Chapter 8 introduces and establishes the theoretical premise of the “Narratives” portion of the book, namely that the received history of Song, as codified in the Song History of 1345, can be deconstructed as a metanarrative or “grand allegory.” The chapter explores similarities between daoxue historiography and Herbert Butterfield’s notion of “Whig history,” an account of Britain that rendered Whig political ascendency over the Tories historically inevitable. First, both are blatantly presentist: historical events are chosen because they contain positive or negative value as guidelines for present action. Both rely extensively upon abridgment to foreground these examples. Both generate clear heroes and villains whose earlier struggles presage the political conflicts of the present. And finally, both create a teleological trajectory of moral rectitude that ensures the ultimate intellectual and political triumph of the writer’s own beliefs. I use the term “grand allegory” because the Western notion of allegory indeed seems appropriate for how these late Song and Yuan historians accessed their own daoxue convictions to impose structure and meaning on the disparate data of Song history. The chapter introduces the three major thematic clusters that comprise the grand allegory as presented in the 1229 preface by Zhen Dexiu (1178–1235) to Chen Jun’s history of Song.

“The Daoxue Historians” defines the existence of a distinctive historiography associated with the Southern Song intellectual movement known as the Learning of the Way (daoxue). Understood traditionally as a philosophical movement within Song Confucianism, this chapter accentuates the political aspects of daoxue and the need of its advocates for a historiography that supported their political goals. This chapter examines the historical writings of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), Chen Jun (1174–1244), and Lü Zhong (fl. 1250) as instrumental to the formation of a metanarrative of Song history that became codified in the official Song History (Songshi) of 1345. Drawing on Hartman’s previous scholarship, this chapter focuses on the centrality of works written in the “outline and details” (gangmu) format, first devised by Zhu Xi, as a rhetorical vehicle for this metanarrative. The annalistic “outline and detail” histories, covering the period from 960 through 1189, completed by Chen Jun about 1229, constitute the first privately compiled history of Song from its inception to the writer’s own day. This chapter frames these gangmu histories as “pedagogical,” since they were often intended for instructional purposes, as opposed to the “documentary” focus of the Sichuan school. Lü Zhong’s Lectures on Song History, essentially an extended commentary on Chen Jun’s history, illustrates the pedagogical nature of these works. The chapter closes with a summary of the goals and methods of daoxue historiography.