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562 Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Edited by Peter 562 Book Reviews / T’oung Pao 99 (2013) 539-584 Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Edited by Peter Lorge. Hong Kong: Chinese Univ. Press, 2011. ix + 252 p. Contributions by Hugh R. Clark, Johannes L. Kurz, De-nin Lee, Peter Lorge, Tracy Miller, Ruth Mostern, Naomi Standen. This book is an excellent collection of thought-provoking essays. It successfully presents the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (906-960) as highly sig- nificant to Chinese history, and also demonstrates the benefits of a pluralistic perspective in analyzing this period. Moreover, this volume raises methodological questions that are broadly relevant to historians in other fields. Peter Lorge’s introduction concisely explains how the collection was conceived, and lays out the broader historical and historiographical background of the case studies in this volume. Without claiming to do a complete reassessment of the traditional historiography on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, Lorge points out certain of its weaknesses. With its emphasis on periodization and the “legiti- mate succession” (p. 3) of dynasties, it tends to favor a linear view of history, which is inadequate to explain the diversity in this period of division. Moreover, the focus on periodization tends to create a “cognitive dissonance” (p. 2) in tra- ditional historians. Ouyang Xiu’s 歐陽修 “Historical Records of the Five Dynas- ties” (Wudai shiji 五代史記), for example, seems to have been written teleologically to explain the subsequent rise of the Song rather than to analyze the Five Dynas- ties period on its own terms (p. 1). An important goal of this volume of essays, then, is to promote a historical perspective that is centered on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period itself. Writing with great lucidity and confidence, Lorge emphasizes the pioneer sta- tus of this volume by freely admitting that some important questions are merely “raised, but not answered” (p. 8). He is also refreshingly frank about the limita- tions of what the sources can tell us. As he writes when summarizing the contribu- tion of Tracy Miller’s article on architecture: “The actual remnants of Song imperial architecture are fragmentary, and a solid reconstruction of its style beyond our reach; only local style is extant” (p. 10). Indeed, the question of sources is an important one for several of the articles and is therefore worthwhile for the reader to bear in mind. Naomi Standen’s “Who Wants to Be an Emperor? Zhao Dejun 趙德鈞, You- zhou 幽州 and the Liao 遼” uses an intriguing case study to analyze the political culture of north China during the Five Dynasties. Focusing on Zhao Dejun, a “loser” who has been much neglected by historians, Standen shows that the polit- ical world in this period operated on a principle of reciprocity rather than absolute loyalty (the latter being the value system favored by historians writing under the subsequent Song dynasty). While rulers valued local commanders like Zhao Dejun for their loyalty, this loyalty was based on shared interests and mutual benefit. So when this system worked well for Zhao Dejun, “defending his prov- ince and protecting his master’s realm were one and the same” (p. 28). Indeed, Zhao Dejun thrived during much of his career precisely because he was able to © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15685322-9945P0012 Book Reviews / T’oung Pao 99 (2013) 539-584 563 enter into and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with various rulers. It was only when this kind of relationship had become impossible that he was forced to strike out on his own and make a desperate—and ultimately failed—bid at becoming an emperor himself. Besides providing an insightful analysis of the changing power structure during the Five Dynasties, Standen’s article also raises significant questions about her sources, many of which were composed during the Song. Although she has argued that the Song sources she uses are influenced by anachronistic value judgments, she still needs very much to rely on them for information. Triangulating between different sources with great skill, Standen succeeds in constructing a narrative that is very convincing. Yet, because Standen’s understanding of this period is so dif- ferent from that of her sources, and because the sources do not always provide the information she needs, she sometimes has to resort to educated guesses, as evi- denced by her use of expressions such as “it may be that” (p. 31), “it seems reason- able to suppose” (p. 37), and so on. Unfortunately, once educated guesses enter the scene, one may play the devil’s advocate and question Standen’s choice to reject some of the accounts in the sources she uses. For example, she rejects an account recorded in Sima Guang’s 司馬光 Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑 because it does not match her analysis of Zhao Dejun’s career, and also because it seems to have been written to promote “the ideal of single-master loyalty” (p. 39-40). But if it is false, how did it enter Sima Guang’s text? Did Sima Guang take this version from a Five Dynasties source? It will not do to argue that this is impossible because people of the Five Dynasties lacked the ideal of single-master loyalty, since the absence of this ideal is precisely what needs to be proven here. Or did Sima Guang make it up out of whole cloth? Then the reliability of his other records would also need to be examined. Without major breakthroughs on the historiography of Zizhi tongjian and other Song nar- ratives of political history, perhaps the best we can do is indeed what Standen has done, which is to triangulate between questionable sources, and then take the best educated guess based on the best analysis one can produce. Thus Standen’s work is not only brilliant political history; it is also a reminder of what unstable ground we Middle Period historians sometimes stand on. Hugh R. Clark’s “Scoundrels, Rogues, and Refugees: The Founders of the Ten Kingdoms in the Late Ninth Century” sets out to use a biographical study of the founders of the Ten Kingdoms to test a modern social science model of social banditry and peasant rebellion. According to this model, the “bandit confedera- tions” that led to the founding of the Ten Kingdoms were once “military organi- zations operating autonomously outside any other hierarchical structures” as well as “expressions of popular distress in the face of an oppressive and unresponsive central authority” (p. 47). In the end, Clark finds that this model does not really apply. The founders of the Ten Kingdoms were not Robin Hood-like figures fight- ing for justice, but merely “survivors in a vicious cycle of violence and predation that characterized the collapse of the Tang” (p. 70)..
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