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Middle Period China

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The Middle period (c. 100–1500 CE) occupies a special position in the history of China. Coming neither at the formative beginning of the imperial period nor at the end, when the imperial structures collapsed from stresses within and without the country, the Middle period was framed by the reunification of the empire in the 580s and the final chapter of the Mongol conquest in the 1270s and can lay claim both to one of the most expansive and brilliant of Chinese dynasties—the Tang—and the period of perhaps the greatest intellectual and socioeconomic dynamism and creativity—the Song. The modern study of the history of this period had its origins with Japanese scholars in the early 20th century—most notably Naito Kōnan (b. 1866–d. 1934)—who argued that the changes that occurred from the Tang to the Song dynasties were among the most fundamental in all of Chinese history and who pioneered in studies of the political, economic, and social structures of the period. Following World War II, many Euro-American and Taiwan scholars joined the Japanese in turning their attention to the period, attracted by the political successes and multicultural brilliance of the Tang and by the profound social, economic, and intellectual changes of the Song. To this mix has been added a host of historians in China, who, once they were liberated from a Marxist insistence on focusing on peasant uprisings, class struggles, and the like, proceeded with wide-ranging research and large-scale bibliographical and digitizing projects that have significantly increased the number and kinds of sources available to historians. The result of these activities has been to establish China’s Middle period as critically important in Chinese history, one that shaped many elements of the Late Imperial period intellectually, institutionally, and socially, and as a period of increasing interest to world historians.
  4.  
  5. Historical Overviews
  6.  
  7. Because of its great length and the fact that it encompasses three dynasties and one period of division, there are few treatments of the Middle period as a whole, apart from general histories of China. With a few exceptions that are noted here, broad historical overviews have generally focused on individual dynasties. A number of historians have followed the lead of the great Song historian Sima Guang (Sima and Hu 1976) in offering a broad narrative sweep ending at the beginning of the Song. By contrast, Mote 2003 begins its study with the fall of the Tang (900) and continues it well into the Qing (1800). By contrast, Holcombe 2001 presents the Tang as the culmination for the spread of an East Asian civilizational consciousness from China to Japan, while Wang 2003 likewise centers its treatment on the Tang and those dynasties that directly preceded and followed it.
  8.  
  9. Holcombe, Charles. The Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.–907 A.D. Asian Interactions and Comparisons. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
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  11. A pathbreaking study that places the history of imperial China, through the Tang, within the framework of the spread of a Sinocentric East Asian civilization.
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  13. Mote, Frederick W. Imperial China: 900–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
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  15. Mote’s massive study provides an accessible political history that is not bound by dynastic divisions. Although it covers only the latter portion of Middle-period history, that section takes four hundred pages. Its focus is on political history and it is especially informative in its treatment of the peoples and states along the borderlands.
  16. Find this resource:
  17. Sima Guang, and Hu Sanxing. 司馬光. Zizhi tongjian (資治通鑑). 20 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976.
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  19. This magisterial chronicle of China’s history from 403 BCE to 959 CE remains perhaps the greatest history of imperial China down to the Song and continues to be used by historians dealing with the periods it covers. The “comprehensive mirror” (tongjian) of the title reflects the author’s conviction that the past served as a mirror for understanding the present.
  20. Find this resource:
  21. Wang Zhongluo 王仲犖. Sui Tang Wudai shi (随唐五代史). 2 vols. Zhongguo duan dai shi xi lie. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2003.
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  23. A comprehensive treatment of the history of the Sui, through Five Dynasties, by one of the major contemporary historians of this period.
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  25. Sui and Tang
  26.  
  27. Chinese scholarship has been particularly rich in histories of these two brilliant dynasties, which are usually treated together. Western scholarship on this period, which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, lagged for some time thereafter but has recently become very active. Both Cen 1957 and Twitchett 1979 provide detailed chronological accounts of both dynasties. The Sui alone has been well served by Wright 1978, while the Tang has benefited from the essay collection in Wright and Twitchett 1973, and more recently by the excellent one-volume introduction in Lewis 2009.
  28.  
  29. Cen Zhongmian 岑仲勉. Sui-Tang shi (隋唐史). 2d ed. Beijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 1957.
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  31. An authoritative treatment of the history of the Sui and the Tang, by one of the most eminent mid-20th-century Chinese historians of this period. Republished as recently as 2000 (Shijiazhuang Shi, China: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe).
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  33. Lewis, Mark Edward. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. History of Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009.
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  35. Lewis’s book is a welcome new treatment of Tang history, a scholarly and accessible introduction to a complex period, and reflects many of the scholarly findings of recent years.
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  37. Twitchett, Denis, ed. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 3, Sui and T’ang China, 589–906, Part 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
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  39. The first of two volumes on Tang history in the magisterial Cambridge History of China, this presents the only English-language comprehensive narrative history of the Sui and Tang and continues to be useful to all those interested in Tang history.
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  41. Wright, Arthur F. The Sui Dynasty: The Unification of China, A.D. 581–617. New York: Knopf, 1978.
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  43. The only history devoted to the Sui in a Western language, this work was published after the author’s death and provides both in-depth treatment of the reunification of China and a general survey of this short but important dynasty.
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  45. Wright, Arthur F., and Denis C. Twitchett, eds. Perspectives on the T’ang. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973.
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  47. A topical volume that defined the state of Western historical studies of the Tang in the 1970s, its eleven chapters cover a wide range of topics: political and institutional, intellectual and religious, and literary.
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  49. Five Dynasties and Song
  50.  
  51. Song history has been a field of great popularity since the early 1960s, with scholars from around the world attracted by its social, economic, intellectual, and cultural dynamism. By contrast, the history of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms has received much less attention, though several recent studies have begun to counter that neglect, specifically through Tao, et al. 1985; Lorge 2011; and the first two chapters of Twitchett and Smith 2009. The many treatments of the Song in Chinese are well represented in Chen 2003, while Western scholars have benefited greatly from the scholarly and accessible treatment in Kuhn 2009 and the massive and detailed Song chapters in Twitchett and Smith 2009.
  52.  
  53. Chen Zhen 陳振. Zhongguo lishi 8: Song Shi (中国历史8：宋史). Zhongguo duan dai shi xi lie. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2003.
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  55. An accessible and well-illustrated general history of the Song, organized chronologically but with topical chapters as well.
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  57. Kuhn, Dieter. The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China. History of Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009.
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  59. A new and excellent single-volume treatment by a leading German historian, it combines a narrative history with chapters on a wide range of topics.
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  61. Lorge, Peter Allan, ed. Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011.
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  63. The only book-length history in Western languages of this important period between the Tang and Song dynasties, the authors present the diverse states of north and south through art and culture as well as politics.
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  65. Tao Maobing 陶懋炳, Zhang Qifan 張其凡, and Zeng Yurong 曾育榮. Zhongguo lishi 7: Wudai shi lue (中國歷史：五代史略). Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1985.
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  67. One of the only histories of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, perhaps due to the complexity of the period, this work provides a brief history of the many southern kingdoms (and the new Liao state in the northeast), with a detailed and topical treatment of the five northern dynasties.
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  69. Twitchett, Denis, and Paul Jakov Smith, eds. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 5, The Sung Dynasty and Its Precursors, 907–1279, Part 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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  71. The first of two volumes on Song history, this massive (1,128 pp.) work provides the most comprehensive and detailed modern narrative history of the Song in any language and also includes two important chapters on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.
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  73. Liao, Jin, and other States
  74.  
  75. Although the “alien dynasties” that flourished in the north and west from the 10th through 13th centuries will be treated in a separate Oxford Bibliographies article, these general studies are provided in recognition of their importance for the Song and Five Dynasties. Twitchett and Franke 1994 provides a broad and comprehensive treatment of all these states (including the Mongol Yuan). For individual states, Wittfogel 1949 continues to serve as an important reference for the Liao; both Mackerras 1973 and Drompp 2005, for the 8th- and 9th-century Uighurs; Beckwith 1987, for the Tibetan empire of the same period; and both Dunnell 1996 and Li 1998, for the 11th-century Western Xia and its relations with the Song.
  76.  
  77. Beckwith, Christopher I. The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
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  79. A political and military history of medieval Tibet, a period when it was a power to be contended with by its east and middle Asian neighbors.
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  81. Drompp, Michael R. Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire: A Documentary History. Brill’s Inner Asian Library 13. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2005.
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  83. A well-documented study of the sudden collapse of the Uighur Empire in 840 and the crisis it precipitated in Tang policies toward central Asia, on the basis of the accounts in the two Tang dynastic histories and the rich collection of documents in the writings of Li Deyu, who had been charged by the Tang emperor with handling the crisis.
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  85. Dunnell, Ruth W. The Great State of White and High: Buddhism and State Formation in Eleventh-Century Xia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996.
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  87. The only Western-language history of the Tangut state of Xi Xia, this book shows how the Tanguts fashioned an imperial ideology from tantric Buddhism, and in so doing provided a model for the Mongols and Manchus.
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  89. Li Huarui 李華瑞. Song Xia guanxi shi (宋夏關係史). Shijiazhuang Shi, China: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1998.
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  91. A history of the diplomatic and military relations between the Song and the Western Xia (or Xixia), the powerful kingdom located in the Gansu corridor during the 11th and 12th centuries.
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  93. Mackerras, Colin. The Uighur Empire according to T’ang Dynastic Histories: A Study in Sino-Uighur Relations, 744–840. Asian Publications 2. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973.
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  95. A parallel translation of the sections on the Uighur Empire in the two Tang dynastic histories, with numerous details concerning the relationship between the Uighurs and the Tang. Originally published in 1968 (Canberra: Center of Oriental Studies, Australian National University).
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  97. Twitchett, Denis, and Herbert Franke, eds. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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  99. While more than half this volume is devoted to the Mongols and the Yuan dynasty, the first three hundred pages provide narrative histories of the Liao, Xi Xia, and Jin.
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  101. Wittfogel, Karl A., and Feng Chia-sheng. History of Chinese Society: Liao, 907–1125. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 36. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1949.
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  103. A comprehensive and systematic treatment of the Khitan Liao Empire in northeastern Asia.
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  105. Primary Sources
  106.  
  107. It was during China’s Middle period that printing was discovered and developed, and this had a profound influence on the legacy of extant primary sources from that period. Far more historical sources, generally, are available for this period compared with earlier periods, but even within the Middle period, sources from the Song greatly outnumber those for the Sui and Tang, because it was in the Song that printing became widespread.
  108.  
  109. Major Historical Sources for the Tang and Five Dynasties
  110.  
  111. Such are the scholarly achievements and historical importance of the official or standard dynastic histories that they constitute essential starting points for the study of all the Middle-period dynasties. Unique among the dynastic histories, the Tang and Five dynasties each had two histories: the new and old Tang histories originally completed in 945 and 1060, respectively, in Liu 1995 and Ouyang, et al. 1995; and the new and old histories of the Five Dynasties, from 973 and 1072, in Xue 1976 and Ouyang 1997, and a full translation of this last work by Richard Davis (Ouyang 2004). Du 1988 (an institutional encyclopedia) and Li, et al. 1995 and Wang 1994 (general encyclopedias) are also of great importance for research on this period.
