The History of China - #135 - N. Song 3: A Lesser Empire

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

Song's second emperor, Taizong, wants to achieve the heights of Chinese glory, power, and territory just like the Tang and Han before him. But aspirations are easier than results, and he's going to have to contend with neighbor states on all sides far more powerful than his predecessors - and with his own position far weaker. Still it's either that or the utterly unthinkable: acknowledge that China is no longer the preeminent superpower of the East, but now just one state among equals. Time Period Covered: 976-986 CE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episode 135, A Lesser Empire Last time we ended off with the unexpected death of the Song Dynasty's first emperor, Taizu in 976, and the completely unprecedented accession of his brother, Zhao Kuangyi, who may or may not have, but probably didn't, secretly and strangely murder his brother in his sleep or something. So today, that is the personal political situation we're going to start off with, but I'd also like to make a central focus of this episode that of Song China's relationship with its neighbor states and peoples,

as that will prove to be at least as, and in reality far more important and relevant to the events as we move forward. But first, yes, our second Chinese Taizong, that is Emperor Taizong of Song. As usual, it's worth reminding us all that the title of Taizong would have never been used over the course of the second Song emperor's lifetime, and was not in fact chosen until well after his death as a temple name for his family's worship. And so it's once again time to play another round of imperial Chinese name game. Okay, so Taiji's younger brother would have been born as, and I've been calling him, Zhao Kuangyi. But upon his brother's usurpation and establishment of the reigning dynasty, he was forced by custom and law to change his name in order to avoid the long-standing

imperial naming taboo, which you'll remember forbade any person or place name from sharing a word with the given name of the reigning emperor. As homophone-rich an environment as the Chinese language was, and is though, it wasn't a terrible stretch for Kuang Yi, who then dutifully changed his name to Guang Yi in 960, and everything was hunky-dory. Then, the year after his unorthodox elevation to the throne in 976, he changed his personal name again, this time to Zhao Zhong, for reasons I know not what. Now, if we were to try to call him by his posthumous name, bestowed, as the title would suggest, well after his death in the year 1017, it would be quite the mouthful. He was the 智人, 英道, 圣公, 圣德, 文武, 蕊列, 大明, 光孝, 皇帝, which is to say, the most gracious and trodden upon the correct path with divine skill,

wholly cultured and militant, farsighted and strong, greatly enlightened, vastly filial emperor. So yeah, let's just go ahead and call him Taizong instead, shall we? Song Taizong was 37 when he took up the throne, and in spite of Taizu having two grown sons, was handily the most dominant of all the potential political successors to the throne, owing to his own professional and personal connections, as well as the looming foreign conflict between Song and the Qitan Liao to the north that just wouldn't go away. Professors Lau and Huang write, No imperial clansman was more experienced than Guangyi in dealing with the military and civil measures Liao to the north, then it just wouldn't go away. Professors Lau and Huang write, quote,

no imperial clansman was more experienced than Guangyi in dealing with the military and civil measures such protocols demanded, end quote. This evident experience gap was made about as official as it could be with his brother Taizu's own decisions regarding his sons versus his brother. Now up until today, I'd been erroneously referring to Taizu's eldest son, Zhao Dazhao, as the crown prince, which I'm sorry to say he never was. So sorry about that slip up. In fact, Taizu had never gotten around to officially naming an heir, something which just seems to be bizarrely common amongst Chinese nobility for some reason. And Zhao Kuan-yi had, across his elder brother's entire reign,

been well above the would-be scion of Taizu's position. Even into his 20s, Dejiao was never in command of an official post, nor had he even been ennobled with the title of Wang, or prince, upon his 18th birthday, a huge contravention to standing etiquette. This isn't to say that he was some pariah. To the contrary, in 973, he was finally granted title and position as a military governor, though the such positions were by this point, you may remember, almost entirely ceremonial. And he was also granted a ceremonial rank equivalent to that of chancellor. Even so, his uncle remained one or more steps ahead, being ennobled the same year as one rank

