The banquet was the dramatic part. The lasting part was a set of rules. Taizu and his successors rotated commanders so that no general stayed long with the same troops, and divided authority over the army among separate offices. They gathered the best troops in the capital, and they gradually replaced military governors with civil officials sent from the court. In the words of the course textbook, Taizu “subordinat[ed] the armed forces to the civil bureaucracy.”

Those officials increasingly came through the examinations. Taizu made the emperor himself the final examiner in a palace examination, so that successful candidates owed their careers to the throne, and his brother Taizong passed candidates in numbers no earlier court had approached. Government passed to educated men rather than soldiers.

Do not stretch this point too far. Song did not abolish its army; its armies grew enormous. What changed was who held authority over the commanders. That ended warlordism inside Song, but it cannot by itself explain every later Song defeat.

Reunifying the South

With the army under control, Taizu turned south. One by one the southern kingdoms fell or surrendered: Jingnan and Hunan in 963, Later Shu in Sichuan in 965, Southern Han at Guangzhou in 971, and Southern Tang in 975, when the poet-king Li Yu was brought north as a captive. After Taizu’s death in 976 his brother Taizong finished the work. Wuyue surrendered peacefully in 978, and in 979 Taizong conquered Northern Han, the last independent state. For the first time since the Tang, the Yangzi valley and the Yellow River plain answered to a single court—except for the one region that mattered most for defense.

Act II: Rivals Song Could Not Defeat

Who Were the Khitans?

The Liao state did not begin as a copy of a Chinese dynasty. In the early tenth century a Khitan chief named Abaoji, of the Yelü clan, united the Khitan tribes. Khitan custom had chiefs chosen by tribal councils for limited terms. Abaoji refused to step down, crushed rivals—including his own brothers—and in 916 proclaimed himself emperor, arranging for his son to succeed him. Hereditary succession on the Chinese model made him a ruler rather than a chief who could be replaced. He also had a Khitan script created. By 960 Liao stretched from the Sixteen Prefectures across Manchuria and much of Mongolia, with a small population but formidable cavalry.

Two Governments for Two Peoples

Liao solved the problem of ruling very different peoples by refusing to choose one system. In the huge, thinly settled north, where most Khitans lived by herding, government was mobile: the emperor and his officials moved with the seasons among hunting and camping grounds, and Khitan tribal and military organization stayed in place. In the south, where most of the farmers and towns were Chinese, Liao governed in Chinese ways, with a civil bureaucracy modeled on the Tang, Chinese officials, examinations, and agricultural taxes. The south produced most of the state’s revenue. Its Southern Capital stood at what is now Beijing—the beginning of that city’s long history as a capital.

The textbook’s summary is precise: “This dual form of administration allowed the Khitans to maintain their tribal organization and resist sinification.” Sinification means adopting Chinese practices and institutions. Liao shows that borrowing could be selective: it used Chinese methods without becoming a Chinese dynasty.

Taizong Rides for Beijing

Fresh from conquering Northern Han in 979, Taizong turned his tired army toward the Sixteen Prefectures. Song’s claim mixed strategy with conviction: the passes were needed for defense, and the land, Song believed, belonged inside the realm. The army reached the walls of the Liao Southern Capital and besieged it. Then a Liao relief army arrived. At the Gaoliang River, just outside the city, the Song army was routed. Taizong himself was wounded and barely escaped; traditional accounts say he fled south in a donkey cart.

In 986 Song tried again with three armies, and again Liao defeated them. The general Yang Ye was captured and died in Liao hands; his family later became the heroes of the popular “Generals of the Yang Family” stories. Song had more people and more soldiers, but a large population did not guarantee victory over Liao’s mounted forces.

The Emperor on the Wall at Chanyuan

In 1004 Liao struck back. The Liao emperor Shengzong and his formidable mother, the empress dowager Chengtian, led a great army south, bypassing fortified towns and driving toward the Yellow River. By the end of the year it was camped near Chanyuan, a city on the river within about a hundred miles of Kaifeng. Some officials urged the third Song emperor, Zhenzong, to flee south, but the chief councilor Kou Zhun insisted that he go to the front, and the troops cheered his arrival. A leading Liao general had just been killed by a bolt from a Song crossbow. Far from home and facing a defended river, Liao was ready to talk, and so was Song.

