The History of China - #136 - N. Song 4: E Pluribus Xia

Episode Date: February 1, 2018

To the Northwest of the Song Empire, a group of non-Chinese known as the Tanguts have long been subject to the whims and subjugations of their greater neighbors. But with the Chinese focused on their struggle against the Khitan Liao, and the Tibetans and Uighur states having collapsed to the far west, the Tanguts need to unite - in spite of their often fractious nature - if they're to seize the moment and carve out their place in history. Time Period Covered: ~735-1001 CE Major Historical Figures: Song Dynasty: Emperor Taizong of Song (Zhao Jiong) [r. 976-997] Emperor Zhenzong of Song (Zhao Heng) [r. 997-1022] Western Xia: Governor-General Tuoba Sigong (Li Sigong)of Dingnan, Duke of Xia [d. 886?] Li Yiyin/Yixin, Prince of Xia (posthumous) [d. 967] Li Kerui, Governor-General of Xia [r.967-978] Li Jiqian, rebel leader against Song Dynasty[963–1004] Li Deming (post. Emperor Taizong of Western Xia), founder of Xi Xia Dynasty [981–1032] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Thank you for your patience. So, that said, let's jump right in. Today, we begin not where we left off. Not in China at all, in fact. Heck, not even in the same century or dynasty that we left off. But don't fret, we'll be back home in the bosom of Kaifeng by episode's end, just in time to lay Emperor Taizong to his eternal rest. Instead, we are, for the moment, leaving the trials and travails of the early Northern Song Dynasty behind at the end of the 10th century and heading out west. Way out west. No, not quite so far west as the great stretches of the Tang dynasty, but we are talking about the same general region because we're looking at what will become the third major player in the game of Asian thrones during the 11th and 12th centuries. That is the state of Xia, or as we will refer to it to differentiate it from the oh-so-ancient,

it's probably mythical, first dynasty with which it shares a name, Western Xia, or alternatively, Xixia. Western Xia, in some respects, seems to just kind of pop up out of nowhere at the end of the 10th century, as the Song and Liao tangle and struggle with each other. Yet, as with any state that just seems to arise out of nowhere, that is never actually the case. The people who made up the state had a long and rich history in Central Asia, one which, alas, I will only have the time to briefly explain, and should in no way be taken as anything approaching some exhaustive study. The primary and ruling ethnicity of the Xisha state are known as the Tanguts,

but as Professor Ruth Dunnell points out, calling Xisha a Tangut state is not strictly accurate. Like virtually all of the kingdoms and empires of Central Asia, and as we're well aware by now, China as well, Xisha was a veritable melting pot of all sorts. Tanguts ruled over, but also mixed, married, and propagated with Han Chinese, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Khitans, Turks, Qiang, and multitudinous other peoples, over which there seemed to be few if any laws regarding or prohibiting intermarriage. In terms of the affairs of the state, at least from the outside looking in, Chinese observers noted its similarities to the Chinese model, but its inner workings still remain mostly unknown. Economically, it relied on

taxation of its agricultural and herding populations, as well as on that of the lucrative trade that passed through the region to and from the distant kingdoms of the far west. Culturally and religiously, as with many of the Central Asian kingdoms prior to the rise and eventual primacy of Islam, Buddhism was the official state religion, practiced as a blend of Tibetan Tantric and Chinese Mahayana traditions, often known as Karakoto. Professor Dunl writes, quote, This religion provided that outstanding inspiration of Tangut culture, judging by its literary and material remains. Officials in the literate read classics such as the ever-popular Xiaojing,

or Book of Filial Piety, Yunlu, or the Analects of Confucius, or Mengzi, the Book of Mencius, through Tangut translations. But they were equally likely to read the works of Zhuangzi or Laozi, military treatises, divination manuals, or Buddhist sermons on popular morality. The Tangut emperor cultivated his sacral image as a Buddhist ruler and accorded high status to the Tibetan lamas at his court. As a people and a culture, their origins trace them to the Kokonor region, modern Qinghai in central China, with Chinese sources describing them as descended from the Qiang peoples on the peripheries of the Han dynasty between the 3rd centuries BC and CE, respectively. Linguistic studies help us trace them back even further, linking them to the Tibetan-Burman language family. The name Tangut, or perhaps Tangud, comes from the Orkhon

