China's Southern Tang Dynasty, 937-976 by Johannes L. Kurz, and: Power and Politics in Tenth-Century China: The Former Shu Regime by Hongjie Wang (review)

Suddenly, after eons of neglect, the history of the tenth century is hot! In addition to the opening chapters of the recently-published Song volume of the Cambridge History of China¹ work such as Richard Davis's translation of Ouyang Xiu's New History of the Five Dynasties, Naomi Standen's Unbounded Loyalty: Frontier Crossing in Liao China, and my own Portrait of a Community: Society, Culture, and the Structures of Kinship in the Mulan River Valley (Fujian) from the Late Tang through the Song have put the interregnum era that divides the Tang and Song dynasties front and center.² Now we have two books that take a different approach. Johannes Kurz, in his study of Southern Tang (Nan Tang 南唐), based in the Jiangnan region defined largely by modern Jiangxi province, and Hongjie Wang in his on Former Shu (Qian Shu 前蜀) in Sichuan focus not on the period within a holistic framework or on broader themes of cultural evolution but on the histories of individual states. And this, in turn, provides an ideal moment not only to consider the two books in question but also the broader question of why this sudden interest in the period has emerged. Let me start with the latter.

At one level, the place of the interregnum in the broader trajectory of Chinese history is easy enough to define. In 907, the last Tang emperor, the unfortunate Li Zhu 李柷 who ruled as the child emperor Aidi 哀帝 in the last years of the dynasty (892-908; r. 904-907), was deposed at the hands of Zhu Wen 朱溫 (852-912) when the latter usurped his throne and the Tang dynasty ended; Zhu had the deposed emperor murdered a year later. Tradition has long dated the end of the interregnum to 960 when Zhao Kuangyin 趙匡 胤 (927-976, reigned as Song Taizu 960-976) usurped the throne from the Latter Zhou, last of the Tang successor states in the Yellow River basin, and proclaimed the new Song dynasty. In between the nominal imperial unity of all the territory south of the Mongolian grasslands and east of the Tibetan plateau broke down, only to be almost entirely restored by Zhao Kuangyin. But in fact that unity had collapsed well before the traditional date of 907 and took a good bit longer than 960 to restore.

The unraveling of the Tang can easily be traced back to the mid-eighth century rebellion of An Lushan 安祿山, following which the court was never able to fully reassert control over much of the traditional heartland. Yet many would loudly and with much justification object that is too early to date the onset of the interregnum—despite the similar challenge to dynastic legitimacy of the two eras, the forces at work in the latter half of the eighth century were not identical to those manifested in the breakdown of the tenth. As Robert Somers demonstrated in his concluding chapter to the Tang volume of the Cambridge History³ a series of rebellions that marked the mid-ninth century collectively emphasized the increasingly tenuous nature of the court's position and more nearly anticipated the looming collapse. No doubt the real onset of the interregnum, however, began with the rebellion identified most prominently with Huang Chao 黃巢 that turned the empire upside down and inside out for a decade (874-884). As traumatic as An Lushan's rebellion had been, it came at a time when the Tang court still had a measure of legitimacy. The rebellion irrevocably undermined that legitimacy, but it had been there and it gave the Tang a cushion that allowed it to endure. By the 870s, however, as a result of decades of compromise with...