Power and Politics in Tenth-Century China: The Former Shu Regime ...

(951–960), the last of the five dynasties in the Central Plains, the Northern Song was seen as its inevitable political successor. The founding emperors of the Song dynasty, Taizu (r. 960–976) and Taizong (r. 976–997), originally served the former dynasty as commanders before seizing power from the child emperor of Zhou in 960.⁶ At that time, several independent regimes still occupied the rest of China and the last of them was not eliminated by the Song until 979. Thus, the Song actually played two different roles before China’s reunification: inheritor of the Later Zhou in the north and conqueror of other powers across China. This historical background resulted in a distinct division of the former polities in Song historical writing between the northern dynasties from whom the Song itself originated and all the other regional polities, most of which fell under the category of “Ten States.”

Along with this dynasties-states division was a sharply different treatment of tenth-century polities in the Song historiography for the period. In general, the five northern dynasties were usually dubbed the “central” powers that dominated national politics and ultimately led China along the path to the Song reunification. In contrast, other regimes, especially those in the south, were treated as subordinate or secondary powers, all considered “illegitimate” (wei ) and incapable of ever challenging the north politically or militarily. For example, Sima Guang (1019–1086) and his colleagues directly adopted the reign titles of the five northern dynasties as time markers in the chronicles of the period in the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (Zizhi tongjian ).⁷ The Old History of the Five Dynasties (Jiu Wudai shi ), an official history compiled in 974 by Song courtiers, put the histories of the rulers of the dynasties into the “Basic Annals” (benji ), a conventional category in traditional Chinese historiography designed specifically for “monarchs,” but grouped all other regimes into the chapters entitled “Usurpation and Illegitimacy” (jianwei ) or “Hereditary Houses” (shixi ), depending on whether pretenders assumed royal titles or accepted the nominal sovereignty of the north.⁸ Even Ouyang Xiu, the famous Confucian historian known for his radical antipathy toward the period in his Historical Records of the Five Dynasties (Wudai