higher than his nephew, as well as becoming the only imperial prince so named in Taizu's lifetime. Murder mystery theories aside, Lao and Huang write, quote, it seems clear that by that time, Guangyi was already Taizu's intended successor, end quote. And why shouldn't he be? After all, he was even before his official ennoblement the second most powerful man in the entire empire, the governor of the capital city, Kaifeng, who had managed by the force of his own argument to convince Taizu to keep the capital there rather than move it back to Luoyang, and had amassed not only a sizable force of personally loyal soldiers, tusks, fugitives, and literati, but also the admiration and critically collection of favors from the nobility and officialdom of his brother's court. It was a pretty sweet gig, if you could get it, and really only reinforces the traditional

narrative that Guangyi really was the go-to guy in the succession order, regardless of how unorthodox it may have been. In many respects, it wasn't until Emperor Taizu's death and the accession of Taizong that the Song dynasty was widely seen as anything other than yet another empty claimant to the long-vacant heritage of the late Great Tang's hegemonic preeminence. Professor Wang Gengwu writes in his paper The Rhetoric of a Lesser Empire Early Song Relations with Its Neighbors, quote, Until the end of Song Taizu's reign, every claim to that heritage, if not obviously hollow, was greeted with suspicion and was challenged by some other rival claimant.

This was particularly true to the claim to Tang greatness in the known world around China, even though that claim by the Tang itself had become more rhetorical than real by the end of the 8th century. The point is that, for some 150 years after the An Lushan Rebellion, while the Tang was struggling to survive as a military empire, the imperial style of the dynasty's relations with foreign kingdoms and tribes seems to have been sustained. End quote. The Tang dynasty, though by now long, long dead, still cast a very long shadow indeed, that in virtually every respect, the Song could only now, with the peaceful accession of its second emperor, even think

about residing within, much less superseding. Thus, the succession of Taizong put it well above its short-lived predecessors, in that it now seemed to have actually thought about the future in some capacity, rather than seeking only immediate territorial gains. The fact that the early Song employed virtually whole cloth the rhetorical imperial devices of the Tang's managerial and diplomatic systems up until then merely marked the nascent state as expressing the aspirations of yet another hopeful unifier of the Chinese empire, the seeking of the norm and the ideal that had been lost for a hundred years. So let's look a little further into what I mean when I talk about

Tang, and now Song, imperial rhetoric. Professor Wong writes that in general, such diplomatic devices can be divided into five broad groups. First, language, which was largely moral and cosmological and expressed inclusiveness. Second, the rhetoric dealing specifically with tribute. Third, derogatory language justifying the use of force. Fourth, routine communications stressing realism and flexibility. And fifth, the rhetoric of contractual relations. All right, well, that's kind of general, isn't it?

So let's take a look at what each of these look like in practice, shall we? First off, the moral and cosmological all-inclusive rhetoric, a pretty representative example of which would have been, quote, Heaven covers all and Earth supports all. We will nurture all those who seek us, end quote. Pretty straightforward. As Wong points out, quote, Everyone far and near was equidistant before the Son of Heaven, and no one would be left out, no one was beyond the pale where the imperial virtue was concerned, end quote. In contrast to that effusion of inclusiveness, the rhetoric regarding tributary payments from China's neighbors did very much discriminate and arrange lesser states into a strictly enforced hierarchy along the lines of states that were geographically, as well as culturally, near or distant to China's own.