Early in 1005 the two courts made peace, in what historians call the Treaty of Chanyuan. Song agreed to send Liao 100,000 ounces of silver and 200,000 bolts of silk every year. (A bolt is a standard length of cloth.) The two emperors addressed each other as equals, as elder and younger brothers, and the border stayed where it was. Song gave up any real hope of recovering the Sixteen Prefectures and received what it could not win in battle: peace. With adjustments—the payments were raised in 1042 to a total of 500,000 units a year—the peace lasted more than a century.

A Bargain or a Disgrace?

Song officials argued about Chanyuan for generations. The case for peace rested on numbers. Under the first three Song emperors the army grew rapidly, to almost a million soldiers by 1022, and by then the military was consuming about three-quarters of the state’s tax revenue. By contrast, peace with Liao, even counting the cost of exchanging embassies, took no more than two or three percent of annual revenue. Much of the silver even came back as Liao bought Chinese goods.

The case against peace rested on honor and land. Those who wanted to recover the lost territory, sometimes called irredentists, saw the payments as humiliation. They thought it common sense that silver sent north strengthened Liao and weakened Song, and the Sixteen Prefectures were still in foreign hands. Both sides saw something real. Peace was cheap, but it meant accepting a world in which Song was not the only emperor.

The Tanguts Build a State

Liao was not Song’s only organized neighbor. In the northwest lived the Tanguts, whose language was related to Tibetan. Pushed north and east by the Tibetan empire in Tang times, they settled in what are now northern Shaanxi, Ningxia, and Gansu. In 881 the Tang court, desperate for help against Huang Chao, made a Tangut chief military governor of the region, and the post became hereditary. The Tanguts came to control the horse trade with China.

Under Yuanhao (r. 1032–1048) the Tangut state stepped forward as a full dynasty. Yuanhao had a script created for the Tangut language and in 1038 proclaimed himself emperor of the Great Xia. When he demanded that Song recognize Xia as a sovereign state, Song sent armies, and the fighting from 1040 to 1042 went badly for Song. In 1044 the two sides made peace. Yuanhao agreed to call himself “ruler of Xia” rather than emperor in his letters to Song, and Song agreed to send a yearly package of silver, silk, and tea, about half the size of what it now paid Liao.

Xia’s institutions drew on Tang, Song, Liao, Tibetan, and Uighur models, and Buddhism was its state religion. It sometimes fought Liao and sometimes recognized Liao as the senior partner. With Song the pattern was now familiar: war failed, and Song paid for peace.

Act III: The Jurchen Gamble

A Chieftain Who Would Not Dance

In the forests and river valleys of Manchuria, northeast of the Liao heartland, lived the Jurchens. They were not Khitans or Mongols, and they were not simply nomads. They lived in villages and small walled towns and combined fishing, hunting, animal husbandry, and some farming. Their lands were excellent for horses; by the mid-eleventh century they were selling the Khitans about ten thousand a year. Jurchens living near Chinese, Khitan, or Korean cities borrowed their neighbors’ practices, which led to a distinction between “civilized” and “wild” Jurchens.

Liao treated the Jurchens as subjects, demanding furs, pearls, falcons, and horses. In 1112 the Liao emperor held a feast during his spring fishing camp on the Songhua River, and the visiting Jurchen chieftains were ordered to dance for him in turn. According to the official History of Liao, one guest stood still and refused. His name was Aguda, a man in his forties from the leading Wanyan clan. The emperor wanted him killed; a leading minister talked him out of it.

It was a mistake. Two years later Aguda led the Jurchens in open revolt and defeated the Liao armies sent against him. In 1115 he proclaimed his own dynasty, the Jin, meaning “Gold.” The order matters: the Jin dynasty existed by 1115, twelve years before it conquered northern China. Conquest did not create Jin. Jin was already a state when it turned on Song.

The Alliance Across the Sea

News of the Jurchen rising reached Kaifeng through rumors and Chinese defectors from Liao. The emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126) and his leading general, the palace eunuch Tong Guan, saw a chance Song had waited a century for: join the Jurchens against Liao and win back the Sixteen Prefectures. Because Liao lay between them, envoys sailed across the Bohai Sea. After several missions, the two sides agreed around 1120 to attack Liao together and divide its territory, with Song promised its lost frontier.

