Emperor Huizong

Patricia Buckley Ebrey

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674727687
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

China was the most advanced country in the world when Huizong ascended the throne in 1100 CE. In his eventful twenty-six year reign, the artistically-gifted emperor guided the Song Dynasty toward cultural greatness. Yet Huizong would be known to posterity as a political failure who lost the throne to Jurchen invaders and died their prisoner. The first comprehensive English-language biography of this important monarch, Emperor Huizong is a nuanced portrait that corrects the prevailing view of Huizong as decadent and negligent. Patricia Ebrey recasts him as a ruler genuinely ambitious—if too much so—in pursuing glory for his flourishing realm.After a rocky start trying to overcome political animosities at court, Huizong turned his attention to the good he could do. He greatly expanded the court's charitable ventures, founding schools, hospitals, orphanages, and paupers' cemeteries. An accomplished artist, he surrounded himself with outstanding poets, painters, and musicians and built palaces, temples, and gardens of unsurpassed splendor. What is often overlooked, Ebrey points out, is the importance of religious Daoism in Huizong's understanding of his role. He treated Daoist spiritual masters with great deference, wrote scriptural commentaries, and urged his subjects to adopt his beliefs and practices. This devotion to the Daoist vision of sacred kingship eventually alienated the Confucian mainstream and compromised his ability to govern.Readers will welcome this lively biography, which adds new dimensions to our understanding of a passionate and paradoxical ruler who, so many centuries later, continues to inspire both admiration and disapproval.

Notes

1. Growing Up in the Palace, 1082–1099

Epigraph: CBSB 20.707.

1. Huizong is his posthumous name, not what he would have been called in his lifetime. His personal name was Ji, and his family name was Zhao. As a prince he would have been called by a succession of titles, the best-known of which is Prince of Duan, and after becoming emperor by terms equivalent to Your Majesty or Emperor.

2. Since Zhezong was born in the last month of 1076, he was already in his second year (two sui) when he was thirty days old. When he died twenty-three years later, he was twenty-five sui, but only twenty-three and one month in years. See the section titled Note on Ages, Dates, and Other Conventions at the beginning of this book.

3. DJMHL 1.30.

4. DJMHL 6.173; ZHWLXY 28.1a–6b; 33.3a–6b; 83.2b–6a; 100.4b–8a.

5. See DJMHLZ 1.30–31, 6.167, 10.243; Zhou Baozhu 1992:31. On the length of bays in various types of construction, see Q. Guo 1998:8.

6. THJWZ 4.168–169; Soper 1951:66; LQGZ 54; Bush and Shih 1985:187.

7. CYLY 1.21–22; ZHWLXY, passim.

8. S. Jang 1992; Ogawa 1981.

9. LQGZ 53–54; Bush and Shih 1985:189–190.

10. Ying Yan 1991; Hartwell 1988:42–43.

11. On clerks, see J. Liu 1967b, Umehara 1985:501–548. On technical specialists, see Zhang Bangwei 2005:98–141.

12. On their numbers, see Zhu Ruixi 1994 and Ebrey 2003a.

13. HSSCGY 8.1a–2a.

14. SS 243.8625, 8630.

15. On eunuchs in the Song period, see Zhang Bangwei 1993:263–303; Wang Mingsun 1981; Umehara 1985:163–165.

16. Hartwell 1988:21–26.

17. SHY Zhiguan 34.31b.; CB 341.8210–8211; WCZL 3.142–143; SLYY 4.56. A room-unit is the area between four pillars. As a unit of length, the space between two pillars is called a bay. A building five bays across and four bays deep has twenty room-units.

18. SDJK 13.324.

19. HSSCGY 8.1b; SHY Houfei 3.33a–b.

20. There were later reports that Shenzong’s grand councilors conspired to install Shenzong’s younger brother Hao instead of his son (CB 351.8409–8412; SS 471.13703). Since Hao would not have needed a regency, if the grand councilors were aware of the empress dowager’s antipathy to them and the reforms, this might have been a way to retain power. Given the repeated rewriting of the histories of this period as a result of factional politics, it is difficult to determine if there was any basis for these charges, but I tend not to believe it because of the strong preference for succession by sons.

21. On Tang and Song empress regents, see H. Lee 2010:6–52.

22. CB 252.6169; SSWJL 3.25.

23. SHY Li 29.57a–67a.

24. Sources disagree on the date of her death. SS 243.8631 says she died at thirty-two and implies that she never quit mourning at the tomb. SHY Houfei 1.4b gives her death date as the sixth month of 1089. HSSCGY 8.210 gives the same death date, and says she was thirty-six when she died.

25. Henansheng 1997:532–533. See also the epitaph for one of Huizong’s sisters who died just under four (Henansheng 1997:539).

26. Two of Huizong’s younger brothers had names pronounced Si, so to keep them straight the younger of them is referred to here as Ssi.

27. Here I refer to Huizong’s brothers (and later his sons) by their personal names (ming). At the time, and in most of the surviving sources, they were referred to by their frequently changing titles, such as Prince of Wei.

28. CBSB 20.707.

29. SDZLJ 29.153–154. See also SS 19.357; SDZLJ 28.144, 29.152, 155, 30.157–158.

30. SS 121.2841–2842; J. Liu 1985:217.

31. DJMHL 6.34–35; trans. West 1999:34–36. See also Idema and West 1982:31–35.

32. DJMHLZ 10.242–243. See also Ebrey 1999.

33. SSWJ 35.992–993.

34. SS 243.8632–8633.

35. SS 111.2658–2660.

36. Henansheng 1997:539–541, 542–544; SS 246.8720–8721; XHHP 20.565.

37. Henansheng 1997:540, 543–544; SS 246.8721.

38. XHHP 20:304–305, 307–308; XHSP 2.15; SHY Dixi 3.6b–7a. On Jun’s interests, see also DDSL 16.5b–6a; SS 246.8721.

39. HZL Houlu 1.53.

40. An allusion to Analects 15.1.

41. DX. On this book, see also Guarino 1994, esp. pp. 86–117.

42. CB 467.11154.

43. SHY Dixi 2.14a.

44. YYDRZ 3.26b; CB 493.11711–11712.

45. FXJ 26.308–311; SYXA 5.100; SS 351.11101; SHY Dixi 2.15a. Fu Yi’s biographer added that he held himself aloof from the eunuchs who managed the princely establishment, earning him the princes’ respect.

46. Egan 1994:104, citing SSJSBM 44.431–432, 46.443.

47. Kaifeng in Song times has been studied by many scholars. For good brief discussions in English, see Kracke 1975; C. Heng 1999:117–135; D. Kuhn 2009:191–205; de Pee 2010. Chinese and Japanese scholarship is very extensive; see esp. Ihara 1991; Zh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Maps, and Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Ages, Dates, and Other Conventions
• Chronology
• Cast of Characters
• Genealogy of the Song Emperors and Empresses
• I. Learning to Rule, 1082–1108
• II. Striving for Magnificence, 1102–1112
• III. Anticipating Great Things, 1107–1120
• IV. Confronting Failure, 1121–1135
• Afterword
• Color Plate Section
• Appendix A: Reasons for Rejecting Some Common Stories about Huizong and His Court
• Appendix B: Huizong’s Consorts and Their Children
• Timeline
• Notes
• References
• Chinese Character Glossary
• Index