The third category, that of derogatory language used to justify military action, of course had a long and storied tradition by this point in China. But like so much else, had reached its high watermark during the Tang, especially when the An Lushan Rebellion effectively calcified the ethnic, versus cultural, otherness of non-Chinese. Yet even well prior to the Great Rebellion, there were plenty of Chinese more than willing to go full-on racist regarding the barbarians at the gates. One of Tang Taizong's closest advisors, for instance, is recorded in the Old Book of Tang as having stated to his emperor in the 6th or 7th century,

quote, The Xiongnu with their human faces and animal hearts are not our kind. When strong, they are certain to rob and pillage. When weak, they come to submit. A couple of notes about this. First, the designation of Xiongnu in this passage is pretty much analogous to medieval and even modern European designations of other, especially Asiatic forces, as the Huns of Attila, which is to say there's no relationship between the term and the actual ethnicity of the groups being discussed, to which the Germans of the First World War were no more Hunnic than the Guk Turks of Tang Taizong's own time, or related to the Xiongnu. In both instances, it instead serves a powerful quasi-historical

archetype, such that many translations, including Disney's own completely ahistorical Mulan, simply render Xiongnu as Hun in translations. Also, as a short aside, it's still pretty ironic that people would be talking to Tang Taizong in such a manner, given his own semi-Turkic ethnicity, which, in spite of later and even contemporary revisionism, was something of an open secret at the court. This sort of rhetoric, unsurprisingly, was confined almost solely to the internal documents of the courts rather than anything sent out to other political actors, because duh.

Anyway, the fourth category, that of realism and flexibility, was much more in line with relevant policy decisions at the macro level than the knee-jerk emotional responses of the third category, and based thoroughly on the calculations of relative strength and weakness of the political actors in question. The overriding policy of China towards its subservient neighbors was that of jimi, which is usually and most instructively translated as the loose rein system, as in holding the reins of a horse loosely. This political position had been in effect since at least the Qin dynasty of the 3rd century BCE, and would remain the de facto foreign policy of the Middle Kingdom until well into the 18th century. From Wang, quote, Depending on the circumstances, it employed the rhetoric both of inclusiveness and of exclusiveness,

as well as language of the tributary system in order to keep the initiative at all times, and was neither aggressive nor submissive, but flexible and neutral enough for practical purposes, end quote. In other words, an imperial realpolitikical diplomatic stance that could read the changeable winds of those under its umbrage and adjust accordingly. A view of diplomacy as not just a routine and necessary endeavor, but a fundamentally proactive and positive bulwark against international breaches, rather than a blanket my-way-or-the-highway approach, a sort of viewpoint that certain modern hyperpowers could stand to learn from. The fifth and final of the rhetorical devices of the Imperium was that of international contracts. Now, for anyone who has lived in

China, done business there, or interacted heavily with its businesses and individuals, this next part might ring a few bells. But China has a long-standing, oh, let's call it loose, relationship with contractual obligations. The list is long indeed of those peoples and firms who have entered into an agreement with a Chinese company, dotted their I's and crossed their T's, and made sure that everything was on the up and up, only to find out later on that their partner suddenly wants to revise or reinterpret swaths of the agreement. It's anathema to Western business practices. A contract is a contract, after all. But it has been part and parcel to Chinese business strategy, both private and governmental, since virtually time immemorial. A contract is often more flexible in the Chinese ideation, merely the starting point

from which to further negotiate. Again, from Wang, quote, there has always been ambiguity as to whether such agreements were really meant to be binding or whether they were merely variations of the strategic approach, that is, merely a temporary device to gain time, regain initiative, and help outmaneuver the enemy. This contractual approach differed from the strategic one in that it did not depend on hard-headed calculations of strength and weakness alone, but also involved ideas about friendship, about legitimate interests, about agreed frontiers, about behavior and duties of envoys, and even about long-term peace and prosperity in what might be described as the rudiments of modern diplomacy, end quote. Again, I just kind of have to shake my head in astonishment from such an outlook, not necessarily because I disagree with it, but rather because I find it so

fascinatingly useful. This understanding that negotiations, agreements, and diplomacy are not just a shield of last resort to cower behind, but in deft hands, actually a weapon that can disarm an enemy long enough for you to reload and renew your own attack. So very, very much unlike the modern US understanding of diplomacy being for the weak, when you can just saber-rattle your way through any and every negotiation. From the outset, the Song attempted to take up the mantle of this rhetoric, along with all other aspects of the late Great Tang. But it was not without considerable pushback in the early years and decades. Again, right up until Song Taizong's accession, the Song was really just yet another wannabe, as likely as anything to just be the

