Strange Weather: Art, Politics, and Climate Change at the Court of Northern Song Emperor Huizong

This study addresses aspects of culture and politics at the court of the Northern Song emperor Huizong 徽宗 (1082–1135, r. 1100–1125) during the middle years of his reign, particularly around 1110. It describes and analyzes the complex relationship between imperial court politics and the ways in which the arts, such as painting and calligraphy, and “auspiciousness reporting” played crucial roles in determining the political fates of individuals in the imperial court. One particular relationship, between Huizong and his powerful grand councilor Cai Jing 蔡京 (1046–1126), is exceptionally revealing. Cai Jing was, in alternation, both a beneficiary and a victim of the vicissitudes of the court during an age in which climate change and a fatal disconnect between the emperor and his realm helped to seal the fate of the Northern Song dynasty.

The common historical judgment on these two characters is that Emperor Huizong was an ineffectual aesthete who knew little of what was going on in his court or his empire. The emperor was manipulated constantly by self-serving, more experienced and able courtiers, such as his grand councilor Cai Jing, who used his influence for his own security and profit.¹ This sterotyped portrait of the workings of the imperial court may be accurate in some respects, but it does not fully convey the complexity of the context and in some ways may even be misleading. This study joins other recent reappraisals of these two figures that challenge, or at least seek to complicate, the older paradigm.²

One way to reexamine the relationship between Huizong and Cai Jing is by considering the role that calligraphy and painting played as media through which the two found common interest. Both Huizong and Cai were connoisseurs and able practitioners of calligraphy and painting, and both seemed to have highly sophisticated knowledge, both historical and aesthetic, of these arts. Cai proved himself especially adept at using calligraphy and painting as a mode of communication between himself and the much younger emperor. Huizong, too, could participate in this game of signs, in which paintings and their attached colophons were used as a kind of secret language.³

An attendant stratagem in court communications was “auspiciousness” and “inauspiciousness” reporting and interpretation. Cai was an apt pupil of this Machiavellian practice: at first a victim of it, he later became an adept manipulator of auspiciousness reporting, using it viciously and effectively to maintain and further his position in court and also to marginalize his enemies. By examining these instances and their potent functions in determining court politics, we are provided with a singular portrait of a court where belief in the power of omens and signs in nature was endemic and was manipulated constantly by the political and moral interpretation of natural events such as the appearances of comets or sunspots or even uncommon weather phenomena.

A central topic in this paper is the Cold Period, ca. 1100–1190s, a climatic event that had drastic consequences for the economy and environment of the late Northern Song. In a world where natural disasters were indicative of Heaven’s displeasure with the imperial court, strange weather could be a menacing sign. Contrasts are drawn between the Cold Period and the so-called Medieval Warm Period (ca. 800–1000) that preceded it. Various issues emerge from the contrast: an increase in the number of snow-related themes in painting, for example, and shifting attitudes towards snow and snowfalls. Here I have chosen a single painting, Returning Boat on a Snowy River 雪江 歸棹圖 (Figs. 1–3), with its colophon by Cai Jing, as an illuminating text for reevaluating these issues.⁴

Cai Jing’s colophon to Huizong’s Returning Boat on a Snowy River (Fig. 4) gives an artist [Huizong], the title of the painting, and the date of the colophon [1110/3/1],⁵ and includes a poem referring to the painting (for translation see Appendix I).⁶ Huizong’s painting creates an image of a peculiar world: a pure, remote, and inaccessible landscape firmly in the grip of winter. The...