  112.  
  113. Du You 杜佑. Tongdian (通典). 5 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988.
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  115. This is the first of ten encyclopedic histories of institutions. Written by Du You in the early 9th century, it covers the history of government institutions and governmental practices, with a particular emphasis on administration.
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  117. Li Fang 李昉. Taiping yulan (太平御覽). 4 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995.
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  119. Commissioned by the new Song court, Li Fang and his collaborators produced this encyclopedia in 984, covering a wide variety of topics and quoting from 1,690 sources from the Tang and Five Dynasties.
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  121. Liu Xu 劉昫, et al., eds. Jiu Tangshu (舊唐書). 16 vols. Ershi sishi (二十四史) 16. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995.
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  123. An essential source for the study of Tang history, more accurate and detailed than the later Xin Tangshu (Ouyang, et al. 1995). Originally published in 945.
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  125. Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修. Xin Wudai shi (新五代史). 3 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997.
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  127. Compiled by Ouyang Xiu in 1073, this work superseded the lengthier Xue 1976 and for centuries was considered to be the official history for the Five Dynasties. Originally published in 1072.
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  129. Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修. Historical Records of the Five Dynasties. Translated with an introduction by Richard L. Davis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
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  131. An accurate, annotated, and highly readable translation of the Xin Wudai shi.
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  133. Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修, and Song Qi 宋祁, eds. Xin Tang shu (新唐書). 20 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995.
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  135. A product of the new Confucian historical writing of the Northern Song, this suffers in comparison with the Jiu Tangshu (Liu 1995) but is noted for the quality of its monographs and tables. Originally published in 1060.
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  137. Wang Qinruo 王欽若. Cefu yuangui (冊府元龜). 12 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994.
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  139. Despite a literary title that could be translated “Outstanding models from the storehouse of literature,” this is one of the two general encyclopedias dealing with the Tang and Five Dynasties, with much material from sources now lost. It was completed in 1013.
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  141. Xue Juzheng 薛居正, et al., eds. Jiu Wudai shi (舊五代史). 6 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976.
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  143. This work was compiled in 973 and, like the Jiu Tang shu, is lengthier and more valuable historically than Ouyang Xiu’s later work. By the mid-15th century it was apparently lost, though Qing scholars were able to reconstitute most of it from the Ming Yongle Encyclopedia.
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  145. Major Historical Sources for the Song
  146.  
  147. The Song dynastic history in Tuotuo, et al. 1990 is a key source for Song history despite its somewhat uneven character, but the preeminent works for that period are those of the Southern Song historians Li Tao (Li 1979–1995) and Li Xinchuan (Li 1956–1988), who provided superb annalistic histories for the Northern and early Southern Song that have no parallels for the Sui and Tang. As with the Tang, Ma 1986, which is an institutional encyclopedia, and Wang 1987, a general encyclopedia, are also essential historical sources.
  148.  
  149. Li Tao 李燾. Xu zizhi tongjian changbian (續資治通鑑長編). 34 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979–1995.
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  151. By far the most detailed and reliable annalistic account of the Northern Song, covering the years 960–1100. Originally published in 1183.
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  153. Li Xinchuan 李心傳. Jianyan yilai xinian yaolu (建炎以來繫年要錄). 4 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1956–1988.
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  155. The primary Song historical account of important events in the early Southern Song, covering the years 1127–1163. Originally published in 1253–1258.
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  157. Ma Duanlin 馬端臨. Wenxian tongkao (文獻通考). Beijing: Zhonghua, 1986.
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  159. An institutional encyclopedia covering a wide variety of institutional topics from earliest times to 1204; first published in 1224. Its material on the Song is most important, but its long chronological span provides useful overviews of the historical development of institutions.
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  161. Tuotuo 脫脫, Pei Rucheng, Yan Wenru, and Zhu Heping, eds. Song shi (宋史). 40 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990.
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  163. Compiled in the mid-14th century, this work—the longest of all the dynastic histories—is noteworthy for the high quality of its monographs and biographies, even though the basic annals are less reliable than the histories of Li Tao and Li Xinchuan. Originally published in 1345.
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  165. Wang Yinglin 王應麟. Yuhai (玉海). 6 vols. Si ku quan shu. Shanghai: Jiangsu guji, 1987.
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  167. A general encyclopedia first published in 1330–1340; despite its poor organization it contains much valuable information from now-lost sources.
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  169. Collections of the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties
  170.  
  171. The primary-source collections for Sui, Tang, and the Five Dynasties—and also Song (see Collections of the Song)—are of two types, both of which are represented here. Scholars in these periods were great collectors and collators of materials, often at the request of the throne, and the products of that collecting have been used for centuries. Then there are modern collections, especially those that have resulted from major collecting projects in China since the late 20th century. The “important documents” collections were utilized from Song times on for presenting, in a topical format, large numbers of government documents. The first two of these, Wang 1955 and Wang 1978, were compiled for the Tang and Five Dynasties, respectively, by Wang Pu in 961. Another earlier collection is the 8th-century legal compendium in Li 2005. In recent years, a project to present all extant documents in Tang history in chronological order has resulted in Dong 1996 and its sequel, Wu 1994–2007. The wealth of funerary inscriptions newly unearthed from Tang tombs is represented in Zhou and Zhao 1992 and Zhou and Zhao 2001.
  172.  
  173. Dong Gao 董誥, et al. Quan Tangwen (全唐文). 12 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996.
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  175. A large collection of Tang prose documents from all sorts of Tang works. Wu 1994–2007 contains a ten-volume supplement with additional writings.
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  177. Li Linfu 李林甫, ed. Tang liudian (唐六典). 2 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005.
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  179. The earliest extant collection of Chinese administrative law of the six divisions of the Tang bureaucracy, this was compiled by Li Linfu, an imperial clansman who served as chief councilor in the mid-8th century.
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  181. Wang Pu 王溥. Tang huiyao (唐會要). 3 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1955.
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  183. A collection of Tang governmental documents in one hundred chapters (juan), many of which are not to be found in other sources. It was compiled in 961 by Wang Pu, who combined two earlier huiyao (document collections) to form the body of this work.
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  185. Wang Pu 王溥. Wudai huiyao (五代會要). Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1978.
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  187. Like its companion work for the Tang, this collection of governmental documents from the Five Dynasties was also compiled in 961. However, Wang Fu had no preexisting document collection with which to work and so had to gather all the documents he could find to create this thirty-chapter work.
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  189. Wu Gang 吳鋼, ed. Quan Tangwen buyi (全唐文補遺). 10 vols. Xi’an, China: Sanqin chubanshe, 1994–2007.
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  191. A supplement to the Tang prose works in Quan Tangwen (Dong 1996).
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  193. Zhou Shaoliang 周紹良, and Zhao Chao 趙超, eds. Tangdai muzhi huibian (唐代墓誌彙編). 2 vols. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1992.
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  195. A collection Tang funerary inscriptions that were excavated through the 1980s. An important and thus-far-underutilized collection for the political and social study of Tang elites.
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  197. Zhou Shaoliang 周紹良, and Zhao Chao 趙超, eds. Tangdai muzhi huibian xuji (唐代墓誌彙編 續集). Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 2001.
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  199. A sequel to Zhou and Zhao 1992, with additional funerary inscriptions. This collection brought the total of newly discovered inscriptions to several thousand.
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  201. Collections of the Song
  202.  
  203. The sources included here are restricted to works comprising large collections either of discrete books or documents and include both compilations from the Song as well as those from recent years. The most important of these for institutional, economic, and social history is Xu 2006, originally published in 1936. Huang and Yang 1989 for memorials, Song da Zhaoling ji, for edicts, Song Yuan fangzhi congkan for gazetteers, and Zhu and Fu 2003– for “jottings” literature are also important in this regard. Special note should be made of Zeng and Liu 2006, a monumental undertaking to provide the entirety of Song prose documents in chronological order. See, too, the many individual Song titles referenced in Balazs and Hervouet 1978, cited under Reference Works and Research Aids.
  204.  
  205. Huang Huai 黄淮, and Yang Shi Qi, comps. Lidai mingchen zouyi (歷代名臣奏議). 5 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989.
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  207. A 14th-century compilation of more than eight thousand memorials of leading officials of each period, a majority of them from the Song.
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  209. Song da zhaoling ji (宋大詔令集). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962.
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  211. Compiled in the early Southern Song, this contains more than 3,800 edicts from the Northern Song, many of them unique.
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  213. Song Yuan fangzhi congkan (宋元方志叢刋). 8 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990.
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  215. A collection of the more than thirty extant local gazetteers from the Song and Yuan, the great majority of which are from southeastern China.
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  217. Xu Song 徐松, comp. Song huiyao jigao (宋會要輯稿). 8 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006.
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  219. Originally published in 1936 (Peking: Pei-p’ing t’u shu kuan). A voluminous collection of Song governmental documents recovered from the Ming Yongle dadian (Yongle encyclopedia) and compiled in the 19th century, this is the most important source for the study of Song political and economic institutions, foreign relations, and the Song economy. Its coverage by period is uneven, with little after 1220.
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  221. Zeng Zaozhuang 曾棗莊, and Liu Lin 劉琳. Quan Songwen (全宋文). 360 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2006.
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  223. A massive collection that attempts—with substantial success—to contain all prose writings from Song sources. Its 360 volumes are arranged chronologically. An electronic index to this work can be found online.
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  225. Zhu Yian 朱易安, and Fu Xuancong 傅璇琮, et al, eds. Quan Song biji (全宋笔记). Zhengzhou, China: Daxiang chubanshe, 2003–.
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  227. An ongoing publication series aimed at collecting and publishing all the Song biji (“jottings”), works that are invaluable for social and cultural historians. Thus far, five collections (bian) have been published, each with ten volumes, most of which contain multiple titles.
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  229. Reference Works and Research Aids
  230.  
  231. It is a measure of the scholarly activity in Middle-period history that references and research aids have proliferated in recent years, especially those that have sought to provide systematic access to information about the huge number of individuals for whom we have historical information. Those coming to this field for the first time would be well advised to begin with De Weerdt’s Song Research Tools. Wilkinson 1998 and Tonami, et al. 2006 provide excellent introductions to Chinese historical works in English and Japanese, respectively. Balazs and Hervouet 1978 provides an essential guide to Song sources, while two dictionaries, Gong 1997 and Wright 1992, are important reference works for Song government institutions and administrative geography, respectively.
  232.  
  233. Balazs, Etienne, and Yves Hervouet. A Sung Bibliography (Bibliographie des Sung). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978.
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  235. An essential introduction to Song historical sources. Organized according to the traditional Chinese classification of classics, histories, philosophers, and collections, this bibliography covers more than one thousand Song-era sources, with often-substantial annotations, either in English or French, contributed by eighty scholars from around the world. There are also useful indices for Song names, book titles, and subjects.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. De Weerdt, Hilde, ed. Song Research Tools.
