Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms

The period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-960) has long been treated as an anomaly in the history of China, an age of great disunity between the empires of the Tang and the Song dynasties. Breaking with previous scholarship on China's middle period, this edited volume presents individual studies that focus on the art, culture, and politics of the interregnum, challenging underlying assumptions about the unitary nature of dynastic culture and its value as a category of historical analysis. It understands these decades as a time of important transition in which the incipient cultural shifts of the mature Tang dynasty turned into the foundations of Song society. Consequently it highlights the complex narrative processes that gave birth to Song culture.

Peter Lorge is a senior lecturer of Chinese and military history at Vanderbilt University.

Introduction
Peter Lorge
There are two general approaches to discussing the history of the Five
Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (Wudai Shiguo 五代十國). The first, adopted
by traditional historians and carried over into most contemporary practice,
is to see the period as a break, an interregnum of disunity between
the large, unified empires of the Tang 唐 and Song 宋 dynasties. The
second, which this volume will pursue, is to see the period as fully
continuous with the Tang and Song. As part of the Tang-Song transition,
the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period shared in all of the trends in
social, economic, cultural and political development from the seventh to
the thirteenth centuries, lacking only a unified political center. This
diminished imperial overlay opens a historiographical window on the
underlying structures and mores of middle period China, allowing not
only a clearer view of individuals and local circumstances, but also
providing a useful comparative sample for the growing body of studies of
Chinese local culture.
Since it is not the purpose of this volume to criticize the traditional
historical approach to this period, a brief discussion of its characteristics
and origins is in order. Traditional histories served important political
and cultural purposes in assigning beginnings and endings to periods.
One of the contributors to this volume, Johannes Kurz, has previously
published an outstanding article on the coining of the term “Five Dynasties
and Ten Kingdoms” by the eleventh-century statesman Ouyang Xiu
歐陽修 (1007–1072) in connection with the creation of his Historical
Records of the Five Dynasties (Wudai shiji 五代史記).1 Ouyang’s intentions
in writing a history of the period were more didactic than historical,
however, and he often seemed to have had more of an eye toward
explaining how the Song dynasty came to be as it was in reaction to the
period, than to analyzing the period itself. This understanding of Ouyang
is implicit, I think, in Richard Davis’ comment that “… the Historical
2 · Peter Lorge
Records nonetheless contains insights and agendas that are distinctly
eleventh-century in origins …” though Davis himself might not agree
with this view.2
Ouyang Xiu effectively cut the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms
period off from the Song and even the Tang, encapsulating in his history
all that could go wrong in the Chinese ecumene. As war-torn and chaotic
as the late Tang was, particularly after the Huang Chao 黃巢 Rebellion
(875–884) shattered what political strength the Tang court had rebuilt
after the An Lushan 安祿山 Rebellion (755–763), the Five Dynasties
period was even worse. The Song dynasty was built on the ashes of a
political body consumed by rampant militarism. Its cure for this selfdestructive
infighting and warfare was reestablishing the dominance of
civil government. This was not without its costs, however, and men of
Ouyang Xiu’s generation believed that civil dominance had created a
militarily weak empire. Ouyang was therefore excusing the situation the
Song found itself in during the eleventh century, while at the same time
celebrating the accomplishments of the dynasty. To him, virtually every
aspect of Chinese civilization had collapsed during the Five Dynasties,
and the founding of the Song marked a clear break with that dark time.
But culture did not die during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.
Not only did it flourish in places like the Southern Tang 南唐 and Shu 蜀
courts, it also provided the foundation for the Song culture that emerged
in the late tenth century. The very culture that Ouyang Xiu prized in the
eleventh century grew directly out of the early and mid-tenth century,
and was mostly southern in origin (as was Ouyang himself). Political
fragmentation deprived the period of a single culture, at least with respect
to a ruling court, allowing many cultures to exist simultaneously. It
would have been difficult for a conventional Confucian moralist like
Ouyang to accept that anything good could come of such a politically,
and by extension morally, compromised period. Unfortunately, the
worlds of politics and culture proceeded just as often in parallel as in
concert, interacting only minimally. The central conceit of traditional
historiography, that political periodization is the master ordering narrative,
created a perhaps unacknowledged cognitive dissonance for men like
Ouyang Xiu with respect to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.