sixth of the five dynasties ready to crumble the minute its singularly charismatic founder departed the stage. All this was compounded by the fact that for all of his successes in mending the fractured empire back together, Taizu had died with the job left incomplete. The state of northern Han yet remained as a glaring reminder that whatever its rhetoric, the Song so-called dynasty, hadn't reunified China, as was the inarguable responsibility of any seeking the mandate of heaven. Worse yet, the state that diplomatically, financially, and militarily backed the renegade northern state, the Khitan Liao, likewise had claimed the traditionally Chinese imperial prerogative

of the son of heaven and his mandate to rule. This was no mere stylistic problem either, since by definition, there could only ever be one legitimate claimant to that aegis of authority, and there was no doubt that the Liao had been around far longer than the newborn Song. If anything, Taizu had been super lucky that he'd come around during the reign of Liao Muzong, who you may recall had well and truly earned his deriding nickname the Dozing Emperor by being singularly incompetent and torpid over the entire course of his rule. From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg, from the Emancipation

Proclamation to Appomattox Courthouse, from the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877, from Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. I'm Rich and I'm Tracy and we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era when a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. This had allowed Taizu to beef up his own bona fides in the South

with virtually no pushback from his northern neighbor. But Taizu had always remained acutely aware of the sleeping dragon to his north, and had taken great pains to employ only the kindest and most conciliatory of rhetorical flourishes when dealing with the Liao. A favor the Liao court had apparently been only too happy to reciprocate. For instance, an early missive compiled in the Qing dynasty era Song Compendium of Governmental Manuscripts, the Liao prefect Ye Liu Cong wrote that his government and that of the Song need not be adversaries, but instead, quote, why not generations of friendly alliances and regular gifts? And further that, there has never been the slightest fissure between our two courts.

If envoys were exchanged and the intentions of our rulers were bared, this would rest our weary people and restore our good relations. For his own part, Emperor Taizu had reciprocated this amiable rhetoric, minimizing the typically high-handed wording in his dealing with the Liao emissaries sent to his court. Speaking of them coming to his court because they admire us, but immediately following that up with the equivocation that it was less because of his empire's little virtue than of the sheer good fortune on his part. It wouldn't be until 979 that he'd ever refer to the Liao envoy's presentations, it wouldn't be until the very end of his reign, 979, that he would ever refer to the Liao envoy's presentation of gifts as laigong, meaning coming to offer tribute, rather than an equivocal exchange of gifts between peers. Indeed, the Liao records consist of using the terms xian and zi in their descriptions of their gift exchanges, meaning offer up and confer upon an inferior, respectively.

A clear sign, Professor Wang notes, that it never saw itself as anything less than the song's equal and quite possibly superior partner throughout the 970s. He writes that a term like gong, tribute, quote, certainly could not have been accepted by the Liao. What emerges is that the relationship was based principally on the exchange of gifts between equals, end quotes. Contrast this, then, with the Song court's understanding

and treatment of its other neighbor states. Both Korean Goryeo, as well as the nomadic Tanguts of the northwest since 962, the southern Vietnamese kingdom of Champa since 963, and the envoys of the newly created northern Vietnamese kingdom of Dai Co Viet, meaning Great Viet, and formerly the Chinese province of Annam as of 973. One and all, they had arrived at their designated times to present their gong, tribute, like the good little satrapies they were. But this all-singing, all-dancing, happy relationship was not to last. As we finished off with last time, Tide's virtual last act in office was to launch his ill-fated war against Northern Han in 979, during the course of which he would die. This inexorably dragged the two powers of the region into direct conflict, with Song, now under the iron fist of Taizong, claiming its casus belli as reclaiming

the 16 prefectures of the northeastern border that had been ceded to the Liao by the later Jin back in 938. Meanwhile, the Liao responded that they too had a perfectly legitimate reason to go to war, citing the defense of the same 16 prefectures against this unprovoked Song aggression, as well as defending poor, helpless little northern Han, its subsidiary state after all, from big bad China. Well, I use big and bad relatively here, since, as I've already pointed out, the Song was certainly no Tang, either in terms of physical size or military might, whatever pretensions to the old glory days might have been at its court. Lao and Huang write, quote, The Song Empire was much smaller than the cosmopolitan Tang.

