This chapter illustrates the central role of the Confucian classics in Song politics, culture, and society and traces the evolution of schools and examination standards in canonical education. Simplified versions of the classics facilitated the less-educated masses to familiarize themselves with Confucian cultural practices and ethical values. The canonical texts served as the core curriculum in government schools, but were marginalized in the most prestigious examinations in the early Song. Only with the growing influence of government schools on examination preparation did literati elites revive their interest in classical studies. Wang Anshi and his fellow reformers not only made new commentaries on the classics and imposed them to be the state intellectual orthodoxy but also reformed government education to serve as a mechanism for recruiting civil officials. These measures exerted large impacts on late Northern Song politics and intellectual activities. Literati in the mid-Southern Song grew dissatisfied with the examination-oriented approach of classical studies in government schools and thus turned to private academies to pursue their ideals of moral education.

The Song religious world exhibited remarkable variety, innovation, and vibrancy. This survey of Song divinities, religious specialists, and religious practices highlights this era’s innovations and its continuities with the medieval past. Some old deities took on greater, national prominence in the Song. New local deities also emerged. The Song government approached these deities and their cults in various ways, granting state support, banning them, and often simply turning a blind eye. Among the lettered religions, Buddhism thrived, as the Chan school won widespread elite patronage. The Daoist church benefitted from extensive state patronage in two reigns, and new therapeutic, exorcistic regimens won government support and saw extensive use in the empire. Local festivals honoring new and old deities proliferated , as did large-scale rituals for the benefit of the suffering dead in the underworld. Clergies, lay elites, and commoners borrowed and shared practices to an unprecedented degree to secure protection and blessings in this life and the next.

This chapter surveys the major institutions of Song dynasty governance. It constructs a model of these institutions as a dynamic interaction between two competing visions and modalities of governance. Imperial technocracy focuses on the Song monarch (either male emperors or female empress regents) as the sole sovereign power that presided over an officialdom of technocrats trained to perform specific technical functions of government. These groups included military officials, imperial relatives, eunuchs, and the emperor’s female secretariat. In contract, Confucian instititionalism, promoted by committed Confucian officials advocating a vision of “shared governance” and grounded in a system of interlocking, hierarchically ordered agencies, challenged the monarchy’s claim to absolute authority. This chapter also includes a discussion of the various systems of state service that administered the professional lives of these groups. As the dynasty progressed, both creative and destructive tension between these two political visions and forces generated an ever-changing, hybrid mixture of institutional variations that provide the backdrop for understanding Song politcal history.

This chapter explores the flourishing of Buddhist print culture during the Song dynasty, focusing on its visual, material, and transregional dimensions. It shifts attention from elite literary publishing to religious book production, highlighting how Buddhist printing developed in both court-sponsored and commercial contexts. Beginning with rare early blocks, it sheds light on some of the earliest extant printed materials. The discussion on the Imperial Secret Treasures demonstrates visual strategies in imperially sponsored scripture printing. Finely produced Buddhist texts discovered in the tomb of Lady Sun reveal how printed books functioned in funerary practice and lay devotional life. The final section examines Hangzhou as a vibrant printing hub, where family-run publishers produced richly illustrated scriptures. Modular visual strategies in these frontispieces facilitated the circulation of Buddhist imagery, spreading Hangzhou’s Buddhist print culture to Xi Xia, Korea, Japan, and other parts of Asia. The chapter argues that image-bearing prints operated as visual and ritual media, enabling dynamic visual transmissions that often exceeded the textual reach alone.