The continuity within the Chinese ecumene extended to its periphery
as well. As De-nin Lee shows in her discussion of tomb murals in what
was Liao territory, some remarkably accomplished painting that does not
fit into the existing art historical schema for the period, a schema based
Introduction · 3
again in eleventh-century analysis, was done at a considerable remove
from the urban centers of Chinese culture. Modern art history has
reacted to this sort of art by creating, just as Ouyang Xiu did, categories
that isolate it from the main narrative. “Liao art” can be conveniently set
aside, along with “regional art,” leaving intact the Tang-Song transition
from figure painting to monumental landscapes. This single thread of
narrative made sense from the perspective of the unified culture of eleventh-
century Song China, but it was only one part of a richer and much
more complex history.
Diversity is the nemesis of imperial orthodoxy, and any effort to
explore the complexity of Chinese culture is inherently subversive of the
imperial, or even national, order. It is for this reason that when regional
elites in subsequent periods were dissatisfied with the central government,
they turned to the study of the early tenth century, as well as other
periods when the Chinese ecumene was not controlled by a single government.
Conversely, the goal of someone concerned with bolstering imperial
legitimacy, like Ouyang Xiu, was to emphasize the unity of both
territory and culture even when there was no single government. In
effect, the Chinese empire existed regardless of “temporary” political
divisions, caused by the inability of the legitimate imperial court to
extend its authority over the whole territory.
The “legitimate succession” (zhengtong 正統) ran through the series
of northern regimes that led to the establishment of the Song dynasty in
960. This was not very difficult to maintain, since the Song extended its
rule to most of the former Tang empire. While the issue of political
disunity had to be directly confronted, it was still possible to fit it into
Confucian historiography through pre-existing means. Cultural disunity
could not be so easily finessed, since any attempt to explicate it was an
admission of its existence. The articles in this volume all turn on these
gaps in unity, whether political or cultural, and how later historians
attempted to reconcile them.
The Origins of This Volume
Several years ago, Steven Miles, a historian of Qing dynasty China asked
me what was happening during the tenth century in Guangdong that
would so interest people living there in the nineteenth century. He knew
that their interest in the history of the Southern Han 南漢, the kingdom
that ruled that area, was an assertion of regional identity, but not
4 · Peter Lorge
whether there was something more to the Southern Han than its independence.
3 My own work on the creation of the Song empire only dealt
with the destruction of the Southern Han in 971, not the polity itself or
its culture. Moreover, while the cultures of the Southern Tang and Shu
kingdoms strongly inf luenced Song culture, Southern Han culture
apparently did not make a similar contribution. The only published work
in English on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period at that time
was Wang Gungwu’s The Structure of Power in North China during the
Five Dynasties, and it focused exclusively on how the roots of Song
government lay in the institutional development of the military governors’
administrative structure.4 Scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, and
other Western languages was similarly sparse.5 I simply could not answer
the question, which prompted a discussion about remedying this lacuna
in the scholarship.
Our first thought was to gather a collection of individual studies of
each of the polities existing in China from 907 to 960. That approach
would have sidestepped the issue of overall coherence by presenting a set
of histories of adjacent, contemporary or successive states. But Naomi
Standen argued strongly and convincingly against that approach, and her
objections are worth summarizing here. While admitting the value of
specialized studies of single polities, Standen felt that a collection of
essays offered the opportunity to discuss the nature of the period as a
whole. Of even greater importance was the deep interconnectedness of
the various polities. Not only were polities connected across borders, but
subsequent dynasties in a given area maintained remarkable continuity of
personnel and culture with their predecessors. Moreover, many of the
concepts inherent in those political divisions created misleading impressions
of the ethnic and cultural separations spanning the Chinese
ecumene, the steppe, and non-Han groups in the south. Standen argued,
as she has done so forcefully in her other writings, that some of the most
important issues, like loyalty, were not ethnically driven.6
Standen’s arguments were compelling, and made it clear that we had
been taking the traditional view, using the political narrative to organize
culture. A series of individual histories would therefore deepen our
understanding of each polity studied without really advancing the overall
understanding of the period as a whole. We also, for both pragmatic and
personal reasons, rejected the idea of trying to follow a series of topical
threads across the period. Naomi Standen and Hugh Clark had themselves
recently finished chapters for the Cambridge History of China
Introduction · 5
providing overviews of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, respectively.