The Song never controlled any part of Central Asia, from which Indian Buddhism and the best warhorses had come. It never reincorporated Annam, again, now Dai Zhaobiet, its southwestern neighbor, whose independence in 968 ended centuries of Chinese hegemony over the Red River floodplain. Instead, the Song was continually humiliated by its neighbors. Attempting to recover the 16 prefectures of Yan Yun from the Liao ended in disastrous defeat, and the policy of Yiyi Ziyi, playing the barbarians off of each other, used against the Tanguts, only hastened the Tangut achievement of autonomy

into the kingdom of western Xia, or Xixia in 1038. Given its place in a geopolitical triangle of the Song, Liao, and Xixia states, the Song empire has been described by modern historians as just one state among equals. What had begun as a cordial, even friendly relationship between the Song of Taizu had been abortively breached in 978 with the first emperor's death. But any chance of mending those fences was quickly brushed aside by Taizong, who the following year renewed his brother's invasion plans of northern Han, forcing the Liao to once again ride to the rescue. Taizu's last attack had been a direct strike from south to north, which he'll remember failed pretty miserably, and so Taizong was

resolved not to repeat the same mistake. Instead, this time he'd attack from the northwest, a strategy that met with major early success when it encountered and demolished the Liao defense force sent to reinforce the targeted state. The remainder of the war was quick and decisive, with Northern Han holding out for just 15 days before capitulating utterly to the invading Song armies. But where Taizu had made a career out of showing uncommon leniency toward his vanquished foes, Taizong had no such compunction. In the days following the capture of the last Han stronghold, its capital, Taiyuan, the emperor decreed that the city was to be permanently downgraded from its status as

prefectural capital to mere county seat, and then just for good measure, he ordered his troops to set the city ablaze once they were done pillaging and looting it of its valuables, a course that would result in the deaths of many of its inhabitants in the resulting inferno. Yet in the blazing light of what had been an unexpectedly easy victory, Taizong now prepared to use the destruction and annexation of northern Han as just the starting point for his much wider goal, the total and absolute restoration of all Chinese territories into the Imperium, meaning that the next and final target would be the 16 prefectures that had so long ago been ceded to the Liao. Those generals were reluctant to push their luck so soon after the campaign against Taiyuan, but with their men already fatigued and supply shortages already

beginning to grip the army. Internally, the generals and ministers both feared that the Song army did not yet possess sufficient strength to win an extended war against Liao. Yet at the same time, we once again see clear and interesting elements of the old Chinese rhetoric playing havoc with those more sober assessments. Still other ministers wrote in internal memoranda that the Khitan barbarians dragged their smell of sheep and goats with them into China, quote, as rascals who would run away when faced with authority, and as minor evil spirits who the emperor could easily frighten away, end quote. At the same time, the external propaganda arm of the Song government

was likewise in full swing, albeit with a somewhat different tact. In an imperial edict to the leader of Bo Hai, bordering the Korean peninsula, inviting him to join in the looming campaign, it was written, quote, And as a brief aside, I just love how many translations of the old texts use the word rascals. Makes it feel like they're about to face down alfalfa and spanky. A better translation might have been scoundrel, but hey, what do I know? Another example of this lack of one-to-one meetings between translations is in the word silly. Now in English, of course, silly typically just means not serious or joking.

