"The occupation of the northern half of the Chinese territories in the 1120s brought about a transformation in political communication in the south that had lasting implications for imperial Chinese history. By the late eleventh century, the Song court no longer dominated the production of information about itself and its territories. Song literati gradually consolidated their position as producers, users, and discussants of court gazettes, official records, archival compilations, dynastic histories, military geographies, and maps. This development altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the imperial period. Based on a close reading of reader responses to official records and derivatives and on a mapping of literati networks, the author further proposes that the twelfth-century geopolitical crisis resulted in a lasting literati preference for imperial restoration and unified rule. Hilde De Weerdt makes an important intervention in cultural and intellectual history by examining censorship and publicity together. In addition, she reorients the debate about the social transformation and local turn of imperial Chinese elites by treating the formation of localist strategies and empire-focused political identities as parallel rather than opposite trends."

Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.

From its first designation as temporary capital in 1138, the city of Hangzhou (then called Lin’an) was deemed representative of the diminished empire of the Song (960–1279), in all its contradictory aspects. The exquisite beauty of the city confirmed its destiny to become an imperial residence, but it also portended its fatal corruption. The wealth and ease of Hangzhou epitomized the vigor of the southern empire as well as its oblivious decadence. The city was paramount and feeble, aweinspiring and threatened, the most admired city in the civilized world and a disgrace to the dynastic founders. Rather than perpetuating the debate about the merit of these polemical judgments, the contributors of Senses of the City treat them as expressions of their historical moment, revealing of ideological conviction or aesthetic preference, rather than of historical truth. By reading the sources as expressions of individual experience and political conviction, the contributors defy the impassioned rhetoric of past generations in order to recover the solid ground of historical evidence. Leading scholars of the field, including Beverly Bossler, Stephen West, and Martin Powers have produced essays that relate changes in literary convention to shifts in territorial boundaries, and analyze writing, painting, dance, and music as means by which individual literati placed themselves in time and space. The contributors reestablish the historical connections between writing and meaningful action, between text and world, between the sources and their own words, and between the page and the senses. Their efforts to retrieve the sounds, sights, and smells of Hangzhou from Southern Song texts replicate, in reverse direction, the attempts of twelfth and thirteenthcentury authors to devise effective tropes and suitable genres that would preserve their living impressions of the city in writing.

During the Song (960-1279), all educated Chinese men traveled frequently, journeying long distances to attend school and take civil service examinations. They crisscrossed the country to assume government posts, report back to the capital, and return home between assignments and to attend to family matters. Based on a wide array of texts, Transformative Journeys analyzes the impact of travel on this group of elite men and the places they visited. In the first part of the book, Cong Ellen Zhang considers the practical aspects of travel during the Song in the context of state mobilization of and assistance to government travelers, including the infrastructure of waterways and highways, the bureaucratic procedures entailed in official travel, and the means of transport and types of lodging. The second part of the book focuses on elite activities on the road, especially the elaborate farewell banquets, welcoming ceremonies, and visits to famous places. Zhang argues convincingly that abundant travel experience became integral to Song elite identity and status, greatly strengthening the social and cultural coherence of the practitioners. In promoting their experience of traveling across a large empire, Song elite men firmly established their position as the country’s political, social, and cultural leaders. The literary compositions and physical traces they left behind also formed an overlapping web of collective memories, continually enhancing local pride and defining the place of various localities in the cultural geography of the country. Transformative Journeys sheds new light on the nature of Chinese literati, their dominance of culture and society, and China’s social and cultural integration. Those interested in premodern China and travel literature will find a wealth of material previously unavailable to Western readers.

The trade between peoples of differinf cultures, from the ancient world to the commercial revolution.

"Opening up questions about women's lives, about gender, about why we read history at all and how we write it, Patricia Buckley Ebrey has made The Inner Quarters a place we need to enter."—from the Foreword

The Southern Tang was one of China’s minor dynasties and one of the great states in China in the tenth century. Although often regarded as one of several states preceding the much better known Song dynasty (960-1279), the Southern Tang dynasty was in fact the key state in this period, preserving cultural values and artefacts from the former great Tang dynasty (618-907) which were to form the basis of Song rule, and thereby presenting the Song with a direct link to the Tang and it traditions. Drawing mainly on primary Chinese sources, this is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive overview of the Southern Tang, and full coverage of military, cultural and political history in the period. It focuses on a successful, albeit short-lived, attempt to set up an independent regional state in the modern provinces of Jiangxi and Jiangsu, and establishes the Southern Tang dynasty in its own right. It follows the rise of the Southern Tang state to become the predominant claimant of the Tang heritage and the expansionist policies of the second ruler culminating in the occupation and annexation of the two of the Southern Tang’s neighbours, Min (Fujian) and Chu (Hunan). Finally the narrative describes the decline of the dynasty under its last ruler, the famous poet Li Yu, and its ultimate surrender to the Song dynasty.