The danger now loomed that a collection of articles without the
structure of political divisions would degenerate into incoherence.
As I sought out contributors and discussed the volume with them,
my fears in that regard were soon allayed. Freed of the immediate political
structure, there was nevertheless a consistent pattern in the contributions.
Without the simplifying power of a single government, an
intellectual space opened up in the period between the ecumene-spanning
governments of the Tang and Song dynasties. This gap between a
politically and culturally asserted unity of “China” and the reality of
politics and culture during the period created the possibility of people
and polities functioning independently of an imperially-defined relationship.
This is to say that there was no imperial court to determine if something
or someone were good or bad because of how they related to the
court. Given that designations like “bandit” or “scoundrel” were fundamentally
subjective, as Hugh Clark’s contribution amply illuminates, but
also vitally necessary to Chinese imperial historiography, Chinese historians’
handling of this period was quite varied.
What became clear throughout all of the contributions was that the
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period was different from either the
Tang or Song, while also very familiar. There was an extraordinary
freedom of movement, physically, intellectually, artistically, politically,
and even administratively. Culture flourished because it was not unified,
and, because of the historiographical window opened by this centerless
period, it is actually possible for us to see that variety. Although Song
intellectuals traced their proximate roots to Tang antecedents, they owed
a very great deal to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. There was a
deep-rooted ideological shift away from the cultural need for a defining
imperial center during the period, which was later ref lected in Song
culture. All of the contributors describe aspects of this shift, while my
own concluding chapter describes the emergence of Song culture, and
thus the conclusion of the period.
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms as a Period
I would like to explain the rationale for treating the Five Dynasties and
Ten Kingdoms as a heuristic unit. It is worth asking whether the period
from 907 to 960 can or should be discussed as a whole, or if it is merely an
odd artifact of traditional Chinese historiography without redeeming
6 · Peter Lorge
value? If, as I have argued, it was fully continuous with the Tang and
Song, then why should such a short period be studied separately? At the
same time, the central tenet of this volume, that there was a deep-rooted
ideological shift that took place during this period, seems to contradict
the notion that it was fully continuous with the Tang and Song. It is not
so difficult to reconcile these positions when we acknowledge, on the one
hand, that there was not a sharp break between periods, and, on the other,
that the conditions during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms were
different in significant ways.
The Tang central government declined long before 907 and the Song
central government took several decades after 960 to establish full control
over its empire. In some places, like Sichuan, the decline began sooner
and the establishment of control took longer.7 The many component
parts of the Chinese ecumene were not on the same economic, political
or cultural cycles as the Tang declined. While effective central government
never meant that regional economies operated in lock-step, it did
have a great degree of control over the intellectual and cultural spheres,
as well as political institutions. A strong center not only created an officially
sanctioned imperial culture, it also engendered a counterculture.
That counterculture was not necessarily in opposition to imperial
culture; it could also function as a new or external force attempting to
change imperial culture. Imperial culture simplified the understanding
of intellectual and cultural trends, at least historiographically, by identifying
a dominant power and locating other forces with respect to it. As
long as that political center existed in some form, no matter how weak,
this overall structure influenced the general perspective of the actors in
every sphere. This is most clearly demonstrated in the life of Han Xizai 韓
熙載, the historiographically paradigmatic literatus of the time, and the
subject of Johannes Kurz’s contribution to this book, but also in the many
power seekers discussed by Hugh Clark. The actual political break in 907
was therefore significant in removing that vestigial, but important, ideological
brake.