From Kaifeng the plan looked reasonable: use a rival’s rising enemy to recover what you could not win alone. Song’s rulers were not knowingly inviting their own destruction. But alliances reveal things. Jin armies swept through Liao’s capitals with startling speed. Song armies, sent to take the Liao Southern Capital at Beijing in 1122, were defeated twice by what was left of the Liao forces. Jin took the city itself, stripped it, and handed the shell to Song for large payments. In defeating Liao, the Jurchens had discovered that Song was not much of a military threat.

The Fall of Kaifeng

The last Liao emperor was captured in 1125. That same winter, using Song’s acceptance of a defector as a pretext, Jin armies invaded Song. Huizong panicked and abdicated in January 1126 in favor of his son, Qinzong. Jin forces besieged Kaifeng, then withdrew after the court promised an enormous indemnity in gold, silver, and silk and the surrender of three northern prefectures. When Song failed to deliver, they came back. In January 1127 Kaifeng fell.

This time the Jurchens did not leave quietly. They collected the ransom, emptying the palace treasuries and the city’s households. Then, in the spring of 1127, they marched north with thousands of captives: Huizong, Qinzong, empresses and consorts, much of the imperial clan, officials, craftsmen, and female entertainers. Huizong, a gifted painter, calligrapher, and collector, died a captive in Manchuria in 1135. His artistic interests did not by themselves cause the disaster; the decisive sequence was Jin’s rise, the alliance, the exposure of Song’s weakness, and Jin’s attack.

The fall of the northern capital ended the period historians call Northern Song. It did not end the Song dynasty.

Act IV: Two Courts, One Divided China

A Prince Who Was Away from Home

One of Huizong’s sons, Zhao Gou, was away from Kaifeng on a mission when the city fell. After his father and brothers were taken north, Song officials and commanders rallied around him, and in the summer of 1127 he was enthroned as Emperor Gaozong (r. 1127–1162).

Gaozong retreated south. The Yangzi was no automatic guarantee of safety: in 1129–1130 a Jin army crossed it, captured Hangzhou, and chased the emperor to the coast, where he escaped by putting out to sea. The Jin forces eventually turned back north, and in the following years Song generals, most famously Yue Fei, won real victories.

Gaozong and his chief councilor Qin Gui chose peace instead. In 1141 Song and Jin made a treaty that fixed the border along the Huai River, between the Yellow River and the Yangzi. Song agreed to pay 250,000 ounces of silver and 250,000 bolts of silk a year, and this time the Song emperor accepted the status of a Jin vassal. Yue Fei, the leading voice for continuing the war, was arrested and died in prison in January 1142. Later generations made him a hero and Qin Gui a villain, but the court’s logic was the old logic of Chanyuan: peace at a price was safer than a war Song might not win.

Song made Hangzhou its capital, officially only a “temporary residence,” as if the court still planned to go home to Kaifeng. It never did. This is the beginning of Southern Song. It had lost the north China plain but kept the most productive farmland and most of the population. As Lecture 2 explains, China’s economic center had already shifted south before 1127, which is why Southern Song could flourish.

Conquering the North Was Not Governing It

The Jurchens now ruled a far larger Chinese population than the Khitans ever had, and winning battles did not tell them how to govern it. At first Jin continued Liao’s dual administration and employed former Liao officials, both Chinese and Khitan. Jin also moved Jurchen households into north China to hold the land, so Jurchens increasingly lived among Chinese neighbors.

Over time Jin adopted more Chinese political institutions and employed more Chinese officials. It moved its capital from central Manchuria to Beijing in 1153 and to Kaifeng in 1161, the year of a failed invasion of Southern Song. Jin rulers found that some Chinese institutions served their own goals. Early Jin succession had often passed from brother to brother, with powerful nobles having a say. Chinese-style hereditary succession from father to son, backed by a bureaucracy that answered to the throne, gave Jin emperors a weapon against their own nobles. Borrowing Chinese institutions did not hand power to the Chinese officials who ran them.

Borrowing Without Surrender

Inside Jin, borrowing was contested. Many Jurchens adopted Chinese language, dress, and rituals, and some Jurchen leaders worried that their people were losing themselves. Emperor Shizong (r. 1161–1189) worked to raise the prestige of the Jurchen language. He ordered Jurchens to attend Jurchen-language schools, had Chinese classics translated into Jurchen, and created civil service examinations in Jurchen.