Turks, who named them as such circa 735 CE, with the name being transliterated into Chinese variously as Tangwu or Tangkute, a name which would in time be a sweeping Chinese generic term for the non-Chinese peoples of Qinghai and Gansu all the way up to the 19th century. In their own language, Dunlop explains, quote, The Tanguts called themselves Mi or Minya. Minyang, Chinese Minyao or Miao, was also their Tibetan name, first documented in the 7th century in the Tang histories, end quote. As is by now hopefully abundantly clear, the history of the Tanguts is, like all of Chinese neighbor states, one profoundly influenced by its larger and more

culturally exporting neighbors, that is, China, India, Tibet, the Turks, and, in due time, the Mongols. Their early history, again, like most groups of Central Asia, begins as what amounts to a loose confederation of allied tribes and clans, ranked in importance by literally the number of warriors they could muster when the call to raid or battle arose. As the Chinese first started taking notice of them in the 6th and 7th centuries, it was repeatedly noted that their most distinguished characteristic was, quote, a stubborn independence sustained by strong mutual animosities nurtured by constant raiding and blood feuds, end quote, among themselves. Though theoretically allied, that would only be invoked in the event of either grave external military threat or the grand sacrifice of animals to heaven which occurred

once every three years. That such a state of loose and often acrimonious tribalism would or even could be forged into a unified and powerful state able to hold its own against the Khitan and Chinese states to its east is something of a miracle in itself. A miracle that would be accomplished by none other than the scions of the Tuoba clan. Wait a second, Tuoba, I've heard that before, I remember that, I hear you saying it. And yes, yes indeed you have. The ruling royal clan of the Xianbei peoples of the northeast that, during the period of disunion following the collapse of the Han dynasty, came to dominate virtually the whole of northern China. Well, it seems that some of them

might have found their way out west, all the way to Qinghai, because the Tuoba Tanguts have a surname markedly different than any of their fellow tribesmen. They'll even come to acknowledge and play up this familial association when in the 11th century, the first true emperor of Xisha will claim heritage with the emperors of later Wei. As we know, the Chinese would rediscover the West following the reunification of the Imperium under the Tang in the 7th century, expanding into the Ordos regions and thus triggering tribe after tribe to submit or face the wrath of Tang Taizong, the Khan of Heaven. Yet by the late 630s, the peoples of the Westerlands found themselves pinned against the Tang anvil and now struck from their southwest

by the newly forged Tibetan Hammer, leading by 680 to the whole of the region settled by the Chong peoples, including the Tanguts, to submit to Tibetan conquest and subjugation. This situation, with the Tanguts split roughly between the Tang and Tibet, would persist until, say it with me now, the An Lushan Rebellion of 755. It's just the gift that keeps on giving. The chaos that gripped China over the course of that civil war allowed many of the Tangut tribes under Tang dominion in Gansu to shake off Chinese control and join up with parallel insurrections with nearby bands of Turks and Tuya Hun,

which themselves would later be incorporated into the armies of a Uyghur general whose name I won't even trouble you with. Ultimately, what this means is that one of the groups that was allied with the Tibetans came into the possession of the Xiazhou Prefecture, hence the name of the eventual state. And with Tang authority over the western regions now terminally on the wane, they began raiding their surrounding territories with renewed and increasing ferocity and frequency. The Tanguts would remain the thralls of the Tibetans and Uyghurs right up until about 840, when, conveniently, both Western empires simultaneously dropped dead.

This left the Tanguts, quite unexpectedly, as one of the power players of the region. In the subsequent decades, then, they'd be a key player in coming to terms with the now truly moribund Tang dynasty and keeping the trade lanes of the diminishing Silk Road at least partially open. This relationship was predicated on the desperate Chinese need for horses, which the Tangans just so happened to have in droves. Enter the year 880 and the rebel warlord Huang Chao capturing and sacking Chang'an. Now, as you may recall, the Tang imperial court had been responding to the successive waves of rebellion by handing out titles and lordships like they were candy at a Thanksgiving parade, in return for their recipients toong, general of a newly created combined Chinese and Tangut army to assist the loyalist forces in driving the rebels from the smoldering ruin that was the capital city. In return for his aid, he was proclaimed the acting jiedushi, governor-general,