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period was the culmination
of decades, if not more than a century, depending upon one’s perspective
on the late Tang, of increasing regional development at the expense of the
center. Multiple rulers claimed to be emperors, and were able to interact
with each other while maintaining their own titles. This reality helps put
some perspective on the Song court’s ability and reluctance to acknowledge
the Kitan ruler as an emperor in 1005. The Song imperial project
Introduction · 7
had attempted to create and enforce an ideology requiring that there be
only one emperor ruling a unified Chinese empire. Since 907, however, a
multiplicity of imperial ideologies based in the same intellectual tradition
had allowed for a different discourse. Historians and moralists spent
considerable effort in the eleventh century attempting to digest, or otherwise
accommodate this uncomfortable reality. Indeed, it might not be
too far wrong to suggest that this political/ideological issue was the
starting point of the eleventh-century Song intellectual problematique. A
fundamental shift had occurred that knocked the previous imperial
worldview askew.
Zhao Kuangyin’s 趙匡胤 (927–976) founding of the Song dynasty in
960 did not immediately recreate an imperial center like that of the Tang.
Decades of bloody warfare accompanied by similarly extensive ideological
and administrative efforts gradually put most of the pieces of the
empire together. Ruth Mostern’s discussion of the spatial organization of
government administration clearly demonstrates both the differences
between Song and Five Dynasties’ practice, and the incremental bureaucratic
ground war that extended central control to the provinces.8 The
ideological efforts extended through history writing, and formed the
basis of the traditional historiography that has shaped the primary
sources themselves. Thus, even were we to defy the category of “The Five
Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms,” it would be reified at the most basic level
of research by the change in sources from one traditionally constructed
period to the next. It is true that the biographies of many important early
Song figures contained in the Song History (Songshi 宋史) do recount their
pre-Song careers, but this is always done with respect to the “inevitable”
Song unification.
We are therefore left with a period that has previously been defined
as “Not-Tang” and “Not-Song” in the negative sense of having no real
identity or history. But if we reverse that characterization into a positive
sense of a period that was, indeed, not the same as the preceding and
following periods, then it becomes the place where late Tang culture and
society became something else (Not-Tang), but before it became the quite
different Song culture and society. Traditional historiography was
didactic, but it was not necessarily wrong in needing to mark off the
period between two great dynasties. The Song did not return to the Tang
system, whether early, middle or late, or even try to, beyond the retention
of certain titular offices. Song government, that purportedly most civil of
institutions, was evenly split between the military side and the civil side.
8 · Peter Lorge
This state of affairs would have been unrecognizable to the founders of
the Tang, and ref lected major developments in military administration
and culture. When Ouyang Xiu lamented the dominance of military men
during the Five Dynasties, he must also have been aware, having earlier
written a history of the Tang, of how much more pronounced the military
was in the Song government.
Wang Gungwu traced the origins of Song government institutions to
the military governors’ administrations of the Five Dynasties.9 This
historical development explains much of the military character of Song
government, but not all of it. Although David McMullen used debates at
the Tang court over worship in the martial temple to highlight a growing
anti-militarism among court officials, he could just as easily have pointed
out that the creation of a martial temple to parallel the civil temple with
Confucius at its head, and the reaction to that, indicated the growth of
martial culture in the Tang court.10 Türkic generals gained great power
over the course of the dynasty, and the power of the aristocratic clans
declined (though the Türkic associations of the imperial family alert us
to the danger of making too strong an ethnic or cultural distinction). The
major rebellions of An Lushan and Huang Chao were part of these
changes, among many others, and Tang society and culture were still
changing when the dynasty ended in 907. Indeed, the next three dynasties,
the Later Liang, Later Tang, and Later Jin, played out the final political
and military acts of a struggle between groups begun under the Tang.
The Kitan invasion of 946–947 was a pivotal event in north China.
While the Kitan capture of Kaifeng and destruction of the Later Jin
dynasty demonstrated the reach of Kitan power, their inability to maintain
that position conversely demonstrated that their reach had exceeded
their grasp. In any event, the political struggles of the Tang finally ended
with all sides destroyed. A new configuration of players began to take
shape that would close out the period. While it is clear that many early
Song generals and statesmen began their careers in the later part of the
Five Dynasties, it is less clear whether there were significant breaks in the
personnel of the ruling class. The examination system began to create a
class of new men in the civil service in the early Song, but the military
appears to have continued the Five Dynasties pattern, although further
research on this is needed to be certain.
