Kurz Johannes L. - Chinas Southern Tang Dynasty, 937-976

The Southern Tang was one of Chinas minor dynasties and one of the great states in China in the tenth century. Although often regarded as one of several states preceding the much better known Song dynasty (9601279), the Southern Tang dynasty was in fact the key state in this period, preserving cultural values and artefacts from the former great Tang dynasty (618907) that were to form the basis of Song rule and thereby presenting the Song with a direct link to the Tang and its traditions.

Drawing mainly on primary Chinese sources, this is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive overview of the Southern Tang and full coverage of the military, cultural and political history of the period. It focuses on a successful, albeit short-lived, attempt to set up an independent regional state in the modern provinces of Jiangxi and Jiangsu and establishes the Southern Tang dynasty in its own right. It follows the rise of the Southern Tang state to become the predominant claimant of the Tang heritage and the expansionist policies of the second ruler, culminating in the occupation and annexation of two of the Southern Tangs neighbours, Min (Fujian) and Chu (Hunan). Finally, the narrative describes the decline of the dynasty under its last ruler, the famous poet Li Yu, and its ultimate surrender to the Song dynasty.

Johannes L. Kurz is Senior Lecturer in the History Department at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He is the author of Das Kompilationsprojekt Song Taizongs (reg. 976996) (2003).

These abbreviations only appear in the Notes section (pp. 119128).

I would like to thank Peter Lorge, who asked me in early 2007 if I would be willing to contribute a volume on Southern Tang history to the present series. I am grateful to friends and colleagues who provided many texts that otherwise I would have found hard to retrieve while working and living in Brunei. Among these are Matthias Kaun, Head of the excellent East Asian collection at the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, Anne Labitzky-Wagner, librarian at the Institute of Chinese Studies in Heidelberg, and Birgit Mayr. Hugh R. Clark kindly sent me his draft chapter on the history of the Ten States, many years before it was finally published in the Cambridge History of China . My appreciation goes to all the scholars whose work I have drawn upon in writing this history of the Southern Tang. Their names are listed in the notes and the bibliography. Dawn Clare was so kind as to read through the first draft and eliminate the most obvious English language and style flaws. Special thanks go to my wife Doris who, over the past twenty years, has supported my interest in the Southern Tang and has read through various versions of the present book. Any remaining errors and, unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

Johannes L. Kurz

Bandar Seri Begawan, January 2011

The importance of Asia will continue to grow in the twenty-first century, but remarkably little is available in English on the history of the polities that constitute this critical area. Most current work on Asia is hindered by the extremely limited state of knowledge of the Asian past in general, and the history of Asian states and empires in particular. Asian States and Empires is a book series that will provide detailed accounts of the history of states and empires across Asia from earliest times until the present. It aims to explain and describe the formation, maintenance and collapse of Asian states and empires, and the means by which this was accomplished, making available the history of more than half the worlds population at a level of detail comparable to the history of Western polities. In so doing, it will demonstrate that Asian peoples and civilizations had their own histories apart from the West, and provide the basis for understanding contemporary Asia in terms of its actual histories, rather than broad generalizations informed by Western categories of knowledge.

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After the Huang Chao rebellion (874884), which rocked the Chinese Empire to its very foundations, and prior to the demise of the Tang dynasty in 907, regional commanders had already gained various degrees of autonomy from the increasingly weak Tang court in Changan. In what historians of the Song dynasty came to label the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten States, the empire was divided largely into two parts. In the north, the heartland of Chinese culture, five dynasties succeeded each other until 960. South of the Yangzi, the situation was quite different, as the topography favoured the creation of a number of states that existed simultaneously, the last of which only surrendered to the Song in 978.

One of the most successful regional warlords during the last decades of the Tang was Yang Xingmi (852905). Coming from very humble origins, Yang had become a soldier and risen through the ranks to the position of prefect of Luzhou (in modern-day Anhui) in 883. After Gao Pian ( c . 822887), the governor of the Huainan region, had been murdered in 887, Yang Xingmi, in the ensuing fight for possession of Huainan, gained the upper hand against his main opponent Sun Ru (?892). His position was bolstered by the court, which appointed him surveillance commissioner In the following years, he expanded his power throughout Jiangnan and inevitably clashed with Qian Liu (852932), who, at the time, held sway over part of the Yangzi delta and territories in the region of modern-day Zhejiang province.

Upon Yang Xingmis death in 905, the territory of the state that came eventually to be known as Wu comprised, basically, the larger regions of Huainan and Jiangnan, or roughly the modern-day provinces of south Anhui, Jiangsu and Jiangxi, as well as parts of Hubei, and a total of twenty-nine prefectures. The northernmost town was Haizhou (near modern-day Lianyungang, in Jiangsu), and the southernmost city was Qianzhou (modern-day Ganzhou, in Jiangxi). The most important city in the west was Ezhou (in the vicinity of modern-day Wuhan, in Hubei), and the most important city in the east, for its strategic location on the Grand Canal, was Changzhou.

The Huai River in the north was a natural border and defence against incursions from the north, and the south was relatively well protected by the mountain ranges that separate southern Jiangxi from the states of Chu in Hunan, Southern Han in Guangdong and Min in Fujian. The border with the state of Wuyue roughly followed the Huaiyu mountain range.

The Yangzi and its tributaries and canals in the northern part of the Wu territory provided easy access to the western and eastern areas, while the Gan River network in the south facilitated intraregional traffic.

The borders in the west, south and east remained relatively stable until towards the end of the Southern Tang dynasty. The real concern for the Wu, as well as the Southern Tang, dynasties was always the state of Wuyue to the east, as well as the dynasties that succeeded each other north of the Huai River.