approaches and departures: historiographic issues

Ensconced within his palace pleasure gardens, a dissolute aesthete-emperor paints exquisite birds and flowers, even as the empire rots from corruption within and succumbs to invasion from without. Such is the classical historiographic image of Emperor Hui-tsung (1082–1135, r. 1100–26), the penultimate monarch of the Northern Sung. Occupying a tantalizingly ambiguous position in history, he has been simultaneously celebrated as a magnificent patron and practitioner of the arts and reviled as a negligent ruler who nearly doomed the dynasty. For centuries of Chinese historians, Hui-tsung has functioned as a metonymic figure, embodying the contradictions of the Sung dynasty as a whole, symbolizing the ascendancy of wen, the refinements of culture, over wu, the arts of war. Rich in tragedy and irony, the contradictions and contrasts of Hui-tsung’s reign have been suppressed by historians, who have reconstructed a fragmentary corpus of primary sources into a didactic and moralistic narrative.

Judgments of the Hui-tsung era have tended toward high levels of generalization, for the documentary record of his reign poses a minefield of historiographic problems. Foremost of these issues is the moralistic praise-and-blame bias of traditional Chinese historiography. In the standard dynastic histories of the Sung, and in privately compiled works of historiography, Hui-tsung and his long-serving chief councilor Ts’ai Ching (1046–1127) have been held responsible for a litany of crimes against the moral and territorial integrity of the state. Ts’ai and his fellow state councilors, pejoratively referred to as the “Six Felons” (liu tsei), were blamed for prosecuting the most sweeping factional purge in Sung history, allowing governmental corruption to run rampant, and pushing the subjects of the empire toward impoverishment and rebellion.