One of the main questions raised, but not answered, by this volume
is whether or not Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms practice persisted
into the Song in other spheres as well, be they intellectual, cultural or
Introduction · 9
simply regional. To what extent did regional differences truly end with
political unification? Here we should recall Beverly Bossler’s forceful
refutation of the Hartwell-Hymes thesis of change in marriage practice
from the Northern Song to the Southern Song elites.11 Bossler convincingly
argued that the change was apparent, rather than real, and had
more to do with the source material than with an actual change in practice.
It may well be that the Northern Song period was anomalous in so
effectively covering up the inherent differences within its empire. If that
were the case, then the noted phenomenon of literati turning toward local
activism in the Southern Song, to cite one possible example, might also
be an artifact of the sources. All of this points to the critical place that the
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period can play in our understanding
of Chinese history.
Was this relatively brief period a “turning point” where China
swerved off the medieval road and onto the uncharted and unpaved path
to modernity? Was it the leading edge of the Song invention of what we
would today call “the modern”?12 We must retreat from these larger
issues, however, to consider the analytic structure that underpins their
prosecution. Not only have the contributors to this volume accepted the
non-unity of China in the first half of the tenth century as revealing
rather than aberrant, they have also handled the political/territorial divisions
with great sophistication. They have not, as would have been so
easy, disregarded these divisions out of hand, but neither have they
accepted the constraints these distinctions explicitly impose. This
extends even to the sorting of political units into “Five Dynasties” and
“Ten Kingdoms.” Ouyang Xiu had particular political and didactic
reasons for separating the Five Dynasties from the Ten Kingdoms, but, as
mentioned above, there were less charged reasons for doing so as well.
Ruth Mostern is surely right to emphasize the intentions of governments
in their administrative and geographic organizations of their territory.
It is also clear that local phenomena could remain local as well as
become imperial. Tracy Miller’s contribution contrasts the local architectural
style of southern Shanxi 山西, the Shangdang 上黨 region, with that
of Zhejiang 浙江. The Zhejiang style was adopted by the Song imperial
court and established empire-wide over the course of the dynasty, while
Shangdang architecture remained the same and local. By a quirk of
history, Shangdang architecture is better preserved than that of any other
region for the Song period. Yet, since it is really a local rather than a
dynastic style, it cannot be directly used as an example of Song imperial
10 · Peter Lorge
architecture, though it can be used as an example of architecture during
the Song. Local architecture probably remained local in most places. Of
course, the grandest Song imperial buildings are not extant, making
useful comparison with other large-scale architecture, like that of the
Kitan Liao empire, for example, impossible.13 The actual remnants of
Song imperial architecture are fragmentary, and a solid reconstruction of
its style beyond our reach; only local style is extant.
Ultimately, the value of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms as a
heuristic unit is evident in the very idea of the Chinese imperial dynastic
structure. Many trends in Tang history continued through the Five
Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms and on into the Song. But the very fact that
the transportation of southern culture, whether books, scholarship,
scholars, or architecture to the north during the Song, was an act of
imperial legitimation and a show of power, demonstrates the profoundly
changed significance that political ideology brings. Notions of loyalty or
correct behavior were constrained and categorized during the Song in
ways that they could not be during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.
Having a center did matter, as did not having a center. The openness of
the period was very different, and not to be seen again in China.
Conclusion and Beginning
The notion that Confucius edited the Spring and Autumn Annals so as to
subtly indicate praise and blame was part of a tradition that embedded
considerable moral force in the writing of history. Most specifically, the
choice of what was studied, at what length, and how it was portrayed,
exclusive of explicit comment, was itself an argument for a particular
interpretation of history. Chinese historians recognized the power of the
selection process from early on, without benefit of contemporary Western
theoretical hand-wringing over the “objectivity” of history. There was no
objective or amoral stance for the historian, though he should work from
reliable documentation and not manufacture events and conversations
himself. The process of “reflecting” or acting as a mirror, to pay heed to
Song emperor Shenzong’s renaming Sima Guang’s history a “mirror,” was
inherently didactic.
