Fire and Ice: Li Cunxu and the Founding of the Later Tang by Richard L. Davis (review)

Despite the great strides made in the last generation in Middle Period scholarship, there has been relatively little research in the Five Dynasties. It may be discouraging that work on this period has to be so reliant on official histories and other compiled historical works that have been widely regarded as combinations of formulaic recountings of the merely factual and partisan representations of heroes and villains, with problematic routes of transmission to boot. Happily, as evidenced by the second Middle Period Conference in Leiden in September 2017, there is currently an upsurge of interest in text-critical methods for work on the histories, including intimate textual comparison, narratology, and rigorous contextualization, with attention paid not only to transmission histories and general circumstances of production, but also to the texts' structuring as narratives and their rhetorical effects.¹ These approaches are long overdue and begin to bring us to a methodological par with our colleagues working on the history of medieval Europe.

Most of this Middle-Period text-critical work on the histories has focused on the texts themselves and the way they tell their stories, and has increased recognition of the constructed nature of historical writing, making these materials even more problematic as sources for doing actual history. Despite the headaches, the fresh perspectives provided by narrative-aware approaches offer methods for empirical analysis that are particularly valuable for under-studied and under-evidenced periods like the Five Dynasties, along with opportunities to question the received knowledge of the texts and to venture conceptual or even theoretical contributions as well. Richard Davis made a foray into unpacking authorial intentions regarding Five Dynasties political history in the introduction to his translation of Ouyang Xiu's Historical Records of the Five Dynasties.² Here Davis publishes the second of two volumes that come back to such newly difficult historical materials as sources for historical events.³

Davis's subject is Li Cunxu 李存勗 (885–926), who became the emperor known to us as Zhuangzong 莊宗 of the Later Tang 後唐 (r. 923–926).⁴ Cunxu was the founding ruler of the Later Tang dynasty (923–936): the second of the Five Dynasties, the first of three led by ruling houses ascribed with Shatuo Türk origins, and with a name and reign era names claiming the regime as a revival—indeed a continuation—of the great Tang dynasty (618–907) itself. Davis's brief preface explains that the book's goal is to advance student understanding by presenting a portrait that recovers Cunxu's "positive characteristics" from a hostile official record, without shying away from the complexities of his difficult personality (pp. x–xi). There is great promise here for using Li Cunxu as a case study to discuss topics such as military leadership, rulership in turbulent times, the everyday workings of sociopolitics, how leaders emerged, relations between the ruler and his senior followers in various combinations, court-regional relations in a post-Tang and Tang revival context, the ideas and practices people used or invented to try to achieve their ends, what those goals might have been, where the money came from and went to, relations with neighbors and others in the region, and the salience of Cunxu's ascription as Shatuo.

The histories for the Five Dynasties are good sources for such topics because these works are, above all, accounts of politics, although they are frequently less than transparent about motives, intentions, and agendas. Davis's method of tackling this is to go through the dynastic history annals, supplemented by the Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑, encyclopedic works like the Cefu yuangui 冊 府元龜, and sometimes by dynastic history biographies or other material, and to read between the lines in search of what was really going on. This requires the sinologist's intimate knowledge of the texts and of cultural/historical contexts, since the notoriously laconic...