of Xia, Sui, Yu, and Yin prefectures, a title that was soon rendered permanent and renamed to the province of Dingnan. In 883, following the final defeat and destruction of Huang Chao's rebellion, Governor Si Gong was further lavished with promotions, honors, and titles, including being conferred the Chinese imperial surname of Li, so now he's Li Si Gong, and created as the Duke of Xia, or Xia Guogong. With the collapse of even the vestiges of Tang authority in 907, the state of Xia was left more or less to its own devices, militarily, politically, and economically. Given their near-monopoly on high-quality horse stock,

it's unsurprising that Xia was able to amass huge amounts of wealth via trade with northern China, which was of course desperate for any and all warhorses it could get its hands on. Not everyone in China was quite so gung-ho about such a lopsided trade arrangement, depleting their already strained coffers, however. As evidenced in 929, when the court of later Tong announced that it would no longer allow foreign merchants to trade their wares directly at the capital city, but would instead restrict all such trade to specially arranged border markets. That went about as well as you might expect, in that it was an utter failure, and in the words of later Zhou and then Song chancellor Wang Pu, quote, the sheep and the horses of the tribes did not cease to fill the roads, end quote. In response to this flagrant contravention of their laws,

as well as the periodic raids from other, possibly affiliated groups of Tanguts, in 933, the state of later Tang attempted to impose upon Xia a governor of their own choosing to supplant the Tuoba, now Li, ruling clan. This effort would likewise succeed in doing little more than further alienating the Tangut state and further undermining any remaining sense of formal connection to the still chaotic Chinese heartland. Though Xia attempted to stay mostly out of the tensions between northern China and the Khitan Liao, it did occasionally insert itself, or at least claim to, in order to win the favor of one or the other. In 944, for instance, the then governor of Xia, Li Yiyin, answered a call from the state of Jin, which was preparing for an attack by the Liao armies. Governor Li agreed to send an army of some 40,000 soldiers eastward into the Catan flank besieged Chinese court to verify whether or not he had actually kept his word, he might have sent a message saying, I will totally help you, while totally not sending anyone and risking the wrath of the Catan juggernaut.

It was a gambit that seems to have paid off well, since the Jin court subsequently bestowed upon Governor Li the title of Commissioner of Khitan Southwestern Pacification the same year. Governor Li Yiyin would die in 967, having ruled the state of Xia as Jiedushi for more than three decades. Shortly after his death, he was posthumously confirmed as Xia Wang, or the Prince or King of Xia, by the Song Dynasty's Emperor Taizu and his imperial court, which went on to confirm his son, Li Kelei, as the state's new governor-general, in spite of its own recent prohibition on non-Chinese serving in such positions of power along the northwestern borderlands. Governor Kelei would stay on as governor-general for little more than a decade before his own death in 978, leaving the position to his own infant son, which obviously was never going to

work out. The baby governor survived little more than a year, and upon his death it would be Kurei's brother that would take the helm of Sha, apparently without the consent of the other clan heads. This, obviously, didn't sit well with them, and they were able to successfully oust the pretender to the throne by appealing to the Song court for direct intervention, something Emperor Song Taizong was only too delighted to agree to, since it resulted in him being able to award direct control of the four prefectures of Xia to himself, naturally. And so, the state of Xia was successfully reintegrated back into Song in 982, and everyone was happy, and so therefore we have no further reason to talk about the territories or the Tanguts. Just kidding. Following the reunification, Song officials proceeded to round up the clan

heads of the Tanguts and implement the standard-issue imperial policy of relocating them all far, far away from their power bases in the interior of China. But they managed to miss one, the 19-year-old Li Jitian, who fled north into the pasturelands of Pingxia ahead of the Song relocation force. Now, most of the Tangut clan heads were by this point pretty signified, and many were willing, if perhaps not exactly eager, to move away from the frontiers and into the heart of the empire. All that suited Li Jitian just fine, since that would mean that from Dunl, quote, the ruling Tangut clan was purged of its more signified elements, leaving the guardians of the Tuoba tribal legacy to establish an independent Ordos state, end quote.

