China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978 This book challenges the long-established structure of Chinese history around dynasties, adopting a more “organic” approach which emphasises cultural and economic trends that transcend arbitrary dynastic boundaries. It argues that with the collapse of the Tang court and northern control over the holistic empire in the last decades of the ninth century, the now-autonomous kingdoms that filled the political vacuum in the south responded with a burst of innovative energy that helped set the stage for the economic and cultural transformations of the following Song dynasty. Moreover, it argues that these transformations and this economic and cultural innovation deeply affected the subsequent model of holistic empire which continues right up to the present and that therefore the interregnum century of division left a critically important legacy. Hugh R. Clark is Professor Emeritus of History and East Asian Studies at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania Asian States and Empires Edited by Peter Lorge, Vanderbilt University For a full list of available titles please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Asian- States-and-Empires/book-series/SE900. The importance of Asia will continue to grow in the twenty-first century, but remarkably little is available in English on the history of the polities that constitute this critical area. Most current work on Asia is hindered by the extremely limited state of knowledge of the Asian past in general, and the history of Asian states and empires in particular. Asian States and Empires is a book series that will provide detailed accounts of the history of states and empires across Asia from earliest times until the present. It aims to explain and describe the formation, maintenance and collapse of Asian states and empires, and the means by which this was accomplished, making avail- able the history of more than half the world’s population at a level of detail comparable to the history of Western polities. In so doing, it will demon- strate that Asian peoples and civilizations had their own histories apart from the West, and provide the basis for understanding contemporary Asia in terms of its actual histories, rather than broad generalizations informed by Western categories of knowledge. China, Korea & Japan at War, 1592–1598 Eyewitness Accounts J. Marshall Craig China’s Northern Wei Dynasty, 386–535 The Struggle for Legitimacy Puning Liu China's Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912 Perspectives and Approaches in the Investigation of Imperial Boundary Regions Daniel McMahon China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978 New Approaches to the Southern Kingdoms Hugh R. Clark China during the Tang-Song Interregnum, 878–978 New Approaches to the Southern Kingdoms Hugh R. Clark First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Hugh R. Clark The right of to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-05362-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05365-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19724-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003197249 Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books Contents List of illustrations vi Preface vii Glossary xii 1 Introduction 1 2 Semi-colonialization under the Tang: Setting the Stage for the Independent South 9 3 Politics in an Age of Division: North–South Relations and Inter- state Negotiation 25 4 The Economies of the South 40 5 The Social and Cultural Initiatives of the South 57 6 Steps Toward Restoration of the Holistic Empire 78 7 The Legacy of the Interregnum: Recruiting the Southern Elite, the Discourse on Civilization, and the Standardization of Values 86 8 Conclusions: The Holistic Legacy 100 Bibliography 109 Index 119 Illustrations Figures 0.1 Map of Southern Polities (approximate) x 5.1 The Descendants of Zheng Zhuang 69 Tables 0.1 Southern Polities in the 10th Century x 4.1 Census data, 742 versus 1080 45 4.2 Demographic Data from the Taiping huanyu ji.47 Preface The following essays address an understudied epoch in the history of that corner of East Asia we call “China.” This is the era known to orthodox his- tory as the Ten Kingdoms, referring to a congeries of polities in the Yangtze basin and lands further south that controlled southern China through the interregnum that divided the Tang and Song dynasties. I will explain in later chapters why that is a misnomer; suffice it here to say that I shall argue that the role these “kingdoms” played through the years in question has generally been overlooked. These essays are my attempt to recognize the essential role they played in a range of economic and cultural developments that affected the cultural and political history China thereafter. The Introduction and Chapters 2 and 3 are published here for the first time; Chapters 4 through 7 and the Conclusions were initially published as a series of three essays in the Journal of Song Yuan Studies (citations in text). I present them here with minor modifications to limit repetition; most notably, the third essay has been divided into two chapters (Chapters 6 and 7), and the individual conclusions of each essay have been consolidated in the final Conclusion. The initial inspiration behind these essays was an on-going series of work- shops on the Tang-Song Transition that have been convened by Robert Hymes (Columbia University) and Anna Shields (Princeton University). It has been a privilegetobeincludedinthesegatherings,buttheypresentedanhistorio- graphical problem to me. Although I had never explicitly sought to define my ownresearchintermsofthattransition,infactallmyworkhasbeenbuilt around the decades in question, where it has often played a central role in my discussions; a reader might check the numerous references to my own work amongtheworkscited.Itwas,therefore,strikingtomethattheearlypapersin the workshop largely jumped over the interregnum decades. The fact is, the interregnum is complex and often poorly or even completely undocumented, and there are topics that simply cannot be explored. I felt, however, that it was important to demonstrate that the century does offer a range of topics that are accessible, that it was in fact a time and place that saw important social and cultural change, and that as a consequence it should not be overlooked. It is rarely sufficient, I will argue, to identify a phenomenon in the Tang and present contrasts with the Song, and then to consider the job done. Scholars should look into the interregnum decades as much as the sources allow because so much of what we see taking shape in the Song had roots or evolution in the interregnum. These chapters are intended to affirm that point. viii Preface The text focuses on the south, which I define as the lands of the Yangtze River basin and below. This is a reflection of my prior years of scholarship on the history of southern Fujian province and the wider south from the late Tang through the Song; my background addresses the south. That is not to deny the important developments in the north, but they have been studied by other scholars: Wang Gungwu, Naomi Standen, and Richard Davis, for example, all of whom have worked on the interregnum north. But the north is another story for others to tell; its trajectory was in fact quite distinct from that of the south. I am confident that the southern focus of these essays does not detract from the wider importance of what they cover. A second point that requires clarification is what I define as the “inter- regnum century.” Ever since the earliest summaries of the years that sepa- rated the abdication of the last Tang emperor in 907 and 960 when Zhao Kuangyin (927–976) announced the Song dynasty, those 53 years have defined that separation. However, as I will emphasize, the Tang effectively ended in the 870s with the great rebellion associated with Huang Chao (835– 884). In 878 Huang abandoned his rebellion’s origins in the Huainan region and embarked on a cataclysmic sweep through the lands of the lower Yangtze River basin and then into the deepest south. In his trail he left a radically altered political landscape where the Tang court had almost no influence. Because these are the lands on which I will focus, I will cite 878 as the beginning of the interregnum. At the other end, Zhao Kuangyin, now the Emperor Taizu of the Song dynasty, began to systematically target the indi- vidual southern courts shortly after taking power, but it was a step-by-step process. Finally in 978 the last of the independent southern polities: the WuYue court based in Hangzhou and the QuanZhang autonomous satrapy in southern Fujian, formally submitted to the Song. Thus throughout the following discussion I will define the interregnum as a full century, 878–978. Lastly, a word about terms. The language of the world I will discuss was, of course, Middle Period Chinese.