Historians traditionally divide the Song dynasty into two parts. The Northern Song ruled from 960 to 1127, with its capital at Kaifeng in central China (Figure 9.2). The Southern Song ruled southern China from 1127 to 1279, after the Jurchen conquest of the north; this era is covered in Chapter 14.
Although the Song had control of most of northern China, Taizu faced tremendous obstacles to unifying the whole of China. South China was still divided into several territories, and there were two independent entities in the north with their own dynasties. In addition, there were two powerful nomadic kingdoms, one in the northwest established by the Tang- uts (a Tibetan people), known as Xi Xia, and one in the northeast established by the Khitans, known as Liao. While Xi Xia territory was predominantly a non-Chinese land, the Khitans controlled a large Chinese territory called the “Sixteen Prefectures” and launched numerous raids farther into China throughout the tenth century. At one point, the Khitans had penetrated as far as Kaifeng in central China, which city would later become the capital of the Northern Song.
Taizu turned first against the south. He had to leave behind some of his more gifted generals to keep the north secure, but the gamble paid off. The southerners could not resist the veteran northern armies of the Song, with their large complements of nomadic cavalrymen. In some cases, Taizu had propaganda spread that barbarian northern soldiers cooked and ate prisoners of war. Taizu was able to take control of most of south China with little actual fighting.
The growing economic difference between northern and southern China influenced these campaigns, as naval forces rather than cavalry became the crucial complement to infantry armies and fortifications: The vast river system of the south compelled the development of an inland navy. Most of the ships were obtained through capture as the army moved south, and the navy was used to transport men and material, protect against amphibious assaults on Song forces, and assist in sieges of fortifications along the waterways. The Song navy would eventually total thousands of ships, some large enough to carry over 1000 men. However, when Taizu’s attention shifted back north, resources were siphoned from the navy. The Song navy would not again attain such size and importance until after the Jurchen invasions of the early twelfth century.
Once the south was secure, Taizu shifted his attention to the conquest of the Sichuan region in the west. This required sending his army up the Yangzi River, past a series of fortifications, some quite large and defended with huge catapults that sent large rocks and flaming substances onto approaching craft. These fortifications were not easy to overcome, and Taizu was often dependent on defectors to create dissension and inform him of weak spots. Taizu also used a policy of terror in the countryside around these fortifications, reducing their local support. These actions were successful, but the enraged local population engaged in rebellions for years afterward.
Having secured the rest of China, Taizu turned his attention back to the northern frontier, focusing his efforts against the Khitans of Liao, who controlled the Sixteen Prefectures. Decades of fighting under Taizu and his successors resulted in military stalemate, and a treaty finally ended the war. The Song in effect bought peace with Liao by paying annual tribute and recognizing the Liao ruler as an equal of their emperor, a provision far more grating than the tribute payments. There were additional smaller wars between the two antagonists, but neither was able to expand at the expense of the other.
From Taizu’s reign through to the end of the dynasty, Song rulers and government officials were constantly and consciously concerned not to reenact what they saw as the failings of the Tang dynasty. Foremost among those failings, they believed, was the level of both power and prestige attained by military men. The founder of the dynasty had himself been a military man who attained his position through military means. The Song went to great lengths both to ensure imperial control over the Song military and to reduce the prestige of the military as a career. The first result was a centralized army, controlled personally by the emperor, that never threatened to break free of that control. The second, less positive, result was an army incapable of projecting imperial power beyond the limits of Song territory and eventually incapable even of defending the empire from large-scale invasions.
Taizu accomplished the coup that established the Song dynasty through his command of the palace guard army of the Later Zhou dynasty. Throughout his reign, he worked to ensure that the Palace Army was both loyal and the best of all the Song armies. For example, units from other armies that distinguished themselves in battle were transferred to the Palace Army. Units of the Palace Army that were considered substandard, in turn, were transferred to the provincial armies. Taizu’s successors continued this policy, as well as often flooding provincial armies with civilian inspectors and spies and constantly rotating units from one army to another.
As Taizu took control of an area of China, he placed a trusted general in charge as military governor, but soon thereafter, he sent a civilian to oversee administration of the province. Once the area was secure, the military governors were replaced by civil officials directly answerable to the emperor. This not only was a check on the possibility of a military governor acting independently, as had happened in the Tang dynasty, but it also set the stage for the eventual replacement of the military governor with a civilian.