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with the Song Chinese all up in their business all of a sudden, and were therefore only too eager to join up with a ruler like Ji Tian, who promised to resist Chinese meddling as much as possible. In short order, he was able to amass a force of some 20,000 men to begin harassing the Chinese-held cities of Yin and Xia in attempts to both rile up the Tangut population within and keep the Chinese forces occupying the cities off-balance. Still, this was no walk in the park for Ji Qian,

who had the very difficult task in front of him of convincing the disunited and often mutually hostile Tanguts and other border tribes to unify behind him and against the Song dictums. The northern region of the Ordo Slupe, for instance, was lightly populated by Tanguts who made their living primarily off of raising and then selling horses to the Chinese, and it was a tough sell indeed when Ji Qian started making overtures to them that they should cut off their trade with the Chinese and join him instead. That would mean, after all, kissing their very lucrative contracts goodbye. But that wasn't even half of it. To the south, he was also vying for the support of the Tibetan Chang Tangut populations, who, as the double-hyphenated name might tell you, weren't

exactly of one mind as to anything at all. From Dunnell again, quote, Riven by internal divisions and conflicting loyalties, this population tended to resist all external controls. Many chieftains regularly offered armed auxiliaries in return for gifts generously bestowed to win either their neutrality or their assistance against Li Jichen. Such tenuous alliances, however, frequently lapsed and often had to be renewed by force. This worked to the Tangut's advantage. For both the Song Dynasty and Li Jixian, it was a bit like trying to herd heavily armed cats. Jixian's strategy in winning these groups of disassociated, fractious, and mercenary groups to his own underdog cause

was to build up his clan's story and personal legend as a stalwart protector of the downtrodden tribes against the onerous and oppressive Chinese administrative apparatus. The man's trying to keep you down, jackboots on your neck, and laughing while he does it. At the same time, he employed the tried-and-true method of securing alliances with unlikely friends. That is, marriage. He chose for himself a wife from among the powerful leaders of the South, from the Ye Li clan, boosting his prestige within the developing Xia state as one of the inner circle, and meanwhile, giving Li Jitian the leverage he needed to forge a lasting partnership

with the Southerners. The single most important alliance Jitian absolutely had to secure, though, was with the 600-pound gorilla in the room, the Liao dynasty. He needed the Khitan to at best actively support his bid for independence from Song, or at the very least, not try to exploit the situation to its own advantage. Marriage was once again his weapon of choice, because after all, one can never have too many wives, am I right? In 986, strategically right on the eve of Song Taizong's military strike against the Liao, he offered his formal submission to the Liao emperor in exchange for an imperial bride, along with a dowry of 3,000 warhorses. The Liao court's assent was received in 989 with the arrival

of the princess in question, as well as a formal recognition on Liao's behalf that Ji Qian was indeed the independent king of Xia, or Xia Guowang. Now, this shouldn't be taken to mean that the Tanguts and the Khitan were all of a sudden best buddies. To the contrary, whatever alliance the two states had was tenuous at best, and the Tangut king never saw his supposed submission to the Liao as any impediment to further dealings and negotiations with the Song court, turning this whole enterprise into a big ol' relationship triangle of suspicion, squabbles, secrets, and backbiting. Y'know, just like all love triangles. As far as the Song empire was concerned, this was just a total sideshow to what really mattered,

and certainly nothing they could afford to commit much in the way of resources, energy, or troops toward quelling. They had much bigger fish to fry after all, namely not getting curb stomped by the Liao. What they were forced to rely on then was a more subtle art of persuasion, economic pressure, and intimidation. With the limited troops available, the Song fortified strategic border positions and committed their military strength in the region to quashing rebellious barbarian groups before they could link up with the burgeoning Xia alliance. They also promoted continued subjugation to their will by wheeling and dealing with the Tibetans and Uyghurs across the area in order to keep the various non-Chinese forces from

unifying against them, a classic divide-and-conquer tactic. Economically, the Song also restricted trade of horses for cash coins, which the Tangos could melt down to produce weapons, with a strictly in-kind policy of trade. In 933, the court sought to outright ban the trade of Tangut salt supplies in an effort to induce their surrender by impoverishing their allies. This backfired so spectacularly, however, inducing the Tangut allies to anger against them and simply smuggling the product, that the ban was quickly rescinded the same year. The same outcome was forthcoming for limited Song raids against uncooperative tribes, which drove them towards further hostility against the Chinese rather than increased

