Cong Tianshu shidai dao guwen yundong

Reviewed by: Cong Tianshu shidai dao guwen yundong: Bei Song qianqi de zhengzhi guocheng by Chang Wei-ling 張維玲 Charles Hartman Chang Wei-ling 張維玲. Cong Tianshu shidai dao guwen yundong: Bei Song qianqi de zhengzhi guocheng 從天書時代到古文運動⸺北宋 前期的政治過程 [From “Heavenly Texts” to the Guwen Movement: Political Process in the Early Northern Song Dynasty]. Guoli Taiwan daxue wenshi congkan 國立臺灣大學文史叢刊 158. Taipei: Guoli Taiwan daxue chuban zhongxin, 2021. Pp. 362. NT$520 (paper). ISBN 978-9863505563. Studies of the Song dynasty—and of middle period Chinese history in general—often suffer from the preference of most scholars to conceive and present their research within the confines of the self-contained silos of modern disciplinary knowledge. Thus, we have histories of Song politics, society, literature, art, economics, or “thought.” Useful as such histories often are, culture is lived as a seamless fabric of experience. The Song artists, poets, and politicians of our scholarly imaginations all lived their lives in a larger indivisible culture that remains beyond our ability to reconceive as a whole. True, on the one hand, intrepid interdisciplinarians may occasionally venture a cross-disciplinary comparison. But, since few scholars are equally proficient in more than one discipline, cross-references from the weaker discipline usually act as mere grace notes to the stronger, dominant discipline. On the other hand, proficient interdisciplinary scholars face the daunting challenge of deciding for any given research problem where and how they should best converge two disciplinary histories. Chang Wei-ling’s book reconceptualizes the history of early Song by merging the hitherto separate silos of political, intellectual, and literary history. She understands the “political process” of the title as that common ground of scholarly inquiry where political and intellectual history intersect; in other words, where ideas manifest as concrete political action. This focus is crucial, since, clearly, not all ideas result in political action, nor does all political action originate from ideas. To date, most scholars of Song history have treated what Chang calls the “era of the Heavenly Letters” (tianshu shidai 天書時代) as political history, and they treat the ensuing “antique prose movement” (guwen yundong 古文運動) as intellectual or literary history. By examining the cultural and literary foundations of the former and the political origins of the latter, Chang’s work places both phenomena within the same arena of scholarly inquiry. The result is a brilliant re-creation of the larger picture of the lived world of early Song political culture and carries major implications for the separate histories of Song politics, thought, and literature. [End Page 201] The book is divided into two parts, the first on the Heavenly Letters, the second on the guwen movement. After a short introduction (1–16), Part One contains three chapters. Chapter One reviews the Taizu 太祖- and Taizong 太宗-era origins of the concept of the Great Peace (Taiping 太平) and its relationship to the fengshan 封禪 sacrifices that came to dominate the ensuing Heavenly Letters era, which Chang defines as 1008 through 1033 (19–79). Chapter Two offers a detailed account of the intellectual foundations of this ritual program under Emperor Zhenzong 真宗 (968–1022; r. 997–1022) (81–138), and Chapter Three describes the larger political culture that grew up around this program (139–201). In the book’s second half on guwen, Chapter Four treats the emergence of the first challenges to the political culture of the Heavenly Letters era in the years after Zhenzong’s death in 1022 (205–267), and Chapter Five describes in detail the complex political forces that gave rise to the developed guwen movement along with related measures to question the traditional Han-Tang commentaries on the classics (269–332). Chang grounds her treatment of each part upon a historiographical de-construction of their standard received narratives. In the first case, the story goes: Wang Qinruo 王欽若 (962–1025), jealous over of his rival Kou Zhun’s 寇準 (961–1023) success in negotiating the Chanyuan 澶淵 Treaty of 1005, convinced Emperor Zhenzong that the treaty terms made Song look weak. He thus convinced the emperor to undertake a grandiose ritual program that would convince the superstitious Kitan that Heaven indeed supported Song. In preparation for the fengshan sacrifices, in 1008 Wang forged “letters from Heaven” (Tianshu 天書) that signaled Heaven’s support for

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