I can't think of anyone who'd get offended by being called silly in normal conversation. But yeah, don't try translating that into Chinese, because the most common translation means something more akin to imbecilic asshole than, oh, you silly goose. Just trust me on this. In any case, egged on by such propaganda pieces, the generals, though still reluctant, were compelled at last to assent to the emperor's will and mobilize their troops northeast towards the borderlands. After all, they had defeated both the Han and the Liao forces so easily, it should be a cakewalk for them to finish off the campaign before the Liao could muster another force to oppose them. They proceeded toward the great southern capital of the Liao, Yuzhou,

in what is modern Beijing, a truly formidable city surrounded by more than 16 kilometers of outer walls. Undeterred, the Song army, personally led by Taizong, and after an initial 10-day blitz aimed at cracking the city open, settled in for a siege that would last three months. In this next part, I'm translating from the 2009 article in the Beijing Qianyin Bao, or the Beijing Youth Daily, written by Liang Changjun. It goes, Up in the northern reaches of the Liao territories, the Catan emperor, Jing Zong, the nephew of the murdered Mu Zong, was off on one of his people's seasonal hunts

when word arrived that Yan was under siege. His initial reaction, apparently, was more or less to shrug off the news and simply leave the, to his mind, distant and intemperately hot southern city to its fate. But the Liao Emperor's brother, Ye Luhuo, volunteered to lead a force himself to aid the southern capital against the encroaching Chinese. The two forces would clash on the banks of the Gaoliang River in the sixth day of the sixth lunar month 979, which corresponds to August 1st. At this time, much unlike the later Ming and Qing periods in which the river had shifted close to the Great Wall, the Gaoliang River lay more than a day's quiet ride from the wall. However, here and now, the clash of swords broke the stillness.

General Song Jun and Prime Minister Ye Li Sha commanded Song forces, whose morale was high, leading them to crush the barbarian defenders of Yan in one fell swoop when they sallied forth from the city defenses. With the defenders broken, the Song armies chased after them in victory. By dusk, however, Prince Ye Lu Hou's Khitan relief force had arrived, catching the Song armies completely by surprise and out of formation, much to their great sorrow. The Khitan commanders flanked the Song army from both the left and the right, while the commanders of the city defenses, bolstered by the appearance of his reinforcements, was able to rally his troops once more and pin the Song soldiers from the north.

Thus, the Song suddenly found themselves enveloped on three sides and facing a completely unexpected and total defeat. That night, the blood of more than 10,000 Song soldiers stained the shores of the Galiang River, and the Liao army pursued the routed and shattered remains of the Chinese army for some 30 kilometers. Again from Lao and Huang, quote, the disastrous defeat suffered by the Song at the Gaoliang River, where over 10,000 Song troops were killed and Taizong himself was wounded by arrows, ushered in 25 years of warfare between the Song and the Liao, who now faced each other directly, without the northern Han between them as a buffer state.

Not only was Taizong badly wounded in the battle, but he reportedly was forced, surely to his even further humiliation, to steal a donkey cart to escape the carnage with his life. The Battle of Gaoliang would mark the end of any real auspices of Song reclaiming the lost 16 prefectures, and indeed, barring a period of just two years, more than a century and a half later, when the Song briefly held the city between 1123 and 1125, marked Beijing falling permanently out of Chinese control for the next 390 years until the rise of the Ming against the Mongol Yuan in 1368. In the wake of this crushing defeat, the still-recovering Taizong heard rumors that many of his troops, understandably deeply unhappy at the way his reign was shaping up, were beginning to grumble that maybe his nephew, Taizu's eldest son, Zhao Dajiao, ought to seize the throne from Taizong. Well, the emperor went ahead and nipped that might-have-been mutiny right in the bud, and immediately ordered Prince Dajiao

to commit suicide. The Battle of Gaoliang River would critically shape Song military policy for virtually the remainder of its lifespan, shifting from an offensive footing to a decisively defensive one. Over the course of the six years that would follow Gaoliang, it would be the Liao, not the Song, that held the entirety of the war's initiative. They initiated all attacks, used their far superior mounts and horsemanship to conduct hit-and-run lightning raids with near impunity, and generally drove the Song armies to utter exhaustion. And it's no surprise, really. Back in the Five Dynasties period, remember how that had been the whole Liao strategy? Well, nothing's really changed. The Chinese are still primarily