subservience. For his own part, Li Jixian focused on a combination of diplomacy and military force of arms to assert his state's independence, as well as offering what economic incentives and compensations he could to would-be allies who were hurting under Song restrictions. In 958, after barely escaping capture during a Song raid of his headquarters at Dijin, his army was able to retake the prefecture of Yin and began a campaign of reconquest across the traditional Tuoba territories of Dingnan, whereupon he appointed the various tribal chieftains of his allies as the officials in charge of maintaining order of the region. Not all of his efforts were so successful, and in fact, in 992, all of his efforts were very nearly unmade when the Liao heard that Ji Qian had submitted himself once

again to the Song Emperor in contravention of his submission to the Khitan. Notwithstanding that it was in fact just a feigned submission to gain political advantage, the Liao were enraged at this apparent betrayal and launched a punitive expedition into Xia territories that same year, looting and pillaging across the region. Even so, if their objective had been to overthrow Li Jixian, they were unsuccessful in that drive and J Ji Qian remained in command of his coalition. 994 would be another close call for Western Xia, when the Song declared Ji Qian was to be deposed and sent another military strike force to make sure that it happened. The Song army succeeded in capturing and raising the capital city at Xiajiu, and began rigidly enforcing another prohibition of trade for Tangut salt with the goal of starving them once again into submission. Forced out of his stronghold and very much onto his heels, Li Jichen was forced to

resume a strategy of raiding to feed his people, lest they abandon the cause and turn on him. For the time being, at least, their starvation actually bolstered Jichen's cause, and with his military swelling with hungry and thoroughly ticked off Tangut warriors, they were able to intercept a Song expedition in 996 and seize intact its supply train brimming with enormous amounts of grain, much, I'm sure, to Li Jixian's relief. This would convince the Song court that the best policy toward the Tanguts would be appeasement once again rather than force, and in 998 they made the decision to once again formally recognize Jix as the governor-general of Xia. In hindsight though, that was probably the exact wrong thing to do, as it gave Ji Qian the formal

legitimation he needed to secure his power base and consolidate the various tribes under his banner once and for all. Without question, the most pressing concern for Li Ji Qian's drive towards independence was to establish a stable resource base from which he could fund his efforts. He encouraged illegal trade with China in spite of Song prohibitions, and opened up his own border markets to attract customers whose economic bottom line outweighed any fear of potential punishment. Though these efforts did bear fruit, the region had been so ravaged by conflict over the prior decades that it had become something of an economic backwater, and so did not meet the total needs of the Xia state. Still, by the turn of the millennium, the year 1001, Ji Qian's army, now having swelled from 20,000 to 50,000 strong,

was able to cut off Chinese access to its own border markets at Lingzhou, and the next year seized the city outright, which would soon become the state's first official capital, as well as providing a fertile and potent base of operations for further Xia expansion. Lingzhou was to be renamed Xipingfu, or the Prefecture of Western Peace. Lingzhou had been the last major holdout of Song military and political control over the Ordos Loop, and its loss would mark the de facto end of Xi Xia's initial territorial acquisitions, as well as Song being forced to recognize that they had, in spite of all their efforts, lost control of the northwest to the unstoppable Tangut force. That same year, the imperial court at Kaifeng at last accepted the fait accompli for what it was,

marking its all but formal recognition of western Xia as an independent state. The following year, 1004, Li Jichen would die in battle as his forces continued to press southward toward the great western city of Lanzhou, leaving the future of his patchwork state to his 23-year-old son, Li Daming, who would continue to expand his people's control west and southward, sealing Song China off from its western trade routes for the remainder of its lifespan. As the three states, Song, Liao, and Xia, settled into an uneasy but fairly stable tripartite relationship, the question of the north became more and more settled. Though their respective power would ebb and flow as the century progressed, it had become obvious to even the most hawkish and obdurate of court members

and their respective monarchs that total victory was simply off the table. What had once been unquestionably a united empire was now three politically and ethnically distinct equals. For the Song Dynasty, this meant that the overland trade routes westward into Central Asia, so long the centerpiece of Chinese foreign trade, was gone. At least as far as the Song were concerned, forever. While that certainly wasn't good news, it would force the invention of novel solutions. From Professors Lau and Huang,