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  239. First published by Peter Bol in 1990, this is the fourth edition and includes bibliographies, indexes, dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, and chronologies. An essential tool for research in Song studies.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Gong Yanming 龚延明. Songdai guanzhi cidian (宋代官制辞典). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997.
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  243. A comprehensive and essential reference for the study of the Song government, with definitions and descriptions of government offices, bureaucratic positions, official posts, and the functioning of the personnel system.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Tonami Mamoru 砺波護, Kishimoto Mio 岸本美緒, and Sugiyama Masaaki 杉山正明, eds. Chūgoku rekishi kenkyū nyūmon (中国歴史研究入門). Nagoya, Japan: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2006.
  246. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. An essential guide to Japanese studies in Chinese history, not only to individual works of scholarship but also to historiographical issues and scholarly trends. See in particular the chapters on Sui-Tang and Song.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: A Manual. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 46. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998.
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  251. Although covering all periods of premodern Chinese history, this is an invaluable guide to students of Middle-period China, covering and explaining of manner of sources and providing essential bibliographical details about them.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Wright, Hope. Alphabetical List of Geographical Names in Sung China. Sung-Yuan Research Aids 3. Albany, NY: Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies, 1992.
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  255. An authoritative geographical dictionary for the Song, providing the names and locations of all circuits, prefectures, and counties (and changes in them over the course of the dynasty) and the names of the subunits within each, and also giving available census data for each. Originally published in 1956 (Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études, Centre de Recherchers Historiques).
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Biographical Aids
  258.  
  259. For access to the biographies and biographical sources, see the index in Fu, et al. 1982 for the Tang, and Chang, et al. 1988 plus the supplement in Li 1994 for the Song. Both Franke 1976– and Ting 1989 provide biographies in Western languages of important Song individuals, though the latter is noteworthy for the informal nature of the sources employed. The China Biographical Database Project provides the most comprehensive collection of individuals and biographical information for them for the Tang and Song.
  260.  
  261. Chang Bide 昌彼得, Wang Deyi 王德毅, Cheng Yuanmin 程元敏, and Hou Junde 侯俊德. Songren zhuanji ziliao suoyin (宋人傳記資料索引). 6 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988.
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  263. An index that contains citations to biographical materials and, in most cases, brief biographical information for fifteen thousand Song individuals. See Li 1994 for the supplement. Previously published in 1976–1980 (Taibei: Dingwen shuju).
  264. Find this resource:
  265. China Biographical Database Project.
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  267. This project, which originated with the work of Robert M. Hartwell (1932–1996), who digitized biographical information for Song individuals, currently consists of an online relational database with 112,000 individuals (as of April 2011). Although it spans the Tang through Qing periods, the majority of the entries are for individuals from the Tang through Song.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Franke, Herbert, ed. Sung Biographies. 4 vols. Münchener Ostasiatische Studien. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Steiner, 1976–.
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  271. The only Song biographical dictionary in a Western language, this work contains biographies of varying lengths (a paragraph to more than eighty pages), mainly in English but also in French and German, by scholars from around the world.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Fu Xuancong 傅璇琮, Zhang Chensi, and Xu Yimin. Tang Wudai renwu zhuanji ziliao zonghe suoyin (唐五代人物傳記資料綜合索引). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982.
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  275. The best, though now somewhat outdated, guide to Tang and Five Dynasty biographical materials.
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  277. Li Guoling 李國玲. Songren zhuanji ziliao suoyin bubian (宋人傳記資料索引補編). Chengdu, China: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 1994.
  278. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  279. A supplement to the index in Chang, et al. 1989, it contains information on an additional fourteen thousand individuals as well as additional citations for six thousand in the original compilation.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Ting Ch’uan-ching (Ding Chuanjing). A Compilation of Anecdotes of Sung Personalities. Translated by Chu Djang and Jane C. Djang. Jamaica, NY: St. John’s University Press, 1989.
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  283. A selective translation of more than one hundred biographical sketches, drawing primarily on the informal jottings (biji) literature from the Song. Useful in its presentation of materials not found in more-traditional biographies.
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  285. Bibliographies of Contemporary Scholarship
  286.  
  287. The Song period has been particularly well served by bibliographies of scholarship in all languages; in addition to the works listed here, the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies (cited under Journals) has published many bibliographies, to cover scholarship both from particular languages and also on specialized topics. The Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties bibliographies are somewhat sparser, but those works listed will still provide excellent information about relevant scholarship. Although it covers far more than the Tang and Song, the Revue Bibliographique de Sinology provides a useful introduction, through its abstracts, to relevant scholarship in all languages. For Chinese scholarship on the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties, see Qufu shi yuan lishixi Zhongguo gudaishi yanjiushi 1983 and its sequel, Hu 1997. For mid-20th-century Western-language scholarship on the Song, Hervouet 1969 is the standard source. Fang 2006 is now the authoritative guide to Song scholarship in Chinese, but Chan 1979 provides a useful introduction to it in French. The great quantity of Japanese works on the Song is well covered in Sōshi Teiyō Hensan Kyōryoku Iinkai 1961 for earlier scholarship and in Nihon Sōdaishi kenkyū bunkenmokuroku for the late 20th century.
  288.  
  289. Chan Hing-ho (Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩). Bibliographie et index des travaux en Chinois sur les Song, 1900–1975宋遼金史書籍論文目錄通檢. Travaux d’Index, de Bibliographie et de Documentation Sinologiques 5. Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1979.
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  291. This bibliography, along with Hervouet 1969, was among the products of the European-led Sung Project, which produced a number of important research aids for the study of Song history in the 1960s and 1970s. It is valuable for drawing on scholarship from both the China mainland and Taiwan, and also for its useful indices.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Fang Jianxin 方建新. Ershi shiji Song shi yanjiu lunzhu mulu (二十世紀宋史研究論著目錄). Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2006.
  294. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. Now the most authoritative bibliography for Chinese works from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the China mainland, including those for all of the 20th century. It contains more than forty-one thousand books and articles.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Hervouet, Yves. Bibliographie des travaux en langues occidentales sur les Song parus de 1946 à 1965. Bordeaux, France: So–Bo–Di, 1969.
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  299. This is the only comprehensive bibliography for Western-language works on the Song, which were exceedingly rare prior to 1946. For the period since 1965, the Bulletin of Sung Yuan Studies (now the Journal of Song Yuan Studies) has periodically provided bibliographies for works in Western languages as well as Japanese and other languages.
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  301. Hu Ji 胡戟. Sui-Tang Wudai shi lunzhu mulu (1982–1995) (隋唐五代史論著目錄 [1982–1995]). Xi’an, China: Shanxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997.
  302. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. Covering Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties historical scholarship for 1982–1995, this is a sequel to the Wei-Jin Nanbeichao Sui-Tang Wudaishi lunwen ziliao suoyin (Qufu shi yuan lishixi Zhongguo gudaishi yanjiushi 1983).
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Nihon Sōdaishi kenkyū bunkenmokuroku (日本宋代史研究文献目).
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  307. A sequel to Sōdai kenkyū bunken teiyō listed below (Sōshi Teiyō Hensan Kyōryoku Iinkai 1961), this online bibliography of Japanese writings on Song history covers the years 1982–2003 and is organized first by year and then topically within each year.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Qufu shi yuan lishixi Zhongguo gudaishi yanjiushi 曲阜師院歷史系中國古代史硏究室, comp. Wei-Jin Nanbeichao Sui-Tang Wudaishi lunwen ziliao suoyin (魏晉南北朝隋唐五代史論文資料索引). Qufu, China: Qufu shi yuan, 1983.
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  311. Although covering more than just the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties, this provides a useful bibliography of more than thirty years of Chinese historical scholarship relating to those periods.
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  313. Revue bibliographique de sinologie. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
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  315. Published from 1955 to 1970, and again from 1983 to 2003, this review annually abstracted several hundred works in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages on Chinese topics. Although Tang and Song were just a part of its coverage, it offers valuable introductions to many of the important works on Tang-Song topics published during its existence.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Sōshi Teiyō Hensan Kyōryoku Iinkai 宋史提要編纂協力委員會, comp. Sōdai kenkyū bunken teiyō (宋代研究文獻提要). Tokyo: Tōyō bunko, 1961.
  318. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. An authoritative guide to Japanese scholarship on the Song before 1961, including abstracts of books and articles.
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  321. Journals
  322.  
  323. These newsletters, journals, and annual conference proceedings relating to Tang and Song studies are venues for the presentation and discussion of the latest research and research trends in these fields. In most cases these are published either by an academic institution or a parent society. The T’ang Studies and the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies are the premier Western-language publications for their respective periods. In Chinese, Tang Song shi yanjiu is noteworthy for its articles and research aids on both Tang and Song. Among Chinese journals on the Tang, Tangshi luncong provides a wide range of historical articles, while Tang yanjiu provides annual conference volumes on the Tang as well as monographs in Tang history. For the Song, Songshi yanjiu tongxun covers current Song scholarship in China, while Sōdaishi kenkyūkai kenkyū hōkoku provides valuable Japanese scholarship on the Song from the 1980s and 1990s.
  324.  
  325. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies. 1971–.
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  327. This began as the Sung Studies Newsletter in 1971; with Vol. 14 (1978) it became the Bulletin of Sung-Yüan Studies, and it took its current name with Vol. 22 (1990–1992). Published annually, it contains articles, book reviews, and specialized bibliographies. The complete texts of most of the earlier issues are available online.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Sōdaishi kenkyūkai kenkyū hōkoku (宋代史研究會研究報告). 1983–2001.
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  331. Collections of articles on Song history, primarily but not exclusively by Japanese scholars, published every two to three years from 1983 to 2001 by the Song History Research Group at Hiroshima University. The group’s website contains a complete table of contents for the reports.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Songshi yanjiu tongxun (宋史研究通訊), 1985–.
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  335. The primary publication for Song historical studies in China, with bibliographies, publication news, and short articles. Published biannually, a complete table of contents for 1985–2008 can be found online.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Tangshi luncong (唐史論叢). 15 vols. 1987–.
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  339. An annual publication of the Tang History Institute of Shaanxi Normal University, its essays cover a broad range of topics in Tang history.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Tang Song shi yanjiu (唐宋史研究).
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  343. A blog that includes articles, bibliographies, research aids, and links to libraries and databases, all relating to Tang and Song history.
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  345. T’ang Studies, 1982–.
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  347. The only Western-language journal devoted exclusively to the Tang. It publishes annually and is multidisciplinary, with most of its articles dealing with history, literature, and religion. It occasionally includes bibliographies of recent works on the Tang. Its parent organization, the T’ang Studies Society, maintains a website with news of the field, resource links, updates on the journal, and so forth.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Tang yanjiu (唐硏究). 17 vols. 1995–.
