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  • Chapter 9 - Reconceptualizing the order of things in Northern and Southern Sung

  • Edited by John W. Chaffee, Denis Twitchett
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of China
    Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    05 March 2015, pp 665-726

  • Summary

    Modern research on Sung government and politics has lavished attention on Sung officialdom, its composition, its education, its ethos, and on the institutional structures that supported it. Literati refers to civil officials who served in the upper ranks of Sung government. Most Sung writings on political theory and practice, especially in the Northern Sung, emanate from this group of people. This chapter concentrates on how the full development of literati culture in the eleventh century generated a theory, if not a practice, of government that remained largely intact for the entire Sung period. It describes how an extreme application of the same values that first generated and sustained this theoretical model frustrated its practical implementation, which came near to realization only for a brief period in the mid-eleventh century and perhaps again under Hsiao-tsung in the Southern Sung.