Dynasties, courts and emperors did place their mark on their times
and even on subsequent times. China had many dynasties, courts and
emperors, often contemporaneous, during the first half of the tenth
century, and they also inf luenced their time. What is perhaps most
Introduction · 11
interesting about the political divisions of that period is that courts tried
to maintain them, both to preserve their own power and to preserve their
own separate identities. Power and identity cannot be easily separated,
and the Song project was aimed at unifying both under its own banner.
The resolution of the centripetal forces of regional diversity required
a deep-rooted ideological shift, which was later reflected in Song culture.
Culture was drawn into the center from different parts of the empire,
along with local elites, and then recirculated in an attempt to overcome
that diversity. It could only be partially successful, of course, as was
acknowledged by the writing of local gazetteers to inform rotating magistrates
about the district they had come to administer. An outside administrator
sent from the imperial court could not expect to understand the
local environment. But these practical manuals could also become
instruments asserting local identity over the imperial version. To write a
manual about a locality was to create a conceptual category, and to legitimize
places, events and people ignored by the imperial court. Those decisions
were made locally, and with respect to local concerns.
It remains an open question whether the Five Dynasties and Ten
Kingdoms period should be considered a time of “international” relations
within the former territory of the Tang. An earlier generation of scholars
argued for a “China among equals” during the Song, when the Song had
to face powerful steppe empires and treat with them diplomatically as
equals.14 Yet it seems clear that this sort of diplomacy of equals had begun
during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period and never really
stopped until the Yuan consolidation in the late thirteenth century. It was
only retrospectively that some Chinese writers imagined that culturally
Chinese individuals should have preferred loyalty to a Chinese ruler to
loyalty to a non-Chinese ruler. This criticism of some early tenth century
generals and officials made sense in the new culture of the Song, where
one of the main props of the court’s legitimacy was its reasonable claim
to represent Chinese culture. By extension then, culturally Chinese
people owed the Song court allegiance.15
The complexity of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period is
more real than apparent, and it remains a daunting task to engage with it
and write about it in an understandable way. It is my hope that this book
will be part of a growing series of studies of the period. Unlike the history
of the Tang or Song, there are, as yet, few signposts marking the way
through. This creates great freedom, since we have fewer pre-conceived
notions to overcome. The greatest of those notions are that it is not a
12 · Peter Lorge
period worth studying, that it is merely a degenerate and aberrant time
between great dynasties, and that no one studies it. This book attempts to
lay those ideas to rest and go a step toward a true beginning of the study
of this fascinating time. Underlying the complexity is possibly one of the
most important periods of change in Chinese history.
Notes
1. Here I have followed Richard Davis in his translation of the Wudai shiji 五代
史記. Ouyang Xiu, Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, trans. Richard
Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
2. Davis (note 1), xliv.
3. This line of inquiry subsequently yielded the article: Steve Miles, “Rewriting
the Southern Han (917–971): The Production of Local Culture in Nineteenth-
Century Guangzhou,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 62, no. 1
(June 2002): 39–75.
4. Wang Gungwu, The Structure of Power in North China During the Five
Dynasties (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1963).
5. For a survey of the Japanese scholarship in the field, see Yamazaki Satoshi,
“Topics and Results of the Studies of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms
Period during the Past 25 Years,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 36 (2006):
145–167.
6. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Naomi Standen,
Unbounded Loyalty: Frontier Crossing in Liao China (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2007). On the issue of loyalty see also Jonathan Karam Skaff,
“Barbarians at the Gates? The Tang Frontier Military and the An Lushan
Rebellion,” War and Society (2000): 18, 23–35.
7. For the conquest of Sichuan (the Kingdom of Shu) by the Song, see Peter
Lorge, “From Warlord to Emperor: Song Taizu’s Change of Heart during the
Conquest of Shu,” T’oung Pao (2005): 320–346.
8. For the military campaigns that created the Song dynasty, see Peter Lorge,
“War and the Creation of the Northern Song State” (PhD diss., University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1996).