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  351. A publication of the Tang Research Foundation, with content generally related to the annual research conference run by the foundation (see online). The foundation has also published twenty-three monographs on Tang topics.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Political History and Institutional History
  354.  
  355. Given the wealth of political and institutional sources for Middle-period history, the secondary works in this area are particularly well developed, building as they do on the great legacy of traditional Chinese historiography.
  356.  
  357. Sui and Tang Political History
  358.  
  359. The political history of this period has benefited greatly both from the legacy of the early-20th-century Chinese historians and from a generation of Western scholars who devoted their attention to it from the 1940s through 1970s. Western scholarship has been particularly rich in studies of the Sui-Tang transition (Xiong 2006 and Bingham 1941), of early Tang emperorship (Wechsler 1974 and Wechsler 1985), and of the background and events related to the An Lushan rebellion (Pulleyblank 1955 and Levy 1960). The voluminous East Asian scholarship on Sui and Tang history is well represented here by Chen 2011 (on institutions) and Tonami 1986 (on social and political history).
  360.  
  361. Bingham, Woodbridge. The Founding of the T’ang Dynasty: The Fall of Sui and Rise of T’ang; A Preliminary Survey. Studies in Chinese and Related Civilizations 4. Baltimore: Waverly, 1941.
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  363. An outdated but meticulous study of the transition from the Sui to Tang dynasties, this is valuable for its careful treatment of the primary sources. Republished in 1970 (New York: Octagon).
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Chen Yinge 陳寅恪. Sui Tang zhidu yuanyuan luelun gao (隋唐制度淵源略論). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2011.
  366. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. Followed by the second part, Tangdai zhengzhi shi shu lun gao (唐代政治史述論稿), these are two of the major works by one of the greatest modern historians of Sui and Tang history. Although these two works (published in one volume) were written in the 1940s, they continue to be influential today. Part 1 focuses on the origins of Sui and Tang institutions, while Part 2 covers Tang political history.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Levy, Howard, ed. and trans. The Biography of An Lu-shan. Chinese Dynastic Histories Translations 8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
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  371. This is a translation, with a lengthy introduction and copious notes, of the Old Tang History biography of the Turkish general whose rebellion marked the end of the high Tang. Although largely superseded by more-recent scholarship, the translation remains useful in light of the great importance of its subject.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Pulleyblank, Edwin G. The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan. London Oriental Series 4. London: Oxford University Press, 1955.
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  375. A comprehensive and detailed overview of the first half of the 8th century, commonly known as the “high Tang,” focusing on the political events as well as the social and economic conditions that led up to An Lushan’s rebellion in the 750s, which almost toppled the dynasty. Republished in 1982 (Westport, CT: Greenwood).
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Tonami Mamoru 礪波護. Tōdai seiji shakaishi kenkyū (唐代政治社會史硏究). Tōyōshi kenkyū sōkan (東洋史硏究叢刊) 40. Kyoto: Dōhōsha, 1986.
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  379. A comprehensive treatment of Tang social and political history, by a leading Japanese Tang historian.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Wechsler, Howard J. Mirror to the Son of Heaven: Wei Cheng at the Court of T’ang T’ai-tsung. Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany 105. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
  382. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. A study of the Confucian minister Wei Zheng, who served under the second Tang emperor Taizong (r. 626–629), thereby providing important insights into politics and political processes during a formative period of the Tang.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Wechsler, Howard J. Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimation of the T’ang Dynasty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
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  387. A pioneering study in political uses of ritual during the Tang. The author provides not only detailed descriptions of the rituals, but also their classical derivations and historical antecedents, and shows how the Tang emperors employed—and often changed—rituals for their particular purposes.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Xiong, Victor Cunrui. Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty: His Life, Times, and Legacy. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
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  391. This study of the much-maligned second—and effectively, last—emperor of the Sui paints a complicated picture of an emperor who, though a philanderer and oppressive ruler, was at the same time an innovative reformer.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Five Dynasties and Song Political History
  394.  
  395. Scholarship on Five Dynasties and Song political history has in recent years focused upon particular periods and issues, such as dynastic formation in the 10th century, reform and factionalism in the late 11th century, and dynastic crises in the late Northern and late Southern Song. Twitchett 1979 (cited under Sui and Tang) also provides political histories for the entire period. Wang 2007 is an important study of center-periphery dynamics during the Five Dynasties. In the Song, the reform policies of Wang Anshi and his followers (and their opponents) have generated much scholarship; Liu 1959 provides concise overview of the reforms, and Smith 1991 offers an insightful analysis of one of the major reforms. Levine 2008 analyzes the factional struggles of the period, while Ebrey and Bickford 2006 provides a wide-ranging reexamination of the often-reviled reign of the emperor Huizong. Liu 1988 and Davis 1996 offer new interpretations of the early and late Southern Song.
  396.  
  397. Davis, Richard L. Wind against the Mountain: The Crisis of Politics and Culture in Thirteenth-Century China. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 42. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1996.
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  399. Davis provides a detailed account of the Song loyalist movement during the transition from Song to Yuan, with particular attention given to the psychology of loyalism and to the ways in which it was gendered.
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  401. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, and Maggie Bickford, eds. Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics. Harvard East Asian Monograph 266. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
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  403. A diverse set of essays that collectively undertake a major reevaluation of the reign of Huizong (r. 1001–1025), an emperor much reviled by traditional historians. The essays demonstrate the importance of his reign and the complexities of both the man and the reign.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Levine, Ari Daniel. Divided by a Common Language: Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008.
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  407. This is an important study of the bitterly divisive factional struggles that occupied the Song political world from the 1070s to 1120s, which particularly focuses on factional theory and factional rhetoric in Song political culture.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Liu, James T. C. Reform in Sung China: Wang An-shih (1021–1086) and His New Policies. Harvard East Asian Studies 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.
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  411. An early and still-useful study of the New policies of Wang Anshi. In this brief volume (156 pp.), Liu argues that the bitterly fought political battles that surrounded the reforms reflected the particular types of officials who contested them.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Liu, James T. C. (Liu Zijian/Tzu-chien 劉子健). China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century. Harvard East Asian Monograph 132. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988.
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  415. Recounts the critical events of the early 12th century, when the Song lost control of northern China and barely managed to survive as a dynasty. Liu argues that Emperor Gaozong’s determination to survive at any cost led to an inward turn that informed intellectual as well as political thought.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Smith, Paul J. Taxing Heaven’s Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074–1224. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 32. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991.
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  419. A study of the Sichuan Tea and Horse Agency established by Wang Anshi as a part of new policies in the 1070s, Smith portrays the agency as an example of governmental engagement in the economy at its fullest extent and depicts its subsequent decline over the succeeding 150 years.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Wang Gungwu. Divided China: Preparing for Reunification, 883–947. 2d ed. Singapore: World Scientific, 2007.
  422. DOI: 10.1142/9789812770554Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. This is a revised edition of Professor Wang’s pathbreaking study of the Five Dynasties politics, titled The Structure of Power in North China during the Five Dynasties (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), which argues that the northern dynasties played a critical role in taming the power that the military governors had accumulated in the late Tang.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Government Institutions
  426.  
  427. The history of government institutions in Middle-period China has been a particular strength of Chinese and Japanese scholars in recent years. Space does not permit a full listing of that work, but Liu 2004, an analysis of the governing structures of the Tang, and Umehara 1985, a classic treatment of the Song personnel system, provide two excellent examples. Among Western scholars, treatments of Song governmental institutions have been particularly forthcoming: Kracke 1953 and Lo 1987, on the structure and functioning of the civil service; McKnight 1971, on local administration; Mostern 2011, on territorial administration; and Chaffee 1999, on structure and history of the imperial clan. Although Tang institutional history has been less studied, Twitchett 1992 provides an essential treatment of the writing of history in the imperial government.
  428.  
  429. Chaffee, John W. Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China. Harvard East Asian Monograph 183. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999.
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  431. This study traces the eventful history of the Song imperial clan, from the three brothers (two of them founding emperors) who began the dynasties through its massive growth over the course of the Northern Song, its near extinction by the Jurchen, and its political activism in the Southern Song.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Kracke, Edward A., Jr. Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067: With Particular Emphasis on the Development of Controlled Sponsorship to Foster Administrative Responsibility. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
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  435. This classic study of the Northern Song civil service has long been used by scholars to make sense of the complicated bureaucratic and personnel structures employed in the early Song.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Liu Houbin 劉後濱. Tangdai zhongshu menxia tizhi yanjiu (唐代中書門下體制硏究). Zhongguo renmin daxue Han-Tang yanjiu congshu (中國人民大學漢唐硏究叢書). Jinan, China: Qi Lu shushe, 2004.
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  439. An important study of a fundamental transformation in the top level of the civil service—namely, the combination of the Secretariat and Chancellory during the 7th century into a body that administered virtually all nonmilitary functions of government, a change that remained in effect for the next six centuries.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Lo, Winston Wan (Luo Wen 羅文). An Introduction to the Civil Service of Sung China: With Emphasis on Its Personnel Administration. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987.
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  443. An excellent introduction and overview to the Song civil service, describing its organization, recruitment, personnel policies governing evaluations, and advancement. One particular benefit is Lo’s coverage of military as well as civil officials.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. McKnight, Brian E. Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
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  447. An important study of the subcounty governance in the Southern Song, with particular attention given to the service obligation borne by wealthy rural households.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Mostern, Ruth. “Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern”: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960–1276 CE). Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 73. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.
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  451. An innovative study of the spatial organization of the Song state and the role played by geography and geographical knowledge in its territorial administration and political economy.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Twitchett, Denis C. The Writing of Official History under the T’ang. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  454. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511572678Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  455. A meticulous and informative guide to the development of Chinese historiographical practice during the Tang, by a preeminent historian of premodern China, this is an excellent starting point for any serious student of Chinese history.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Umehara Kaoru 梅原郁. Sōdai kanryō seido kenkyū (宋代官僚制度研究). Tōyōshi kenkyū sōkan (東洋史研究叢刊) 37. Kyoto: Dōhōsha, 1985.
  458. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. The most comprehensive treatment of Song personnel administration, covering government clerks as well as regular officials and the examinations for them.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Legal History
  462.  
  463. In the legal history of Middle-period China, the Tang Code, which is comprehensively treated in Johnson 1979–1997, was of enormous importance, not only in China, where the Song adopted it virtually unchanged, but also in Korea and Japan. As scholars of Song law have shown, however, Song officials shaped the law to their own purposes through the use of administrative law, precedent, and case law. For an overview of Tang and Song law, see Su 1996. Song law is broadly treated in both McKnight 1992 and Guo 2000. Van Gulik 1956 and McKnight and Liu 1999 detail the workings of the legal system at the local level, while Hansen 1995 shows the workings of legal contracts in the lives of ordinary people.
  464.  