The military history of the Song Dynasty is a tale of contradictions: the first three emperors sought to replace the militocracy that had dominated society through the first half of the 10th century with a rising class of exam-recruited civil officials. This goal was institutionalized by the so-called Chanyuan treat in 1005, which exchanged wealth, territory, and pride in return for peace along the northern frontier. The Chanyuan settlement inaugurated a national strategy based on accommodation over confrontation, the disparagement of military men, and the subordination of the military apparatus to strict civilian control. But the Chanyuan model was insufficient to contain the challenges posed by an unstable East Asian political order roiled by new states constantly jockeying to assert claims over status, wealth, and territory. Thus over the course of the 11th through 13th centuries, the Song court was constantly forced to amend or abort the centralized, defense-oriented, civilian-run Chanyuan model, only to reimpose variations once crisis was averted. It is this oscillation that shaped the evolution of Song China’s military institutions.

This chapter investigates the life, poetry and philosophy of the Northern Song thinker Shao Yong. Shao lived in a time of dramatic political and intellectual change, when Confucian intellectuals began to reassess their philosophical tradition and develop new theories about the universe, the human condition, self-cultivation and political order. Shao took part in this larger trend and proposed a new way of understanding the relationship between the self and the cosmos, which involved a unique method of perceiving the world and acting within it. Shao termed this method “observing things”, which while unique in many ways, nonetheless revealed the influence of the newly emerging Daoxue school of Confucian thought as well as numerology based in the Book of Change. Shao asserted that “observing things” required that one eliminate distinctions between the self and the world and realize unity with the myriad things. The chapter discusses the significance of this concept in the context of Song Confucian philosophy and how Shao laid out his conception of it in his poetry as well as in his most important philosophical work, the Book on the Supreme Principles for Ordering the World.

It was during the Northern Song era that the Yellow River, the dominant landscape feature of North China, began to flood frequently and catastrophically. Yellow River floods confounded the regime, immiserated and uprooted residents of the North China Plain, and marked a turning point in relations between Chinese people and the natural world that they inhabited. This chapter locates the origins of the flooding crisis in rapidly increasing erosion on the Loess Plateau, hundreds of miles upstream from the floodplain on the Song northwestern frontier, where the edge of the Yellow River watershed was also an ecologically fragile and highly militarized borderland. It also explains responses to flooding by engineers, officials, artists, and the people of the floodplain.

This chapter discusses the ideas and practices that shaped family and kinship relationships in the Song dynasty. After a brief introduction to basic principles that had governed Chinese kinship for centuries prior to the Song, the chapter traces how the growing economy, expansion of the examination system, and enlargement of the literate elite class over the course of the dynasty contributed to changes in family structures and kinship practices. It describes the elaboration of new marriage strategies, the expansion of concubinage, and the development of new institutions to promote kinship solidarity, all of remained central to Chinese kinship relations down to the early twentieth century.

(1) the first introduction is a brief survey of the Song dynasty, the sources to study this period, and the structure, themes, and oraganization of the volume

After the Jurchen conquest of northern China in 1127, Lin’an became the capital of the Southern Song. This period marked a pivotal transition in urban history: commercialization expanded beyond city walls, water management became essential for urban operations, and religion became more integrated into urban life. Businesses relocated from the old capital, while new resources from South China enriched city life. The exchange of goods and movement across the city blended suburban commerce and natural landscapes with city life. Commercial development and the public space offered by West Lake encouraged intense interactions in markets, teahouses, and gardens. Using capital journals, fiction, biji, and gazetteer maps, this chapter explores Lin’an’s environment, layout, commercial development, water management, and secular and religious life. The city’s blend of natural beauty and rapid commercial development marked a significant transition in Chinese urban history. The Southern Song’s influence elevated Hangzhou from a regional hub to a national political, religious, and aesthetic center, with impacts resonating across East Asia and beyond.

This chapter explores the lives of ordinary men and women in Song China – the majority whose experiences were far less documented than those of the elite. What was daily life like for them? What brought them happiness, and what were their fears? Drawing on the remarkably rich materials from the Yijian zhi 夷堅志 (Record of the Listener), this chapter weaves together the life stories of ordinary people in Song China by examining their livelihoods, spiritual world, and emotional trauma. Through these narratives, it reveals how grand historical forces – commercialization, religious integration, and the brutality of war – shaped the everyday experiences of Song China’s non-elite population.