Jin emperors also used a Chinese-style bureaucracy without accepting every Confucian rule about how officials should be treated. The textbook notes that they “had high officials flogged in open court, a brutal violation of the Confucian dictum that officials are to be treated according to ritual and not subjected to corporal punishments.” Later Jin rulers also read the Chinese classics as universal texts, not exclusively Chinese ones. In 1191 an emperor even forbade calling the Jurchens “border people,” seeing no reason their country should not be regarded as the Central Kingdom—the ordinary Chinese name for China itself. Jin did not accept the Song view that only Song represented civilization.

Epilogue: China Among Equals

For the rest of its history Song lived in this divided world. The border with Jin moved little despite more wars, and the two courts exchanged embassies, traded at border markets, and argued over titles. The balance ended only when a far stronger power rose on the steppe. The Mongols destroyed Xia in 1227 and Jin in 1234, then turned south. Hangzhou surrendered in 1276, and the last Song loyalists were defeated at sea off the southern coast in 1279. The dynasty that began with a yellow robe at Chenqiao had lasted 319 years, longer than any Chinese dynasty since the Han.

The Mongol conquest belongs to a later chapter. A dynasty that never controlled all the land it claimed, paid its rivals for peace, and lost its northern capital still governed one of the largest populations in the world and built the most commercial economy China had yet known.

Closing Synthesis

The story can be held together with six anchor dates. In 960, soldiers at Chenqiao made Zhao Kuangyin emperor, and Song began. In 979, Taizong conquered Northern Han, finishing reunification—and then lost to Liao outside Beijing. In 1005, the Treaty of Chanyuan traded silver and silk for peace with Liao. In 1044, Song made a similar peace with Xia. In 1115, Aguda proclaimed the Jin dynasty. In 1127, Kaifeng fell, Huizong was taken north, and Gaozong began Southern Song.

The dates mark a story of two different problems and two different solutions. The first problem was inside Song: generals who could make and unmake emperors. Song solved it with institutions, moving authority over the army to the throne and to civil officials recruited by examination. The second problem was outside Song: organized states that Song could neither command nor defeat. No domestic reform could solve that. Song answered with negotiation, payment, and defense, and when it gambled on war through the Jurchen alliance, the result was catastrophe.

Historians often describe this world with the title of a collection edited by Morris Rossabi: China among Equals. “Among equals” does not mean every state had the same size, wealth, or strength. Song was far larger and richer than any of its neighbors. It means that no single court could impose its order on all the others. The old ideal of one Son of Heaven ruling the civilized world became harder to sustain when more than one ruler claimed the title.

That returns us to the framing question. How could a powerful Chinese dynasty survive without controlling all the territory it claimed? Song survived by taming its own generals, by bargaining with neighbors it could not defeat, and by adapting—even to the loss of its northern capital—to a changing balance of power in a region claimed by more than one emperor.

Notes

Nearly everything we know about the night at Chenqiao comes from sources written under the Song, by historians who served the dynasty Zhao Kuangyin founded. The official version stresses his surprise and reluctance, the officers’ initiative, and his orders to protect the boy emperor and spare the capital from looting. Modern historians read these details as part of a carefully shaped founding story. Several features make them cautious: the conveniently timed report of an invasion from the north, which seems to have faded once the army turned back; the speed with which the coup was completed; and the presence in the camp of Zhao Kuangyi, the future Emperor Taizong, and Zhao Pu, Taizu’s closest adviser, as organizers. The yellow robe itself was a symbol with a recent history. Guo Wei, who founded the Later Zhou in 951, had also been acclaimed by his troops, who wrapped him in a yellow banner or robe. The Song version, in other words, may have been modeled on a familiar script.

The same caution applies to the banquet of 961. The scene appears in full only in later works such as Sima Guang’s Sushui jiwen and Li Tao’s massive twelfth-century chronicle of the Northern Song, the Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian. Earlier versions of the story, from the early eleventh century, are shorter and differ in their details; the scene grew more elaborate with each retelling. Historians generally accept the outcome—Taizu’s senior generals left their commands peacefully and were richly rewarded—while treating the dialogue as a later, polished retelling. What is not in doubt is the result: no Song general ever again took the throne for himself. ↩