The closure of the frontiers also impeded Song trade with Central Asia and confined Song expansion mostly to the south, turning its attention from the interior of Asia toward the oceans. Consequently, the Song developed a prosperous maritime trade and expanded their overseas relations with Goryeo, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. End quote. If China could no longer claim supremacy of the land, having been cut off from its supply of warhorses so critical to any such warfare strategies, then it could at least amass the power to become a naval force sufficient to wrest control of the South Seas from any who would dare challenge it. Such a shift to an oceanic naval focus would result in a broad expansion of Chinese influence across all of

these regions, spreading ideas like Confucianism and the Chinese brand of Buddhism to Korea and Japan. Though former satrapies like Goryeo would swiftly transfer their allegiance to the far closer and more existentially threatening Liao, and in the south Nanyue had been able to successfully break away and form the kingdom of Great Viet, it wasn't all terrible for the empire, reduced and chastened though it may have been. With the shift away from outright war, the Chinese citizens were able to direct their efforts toward achieving levels of economic prosperity and a blossoming of culture that the empire hadn't seen since at least the height of the Tang Dynasty centuries before. Song Taizong was himself a poet and calligrapher of great renown, and he would over the course of his reign establish three new imperial libraries and the Historiographical Institute. Under its auspices, he'd order the compilation of four

great works of Chinese historiography, perhaps the greatest of which is the Imperial Encyclopedia of the Taiping Era, or Taiping Yulan, consisting of 1,000 chapters, and what is now the sole source of a great number of pre-Song texts, since, as Lao and Huang note, "...nearly 80% of the 2,579 works that it quotes and two of the three collect Era, or Taiping Guangzhi, compiled some 475 works of Taoist art, Buddhist tales, immoral acts, dreams, oddities, and grotesques, and others from the Han, the period of disunion, and the Sui and Tang periods, more than half of which are lost in any other format. In the face of the

inevitable conclusion that he would never supersede his elder brother in the realms of statecraft or conquest, it is his, quote, encyclopedic projects, or what some have termed his bibliomania, that justified the first reign title, Taiping Xingguo, the ascendant state of grand tranquility, which implied superiority over his brother, end quote. Such projects, according to Lao and Huang, quote, from the dynasty's perspective, served to provide work and titles for the officials of the various newly conquered southern states, while also allowing Song scholars and their emperors to appropriate the achievements of the past, thus paving the way for the emergence of a new culture that favored literary pursuits over martial endeavors and values, end quote. Emperor Taizong would die in 997, at the age of 57, prompting something of a

succession crisis. Over the course of his reign, you may recall that he had gone on the occasional fratricidal and filicidal rampage, which had systematically stripped the imperial clan of virtually all princes in the direct line of succession. He'd induced Zhao Dejiao to kill himself with a kitchen knife after losing his temper following the disastrous defeat at the Gaoling River in 979. Five years later, Dejiao's younger brother, Zhao Tingmei, who had gotten himself caught up in a conspiracy against Taizong, was demoted from the family, shipped off to Hainan Island in exile, and died of fear and grief. The following year, Taizong's old eldest son, in a drunken stupor at having not been invited to the family's autumn festival feast for protesting a bit too strongly against his

uncle Tingmei's death by exile, set fire to the imperial palace, was subsequently arrested, and then demoted to a commoner. In the same year, his second son, whom Taizong had given the governorship of Kaifeng, thus signaling his status as heir apparent, died suddenly of an illness in his father's presence, sending Taizong into two years of deep mourning, during which none dare broach the question of succession. Interestingly, through all of this, it's notable that precisely none of Taizu's surviving sons came under consideration for the throne. The rationale for this is clear enough. In spite of his earlier promise to Taizu and then his widow, the Empress Dowager, Taizong had firmly decided that it was to be his own family branch that would inherit the

imperial throne, rather than reverting to the initial line. It wouldn't be until 994, just three years before his death, that the aging Taizong, with his war wounds bothering him more and more with each passing season, at last settled on his third and eldest surviving son, the 26-year-old Zhao Heng, as his heir. Even then, he was evidently significantly displeased by the fact that his heir appeared to be very popular with the people, perhaps even more so than himself, and he had to be coaxed into accepting that such popularity meant that he had made the correct decision in his choice of successor, rather than something to get jealous and, well, stabby about. Thus it was that in 997, when death finally took Taizong, it would be Zhao Heng who

would accede as the Song's third emperor, Zhenzong. Next time, we'll look at the rule period of this third emperor and his quarter-century reign over Song China at the dawn of the second millennium CE. Thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.