  465. Guo Dongxu 郭東旭. Songdai fazhi yanjiu (宋代法制研究). Songshi yanjiu congshu. Baoding, China: Hebei daxue chubanshe, 2000.
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. This is a comprehensive and extremely useful study of Song law; beginning with an overview of sources and of legal changes over the course of the dynasty, the book provides sections on administrative law, penal law, property law, and marriage law, among others.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Hansen, Valerie. Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600–1400. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
  470. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. An exploration of the varied uses made of legal contracts by ordinary people over the span of the Tang through Yuan dynasties, demonstrating that the legal knowledge involved in the use of contracts was widespread.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Johnson, Wallace S. The T’ang Code. 2 vols. Studies in East Asian Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979–1997.
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. This two-volume work (Vol. 1, General Principles; Vol. 2, Specific Articles) provides a translation and analysis of the Tang law code, which was used as a model not only by the Song but by the Koreans and Japanese as well. The first volume describes the basic principles of Tang law and the second details punishable acts and the punishments for them.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. McKnight, Brian E. Law and Order in Sung China. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  478. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511529030Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. The authoritative Western treatment on the Song legal system and its role in Song government and society.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. McKnight, Brian E., and James T. C. Liu, eds. and trans. The Enlightened Judgments: Ch’ing-ming Chi, the Sung Dynasty Collection. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. This translation of large portions of a Southern Song collection of legal judgments provides detailed information about the workings of the Song legal system and is full of insights into aspects of social, commercial, and political life.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Su Jilang 蘇基朗 [Billy Kee-long So]. Tang Song fazhi shi yanjiu (唐宋法制史研究). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1996.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. A wide-ranging collection of essays on aspects of law, the government, and society during the Tang and Song dynasties.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. van Gulik, Robert H., ed. and trans. T’ang-yin pi-shih, Parallel Cases from under the Pear Tree: A 13th Century Manual of Jurisprudence and Detection. Sinica Leidensia 10. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1956.
  490. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. This translation with annotation of a 13th-century legal manual contains 144 legal cases (arranged in seventy-two paired cases that the Song author felt informed each other) from 300 BCE to 1100 CE.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Diplomatic and Military History
  494.  
  495. Diplomacy was a constant for all dynasties in Middle-period China. Bielenstein 2005 presents documentary evidence for both land-based and maritime relations over the entire period, while Wang 1992 concentrates on Tang-Persian relations, and Sen 2003 does likewise for Indo-Chinese relations. The ambiguous relationships of the Song with its continental neighbors are broadly portrayed in Rossabi 1983, and in Wright 2005 in the author’s study of Song-Liao relations. The military history of this period is nicely introduced in Graff 2002, while Wang 1983 and Huang 1988 provide insightful treatments of the military and warfare during the Song.
  496.  
  497. Bielenstein, Hans. Diplomacy and Trade in the Chinese World, 589–1276. Handbuch der Orientalistik. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2005.
  498. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  499. A monumental study detailing the diplomatic and commercial relations between the Chinese and its continental and maritime neighbors from the Sui through the Song.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Graff, David A. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300–900. Warfare and History. London: Routledge, 2002.
  502. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  503. Although this book begins well before the Sui to Song parameters of this article, its masterful treatment of the role played by the military through a six-hundred-year span of history provides excellent background for an understanding of Sui and Tang history.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Huang Kuanzhong 黃寬重. Nan-Song shidai kang Jin te yijun (南宋時代抗金的義軍). Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1988.
  506. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  507. An accessible and informative history of the Song wars against the Jurchen Jin, from the 1120s to the destruction of the Jin by the Mongols in 1234, and the role played by militias in support of the Song.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Rossabi, Morris, ed. China among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th–14th Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
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  511. A collection detailing the diplomatic relations between the Song and its neighbors, mainly continental but with one chapter on maritime relations as well. As the title suggests, this period was distinctive for the lack of dominance by the Song, which necessitated a new rhetoric and new—though humiliating to Chinese eyes—set of diplomatic practices.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400. Asian Interactions and Comparisons. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003.
  514. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  515. A wide-ranging study that explores Sino-Indian relations over an eight-hundred-year time span. The central theme is the role played by Buddhism in those relations, but the book also manages to provide important insights into continental ties between the two civilizations during the Tang dynasty and into maritime ties during the Song and Yuan.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Wang Xiaofu 王小甫. Tang, Tubo, Dashi zhengzhi guanxi shi (唐, 吐蕃, 大食政治關係史). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1992.
  518. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. A study of the political and military relations between the three great central Asian powers of 7th- through 9th-century central Asia: the Tang, Tibet, and the Arabs (Ummayid and Abbasid), with particular attention given to the battle of Talas in 751.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Wang Zengyu 王曾瑜. Songchao bingzhi chutan (宋朝兵制初探). Zhonghua li shi cong shu. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983.
  522. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  523. A comprehensive overview of the Song military—the kinds of armies and their organization, recruitment, finances, and lifestyle—by China’s leading Song military historian.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Wright, David Curtis. From War to Diplomatic Parity in Eleventh-Century China: Sung’s Foreign Relations with Kitan Liao. History of Warfare 33. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2005.
  526. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. A history of war and the long 11th-century peace between the Northern Song and their archrivals, the Khitan Liao.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Economic History
  530.  
  531. The central theme of economic historians of Middle-period China has been the Tang-Song transformation, which profoundly changed China’s fiscal order and economy in ways that lasted for much of the following millennium. Surrounding but also apart from that change, however, there were a multitude of developments that have captured the attention of historians. The middle section of Elvin 1973, on the Song “economic revolution,” provides an excellent introduction to the Tang-Song transformation, while Von Glahn 1996 presents the Song monetary economy in the context of economic developments over the last thousand years of imperial Chinese history. Twitchett 1970 remains a classic treatment of Tang fiscal order, while Li 1990 provides a detailed analysis of Tang agricultural developments and Von Glahn 1987 does likewise for the agricultural development of Song Sichuan. The comprehensive and well-organized treatment of the Song economy in Qi 1987–1988 is the single-best work on that topic.
  532.  
  533. Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973.
  534. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. Although this book ranges from the Han through Qing dynasties, its core central section deals with the Tang-Song transition and what Elvin calls the “medieval economic revolution.” This section provides a distillation of the massive amount of research done by the Tokyo school of Japanese sinology.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Li Bozhong 李伯重. Tangdai Jiangnan nongye de fazhan (唐代江南農業的發展). Beijing: Nongye chubanshe, 1990.
  538. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. A detailed analysis of Tang agriculture in southern China, which argues that many of the agricultural developments that some historians have argued occurred in the Song in fact had their beginnings in the late Tang.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Qi Xia 漆俠. Songdai jingji shi (宋代經濟史). 2 vols. Zhongguo gudai jingji shi duan yanjiu 5. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1987–1988.
  542. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  543. The dean of Song economic historians in China provides a magisterial and encyclopedic survey of Song economic history.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Twitchett, Denis C. Financial Administration under the T’ang Dynasty. 2d ed. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 8. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
  546. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  547. A classic study that covers transportation, land tenure, taxation, and the state monopolies, all as a part of Tang financial administration, and contains appendices with translations of relevant documents. Originally published in 1963.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Von Glahn, Richard. The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times. Harvard East Asian Monograph 123. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987.
  550. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  551. An outstanding case study of the southern Sichuan frontier in Song times, which documents how a multiethnic periphery grew in population and developed into one of the core regions of Sichuan.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Von Glahn, Richard. Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
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  555. Although the book’s scope goes into the early Qing dynasty, the early chapters provide an excellent introduction of imperial Chinese monetary history, and a succinct description of Song monetary practices, including the development of paper money.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Industry, Domestic Commerce, and Urbanization
  558.  
  559. The remarkable achievements in industry, commerce, and urbanization that occurred in the course of the Tang-Song transformation have generated a great deal of attention and scholarship. The treatment in Hartwell 1966 of the Song iron and steel industry remains important today. Shiba 1970 is an outstanding example of the rich Japanese scholarship on Song trade, while Clark 1991 analyzes the impact of commerce on the society of Fujian, and Zhang 2008 treats the relationship between transportation and commerce. The history of Tang and Song urbanization is well treated by the comparative studies in Heng 1999 and Ning 2009, while Umehara 1984 offers a detailed treatment on a variety of Song urban topics.
  560.  
  561. Clark, Hugh R. Community, Trade, and Networks: Southern Fujian Province from the Third to the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
  562. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511572654Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  563. This regional study follows the history of southern Fujian from an unincorporated frontier of the Chinese empire to one of its most flourishing and advanced regions. The engine of that growth was commerce, both domestic and overseas.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Hartwell, Robert M. “Markets, Technology, and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the Eleventh-Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry.” Journal of Economic History 26.1 (1966): 29–58.
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  567. A seminal and influential study, whose claim that technological sophistication and production levels of iron and steel in the late 11th century were on a par with Britain around 1800, attracted the notice of historians far beyond the China field. Although some of his claims have been challenged by other scholars, this remains an essential study. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Heng Chye Kiang. Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999.
  570. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  571. A detailed comparative study of the Tang and Song capitals, contrasting the highly structured and supervised Tang capitals (particularly Chang’an) with the open character of Kaifeng and Hangzhou.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Ning Xin 宁欣. Tang Song ducheng shehui jiegou yanjiu: Dui chengshi jingji yu shehui de guanzhu (唐宋都城社會結構研究：對城市經濟與社會的關注). Zhongguo gu shehui he zhengzhi yanjiu congshu. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2009.
  574. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  575. This sophisticated treatment of urbanism compares the uses of urban space in Tang Chang’an and Luoyang and in Song Kaifeng and Hangzhou, particularly the ways in which economic and social patterns were structured and evolved.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Shiba Yoshinobu 斯波義信. Commerce and Society in Sung China. Translated and edited by Mark Elvin. Michigan Abstracts of Chinese and Japanese Works on Chinese History 2. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1970.
  578. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  579. An abridged translation of Professor Shiba’s pathbreaking Sōdai shōgyōshi kenkyū (宋代商業史研究) (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1968), this work provides a vivid portrait of merchant enterprises and, more generally, the role of commerce in Song society, especially in the prosperous southeastern regions.
  580. Find this resource:
  581. Umehara Kaoru 梅原郁, ed. Chūgoku kinsei no toshi to bunka (中国近世の都市と文化). Kyoto: Kyōto daigaku Jinbun kagaku kenkyūshō, 1984.
  582. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  583. This collection of essays focuses on Song urbanization (the “modern period”—kinsei—beginning with Song for many Japanese historians), especially Hangzhou, which is the subject of detailed cartographic, political, and economic analysis.
  584. Find this resource:
  585. Zhang Jinpeng 張錦鵬. Nan Song jiaotong shi (南宋交通史). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2008.
  586. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  587. A comprehensive study of the multifaceted role played by communications and transportation in the Southern Song. Viewed as the responsibility of the government, which attempted to manage them, communications and transportation had a profound effect on the economy and cities, as well as on travelers and transport workers, all of which are dealt with in the book.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Maritime Commerce
  590.  
