Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms

“The Usurper’s Empty Names”: Spatial Organization and State Power in the Tang-Song Transition

“The Usurper’s Empty Names”: Spatial Organization and State Power in the Tang-Song Transition Ruth Mostern Alas! Since the Three Eras, there have been none who have not divided the land in order to govern. —Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072)1 Introduction Geographer Joseph Whitney has observed in China: Area, Administration and Nation Building, that the way that the Chinese state has organized its rule geographically is the way that its “ideology … [is] translated into spatial organization.”2 From its inception, the evolving political practices of the Chinese empire were reflected in changing geographical arrangements . The territory of the empire was always partitioned into counties, prefectures, provinces, defense commands and other spatially delimited jurisdictions. However, historically, the type, number, distribution, and responsibilities of these units were fluid. During the 300 years of the Song 宋 dynasty (960–1276 CE), for instance, there were over 1,000 occasions when counties or prefectures were created or abolished, or when counties were moved from the jurisdiction of one prefecture to another.3 Historians can use the changing map of the empire as a way to understand ideologies of state power. Analyzing spatial organization allows historians to understand how the Chinese court aspired to govern a continent-sized agrarian empire—or failed to do so—at a time when communication with its most distant officials could take months, and when the potential revenue available for war and governance was limited almost exclusively to what could be extracted from people who worked the land. In particular, this paper concerns the period from the middle of the Tang 唐 dynasty (618–907 CE) in the mid-eighth century, through the 5D10K_main text_27Jun.indd 125 22/07/2011 5:24 PM 126 · Ruth Mostern dissolution of centralized rule at the end of the Tang and the development of regional regimes in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (Wudai Shiguo 五代十國) period (907–960 CE), until the reconstruction of a single Chinese empire by the Song. Contributing to a tradition of studies of the Tang-Song transition, this investigation of China’s middle-period spatial organization depicts a transformation from a highly militarized Tang empire to a civilian geography by the reign of Zhenzong 真宗, the third Song emperor, at the turn of the eleventh century. It focuses in detail on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, which played the central role in that transition. As the Tang weakened under the pressure of foreign and domestic rebellion against imperial suzerainty, the apparatus of largely military commissions that had overlaid the civil spatial organization since the beginning of the dynasty came to overwhelm it entirely. The administrative hierarchy of provincial circuit (dao 道)-prefecture (fu 府 or zhou 州)-county (xian 縣), units whose officials were deputed from the court and transferred regularly, became subsumed under the architecture of jurisdictions such as Military Commissions (fanzhen 藩鎮), Area Commands (dudu fu 都督府), and Surveillance Commissions (guanchashi 觀察使) with increasingly autonomous commands. Taxes largely ceased to be remitted to the court as resources were commandeered by local officers. After the fall of the Tang in 906, the independent-minded Commissions gradually became answerable to regional kings and dynasts (often Commissioners themselves prior to their capture of the capital). During the fifty years of the Five Dynasties era, the new courts gradually reasserted direct control over the territory of the realm by empowering places with loyal officials—prefectures and newly established garrisons (zhen 鎮)—in their midst while constraining the capacities of the Commissions for independent action. The process culminated in the Song, as the new regime unified the empire under its own rule. By the turn of the eleventh century, the Song court had performed three crucial tasks aimed at creating centralized civil rule. First, they dismantled Military Commissions and other autonomous and militarized spaces that overlay the counties and prefectures. Second, they created robust provincial circuits (lu 路) responsible for transmitting revenue to the capital. Finally, they founded and abolished counties and prefectures in different parts of the empire so that loyal officials and troops, and accessible tax and labor resources, would be located where they were needed the most in light of 5D10K_main text_27Jun.indd 126 22/07/2011 5:24 PM “The Usurper’s Empty Names” · 127 the priorities of this, the first effectively centralized—if still fragile— empire since the eighth century. In so doing, they overturned three hundred years of established administrative practice and created a new kind of territorial organization. The epigraph of this paper...