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Unbounded Loyalty is a welcome addition to the small shelf of books that treat tenth-century Chinese history as an important and consequential topic in its own right. Rather than viewing the period between the disintegration of the Tang and the consolidation of the Song as an interregnum between dynasties or as a waypoint along the path of a theorized Tang-Song transition, Naomi Standen periodizes the era of the Five Dynasties and Liao and explains how tenth-century events gave birth to new ideas and politics.
Unbounded Loyalty concerns the frontier between the Liao and the succession of regimes to its south, focusing on the careers of southerners who crossed the frontier to work for the Liao and on the negotiations between governments and individuals to define the terms by which they did so. Standen argues that over the course of the century between the fall of the Tang in 906 and the Treaty of Shanyuan between Song and Liao in 1005, a sharply defined border gradually came to divide two powerful regimes, replacing a fluid frontier that linked multiple and shifting centers of power. Relations of personal loyalty framed individual...