  591. The growing awareness of Song as a maritime power with commercial ties throughout the Asian maritime world has made maritime trade a topic of considerable scholarly interest and activity. This work has served to highlight the central role of China in the “global trading system” of the 10th through 14th centuries and also to delineate the many flows of people, goods, and culture across the Eurasian world. Building on the pioneering studies in Wang 1958, which focuses particularly on the Tang, and in Wheatley 1959 and Lo 1969, which focus on the Song, more recently this field has been enriched by Huang 2003 (a broad treatment of Song maritime trade), So 2000 (on the role of southeastern coast), Schottenhammer 2001 and Schottenhammer 2002 (on the unique role played by the port of Quanzhou), and Heng 2009 (on Sino-Malay trade). Clark 1991 (cited under Industry, Domestic Commerce, and Urbanization) and Sen 2003 (cited under Diplomatic and Military History) have also contributed significantly to this literature.
  592.  
  593. Heng, Derek Thiam Soon. Sino-Malay Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through the Fourteenth Century. Research in International Studies, Southeast Asia 121. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009.
  594. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  595. A methodologically sophisticated study of trade and political relations between the Chinese empire and Southeast Asia from the Five Dynasties through Yuan periods.
  596. Find this resource:
  597. Huang Chunyan 黃 純 艳. Songdai haiwai maoyi (宋代海外贸易). Dong fang li shi xue shu wen ku. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2003.
  598. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  599. A useful overview of Song overseas trade, tracing its development over the course of the dynasty, its economic and fiscal significance, its social characteristics, and its particular trade relations with the different regions of maritime Asia.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Lo, Jung-Pang. “Maritime Commerce and Its Relation to the Sung Navy.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 12.1 (January 1969): 57–101.
  602. DOI: 10.1163/156852069X00044Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  603. A seminal work on maritime commerce and its relationship to the powerful Song navy, by a scholar who dedicated his career to demonstrating China’s maritime accomplishments during the Song and Yuan periods. Available online by subscription.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Schottenhammer, Angela. Das songzeitliche Quanzhou im Spannungsfeld zwischen Zentralregierung und maritimem Handel: Unerwartete Konsequenzen des zentralstaatlichen Zugriffs auf den Reichtum einer Küstenregion. Münchener Ostasiatische Studien 80. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002.
  606. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  607. A massively documented study of the economic Quanzhou in the Song, a time of maximal prosperity for that city, and its resulting relationship to the Song state.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. Schottenhammer, Angela, ed. The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400. Sinica Leidensia 49. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: E. J. Brill, 2001.
  610. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  611. A wide-ranging set of chapters relating to the port city of Quanzhou during the Song and Yuan, covering such diverse topics as archaeology, the ceramics industry, the role of metals and the money supply, merchant groups in the city, and the impact of maritime trade on Quanzhou society.
  612. Find this resource:
  613. So, Billy Kee-lung. Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946–1368. Harvard East Asian Monograph 195. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.
  614. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  615. A regional study of the economic and social impact of maritime trade on southern Fujian, from the Five Dynasties through Yuan. While dealing with the same region and much the same periods as Clark 1991 (cited under Industry, Domestic Commerce, and Urbanization), So’s book focuses more exclusively upon maritime trade and the groups involved in it.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Wang Gungwu. “The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea.” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 31.2 (1958): 1–135.
  618. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  619. A classic, pioneering study of Chinese maritime trade; focusing on the Tang through Song, it presents a historical framework for the topic that continues to be useful today.
  620. Find this resource:
  621. Wheatley, Paul. “Geographical Notes on Some Commodities Involved in the Sung Maritime Trade.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 32.2. (1959): 1–140.
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  623. An encyclopedic, monograph-length survey of the many commodities traded by sea during the Song. It continues to be the standard source cited for this topic.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Social and Cultural History
  626.  
  627. Social and cultural histories have been central in Western scholarship on Middle-period China. As the many subtitles below indicate, they encompass a wide variety of topics and approaches, but they share a movement away from history as political and institutional narrative and toward investigations of people’s beliefs, values, practices, and social interactions. Comprehensive general treatments of society and culture are rare, especially in Western literature, so several of the resources included here provide useful overviews mainly by virtue of their topical breadth, despite a narrow focus of time or place. Hartwell 1982 is an exceptionally important quantitative historical approach to demographic and social change, while Zhu, et al. 1998 provides a comparative approach to people’s livelihoods across the 12th–13th-century Sinitic world. Although dated, Gernet 1962 is an extremely accessible introduction to the daily lives and culture of 13th-century Chinese, while Clark 2007 presents a detailed portrait of social change in central Fujian.
  628.  
  629. Clark, Hugh R. Portrait of a Community: Society, Culture, and the Structures of Kinship in the Mulan River Valley (Fujian) from the Late Tang through the Song. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2007.
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  631. Using not only the standard historical sources but a large number of genealogies, Clark’s microregional study of the Mulan River valley in Fujian explores processes of lineage formation and the roles of the elite.
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Gernet, Jacques. Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276. Translated by H. M. Wright. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962.
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  635. This book provides an engaging account of life on Song Hangzhou on the eve of the Mongol conquest. Although dated, thanks to the profusion of work on Song social history that has appeared since then this work by the great French sinologist Jacques Gernet provides a fascinating entrée into a world long lost. Reprinted as recently as 1995.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Hartwell, Robert M. “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750–1550.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42.2 (1982): 365–442.
  638. DOI: 10.2307/2718941Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  639. An influential study, employing a mass of quantitative data, of the long-term (eight-hundred-year) changes in China’s population and society, with particular attention given to macroregional developments and to the roles of the social and political elites, which, he argues, became increasingly localized over the course of this period. Available online by subscription.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Zhu Ruixi 朱瑞熙, Zhang Bangwei 張邦煒, Liu Fusheng 劉復生, Cai Chongbang 蔡崇榜, and Wang Zengyu 王曾瑜. Liao Song Xixia Jin shehui shenghuo shi (遼宋西夏金社會生活史). Zhongguo gu dai she hui sheng huo shi. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 1998.
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  643. A collaborative undertaking by five leading historians to address a wide variety of social-historical topics in the Liao, Song, Western Xia, and Jin, including habitation, clothing, food, births, deaths and marriages, the role of women, religion, and ritual.
  644. Find this resource:
  645. Women, Gender, and the Family
  646.  
  647. The historical study of the women, gender, and the family in Middle-period China is a new field largely pioneered by North American scholars, who were influenced by the development of women’s history there. It has also been a field of great popularity and intellectual vitality. In Tang studies, much attention has been given to the life of Empress Wu, with Guisso 1978 notable among them. The pioneering work in Ebrey 1991 and especially Ebrey 1993 has led to a host of studies focusing on aspects of Song women’s lives: Birge 2002 on their property rights, Bossler 2002 on courtesans, Lee 2010 on empresses and art, and de Pee 2007 on wedding texts. Furth 1999 (cited under Medicine, Science, and Technology) is an important study of medical treatments for women in the Song and beyond.
  648.  
  649. Birge, Bettine. Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960–1368). Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  650. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511511950Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  651. An important contribution to Chinese women’s history, which describes the very considerable legal status of Song women and argues that their subsequent decline in status did not stem from Song Neo-Confucianism but rather from social and legal changes initiated by the Mongols.
  652. Find this resource:
  653. Bossler, Beverly. “Shifting Identities: Courtesans and Literati in Song China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 62.1 (June 2002): 5–37.
  654. DOI: 10.2307/4126583Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  655. One of the first substantial treatments of Song courtesans and of the very considerable role that they played in Song society and literati culture. Available online by subscription.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. de Pee, Christian. The Writing of Weddings in Middle-Period China: Text and Ritual Practice in the Eighth through Fourteenth Centuries. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
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  659. A brilliant book that looks at a variety of texts relating to marriage from the Tang through Southern Song, taking the texts as its subject matter and arguing that the recovery of any historical reality can be achieved only through an understanding of the discourses embedded in these texts.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing about Rites. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
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  663. A study of the rich Chinese corpus on family rituals. Although it begins by treating the ritual texts of Antiquity, much of the book focuses on the Song, examining both how Song Neo-Confucian thinkers theorized family rituals and how rituals were adopted in practice.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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  667. A wonderful overview of women’s lives in Song China. The book proceeds through women’s life cycles, from birth and childhood through marriage and the stages of married life, but with sections as well on women’s work and courtesans.
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Guisso, Richard W. L. Wu Tse-t’ien and the Politics of Legitimation in T’ang China. Occasional Papers, Program in East Asian Studies 11. Bellingham: Western Washington University Press, 1978.
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  671. An important study of Empress Wu, China’s only female emperor, which draws extensively upon Chinese and Japanese secondary literature as well as the pertinent primary sources to revise and complicate the unremittingly hostile representations of her in traditional Chinese historiography.
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Lee, Hui-shu. Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.
  674. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  675. An in-depth investigation of the complex and multifaceted roles played by Song empresses in the world of culture. Its findings concerning the agency of palace women as both producers and patrons of art are important for Chinese women’s history and art history alike.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Education
  678.  
  679. The high value placed on education in Confucian thought and the role of literary examinations in the selection of officials gave schools an important place in Middle-period Chinese society. For Tang schools, readers are advised to go to the general history in Lee 2000; because of the scarcity of sources there is minimal literature on them. Terada 1965 and Yuan 1991 offer comprehensive general treatments of Song schools, as does Lee 1985, though Lee combines education and examinations. Walton 1999 analyzes the rise of academies in the Southern Song, while the essays in De Bary and Chaffee 1989 cover a range of topics relating to education and Song Neo-Confucianism.
  680.  
  681. De Bary, William Theodore, and John W. Chaffee, eds. Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage. Studies on China 9. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
  682. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  683. A large collection of essays that looks not only at Neo-Confucian approaches to education (especially that of Zhu Xi), but also at approaches to education within the family, legal education, Song academies, and public instruction by officials.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. Lee, Thomas H. C. Government Education and Examinations in Sung China. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1985.
  686. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  687. A wide-ranging treatment of the histories of both Song government schools and the examination system and the complex interactions between the two.
  688. Find this resource:
  689. Lee, Thomas H. C. Education in Traditional China: A History. Handbuch der Orientalistik 13. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2000.
  690. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  691. The only Western-language modern history of Chinese education, Lee’s comprehensive account is especially useful for its coverage of the Tang and Song.
  692. Find this resource:
  693. Terada Gō 寺田剛. Sōdai kyōikushi gaisetsu (宋代教育史概說). Tokyo: Hakubunsha, 1965.
  694. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  695. Although claiming to be brief, this is a comprehensive study of Song educational history. Hampered by its nonutilization of the Song huiyao, it nevertheless draws on a wide range of sources to present a good overview of educational development.
  696. Find this resource:
  697. Walton, Linda A. Academies and Society in Southern Sung China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999.
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  699. This study of the Southern Song academy movement not only provides a history of this important movement but also addresses the role of shrines within the academies, the differences between them and the government schools, and the movement’s relationship to the rise of the Daoxue (Learning of the Way) movement.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Yuan Zheng 袁征. Songdai jiaoyu (宋代教育). Guangzhou, China: Guangdong gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991.
