From Warlord to Emperor: Song Taizu's Change Of

320 peter lorge

FROM WARLORD TO EMPEROR: SONG TAIZU’S CHANGE OF HEART DURING THE CONQUEST OF SHU

PETER LORGE Vanderbilt University

“The ruler displayed the banner of surrender on the city walls, I was deep in the palace, how could I know this? One hundred and forty thousand soldiers all took off their armor, How is it that there was not even one who was a man?” Lady Fei1

Introduction

On February 23rd, 965, Meng Chang 孟昶, the king of Shu 蜀, surrendered to a Song army under the command of Wang Quanbin 王全斌. The Song army had conquered the Shu kingdom (modern Sichuan) in a month, a surprisingly short time given the natural bar- riers that protected it. Although the Shu government fell quickly, the depredations of the Song army that followed instigated widespread rebellion. To make matters worse, part of the Song army mutinied when the generals imposed new discipline on it. In order to protect Chengdu 成都 from the rebellion, Wang ordered the massacre of 27,000 surrendered Shu soldiers camped within the city. A further 60,000 Shu men were killed in the course of suppressing the rebellion and putting down the mutiny. My focus in the discussion that follows is on the effect that conquest and rebellion in Sichuan had upon the Song court during the reign of the first emperor, posthumously known as Taizu 太祖. The course of the rebellion brought home to Song Taizu the difference

1 Houshan shihua 後山詩話, cited in Wang Shizhen 王士禛, Wudai shihua 五代詩話, Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998, 301.

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between pleasing the army and being a good ruler. This is not to say that he swore off force as a means of conquest, far from it as he was just beginning a decade of campaigning, but rather that there were other considerations involved in establishing enduring rule than just military ones. Taizu was less concerned with the political effects of the rebellion, which could be easily discounted as a minor annoyance, part and parcel of the process of conquest, than with the depredations of his soldiers. Shu was actually the first major state conquered by the Song (the previous conquests of Chu and Jingnan in 963 being a rather minor affair), and Taizu was confronted with what it really meant to be emperor for the first time. Whatever his motivations, it is to his credit that he took real, costly steps to diminish the negative actions of his soldiers. In so doing, he chose to become an emperor in more than name, rather than a warlord with a grand title.

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