Song Renzong's Court Landscape: Historical Writing and the Creation of a New Political Sphere (1022-1042)

Introduction

The emergence of a new kind of imperial sovereignty during the Song period is a crucial question for all the historians who acknowledge this moment as the beginning of autocratic rule and the birth of the bureaucratic state in China. Deng Xiaonan's research on the "Ancestors' Family Instructions" (zuzong jiafa 祖宗家法) prompted us to work together on the development of this concept in connection with Song ideas of imperial authority and sovereignty.¹ The expression "Ancestors' Family Instructions" was first used by Renzong (reign 1022-1063) in 1034, when he began his period of personal rule.² The young emperor and his ministers considered the "Ancestors' Instructions" to be a set of prohibitions and regulations for eradicating what they called "abuses" within the court and the administration after the first regency. From this time on, the "Instructions" incorporated several fundamental methods of governing and also of political decision making.³ This growing body of knowledge was shared by all subsequent Song emperors and their officials as "norms of the [Imperial] house", that is to say, a political "economy", whose Greek etymology would equate jia to oikos (house) and fa to nomos (law or norms). This political "economy" can be defined as follows: rules produced by the imperial Ancestors constrained both the emperor's own behavior and his management of the empire. At the same time, the process through which the rules were permanently construed and adapted put literati officials in a position to select and standardize the rules. Officials became guarantors of imperial sovereignty and political authority.

It is well-known that Renzong's court was under the growing influence of a new generation of officials, who for the most part came up through the examinations and openly presented themselves as moral men naturally bound together in factions (pengdang 朋黨).⁴ We know that the alignment of officials in factions and the clashes of these factions became one of the main features of political life for the remainder of the Song. Obviously, the emergence of factions was a major step in the formation of the Song bureaucracy. However, our analysis of "Instructions" also emphasizes the body of common knowledge shared by all officials, whatever their factional alignment.

In search of the mechanisms that produced the political culture on which the political "economy" of the court was based, I have followed the path opened by Robert Hartwell, proposing to treat "old models" or "precedents" (gushi 故事) as one of the main notions used in the political debates at the Song court by officials who searched the past for rules to govern the present.⁵ As historical experience revealed the impact of political actions, a good government had to earn the support of officials by linking its program to the appropriate historical context. Thus this collective search constituted a process capable of creating consensus on various issues among the emperor and his literati-officials: this is the other side of the emergence of factions.⁶ In other words, whatever their political options, the coalescence of literati into factions depended upon the development of their right to speak, and this evolving right was among the main factors accounting for the change in the structure of power that began from the second half of the Tang dynasty. Moreover, as Michael Mc Grath emphasizes, "the number of scholar-officials, drawn from the ranks of the literati, grew by virtue of the doubling of the size of the civil service in Jen-Tsung's reign".⁷

The growing influence of academicians and imperial attendants in this process is well-known, but is still frequently viewed from the unique perspective of the development of autocracy or imperial despotism.⁸ However, the intimacy of the academicians with the emperor and the knowledge they shared with him affected their collective vision of power. This fact was mentioned as early as the troubled period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms as a characteristic of late Tang rulership.⁹ On the one hand, the sovereign was permanently in search of counsel and political...