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  703. An excellent general history of Song education, with detailed treatment of educational policies, the management of schools, appointment of teachers, and student progression through the schools.
  704. Find this resource:
  705. Examinations
  706.  
  707. The civil service examinations—which had their origins in the Sui dynasty—have long been recognized as one of the most distinctive and important features of imperial China and thus have elicited a large literature by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars. Miyazaki 1976 provides an overview of the examinations through the 1,300-year course of their history. Moore 2004 offers a vivid portrayal of examination life in the late Tang. Both Araki 1969 and Chaffee 1995 treat the Song examinations in their entirety (see also Lee 1985, cited under Education). Lin 2006 analyzes the relationship between the examinations and literature in the Northern Song, while De Weerdt 2007 details the role of printing and examination preparation books.
  708.  
  709. Araki Toshikazu 荒木敏一. Sōdai kakyo seido kenkyū (宋代科舉制度研究). Tōyōshi Kenkyū Sōkan 22. Kyoto: Tōyōshi Kenkyūkai, 1969.
  710. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  711. An authoritative and comprehensive treatment of the institutional history of the Song examination system.
  712. Find this resource:
  713. Chaffee, John W. The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations. New ed. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
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  715. An important treatment of Song examinations, which traces their development over the course of the dynasty but also treats the increasing role of privilege in making one’s way through them, their changing social impact over the course of the dynasty, their cultural manifestations, and geographical patterns of success. Originally published in 1985 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
  716. Find this resource:
  717. De Weerdt, Hilde. Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127–1279). Harvard East Asian Monograph 289. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.
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  719. An innovative approach to the civil service examinations that uses Southern Song printed examination preparation books to argue persuasively for the influence of leading Confucian schools of thought on the examination curriculum.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Lin Yan 林岩. Bei Song keju kaoshi yu wenxue (北宋科舉考試與文學). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006.
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  723. A sophisticated treatment of Song schools and examinations, with particular attention given to the relationship between the examinations and literary production.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. Miyazaki Ichisada. China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. Translated by Conrad Schirokauer. New York: John Weatherhill, 1976.
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  727. This translation presents this important work on the examinations, by Miyazaki, one of the great Japanese historians of Song China. Although much of the book deals with the Ming and Qing examinations, Miyazaki also discusses the Tang and Song examinations in some detail.
  728. Find this resource:
  729. Moore, Oliver J. Rituals of Recruitment in Tang China: Reading an Annual Programme in the Collected Statements by Wang Dingbao (870–940). Sinica Leidensia 65. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2004.
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  731. Using Wang Dingbao’s remarkable collection of late Tang anecdotes, Moore provides a portrait of aspiring literati as they moved through the stages of examination preparation and success.
  732. Find this resource:
  733. History of Printing
  734.  
  735. Printing had its origins in Middle-period China, though as the various works below attest, the details of its beginnings are a matter of some disagreement. Much of the mid-20th- to early-21st-century work on the history of printing in China, however, has not dealt with origins so much as the social and political functions of printing as it developed, making books and other printed materials available to ever-increasing numbers and groups of people. Carter 1955 and Pelliot 1953 are classic studies on the history of printing. Barrett 2008 argues for a reconsideration of the origins of printing, while Chia 2002 looks at the key role played by printers in Fujian from the Song through the Ming.
  736.  
  737. Barrett, Timothy H. The Woman Who Discovered Printing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
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  739. This book advances the provocative thesis that printing did not originate in 8th–9th-century Buddhist monasteries, but instead in imperial workshops, spurred by Empress Wu’s interest in the propagation of religious texts.
  740. Find this resource:
  741. Carter, Thomas F. The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward. 2d ed. Revised by L. Carrington Goodrich. New York: Ronald, 1955.
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  743. Long the standard Western source for the origins of printing, Carter’s account remains very useful, particularly with regard to the diffusion of printing to the West. Originally published in 1925.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Chia, Lucille (Jia Jinzhu 賈晋珠). Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th centuries). Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 56. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
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  747. A pioneering study of the commercialization and spread of printing from the Northern Song through the Ming dynasties. Chia’s focus is on the printers of Jianyang in northwestern Fujian, a leading center for commercial printing throughout this period.
  748. Find this resource:
  749. Pelliot, Paul. Les débuts de l’imprimerie en Chine. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1953.
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  751. Pelliot began this work on the origins of printing in China in 1928, with the intention of updating Carter 1955 (originally published in 1925) for a second edition, but it then turned into a book in its own right, largely following Carter but adding considerable new material, such as a demonstration of the significant role played by the province of Sichuan in the development of printing.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Elites and Literati
  754.  
  755. No question has exercised social historians of Middle-period China more than the nature of the ruling class. The terms used to describe it in its various manifestations—aristocracy, capital elite, local elite(s), gentry, and literati, among others—as well as questions of origin, economic basis, social mobility, and longevity have all been matters for vigorous debate. For the Tang, readers should consult Johnson 1977 and Ebrey 1978 for their broad analysis of changes among the aristocratic families from the Six Dynasties to Song, and McMullen 1988 is recommended for gaining an understanding of the scholarly society. The argument for the localization of the elite in the Southern Song in Hymes 1986 has been greatly influential. For other views on this question, see Davis 1986 and Bossler 1998. Zhang 2011 explores the very different issue of the role of travel for Chinese elites.
  756.  
  757. Bossler, Beverly Jo. Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, & the State in Sung China (960–1279). Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 43. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1998.
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  759. Addressing the debate over the localist turn in elite society during the Southern Song, as argued in Hymes 1986, Bossler makes an important contribution through her emphasis on the primacy of the descent line (rather than the extended kinship group) and on the fluidity of social status.
  760. Find this resource:
  761. Davis, Richard L. Court and Family in Sung China, 960–1279: Bureaucratic Success and Kinship Fortunes for the Shih of Ming-chou. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986.
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  763. Davis traces the history of the Shi family of Mingzhou (modern Ningbo) from its humble origins in the early Northern Song to its great prominence in the Southern Song, when it accounted for three chief councilors, and in so doing he makes an important contribution to Song elite history.
  764. Find this resource:
  765. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China: A Case Study of the Po-ling Ts’ui Family. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
  766. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511759857Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  767. While much of this book deals with the “Period of Division,” its account of the Sui/Tang history of the aristocratic Cui family of Boling makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Tang aristocracy.
  768. Find this resource:
  769. Hymes, Robert P. Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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  771. A book of great importance for Song social history, because in his painstakingly researched study of Fuzhou (Jiangxi), Hymes argues for a fundamental transformation from a national orientation by the leading families of the prefecture during the Northern Song to a local orientation in the Southern Song. This “localization thesis” has been at the center of much subsequent debate among Song historians.
  772. Find this resource:
  773. Johnson, David G. The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy. Westview Special Studies on China and East Asia. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977.
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  775. This study, encompassing the years 256–906 CE, focuses on the aristocratic ruling class, which Johnson terms the “medieval oligarchy.” He argues that, whereas in the pre-Sui/Tang period the status of the aristocratic families was established locally where they had their main landholding, during the Tang their status came to be dependent on political position, determined in considerable part by the examination system.
  776. Find this resource:
  777. McMullen, David. State and Scholars in T’ang China. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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  779. An exhaustively researched and authoritative treatment of scholarship in the Tang and the relationship between scholars and the state. The book uses the rebellion of An Lushan in the 750s to demarcate a scholarly world by a centralized court before the rebellion, and decentralization thereafter.
  780. Find this resource:
  781. Zhang, Cong Ellen. Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011.
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  783. A study of the role of travel in the lives of Song officials, the state’s support of that travel, and the cultural impact of that travel, from farewell banquets and the poems that accompanied them to the travel literature that flourished during the Song.
  784. Find this resource:
  785. Intellectual History and Historiography
  786.  
  787. Although studies of Tang and Song thought have centered on the Confucian tradition (Neo-Confucianism, Learning of the Way or Daoxue, Song Confucianism, and the like), they no longer focus exclusively on its philosophical aspects, as was once the case. Rather, the wide range of intellectual choices and their competing discourses, and the relationship of these to social and political changes, are much in evidence in recent literature. Bol 1992 presents wide-ranging intellectual changes from Tang to Song. DeBlasi 2002 treats changes in late Tang literary culture. Lee 2004 focuses on historiographical developments in the Song, and Wood 1995 examines how history was used to political ends. The essays in Hymes and Schirokauer 1993 treat state-society issues throughout the Song, while Bol 2008 ranges from Song to Ming in analyzing the political and social functions of Neo-Confucian thought.
  788.  
  789. Bol, Peter K. “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transition in T‘ang and Sung China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
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  791. This magisterial treatment of intellectual history uses the problematic of culture to analyze the intellectual developments spanning the Tang and Song, and it is in that context that Bol places the rise of “Tao Learning” (Daoxue) via the Cheng brothers and the other Neo-Confucian masters.
  792. Find this resource:
  793. Bol, Peter K. Neo-Confucianism in History. Harvard East Asian Monograph 307. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.
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  795. Bol presents a comprehensive and novel approach to Neo-Confucianism and its role in Chinese society, politics, and thought. He argues that Song thinkers moved toward a new and more autonomous notion of self, and that this change coincided with the localization of many political and social functions in the Southern Song and especially the Ming.
  796. Find this resource:
  797. DeBlasi, Anthony. Reform in the Balance: The Defense of Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
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  799. A revisionist approach to mid-Tang literary culture, which argues for a dominant mainstream of literary thought that was separate from the now-more-famous approach of Han Yü and Liu Zongyuan, with their emphasis on guwen (ancient-style prose).
  800. Find this resource:
  801. Hymes, Robert P., and Conrad Schirokauer, eds. Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China. Studies on China 16. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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  803. A collection of essays that interrogate the relationship between the Song state and society in a wide range of areas: intellectual, social, and both official and nonofficial institutions.
  804. Find this resource:
  805. Lee, Thomas H. C., ed. The New and the Multiple: Sung Senses of the Past. Papers presented at a conference held in January 1997 in the Bahamas. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2004.
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  807. The only collection of essays in Western languages exploring Middle-period historiography, the studies here are wide ranging, exploring Song historians, Confucian and Buddhist thinkers, and even historical discourses on such topics as the imperial clan, gazetteers, and the family as seen in local histories.
  808. Find this resource:
  809. Wood, Alan Thomas. Limits to Autocracy: From Sung Neo-Confucianism to a Doctrine of Political Rights. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995.
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  811. A study that argues that Northern Song Neo-Confucian thinkers created intellectual restrictions that curbed the theoretically autocratic powers of the emperor.
  812. Find this resource:
  813. Intellectual Biography
  814.  
