Organizer: Ruth Mostern, University of California, Merced

Chair: Naomi Standen, University of Newcastle, England

Discussant: Peter A. Lorge, Vanderbilt University

The study of the Tang-Song transition has usually been examined in light of the dramatic shift in almost every aspect of life, public, private and intellectual, between those two great dynasties. But in comparing the mature imperial polities, the more gradual evolution of underlying structures that took place during the 9th and 10th centuries is often overlooked. This panel will explore the physical and intellectual spaces opened up between the fall of the Tang and the consolidation of the Song, and the ways in which political and social fragmentation was understood and reorganized. The resolution of these centripetal forces required a deep-rooted ideological shift, which was later reflected in Song culture. Ruth Mostern demonstrates that the organizational changes undertaken at the most basic administrative level during the Five dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, and early Song, to create a unified empire were also reflections of shifting ideas of the balance of power within government. Lewis Mayo takes up the history of Dunhuang in a period in which it was very much on the edge of Sinitic culture, highlighting not only the effects of that culture on Dunhuang, but also the way in which Dunhuang’s cultural products have effected our modern concepts of the Tang-Song transition. Finally, Naomi Standen separates loyalty and culture on the borders of the Central Plains, showing not only that a different ideology existed in those areas, but also the critical role that the Liao played in developing that ideology.

"Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern": Political Geography and State Power in the Tang-Song Transition
Ruth Mostern, University of California, Merced

This paper follows Joseph Whitney's observation that political geography is the way that the state's "ideology...[is] translated into spatial organization." In particular it focuses on the territorial systems devised and maintained in the transition from Tang to Song. What territorial systems did the interregnum states inherit from the Tang? How did they maintain and describe their territory? What was the relationship between territory and other aspects of civil and military rule? The paper focuses on continuities and ruptures in the organization of empire during the transition from Tang to Song. The early Song shared objectives with its Five Dynasties predecessors, constraining the authority of Military Commissioners and expanding the power of the court and its prefects. At the same time, there were also differences between early Song and Five Dynasties practices. The Military Commissions were ultimately disbanded, a step never taken during the interregnum, and robust provincial routes allowed resources to circulate between the court and the rest of the realm. Furthermore, decisions made on a continental scale differed in many respects from the regional ones at play during the Five Dynasties. Finally, the paper looks at key geographical terms and concepts that took on new, civilianized meanings between Tang and Song: jun from army districts to civil prefectures, and zhen from garrisons to market towns. Overall, this paper reveals that a geography consistent with civil rule emerged gradually over the course of the tenth century.

Loyalties in the Borderlands: Changing Masters in the Early Tenth Century
Naomi Standen, University of Newcastle, England

The dominant 'narrative of nationalism' expects that allegiances should always correspond with cultural identity, and that dilemmas arise when this is not possible. Song loyalists certainly agonized about serving the Mongols, but in the early tenth century decisions about serving the Liao seem much less fraught. Trying to explain why Chinese served foreigners assumes such actions were always immoral. Trying to explain how it was possible to change masters is more productive. The contemporary concept was zhong, or loyalty. There were several types. Han Yanhui crossed to the young Liao dynasty and established there a Tang-style administration. Zhang Li crossed between regimes in North China, and made a name as a model of Confucian probity. But the contrast is not between one who departed for Liao and another who remained behind, but rather between different approaches to creating and exploiting opportunities when there were many choices of master. Han Yanhui’s concern to find secure employment followed one interpretation of zhong, while Zhang Li’s filial piety followed quite another. Both gained enormously when they chose to leave their first masters and seek employment elsewhere. Decoupling loyalty from culture makes it impossible to distinguish transfers of allegiance to Liao from transfers of allegiance to anywhere else, revealing that Han Yanhui and Zhang Li lived in the same borderland world, not on opposite sides of an insurmountable cultural boundary. Accordingly, the Liao become an essential element in the Tang-Song transition.

The Tang-Song Transition and the "Imagining" of Guiyi jun Dunhuang (848-1036)
Lewis Mayo, Leiden University, Netherlands

Argument about the structural transformations of the Sinitic world from the Tang to the Song have a rather complex relationship with the 9th and 10th century writings from Dunhuang. Dunhuang lay outside the general trajectories of the Sinitic societies of the Central Plains in this era, having become a colony of the Tibetan empire after the An Lushan rebellion, and falling under the authority of a local warlord government - the Guiyi jun – after 848. Guiyi jun Dunhuang nevertheless retained symbolic and material links to the Central Plains, and was influenced by those areas’ transformation from the 9th to the 11th centuries. This paper will do three things: it will examine how the Dunhuang writings have figured in the modern scholarly arguments about the Tang Song transition, it will examine the internal social and material structures of the Guiyi jun state in the light of the social, political and economic processes occurring in the larger East and Central Asian worlds in this era, and it will consider how the symbolic products of Central China affected the cultural and social order of the Guiyi jun, and how the cultural materials from Dunhuang illuminate the structural transitions taking place in Central China. In this I engage with three versions of historical "imagining": the process by which modern scholars imagine the worlds of a millennium ago; the question of social histories as structures of imagination (a la Georges Duby); and the idea of a specifically "imagined" unity - political, economic and cultural.

 De-nin D. Lee, Bowdoin College

  During the Tang-Song transition, sweeping changes occurred in the practice of painting. Figural and narrative compositions gave way to landscapes; religious, especially Buddhist, art lost ground to secular subjects; scholars increasingly took up the brush to paint, and their particular predilections for more literary modes of painting spread. Generally, artists working in the so called cultural centers of Shu, Nanjing, and the previous capitals of Luoyang and Chang'an are credited with those innovations; while artists working in the periphery, it was more or less assumed, figured little. But, changes in the content and direction of scholarship along with unexpected and intriguing archaeological discoveries have introduced new materials that challenge the assumptions and claims of the received view. We can no longer ignore the production of art from the periphery. This paper will look beyond the metropolitan cultural arenas to provincial sites, such as Buddhist cave temples in western China such as the Mogao caves near Dunhuang to Qidan Liao tombs in Inner Mongolia, to seek a more balanced and complete view. Additionally, it will adopt a bricolage approach to writing an alternative art history, one that captures more accurately the heterogeneous and admittedly sometimes fruitless experiments of this transitional period.