9. Wang Gungwu, The Structure of Power in North China During the Five
Dynasties. This book has recently been updated and reissued as Divided
China: Preparing for Reunification, 883–947 (Singapore: World Scientific
Press, 2007).
10. David L. McMullen, “The Cult of Ch’i T’ai-kung and T’ang Attitudes to the
Military,” Tang Studies 7 (1989): 59–103.
11. Robert Hartwell, “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformation of
China, 750–1550,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42, no. 2 (1982):
365–442; Robert P. Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou,
Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); and Beverly Bossler, Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status and
the State in Sung China (960–1279) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998). Hartwell largely accepted Bossler’s position, though he did not
revisit the issue in print.
Introduction · 13
12. For a sensitive and wide-ranging discussion of some of the background
issues regarding the historical category of “early modern,” see William
Caferro’s forthcoming book, Contesting the Renaissance. Professor Caferro
kindly made an early draft of this book available to me.
Franciscus Verellen, in an article that regrettably could not be included in
this book, argues that the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period actually
gave rise to early modernity in China. Verellen’s position is convincing, and
if he is right, then the break between the Tang and Song may be more real
and significant than previously thought. Moreover, he will have localized
perhaps the first instance of “modernity” in world history. The breakdown
in central political control allowed for local developments that may well
have, though Verellen does not argue this, led to instances of Habermas-like
public spheres for the literati.
13. For Liao architecture, see Nancy Shatzman Steinhart, Liao Architecture
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997).
14. Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1983).
15. Standen (note 6), 149–171 passim.

Contents
List of Contributors v
Introduction 1
Peter Lorge
The Origins of This Volume 3
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms as a Period 5
Conclusion and Beginning 10
Notes 12
Who Wants to Be an Emperor?
Zhao Dejun 趙德鈞, Youzhou 幽州 and the Liao 遼 15
Naomi Standen
Loyalty, Legitimacy and Historiography 17
A Different World 19
The Good and Faithful Servant 23
Surviving the Succession 30
Choices 32
Notes 41
Scoundrels, Rogues, and Refugees:
The Founders of the Ten Kingdoms in the Late Ninth Century 47
Hugh R. Clark
An Analytical Framework: Parsing Words 48
The Founders 51
Conclusions 67
Notes 70
viii · Contents
Han Xizai (902–970): An Eccentric Life in Exciting Times 79
Johannes L. Kurz
Han Xizai in the Twentieth Century 80
Early Career 81
Han Xizai’s Career under the First Southern Tang Emperor 82
Involvement in Politics 83
Private Life 86
Conclusion 92
Notes 93
Lessons from Paintings at the Periphery:
The Murals from Baoshan Tomb 2 and Five Dynasties Art History 101
De-nin D. Lee
Introduction 101
The Murals from Baoshan Tomb 2 102
Some Contexts for Art Historical Analysis and Interpretation 109
Lessons from Painting at the Periphery 114
Conclusion 117
Notes 119
“The Usurper’s Empty Names”: Spatial Organization and
State Power in the Tang-Song Transition 125
Ruth Mostern
Introduction 125
Territory and Authority in the Late Tang:
A Geographical Perspective on the Rise of Provincial Power 128
Control over Territory during the Five Dynasties 132
Recreating an Empire 144
An Empire for a Continent: The Story of Guangnan 154
Conclusion 159
Notes 160
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed:
Local Style in the Architecture of Tenth-Century China 167
Tracy Miller
Contents · ix
Something Old: Tang Architecture in Shanxi and
Its Legacy in the Tenth Century 169
Something New? Tenth-Century Architecture in China’s Southeast 195
Something Borrowed: Architecture and Cultural Politics 208
Conclusion 213
Notes 214
The End of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms 223
Peter Lorge
The Later Zhou Dynasty (951–960) 225
Song Taizu and the Founding of the Song Dynasty 227
Song Taizong and the Foundation of Song Culture 232
Song Zhenzong and the Creation of Song Imperial Culture 234
Song Zhenzong and the Dawn of Song Imperial Culture 238
Conclusion 240
Notes 242
Chronology of Dynasties, Kingdoms and States 243
Index 245