In The Making of Song Dynasty History: Sources and Narratives, 960–1279 CE, Charles Hartman offers an erudite, probing study of “the major sources that survive as vestiges of official dynastic historiography” (xiii). These major sources are the Recovered Draft of the Song State Compendium (Song huiyao jigao) put together by Xu Song (1781–1848), the Long Draft Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror That Aids Administration (Xu zizhi tongjian changbian) by Li Tao (1115–1184), the Chronological Record of Important Events since 1127 (Jianyan yilai xinian yaolu) by Li Xinchuan (1167–1244), and the Song History (Song shi) supervised by Toghto (1314–1355). Hartman explains that these four surviving major sources were the products of an ideological contest between literati and the court: “In essence, history for the monarchy was a vehicle to exert its legitimacy and strengthen political control. For the literati, history was a source of rhetorical precedent for use in political dialogue, and much of that dialogue was directed against imperial expressions of absolute authority” (8). More specifically, Hartman argues, the extant works promote Confucian literati governance (or: Confucian institutionalist governance), in which the court shared authority with its officials, and they oppose the court's tendency toward technocratic governance, in which the court asserted strict vertical control by means of ad hoc appointments of technical specialists. The surviving remnants of Song official dynastic history, therefore, all share a distinct ideological inflection, as they all use the past to demonstrate the superior legitimacy, the superior efficacy, and the superior morality of Confucian literati governance.
The chapters of The Making of Song History trace the development of this ideological inflection from collections of precedents to historical narratives, and from an implicitly moral, documentary approach to an explicitly moral, pedagogic approach. Chapter 1, “The Song State Compendium,” immediately illustrates the strengths of Hartman's methods. Combining bibliography, philology, institutional history, quantitative analysis, and post-structuralist theory, Hartman demonstrates that “the modern Recovered Draft [of the Song State Compendium] reconstructs a specialized subset of the primary Song huiyao collections: today's Song huiyao is a comprehensive yet condensed distillation begun by Zhao Ruyu [1140–1196] in 1180, as continued under Zhang Congzu [d. 1208] between 1204 and 1210, and as supplemented by Li Xinchuan in the mid-1230s” (40). This reconstructed distillation, moreover, “does not present—and … the compilers of its sources probably were never able to present, nor ever intended to present—a consistent, chronologically balanced coverage of Song history” (44). Rather, like the successive state compendia that its compilers rewrote and condensed, the Recovered Draft collects “dynastic actions and precedents” (24) for the convenient reference of officials who drafted government documents. Like most earlier state compendia, moreover, it selects precedents that support literati governance, favoring the ideology of literati prominent during the Qingli (1041–1048) and Yuanyou (1086–1093) periods, attributing that ideology to the founding emperors, and opposing the New Policies of Wang Anshi (1021–1086) and the autocratic councilors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Hartman's purpose in documenting and analyzing the biases of the Recovered Draft is not to discourage its use as an historical source, but rather to explain its strengths and weaknesses, so that “modern students of Song history can better utilize the unique riches of the collection” (47).
Like the compilers of the Song state compendia, Li Tao did not devise his Long Draft Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror That Aids Administration as a narrative history, but “as a ‘resource guide’ for policy formulation” (49). Although he presented the Long Draft to the emperor, he intended it as a collection of precedents to support officials in their advocacy of Confucian literati governance. Chapter 2, “Li Tao and the Long Draft,” explains that Li Tao during his official career opposed the autocratic councilor Qin Gui (1090–1155) and urged Emperor Xiaozong (r. 1162–1189) to honor the precedents allegedly set by the founding Emperor Taizu (r. 960–976), to increase the number of remonstrators, and to reduce the number and influence of military officers. His Long Draft, likewise, urged the emperor to “take Taizu as his mentor when planning for the future and Renzong [r. 1022–1063] as his model when managing officials” (85). Li Tao divided his Long Draft at the year 1067, treating the materials before 1067 as illustrative of the sagely policies of the founding emperors and the materials after 1067 as evidence of the disasters that inevitably occurred when Wang Anshi and his successors violated those policies. The two halves of the Long Draft thus create, by positive and negative examples, what Hartman calls “the Taizu-Qingli-Yuanyou axis of positive political value” (87). Li Tao manipulated the scarce documentation of Taizu's reign to align it with the ideology of the Qingli and Yuanyou periods, pretending against his better knowledge that “the founders ultimately would support a civil-based governance in which the chief councilors, within a balanced political system, exercised authority over the state's civil, military, and financial affairs” (89).
Similar to Li Tao, who had begun his Long Draft as a private work in Sichuan in opposition to the reign of the autocratic councilor Qin Gui, Li Xinchuan wrote his Chronological Record of Important Events since 1127 as a private commoner in Sichuan, in opposition to the reign of the autocratic councilor Han Tuozhou (1152–1207). Chapter 3, “Li Xinchuan and the Chronological Record,” demonstrates that in all his historical works, both private and public, Li Xinchuan sought to verify the facts and correct the errors he found in the historical records, to organize these facts “into small, but definitive, narratives,” and to organize these narratives “into larger patterns of meaning” (110). The narrative of his Chronological Record extends the Taizu-Qingli-Yuanyou axis into the reigns of Emperor Gaozong (r. 1127–1162) and his successors, as he upholds the Northern Song as a model for the Restoration and promotes “an institutional approach to governance that emphasized control by civil officials with jinshi backgrounds, administering agencies according to fixed principles … whose origins Li traced ultimately to the Song founders” (142).