Taizu’s successors took care to not allow regional military commanders to build up centers of power. Those officers, even of low rank, who distinguished themselves in combat or who impressed imperial representatives were transferred to the Palace Army, which remained posted primarily in the capital district. What the Song thereby succeeded in creating was a military in which there were no personal bonds—at least no permanent ones—between officers and men. A whole bureaucracy was created to evaluate, promote, reward, and punish the officer corps. All officers of a certain rank were placed in a pool from which the imperial court would draw in making assignments, whether for military expeditions or for garrison duties. In addition, rank was unconnected to command—high rank did not necessarily denote command of larger numbers of men. The approval of enlisted men was completely immaterial for officers’ reward and advancement. For example, after a particular military campaign, the troops would return to their garrisons whereas the officers were administratively returned to the officer pool, awaiting their rewards, promotions, and next appointments. To emphasize personal loyalty to the emperor, all promotions had to be approved with his seal, promotions to high ranks were conferred in a special ceremony with the emperor, and the emperor personally attended periodic reviews of Palace Army units. When military expeditions were launched, the commanders were provided with detailed instructions on how the campaign was to be conducted. Failure to obey these instructions often led to severe punishment, sometimes execution.
The only exceptions to the principle of the temporary nature of command were officers assigned at the ying level. This was a unit of roughly 500 officers and men that formed the basic building block of the Song army. The imperial court knew that such a small force was no threat to the dynasty, and if any ying commander had antidynastic ideas, they could be quickly and easily squelched.
One of the most effective means of reducing the army’s potential threat to the dynasty involved reducing the army’s importance in society. Instead, prestige, position, and wealth were attained through success in the civil bureaucracy. It was in the Song that the civil examination system became the primary means of access to high-government appointment and all its attendant benefits, a process aided by the invention of block printing, which allowed wider diffusion of the Confucian classics on which the exams were based. The Neo-Confucian revival that characterized Song intellectual life grew out of this milieu, and the main lines of Neo-Confucian thought were civilian, not military, in orientation. As a result, military officers and military service were increasingly looked down on by elite society, and few wealthy or powerful families saw the military as a desirable career choice for their sons. This trend was also made possible in part by the tremendous growth of the Song economy, especially overseas trade. Commerce became a serious alternative to landownership as a source of wealth, undermining whatever remained of the dominance of the great landowning families with ties to old military traditions and cavalry practices.
The policies and cultural attitudes that diminished the threat posed by powerful generals carried a corresponding risk of military weakness. In the late eleventh century, however, the Song court was convinced that it could afford the military weakness its policies caused for two reasons. First, the Khitans and Tanguts were divided and in any case no longer posed a serious threat to China. The tribute sent each year kept these two peoples relatively pacified and represented an almost imperceptible drain on the Chinese economy. Second, the lack of a flexible, talented officer corps was balanced by an enormous army that, it was felt, could overwhelm an enemy through sheer numbers. And Song military production was a nice complement to the large numbers of troops, able to provide a vast array of weapons, uniforms, and other supplies for these large armies.
The Song army grew to immense size. By 1020, there were almost 900,000 men in the army, and within a couple decades, the number had grown to over 1.2 million. Again, the thriving Song economy made this expansion in numbers possible, as government revenues increased significantly. The army was composed not of citizen-soldiers, in the manner of the early Tang, or conscripts, but mostly of paid volunteers—but not well paid, individually. Recruitment of soldiers was from the ranks of criminals, the destitute, and vagabonds, further reinforcing the negative image of soldiering in the culture as a whole. The individual soldier was looked down on and treated very poorly. Most soldiers were tattooed or branded on the head and hands to reduce their chances of successfully deserting the ranks. Only in the Palace Army was discipline emphasized, but even there not too rigorously. In the early years of the dynasty, there was regular training in everything from physical fitness to siege warfare. By the late eleventh century, however, this had tapered off. It was during the Song dynasty that the famous Chinese expression of disdain for military men became current: “Good iron is not used to make nails, and good men are not used to make soldiers.”
The metaphor held another message as well: The quality of the soldiers may often have been quite poor, but they were well supplied and equipped. Contributing to Song economic growth was significant technological development. China had a very large and sophisticated iron industry, with production dwarfing anything in the rest of the world until the advent of the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the eighteenth century. Uniforms, armor, weapons, and other equipment were mass-produced in government factories. Millions of crossbows, arrows, swords, shields, and such gunpowder weapons as small cannons, flamethrowers, and explosive grenades were produced for use by the army. It is hardly surprising that Song political leaders felt confident that their enormous, well-supplied and -organized forces were more than competent enough to carry out the tasks assigned to them by the court.
