Chinese Historiography in the Age of Maturity, 960–1368

This chapter looks at how the Song dynasty (960–1279) reconsolidated central power and eliminated the provincial regimes that had developed in the wake of Tang decentralization. During the first thirty years after 960, they fostered astute policies that promoted and took advantage of continuing economic expansion. To administer their new polity, the Song emperors recruited through the examination system a new class of bureaucratic elite that Western writings on China often call the ‘literati’. The aristocrats of Tang had given way to the merchants and bureaucrats of Song. However, although the Song expanded Chinese economic and political power into South China, it never completed the conquest of all the traditional Chinese lands in the north. The Song coexisted with a series of alien or conquest dynasties to its north and west.