Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
The publication of the first Song volume of the Cambridge History of China is a landmark in the study of Song history. Denis Twitchett began soliciting chapters for the volume in the 1970s. Although, sadly, he did not live to see the book in print, he had the foresight to bring Paul Jakov Smith into the project as coeditor in 2001. The result of their work is a fat volume covering the political and military history of the three and a half centuries from the end of the Tang through the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song. It complements volume 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, on the Song's northern neighbors, published in 1994, and the forthcoming volume 5, part 2, which will have essays on Song government, financial administration, armies, legal system, and examination system, as well as on intellectual, social, and economic change. All scholars of the Song period will want copies of these three volumes on a handy shelf, where they can turn to them again and again.
Ten authors contributed to this volume. Naomi Standen covers the Five Dynasties and Hugh Clark the south during the same period. The Northern Song is covered in four chapters: Lau Nap-yin and Huang K'uan-chung take on the first three reigns (960-1022); Michael McGrath covers Renzong (1023-63) and Yingzong (1064-67); Paul Smith provides a long analysis of Shenzong's reign and the New Policies (1068-86); and Ari Levine covers the remainder of the Northern Song and its fall (1087-1127). The Southern Song is covered by Tao Jing-shen (Gaozong's reign, 1127-62), Gong Wei Ai (Xiaozong's reign, 1162-89), and Richard Davis (the last four reigns and the fall of the Southern Song, 1190-1279). All of the chapters are full of insights and inferences that make them much more than handy retellings of the narratives in the Song shi and other basic sources. The citation of a wide range of primary and secondary sources makes the chapters useful starting points for further research on many issues. The book is enhanced by thirty-two excellent maps that regularly show the location of the places that figure in the narrative.
Most readers will turn to individual chapters when they become relevant to a research project,...