Unfortunately for the government, the growth of its army outstripped even the increased financial resources available to it. By the early 1070s, nearly 80 percent of government revenue was being used to fund the large army. The Song court was desperate for a way out of this predicament. It was primarily the enormous costs associated with maintaining the huge Song army that prompted the emperor in 1068 to call on Wang Anshi to serve as prime minister with a mandate to institute reforms. While Wang Anshi’s tenure in office (1068-76, 1078-85) saw him initiate a range of reforms of the economy and bureaucracy, it was in the military field that he put forth the most radical policies. First, several hundred thousand men were released from the army; most were expected to form new agricultural communities. Second, roughly 130 small, permanent garrisons of no more than 3000 soldiers were established on the frontier. No longer would all the best soldiers be assigned strictly to the Palace Army. Many of these were now sent to the frontier garrisons, where they were expected to partially support themselves through farming—a system much like that of the Tang dynasty. Third, to engage the common people in the task of national defense and mutual security, Wang Anshi instituted a militia system called bao-jia. In return for reductions in taxes, families supplied men for militia duty. Recruitment was organized around groups of ten families supervised by a local official; higher officials oversaw groups of ten such family groups. Officials were sent from the imperial or regional capital to equip and train these militias and to supervise their patrol and mutual security duties.
The bao-jia system in particular greatly reduced the amount of the imperial budget allocated for military purposes. In its early years, the militias were often grouped in large units to train alongside regular army units. As Wang envisioned it, primary responsibility for defense was to be given to the bao-jia militia, along with the new, nearly self-supporting frontier garrisons. The regular army, then, was to be redesigned for offensive operations.
However, this vision was never to be realized. The most important result ofWang Anshi’s military reforms was a serious decline in the morale of the regular army, which led, in turn, to a large diminution of its combat effectiveness. The large reductions in army size caused a great deal of apprehension among those who were left, and nobody wanted to be posted on the far frontiers. Morale also suffered as a result of the shift toward a militia as the mainstay of imperial defense. The military function of the bao-jia was difficult to organize, and it was gradually abolished after Wang was removed from office in 1085. The bao-jia system was retained for local law and order through the end of the imperial era in the twentieth century, but its militia function was never again seriously revived. The frontier garrisons also were not maintained or regularly supervised, and those that remained in the early twelfth century were mostly insignificant to Song defense. Instead, the regular army gradually increased in numbers until it reached roughly its earlier size, and the costs to maintain it rose as well. Morale, however, did not improve, and the Song army was in no shape to react to the major challenge posed by the rising Jurchen Empire in the north.
By the early twelfth century, a rough peace existed among Northern Song China and its neighbors the Liao in the northeast and the Xi Xia in the northwest. Although there were some skirmishes, major campaigns were resisted, with the Song seemingly reconciled to the loss of the Sixteen Prefectures. The Khitans had also relaxed their previously very sharp military guard. The cavalry wing of the Khitan army saw little major action over several decades, and suppression of the frequent uprisings in the Chinese areas of the empire did not require much sustained or large-scale military response. This relative serenity was shaken severely by the rise of a people on the far northern reaches of Liao territory, the Jurchens.
The Jurchens were a Tungusic people from northern Manchuria, the ancestors of the Manchu peoples who would conquer China in the seventeenth century. We know little about them prior to the early twelfth century—mainly that they subsisted primarily through hunting and that the Khitans considered them to be particularly fierce warriors. Never happy as subjects of the Liao, the Jurchens often rebelled. Jurchen tribal division and Khitan unity kept these uprisings from threatening Liao control, but this situation changed rapidly once the Jurchens became unified under a dynamic leader, Aguta. In 1115, after defeating a local Liao army, Aguta proclaimed himself emperor of a new dynasty, called “Jin” (Gold, the name of a river in the region).
The united Jurchen army—a cavalry force organized much like the Khitan army, with a heavily armored vanguard, two, more lightly armored, wings, and a reserve in the rear—quickly swept through the Liao domains in Manchuria. Within three years, nearly all of Manchuria was in the hands of the Jurchen Jin, though the main Liao armies were still located within the Sixteen Prefectures. The Song court saw an opportunity to recover their lands and concluded a treaty of alliance with the Jurchen. The allies organized a joint campaign of assault on the remaining Liao territories, with the Jin to attack from the north and the Song to attack from the south and west. The Song were to get the Sixteen Prefectures, and the Jin all the rest of Liao territory, an arrangement borrowed from Tang practice. Even more than the Tang, however, given the economic and social developments outlined above, what the Chinese Song dynasty lacked was a cavalry force. So, as the Tang did with the Uighurs, the Song bought a cavalry force in the Jurchens.