foot soldiers, and the Liao are still entirely mounted. It doesn't take a military genius to lay odds on that sort of asymmetric war. In the face of this thoroughly embarrassing and demoralizing war of his own make, Song Taizong quickly found his well of allies and tributary states scraping bottom. He'd sent several missives to both Korean Goryeo and Bohai asking for their aid, but time and again had received either a perfunctory excuse as to why they weren't joining the war, or just no reply whatsoever. Meanwhile, and in stark contrast, Liao Jingzong, and then as of 982, his successor and ten-year-old son, Emperor Shengzong, both focused heavily on shoring up their support and

hegemony among the tribes of the western reaches, ensuring that there would be no second front opened up against them from the steppes, and that they could remain completely focused on their foe to the south. That plan would culminate in fact in 986, when the Tangut tribes, long-time allies and tributaries of the Song, flipped and pledged themselves to the Liao. It would be the accession of the Liao's sixth emperor, the boy king Shangzong, that would rouse Taizong out of his defensive posture and plan another attack northward in 986, figuring that neither a child nor his mother, the ruling empress Dowager Xiao, would be a match for him once he again mobilized,

this time at the head of some three forces numbering 200,000 strong. But the target would be the same, Yanzhou or bust, in the campaign called the Yongxi Northern Expedition. Once again, though, the Song infantry would prove no match for the Liao cavalry. After some initial successes in the mountainous passes where cavalry was markedly less effective, the bickering and divided nature of the three commanders of the Song armies proved their undoing. At Zhikou Pass in the Zhou Prefecture, miscommunication between two of the Chinese commanders

resulted in almost the whole of the Eastern Army being trapped by the two Khitan forces led by the Empress Dowager and the young emperor personally, where it was ground to dust at the cost of as many as 30,000 Song soldiers' lives, as well as the senior most of Taizong's command staff. This, combined with equally crushing defeats of the Central Army and then the Western Army, forced Taizong to once again call off his campaign in ignominy and retreat southward. Lao Wenhuang writes,

Taizong's wars against the Liao were very costly. Liao counter-raids inside Song borders devastated the region's human and economic resources, forcing Taizong to grant years of land tax remission to the landowners in Hebei, and to abandon the recruitment of soldiers in the region of Henan. During this period, Taizong also lost potential allies. In 991 and 994, after the requests for military aid were turned down by Taizong, the Jurchen in the region of northern Manchuria and the Goryeo Kingdom accepted Liao's suzerainty. As the hope of victory overchuria and the Goryeo Kingdom accepted Liao's suzerainty.

As the hope of victory over the Liao dimmed, advocates of a diplomatic rather than a military solution began gaining ground at the Song court. Haizong himself became increasingly tired of fighting. Two Song appeals for peace were recorded in the Liao dynastic history, but they came to nothing. Indeed, my working title for this episode had been How to Lose Wars and Alienate Allies. But that low point is going to be where we leave off our poor Song dynasty. Trunken, weakened, embittered, and friendless. And next time, Emperor Taizong will decide that the grapes of conquest were sour anyway, and he didn't even want them.

Deciding instead to focus on that which up until this point he'd been more or less ignoring. The internal policies of his empire, and the diplomatic relations with those few neighbor states that hadn't completely abandoned him quite yet. But even more than that, we're going to begin delving into the group of people that will shortly come to complete our 11th century triumvirate of roughly co-equal mainland East Asian states. We've introduced and extensively looked at the Liao and the Song already, of course, but now it's time to take a look further west, to the Tenguts, who in 984 will decide that they've had just about enough of Song Taizong's ridiculous blockading, launching them on a path towards independence as a state of Xia, the great state of white loftiness.

Or more commonly, because we can't have a Chinese state name without directional or temporal modifiers after all, Western Xia. Thanks for listening, and happy 2018. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the

British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.