Chair: Conrad Schirokauer, Columbia University

This panel examines the role of reading and writing history in Song political culture (960–1279). The three papers are intended to stimulate discussion about three questions concerning the relationship between history and political culture. What does the examination of the composition and publication of private histories tell us about the relationship between official and private historiography with regard to authorship, audience, circulation and genre? What administrative and political goals does the interpretation of history serve? How do we explain the ideological and theoretical frameworks underlying the historical narratives of historians and essayists?

The first paper examines the relation of Su Che’s private history to formats of official historiography. This paper further interprets Su Che’s historical method as an effort to synthesize analytical and commentatorial approaches used in other scholarly fields. The second paper analyzes the political uses of historical analogy among Song literati through a discussion of their divergent interpretations of the career of the Han minister Huo Guang. The third paper addresses the question why private treatises on institutional history became the subject of controversy among literati and the object of a government ban. This paper discusses changes in the publication of private and official historical texts and examines the political uses of private institutional histories.

In the second part of the panel discussion, the two discussants and the chairperson, who have all worked on Song historical writing and political history, will engage the presenters and the audience in a discussion on the questions outlined above.

Chia-Fu Sung, Harvard University

Hardly any modern historian of ancient China has ever referred to Su Che’s Gushi (History of Antiquity) as a source of information or inspiration. Su Che’s history, completed in 1095, did not reveal any new archival material, nor did it introduce any generic novelty, at least from a modern point of view. Indeed, it is fair to characterize the text as nothing more than the rewriting of the pre-Han portion of texts from the annals and biographies in Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of a Historian). In this paper, I intend to take this phenomenon of rewriting as a starting point to explore the logic of historiographical operation in the Northern Song.

My basic observation is that writing history was first and foremost a process of historiographical negotiation among various received texts from and/or on the past. Specifically, between Sima Guang’s radical return to the somewhat archaic format of the chronicle and historical commentators’ loyalty to the dominant genre of "annals-cum-biographies" (jizhuan), Su Che was looking for a way "in-between" to synthesize his life-long scholarship concerning Antiquity. History of Antiquity, in this context, can and should be viewed as the consummation of his work on the classics and the histories.

Xiao-bin Ji, Rutgers University

Northern Song (960–1126) scholar-officials often used historical analogies to express their ideas and to persuade others in political debates. The way they cited history tells us as much about their political thought and the politics of their time as about their historical understanding. This paper analyzes this phenomenon by studying the Northern Song use of Huo Guang’s (d. 68) career.

After the death of Emperor Wudi of Han, Huo made crucial contributions to the stability of the empire. At the same time, he was overbearing to his rulers and colleagues. After his death, Emperor Xuandi distanced himself from the Huo family, and eventually executed most of its members for conspiracy.

Northern Song scholar-officials drew on different aspects of Huo Guang’s life to express different views on the relationship between the ruler and the minister and to reach different political goals. They variously viewed Huo as a paragon of loyal protection of the throne, a case of a powerful minister threatening his ruler, a warning of the danger of excessive assertiveness to a minister’s family, or an example showing that loyalty can ensure the safety of an overbearing official—at least until his own death. In the historically-conscious culture of the Northern Song, history was a mirror to the present. Yet this mirror had many reflections, each showing a different political perspective.

Hilde De Weerdt, University of California, Berkeley

In 1196, the Song government issued a ban on two collections of essays on institutional history, Chen Fuliang’s Awaiting Reception and Ye Shi’s Presented Scrolls. The ban indicated that both collections exercised tremendous influence among examination candidates, but did not lay out the government’s ideological objections to the ideas expressed in the treatises. Even though the current government was challenged by large sections of the political and cultural elite, the ban on these institutional histories was supported by some of the most powerful political allies of Chen Fuliang and Ye Shi. This paper discusses the rationale behind the ban and the support for it by examining the historiographical context of Chen’s and Ye’s institutional histories and the political and social conditions surrounding their publication.

The collections marked a breakthrough in Chinese historiography on institutions. This paper discusses the changes in format, authorship, audience and circulation exemplified in these two works. It relates these changes to developments in examination culture during the twelfth century.