It turned out the Song were playing with fire. The joint attack took place in mid-1122, and within three years, the Liao dynasty was no more. The overconfident Song then snubbed their dangerous allies, and within another three years, all of north China including the Song capital at Kaifeng had fallen to the Jurchens. The remnants of the Song court and army fled south, with a son of the previous emperor taking the throne.
The rump Song court was faced with a dilemma: The only hope of survival was to raise new armies with generals given more flexibility in command and control than had been done since the early days of the dynasty. Commoners were conscripted as militia and given rudimentary training, but most recruitment efforts went toward volunteers for the regular army. Civil officials were called on to perform military duties as officers at all levels of the revived army. However, due to decades of denigration of the military and things martial, nearly all of them refused. This was almost certainly a good thing for the dynasty, for the result of civil officials leading the Song armies almost certainly would have been continued disaster. It was obvious to many Chinese that their very civilization depended on having an army that could defeat the rampaging Jurchens. It was not, however, obvious to all. Many others argued that strong, independent Chinese generals were more threat than protection; to them, the civilization could survive foreign conquest, but not a revival of Tang-style militarism.
Those who supported a strong defense won out at this time, and anyone who could raise an army to defend the dynasty and fight the Jurchens was welcomed. The result was that new-style armies were created, led by charismatic leaders who had complete control over command, administration, and deployment. Although there was some communication and coordination, for several years, these armies acted as independent entities, held together primarily by the personal bonds among commanders, officers, and men.
The Jurchens also found that fighting in the region south of the Yangzi River, with its extensive marshes, myriad rivers, and uneven terrain, was not ideal territory to deploy their primarily equestrian force, though they, like the Khitans, had recruited thousands of Chinese to form their infantry component. They caused much destruction all the way to Hangzhou, the new Song capital, but by 1130, the newly raised Chinese armies had been able to use the topography to their advantage to first stop and then push back the Jin forces. Competent Song generals came to the fore, utilizing the superiority in numbers and weaponry that Song China possessed.
Within a few short years, the Jurchens had been not only ejected from southern China but nearly expelled from the north as well. At this point, with south China secure for the dynasty, the Song court entered negotiations with the Jurchen, signing a treaty in 1142 that divided China between them. The border was set along the Huai River, and the Song was required to pay tribute roughly equal to what they had paid previously to the Liao. The Song armies were ordered to return south, and their commanders were removed, with most executed, to ensure continued civilian dominance of the military. (See the Issues box “The Military’s Role in the Song Dynasty: The Case of Yue Fei” for an in-depth look at this curious turn of events.)
From 1142 to 1279, we usually speak of the Southern Song dynasty. The descendants of Zhao Kuangyin continued to rule and to claim sovereignty over all of China, but they would never again gain control of the north. Instead, more effort was put into new armies that were stationed along the frontier. Officers were career military men who gained promotion internally; civilian administration of the army’s finances and equipment continued.
There is no debate among scholars that one mark of the Song dynasty was an ongoing concern to bridle the military under civilian control, or at least to ensure that the military could not threaten the dynasty. The question has been to what lengths the Song court was willing to go to ensure its dominance of the military. Some believe that the dynasty was willing to give up nearly half the territory of China rather than risk a military overthrow of the dynasty or a situation like that of the late Tang, with powerful, virtually independent, military governors dictating to the court. This discussion of the extent of the dynasty’s willingness to restrict the military concerns the fate of the great Song general Yue Fei.
His statues and temples are scattered throughout China and Taiwan to this day, and his story has been taught to Chinese children for centuries, an exemplar of Chinese nationalism. Beyond the myths and tales, however, it is difficult to get a clear picture of Yue Fei (1103-1141) since so many of the records are lost or were deliberately tampered with. What we do know is that in the Northern Song period he chose a military career at a time when the military and the military arts were in much disrepute. At age 19, he attached himself to a powerful local family, taking charge of their security needs. In this capacity, he primarily protected their lands from bandits and other criminal gangs and suppressed uprisings by the poor tenant workers.
Yue Fei later gained an appointment as a staff officer under a general assigned a major role in the 1122 campaign against the Khitan Liao, who occupied the Sixteen Prefectures in China proper. Yue was part of an army whose assignment was to retake the Liao capital of Beijing. Song forces were soundly repulsed, but Yue gained experience that would become invaluable later when Song China was invaded by the Jurchens. He formed his own independently recruited and led army that spent much of the years 1126-28 fighting other independent commands. All sources agree that Yue Fei was fiercely loyal to the Song dynasty, and it was only in later years that he questioned commands given him by the Song court.
