In the nine original essays collected in this volume, cultural historians, literary scholars, an art historian, and a historical musicologist set out to recover the sights, sounds, and smells of the Southern Song Empire (1127-1279) and its capital at Hangzhoun (then called Lin'a…
The city of Hangzhou symbolized all of the contradictions of the declining Song Empire (960-1279). It was paramount and feeble, awe-inspiring and threatened, the most admired city and a disgrace to its dynastic founders. Rather than debate the merit of these polemical judgments,…
"In this major new study, Nicolas Tackett proposes that the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) witnessed both the maturation of an East Asian inter-state system and the emergence of a new worldview and sense of Chinese identity among educated elites. These developments together ha…
Richard Davis has expertly crafted a stirring narrative of the last years of Song, focusing on loyalist resistance to Mongol dominion. Davis challenges the traditional view of Song martyrdom as a simple expression of political duty by examining the phenomenon instead from the pe…
Richard Davis has expertly crafted a stirring narrative of the last years of Song, focusing on loyalist resistance to Mongol dominion. Davis challenges the traditional view of Song martyrdom as a simple expression of political duty by examining the phenomenon instead from the pe…
States are inherently and fundamentally geographical. Sovereignty is based on control of territory. This book uses Song China to explain how a pre-industrial regime organized itself spatially in order to exercise authority. On more than a thousand occasions, the Song court found…