Chapter 4, “The Daoxue Historians,” does not discuss a major work of official dynastic historiography, but analyzes instead the digests that adherents of daoxue (the fundamentalist form of Confucianism sometimes called “Neo-Confucianism”) made of works such as Sima Guang's Comprehensive Mirror That Aids Administration (Zizhi tongjian) and Li Xinchuan's Chronological Record. In such digests, Hartman discerns “a move away from an archival or documentary approach that viewed historical works as guides to bureaucratic practice, and toward a pedagogic approach that viewed them as guides to moral behavior” (148). This pedagogic approach foregrounded the Taizu-Qingli-Yuanyou axis to an even greater extent than Li Tao and Li Xinchuan had done, and turned it into a “grand allegory”—an account of a cosmic struggle between those who upheld the benevolent policies attributed to the founding emperors and those who supported the New Policies of Wang Anshi and their later permutations.
In chapter 5, “The Song History,” Hartman argues that “the Yuan compilers took the narratives of Song history they found in the daoxue historians of late Song as guidelines to ‘cut and paste’ and thus to shape the official Song sources, which largely predated the thirteenth century, into the official history of the dynasty” (174). This resulted in “a picture of Song history as a series of alternating political and social cycles in which positive and negative forces compete to dominate one [an]other” (206), with the New Policies of Wang Anshi again as the historical turning point. Like the histories compiled during the Song, moreover, the Song History served contemporary political interests: the grand allegory of Song history justified Toghto's displacement in 1340 of Bayan the Merkid (1280–1340), a powerful Mongol nativist who had dominated the court since 1333, and his own subsequent promotion of Confucian institutions and literati governance. Hartman suggests, in fact, that the compilers of the Song History may have intended specific analogies between Sima Guang and Toghto, between Wang Anshi and Bayan, and between the renewal of literati governance in 1086 and Toghto's reestablishment of Confucian institutions in 1340.
Chapters 6 through 10 elaborate the “grand allegory” that daoxue historiography produced during the late Song and the Yuan. Chapter 6 argues that memorials contributed to the formation of historical narratives by their appeals to the “policies of the ancestors” (zuzong zhi fa) and by their use of precedents that aligned with the Taizu-Qingli-Yuanyou axis of positive political value. Chapter 7 explains the concept of “grand allegory,” and the next three chapters describe the development of each of the three thematic clusters that defined this allegory: the representation of the reign of Emperor Renzong as the epitome of literati governance (chapter 8), the transformation of Emperor Taizu from a soldier into a sage (chapter 9), and the designation of “a lineage of evil ministers who suppressed public opinion and harmed the state” (326), such as Qin Gui and Han Tuozhou and, in some versions, Wang Anshi (chapter 10). The final chapter, “The Rhythms of Song History,” reminds the reader that the surviving works of Song historiography were the products of the cyclical struggle that these works describe, as they were written in response to periods of autocracy and repression. This observation is important, not only because it warns readers of the ideological nature of these works, but also because it belies the narratives these works put forward about the triumph of literati governance during the Song. In a companion volume (now in press) to the present book, Hartman will recount the contest between Confucian and non-Confucian practices of governance during the Song, and thus reconstruct the periods of technocratic governance that daoxue historiography has misrepresented or omitted.
Because much of the interest and merit of The Making of Song Dynasty History lies in the precise, telling philological detail of Hartman's analysis, a summary of its chapters and arguments can give only a general impression of its admirable accomplishments. Details matter in this book. By patient philological analysis, Hartman identifies the layers of source texts that compose the compendia and digests, including source texts that do not survive and are known only from descriptions. He counts the number of entries about successive reigns in the major historical sources of the Song in order to show the increasing disproportion between their treatment of the reigns favored by advocates of Confucian literati governance and their treatment of the reigns of emperors and officials opposed to such governance. He proves with greater authority than any previous historian that many cherished anecdotes and tropes of Song political history—such as Emperor Taizu's retirement of his generals over a cup of wine at a banquet and the correlation of the political character of a reign period to the personal character of the reigning emperor—were invented to create false precedents for advocates of literati governance.
In sum, Charles Hartman demonstrates exemplary precision in his methods and in his arguments. With a combination of traditional and innovative approaches, he shows the narrative and ideological cohesion of voluminous historical works and exposes as a fiction what centuries of historians have accepted as fact. Readers should discover the riches of Hartman's research and analysis for themselves, whether they are interested in the political and intellectual history of the Song dynasty or in history and historiography more generally. For the study of the Song dynasty, certainly, The Making of Song Dynasty History is an indispensable book.
