Chapter 3, “Inner versus Outer – The Politics of Political Space,” reviews the spatial dynamics of the Song court that are reflected in the conceptual and spatial dichotomy between inner and outer (nei/wai 內/外) and posits the inner and outer courts as competing and separate political and administrative centers of imperial technocratic versus Confucian institutionalist governance. Most critical was the intermediate, overlapping space where the emperor served as the sanctioned conduit between these two administrative spheres of Song governance. This chapter counters the contention that “the Song had no inner court,” which is itself merely a modern extension of the rhetorical claim that the Song monarchs succeeded in curtailing the political reach of the affinal kinsmen, female bureaucrats, and eunuchs who administered the mechanics and politics of the inner court. On the contrary, this chapter concludes that over the course of the dynasty court administration shifted progressively away from outer towards the imperial palace’s inner space and thus accorded more control over vital governmental functions to the non-literati operatives of the inner court.