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The discourse of loss in song dynasty private and imperial book collecting
Library Trends, Wntr, 2007 by Hilde De Weerdt
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the discourse of loss during the period between the pillaging of the Song Dynasty imperial libraries and the dispersal of private collections in north China in the late 1120s and the rebuilding of the Imperial Library and private collections through the 1140s. It contrasts the different strategies taken by the court and private collectors in managing loss, in developing acquisitions, and in remembering war and peace through collecting.
INTRODUCTION
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In 960 Zhao Kuangyin (r. 960-976) established the Song Dynasty (9601270). Zhao was a general who had served under one of the many dynasties in which the Chinese territories had been divided after the fall of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Twenty years later, in 979, Taizu, as he was officially called, fulfilled his ambition to reunify the Chinese territories. Taizu and his successor, Emperor Taizong (r. 976-97), succeeded in laying the foundations for a lasting empire, even though the Song Dynasty faced major challenges to its rule from the peoples living to its north throughout its three-hundred-year reign. In the early twelfth century the Jurchens, who first lived in the southern part of the area that became known later as Manchuria, began to pose a major threat to Song security. One of their leaders, Aguda, established a Chinese-style dynasty called the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) in 1115. Soon afterwards, in 1126, the Jin armies invaded Song territories in the north. In 1127 they crossed the Yellow River and captured the Song Dynasty capital of Kaifeng. Jin soldiers imprisoned the retired Emperor Huizong (r. 1101-25) and the reigning Emperor Qinzong (r. 1126-27). Following the capture of Kaifeng, hundreds of thousands of remaining court servants, officials, soldiers, and commoners retreated south. Zhao Gou, Huizong's ninth son, ascended the throne later in 1127 and became known Emperor Gaozong (r. 1127-62). After moving back and forth between several cities along the Yangzi Rivet, Gaozong and his court finally settled down in Hangzhon in 1138. By then the imperial libraries and private collections had suffered major losses. Throughout the 1130s and the 1140s court librarians and private collectors set out to restore the losses sustained during the invasions and the ensuing turmoil.
After the Jin armies captured the Song Dynasty capital of Kaifeng in 1126, they gained access to Chinese books and maps and the printing blocks with which some of these materials had been manufactured. During the peace negotiations that followed, Jin envoys transmitted their emperor's desire for books published in the Song territories. For the first time since it had reunified the Chinese territories in 960, the Song court handed over books and documents that it had carefully kept from foreign eyes because, from its perspective, they contained confidential information about the Song state. In 1127 Jin soldiers carried off not only the two emperors but also a large but unknown number of books, maps, paintings, and printing blocks from the preeminent institutions of court cultural production, the Imperial Library and the Directorate of Education. They transported this cache of artifacts as well as additional materials captured from smaller court libraries on carts to the Jin capital of Shangjing (Manchuria, now Heilongjiang Province) (Z. Wang, 1165/1983, 11.19b-20a, 11.24b, 12.17a; Ren, 2001, pp. 712, 836; Winkelman, 1976, pp. 10-12). According to one very rough official estimate made shortly after the Jin invasions of 1127, about 40 to 50 percent of the Chinese books in existence in 1126 were lost in the turmoil and dislocation that attended the Song court's forced move from northern China to the south (Ma, 14th century/1986, preface, 1.32).
Losses of this kind not only affected the imperial collections; similar accounts circulated about the disappearance of 50 to 100 percent of the holdings of private collectors, although the perpetrators were not always Jin soldiers. The most famous of these accounts is the odyssey of Zhao Mingcheng (1081-1129) and Li Qingzhao (1084-1155), a collector couple who carted their collection by river and over land for about five years, discarding and losing things along the way, until only a handful of volumes remained (Owen, 1986, pp. 80-98). Other examples include the collections of Ye Mengde's (1077-1148) family, who lost about half of their collection of over 30,000 juan; the collection of Wang Zhu (997-1057) and Wang Qinchen (1034-1101), father and son, whose collection was appropriated by a general who had promised to protect it for them; and the collection of Li Chang (1027-1090), whose catalog, extant yet incomplete, still preserves the memory of some of what was lost (Fan, 2001, pp. 89, 97, 102).
This article investigates the discourse of loss during the period between the Jurchen conquest of Kaifeng and the capture of the reigning emperor in the late 1120s, and the establishment and consolidation of the southern Song court in the new capital of Hangzhou through the 1140s. Within the discourse of loss both court officials and private collectors developed and defended strategies to recover what was lost. Discussions of loss moved beyond the nostalgic mental recollection of what was gone; the memory of loss was evoked time and again at court and among local elites as part of a strategy for restoring and expanding the imperial and private collections. This article contrasts the different approaches taken by the court and private collectors in managing loss and in remembering war and peace through collecting.
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