  815. Closely related to intellectual history, biographical treatments of scholars and thinkers in Middle-period China have attracted many scholars who have contributed greatly to our knowledge of the thought and culture of the period. Chiu-Duke 2000, Chen 1992, and Hartman 1986 provide three examples of this scholarship from the mid- and late Tang. Liu 1967 and Ji 2005 shed light on scholars in the 11th century, and Tillman 1982 and Tillman 1992 provide an essential understanding of Southern Song Daoxue and its opponents.
  816.  
  817. Chen, Jo-shui. Liu Tsung-yūan and Intellectual Change in T’ang China, 773–819. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  818. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511571411Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  819. An intellectual biography of one of the major Confucian thinkers of the mid-Tang that also provides an informative window into the society and intellectual climate of the early 9th century.
  820. Find this resource:
  821. Chiu-Duke, Josephine. To Rebuild the Empire: Lu Chih’s Confucian Pragmatist Approach to the Mid-T’ang Predicament. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
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  823. A study of the life of the Tang chief councilor Lu Zhi (b. 754–d. 805) and his political thought and statecraft. Chiu-Duke situates Lu within a tradition of Confucian pragmatism characterized by a willingness to combine Confucian principles with practical flexibility.
  824. Find this resource:
  825. Hartman, Charles. Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
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  827. This study of Han Yü (b. 768–d. 824), one of the intellectual giants of the early 9th century, addresses issues fundamental to our understanding of Tang thought, among them how unity in thought, culture, and politics might be achieved. Hartman argues that Han’s thought provided the philosophical underpinnings for Song Neo-Confucianism.
  828. Find this resource:
  829. Ji, Xiao-bin. Politics and Conservatism in Northern Song China: The Career and Thought of Sima Guang (A.D. 1019–1086). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005.
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  831. A biographical treatment of one of China’s greatest historians, who also happened to be an outspoken political and, for a period, chief councilor during the factional struggles of the late 11th century.
  832. Find this resource:
  833. Liu, James T. C. Ou-yang Hsiu: An Eleventh-Century Neo-Confucianist. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967.
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  835. A short but eminently readable and well-researched biography of one of the leading scholarly officials and literary stylists in an era known for its outstanding men of letters.
  836. Find this resource:
  837. Tillman, Hoyt Cleveland. Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch’en Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi. Harvard East Asian Monograph 101. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1982.
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  839. A study of Chen Liang (b. 1143–d. 1194), a Confucian thinker whose distinctive voice—characterized by Tillman as “utilitarian”—contrasted sharply with Zhu Xi. As the title suggests, the book focuses on debates between the two philosophers.
  840. Find this resource:
  841. Tillman, Hoyt Cleveland. Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992.
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  843. An innovative approach to the ascendance of the Daoxue Confucianism of Zhu Xi (b. 1130–d. 1200) and his followers. Rather than accepting the traditional teleological history of this school, Tillman describes a “fellowship” of committed disciples who were able to persevere over their rivals in gaining broad acceptance for Zhu’s thought.
  844. Find this resource:
  845. Cultural History
  846.  
  847. The works represented under this category display the remarkable diversity of mid-20th- to early-21st-century scholarship. The traditional notion of culture as literary and artistic production is much in evidence, but physical culture such as objects, tombs, and even paper (its role in poetry), art collecting, and constructions of ethnicity have also been addressed by scholars. For the Tang, Schafer 1985 (originally published in 1963) and Schafer 2006 (originally 1967) are two prime examples of that great scholar’s work on Tang culture in all its aspects. Nugent 2010 analyzes the material culture of poetry production, and Abramson 2008 analyzes the complex issue of ethnicity in the Tang. For the Song, Murck 2000 and Ebrey 2008 explore the roles of painting in Song elite and court culture.
  848.  
  849. Abramson, Marc S. Ethnic Identity in Tang China. Encounters with Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
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  851. A study of ethnicity during one of China’s most multiethnic and cosmopolitan of dynasties, it draws upon a wide range of secular and religious writings, art, and cultural artifacts.
  852. Find this resource:
  853. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong. China Program Book. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.
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  855. This is an encyclopedic and lavishly illustrated presentation of the world of Song art collecting as practiced by one of the greatest of collectors in Chinese history, the much-maligned Emperor Huizong, and it succeeds in presenting a far more sympathetic portrait of the emperor than one finds in the traditional historiography.
  856. Find this resource:
  857. Kuhn, Dieter. A Place for the Dead: An Archaeological Documentary on Graves and Tombs of the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Würzburger Sinologische Schriften. Heidelberg, Germany: Edition Forum, 1996.
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  859. A valuable compendium of the large trove of archaeological information gathered by Professor Kuhn on Song tomb culture.
  860. Find this resource:
  861. Murck, Alfreda. Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 50. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.
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  863. This book makes the case that a small group of literati, through the production and reception of and poetry about painting, were able to use certain paintings in the late Northern Song as a subtle form of political dissent.
  864. Find this resource:
  865. Nugent, Christopher M. B. Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010.
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  867. A study of the material culture of poetry in the Tang, focusing on the ways it was composed, copied, circulated, and appreciated in an age before printing.
  868. Find this resource:
  869. Schafer, Edward H. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics. History 742. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
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  871. This book, originally published in 1963, describes in minute and fascinating detail a vast array of exotic products from foreign sources found in Tang society and in so doing demonstrates the extent of foreign influences on the Tang, especially those that came via caravans from the west.
  872. Find this resource:
  873. Schafer, Edward H. The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South. Warren, CT: Floating World, 2006.
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  875. Originally published in 1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press), this study of the role of the south in Tang culture is in some ways a companion to The Golden Peaches (Schafer 1985), though the forms of exoticism that Schafer finds prevalent in the south (a region extending as far as Champa in central Vietnam) create a very different sensibility than that in the earlier book.
  876. Find this resource:
  877. History of Religion
  878.  
  879. While the history of Middle-period Chinese religion was long centered on the doctrinal and institutional developments within the major schools of Buddhism and Daoism, more-recent studies have uncovered a vast array of folk religious groups and popular religious practices (including shamanism and exorcism), and have also explored the social and intellectual ties between literati and monks. The articles in Ebrey and Gregory 1993 present a variety of topics, though they are weighted toward the Song. Weinstein 1987 is an excellent introduction to Tang Buddhism, while Song Buddhism is well covered in Gregory and Getz 1999 and Halperin 2006. The now-substantial literature focusing on the popular religious history is well represented by Teiser 1988 (on Tang ghost festivals), Hymes 2002 (on Song Daoist cults), Davis 2001 (on communicating with the supernatural), and Hansen 1990 (on Song popular religious culture).
  880.  
  881. Davis, Edward L. Society and the Supernatural in Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
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  883. This pioneering study investigates the experience of the supernatural in Song society. Focusing on the roles of Buddhist and Daoist clergy, spirit mediums, and ritual masters, it brilliantly presents an aspect of society that is missing—or addressed only in passing—in other accounts.
  884. Find this resource:
  885. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, and Peter N. Gregory, eds. Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China. Papers originally presented at a conference held in Hacienda Heights, CA, in 1989. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993.
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  887. A rich and informative collection of essays detailing the varying roles played by religion—Buddhist, Daoist, and syncretic popular cults—in Middle-period society. The title is a little misleading, because only one of the chapters deals with the Tang, but for the Song the essays are excellent.
  888. Find this resource:
  889. Gregory, Peter N. Jr., and Daniel A. Getz Jr., eds. Buddhism in the Sung. Studies in East Asian Buddhism 13. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999.
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  891. An outstanding collection of studies on Song Buddhism, which proves conclusively—if proof is necessary—the vitality of Buddhism in a period when it was once assumed that it was in decline, and its remarkable diversity.
  892. Find this resource:
  893. Halperin, Mark. Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China, 960–1279. Harvard East Asia Monograph 272. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
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  895. This book details the numerous and multifaceted ways in which the Song elite viewed Buddhism and Buddhist institutions and interacted with Buddhists. It further contributes to a growing literature testifying to the vitality of Buddhism during the Song.
  896. Find this resource:
  897. Hansen, Valerie. Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
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  899. Using temple inscriptions and Hong Mai’s Records of the Listener (Yijian zhi), this study of Song local religion argues cogently and in great detail that religious change was closely correlated with social and economic changes.
  900. Find this resource:
  901. Hymes, Robert P. Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
  902. DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520207585.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  903. This book traces the development of two Southern Song Daoist cults that had their beginnings in the vicinity of Fuzhou (Jiangxi), arguing that they exemplify two distinct models of religion: bureaucratic and personal. In making this case Hymes is challenging the common assertion by students of modern Chinese religion that Chinese gods are a metaphor for the state.
  904. Find this resource:
  905. Teiser, Stephen F. The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
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  907. This is a study of the origins of the Chinese festival for feeding hungry ghosts, which was based on the story of the monk Mulian saving his mother from her deserved punishment in hell. Teiser explores both Buddhist and Chinese shamanic antecedents to the festival, as well as the role it played in Tang society.
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  909. Weinstein, Stanley. Buddhism under the T’ang. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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  911. With an encyclopedic approach to its topic, this volume combines a concise history of Tang Buddhism with an enormous amount of detail concerning Buddhism’s relationship to the state.
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  913. Medicine, Science, and Technology
  914.  
  915. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Joseph Needham, the history of Chinese science has entered the mainstream of Chinese history. There are as yet few works devoted specifically to the Middle period (many deal with the Tang and Song in passing), but those listed below demonstrate the promise of this field. Libbrecht 1973 provides ample evidence for the sophistication of Song mathematics. Goldschmidt 2009 is a welcome treatment of Song medicine, while Furth 1999 sheds light on the theory and practice of women’s medicine in the Song and beyond. Likewise, Bray 1997, a study of gendered technologies, is valuable for its treatment of Song textile technologies.
  916.  
  917. Bray, Francesca. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
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  919. A study of gendered technologies in China, from the Song through Qing. Through her concern with instrumental uses of knowledge, Bray provides extensive treatment of Song textile technology and production as covering such topics as the spatial ordering of households.
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  921. Furth, Charlotte. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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  923. A pioneering treatment of the theory and practice of women’s medicine, which was recognized as a discrete branch of medicine. Although the book’s coverage extends into the early Qing, special attention is given to the Song, which the author sees as the formative period in the development of women’s medicine.
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  925. Goldschmidt, Asaf M. The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200. Needham Research Institute Series. London: Routledge, 2009.
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  927. A comprehensive study of the major transformations in Chinese medical and practice during the Song, with particular attention given to the role of the emperors and government in propagating medical knowledge and addressing issues of public health.
  928. Find this resource:
  929. Libbrecht, Ulrich. Chinese Mathematics in the Thirteenth Century: The Shu-shu Chiu-chang of Ch’in Chiu-shao. MIT East Asian Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973.
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  931. A treatment of the mathematical treatises of Qin Jiushao, one of the greatest of Chinese mathematicians, containing presentations of the mathematical problems and ideas of Qin as well as using the material from his treatise to elucidate aspects of socioeconomic life in 13th-century China. Republished in 2005 (Mineola, NY: Dover).
  932. Find this resource:
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