The Official Historiographical Operation of the Song Dynasty

Bibliographic Data

ID7324045
AuthorsSung Chia-Fu (corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume45
Issue1
Pages175-206
Publication date2015-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Sung-Yuan studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2154-6665 • E-ISSN: 1059-3152
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sys.2015.0004
OpenAlexW2604874149
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited8

The Official Historiographical Operation of the Song Dynasty Sung Chia-fu "On a necessarily limited scale, envisioning history as an operation would be equivalent to understanding it as the relation between a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession or business, etc.), analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (a literature) ... the historical operation refers to the combination of a social place, "scientific" practices, and writing." —Michel de Certeau (1925–86), "The Historiographical Operation" The governmental historiographical agencies—Guange 館閣—played a special and important role in eleventh century China.1 From the imperial vantage point, Guange was the first place to search for historiographical practitioners.2 In this paper, I propose to envision Guange as a nexus of the Song official historiographical operation, which, like other historiographical operations, may be considered as a synthetic event consisting of three interconnected factors, namely, Place (where it happened physically or institutionally), Procedure (how it was conducted), and Product (the final result, usually textual). These three Ps evolve as a package, usually mutually conditioned and interlocked. The late French scholar Michel de Certeau (1925–86) has inspired this 3P model. Although I confess I am intentionally reading him in a simplified and reductionist way, I will try to maintain a practical balance between a faithful observance to all the theoretical nuances of de Certeau's originality as I apply his insights to eleventh century Northern Song historiographical practice. [End Page 175] The official historiographical operation in the Song dynasty has been intensively studied with attention to varying themes including "shiguan zhidu 史官 制度 (the institutional system of the Historiography Officer)," "xiushi zhidu 修史制度 (the institution of compiling history)," or "guanfang shixue 官 方史學 (Official Historiography)."3 Despite of the nominal differentiation, however, the field urgently needs to avoid topical repetition and search for conceptual precision. To the best of my knowledge, there is still no satisfactory answer to the fundamental question "what is official historiography?" Although some scholars have noted that "official" should be defined in relation to a cluster of ideas including "si 私 (private)," "ye 野 (unauthorized)," "zheng 正 (standard)," "guo 國 (national)," and so on,4 the ground on which the dividing line is usually drawn tends to be based on the historiographer's official title, the Historiography Office's organization, or even a certain official ideology, despotic or Neo-Confucian, that supposedly oriented the historian's mindset. This is, in my opinion, still too "official" and not "historiographical" enough. In other words, historiography is not treated as historiography per se but always as an effect or even side effect of something else. Because of this nonhistoriographical view of Song official historiography, I believe, Sima Guang's Comprehensive Mirror and Ouyang Xiu's New History of the Five Dynasties are often misinterpreted as part of the official tradition.5 If historiography, official or otherwise, is envisioned as an operation that encompasses the wholesale package of its place, procedure, and product, then we have to reconsider the meaning and significance of the Song official historiographical operation and its relationship to other possible modes of operation such as Sima's Comprehensive Mirror, Ouyang's New History, and so on at roughly the same time. Historiography is, of course, not insulated from broader political, intellectual, [End Page 176] and cultural contexts. But to recognize this multiple connectedness should not be an excuse for jumping to conclusions regarding the causality of external factors. After all, historiography in the eleventh-century Song China was already a highly developed enterprise with sophisticated differentiations among the literati. At least formalistically speaking, historiography was not reducible to court memorials, policy-question essays, private correspondence, classic commentary, or other formats of writing that one would expect to be used to give voice to ideological struggles.6 To engage in a historiographical operation represented, and still does to this day, a huge commitment. We have to ask, why an author would choose to express himself in such and such a historiographical genre, as opposed to (a) other non-historiographical formats, (b) other historiographical sub-genres, to relate the story he was interested in? Among this extended family of genres, I believe, the workings of the official historiographical operation should first be clarified as distinct from other, but

Archaeology · Art · Eleventh · Epistemology · Historiography · Literature · Nexus (standard · Originality · Social science · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Computer Science · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub