The Chinese Dynasties:

Part 8
 

SUNG DYNASTY: 960 AD

In 960 the Sung Dynasty had begun. A military leader, Chao K'uang Yin seized power and proclaimed the Sung Dynasty. Within a few years he and his officials had restored peace. The Sung were wiser than the other dynasties because they knew how the other dynasties had fallen when the governors became too powerful. Instead they did not split up the land into sections. China was under the emperors hands only. They re-established Confucianism as the master philosophy and reunified most of China Proper.

The Sung period divides into two phases: Northern Song (960-1127) and Southern Song (1127-1279). The division was caused by the forced abandonment of north China in 1127 by the Song court, which could not push back the nomadic invaders.

The founders of the Sung dynasty built an effective centralized bureaucracy staffed with civilian scholar-officials. Regional military governors and their supporters were replaced by centrally appointed officials. This system of civilian rule led to a greater concentration of power in the emperor and his palace bureaucracy than had been achieved in the previous dynasties.

The Sung dynasty is notable for the development of cities not only for administrative purposes but also as centers of trade, industry, and maritime commerce. The landed scholar-officials, sometimes collectively referred to as the gentry, lived in the provincial centers alongside the shopkeepers, artisans, and merchants. A new group of wealthy commoners--the mercantile class--arose as printing and education spread, private trade grew, and a market economy began to link the coastal provinces and the interior. Landholding and government employment were no longer the only means of gaining wealth and prestige.

Culturally, the Sung refined many of the developments of the previous centuries. Included in these refinements were not only the Tang ideal of the universal man, who combined the qualities of scholar, poet, painter, and statesman, but also historical writings, painting, calligraphy, and hard-glazed porcelain. Song intellectuals sought answers to all philosophical and political questions in the Confucian Classics. This renewed interest in the Confucian ideals and society of ancient times coincided with the decline of Buddhism, which the Chinese regarded as foreign and offering few practical guidelines for the solution of political and other mundane problems.
 

The Sung Neo-Confucian philosophers, finding a certain purity in the originality of the ancient classical texts, wrote commentaries on them. The most influential of these philosophers was Zhu Xi (1130-1200), whose synthesis of Confucian thought and Buddhist, Taoist, and other ideas became the official imperial ideology from late Song times to the late nineteenth century. As incorporated into the examination system, Zhu Xi's philosophy evolved into a rigid official creed, which stressed the one-sided obligations of obedience and compliance of subject to ruler, child to father, wife to husband, and younger brother to elder brother. The effect was to inhibit the societal development of premodern China, resulting both in many generations of political, social, and spiritual stability and in a slowness of cultural and institutional change up to the nineteenth century. Neo-Confucian doctrines also came to play the dominant role in the intellectual life of Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.

While the Sung was successful, events in distant lands showed the end and destruction of the dynasty.  In 1206 an assembly of Mongolian tribes at Karakorum and they agreed to unite under Genghis Khan. The Mongol leader Genghis Khan was one of the great conquerors in the history of the world.

 He was the son of Yesugei, leader of a small tribe in northeastern Mongolia. Yesugei was poisoned when Temujin (Genghis Khan's name as a youth) was about 10 years old, and the orphaned boy later entered the service of Toghril Khan, the most powerful Mongol ruler of the time. In 1215 Genghis Khan captured Beijing in 1279. Kublai Khan, his grandson, completed what they called The Quest of China and then he ended the Sung Dynasty.

Continue to Liao Dynasty.......