For the next several years, Yue’s army was one of several that forced the Jurchens to abandon their gains in south China, and in 1134, he was given the major role in the offensive campaign to recover north China from the Jurchens. In this he was tremendously successful, reaching the outskirts of Luoyang, the old Tang capital, in early 1140. He and his army seemed unstoppable as they pushed the Jurchens back toward their Manchurian homeland. At this point, on the verge of achieving the goals of the Song court, he and the other Song armies were ordered to withdraw below the Huai River. Behind the backs of the military commanders in the field, the Song court had been negotiating with the Jurchens and had agreed to terms. The two powers agreed to divide China between them, with the Huai River as the dividing line. In return for Jurchen promises to leave south China unmolested, the Song agreed to recognize the Jurchen’s Jin dynasty as the rulers of north China. Yue Fei was publicly outraged by what he considered a treasonous act. He contemplated disobeying the court’s orders, but the other Song armies obeyed the command, meaning that Yue’s army was exposed far north near the Yellow River. He complied and returned to the Song court, where he was relieved of his command and later arrested and executed.
The question that has led to such debate is why the Song court capitulated to the Jurchens on the verge of complete victory. Nationalist Chinese since the time of the betrayal have most often seen this mainly as a naked power play by Yue Fei’s main rival at the Song court, the civilian prime minister, Qin Gui. Long an advocate of negotiating with the Jurchens, Qin Gui had the most to lose if Yue Fei succeeded in recovering the north. He also worked feverishly to complete his centralization of power soon after Yue Fei’s death by publicly charging and executing most of the other major military commanders and purging most of Yue Fei’s immediate subordinates. Over the next few years, the whole Song officer corps was subjected to periodic purges. Even Yue Fei’s surviving family members were exiled to scattered areas on the periphery of the empire.
There is no doubt that Qin Gui instituted a reign of terror among both the military and civil officialdom of the Song court. Yet some have seen this as an overly simplistic explanation for the Song court’s action in dividing up the realm with the Jurchens. Qin Gui’s action, they assert, was consistent with early Song policy regarding the military. In this telling, when Jurchen forces were rampaging throughout central and even southern China, it was necessary to give a great deal of independent authority to the military commanders. Once this emergency situation was resolved, however, steps could be taken to ensure the continued safety of the dynasty from a military coup. The court had seen that Jurchen cavalry was greatly hobbled in its effectiveness in the varied topography of south China, and now that order had been restored to the south, it was safe to disarm the military generals, who were becoming, from the Song viewpoint, too independent and arrogant. After all, Yue Fei himself was sounding more and more like the founder of a new dynasty, though his claims never became explicit.
The humbling of the military could not be accomplished safely until the Jurchens were convinced that they could not take the south. By 1140, with their hold on north China increasingly precarious, the Jurchens decided to deal with the Song. Thus, according to this view, the Song were willing to give a major portion of China to barbarians in order to preserve not only the dynasty but the principle of civilian control over the military. This was not done solely at the instigation of Qin Gui, they point out, since he at all times had the confidence and support of the emperor and most of the high civil officials.
In recent years, some have analyzed the situation from a strictly military standpoint and note that, although Yue Fei had pushed the Jurchens back quite a distance, his recovery of the rest of north China was not at all a foregone conclusion. The Jurchens, though somewhat disorganized by their defeats, were by this point fighting in land much more suited to their nomadic cavalry tactics. Yue Fei’s last offensives were repulsed by the Jurchens, and though he was determined to take the fight to the Jurchens, the records show that the other top military commanders did not share his confidence and advised securing their gains before continuing on the offensive. Also, the Jurchens were engaged in increasingly sucessful negotiations with the Mongols, their enemies to the north. With their rear secure, the Jurchens would have been able to focus an attack on the Song forces strung out in the north.
Of course, we cannot really know if Yue Fei would have succeeded in expelling the Jurchens from China, but failure could have had disastrous consequences. Shattered Song armies might have emboldened the Jurchen to mount new assaults on south China. Retreat by the Song to the Huai River at least allowed them to preserve the bulk of their armies to fight off any Jurchen incursions, even with the celebrated generals dead and many officers purged. We might say, then, that court intrigue, dynastic fear of strong and independent generals, and even military necessity played a role in the removal of Yue Fei on the eve of possibly his greatest triumph.