The History of China - #143 - N. Song 10: Inertia, Inaction, Insurrection

Episode Date: June 15, 2018

Emperor Renzong of Song continues to twiddle his thumbs. Confucianism get a much-needed adrenaline shot to the arm via Daoism. Zhuang superpatriot Nong Zhigao declares simultaneous war on China and Vietnam in the name of his people's liberation. Time Period Covered: 1043-1054 CE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And now, on with the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 143, Inertia, Inaction, Insurrection. I am back from my week-long trip to Chengdu, Sichuan, camping in the mountains, feeding pandas, and being stuck in airports for nine hours with 40 middle schoolers. It wasn't all a good trip, but wow, talk about exhausting. In any case, we pick up where we left off last time, circa 1043, with the Song Empire having fought to a rather piddling conclusion, a border war with the Tangut state of Western Xia that amounted to what might be described, were one feeling particularly generous, as a technical victory that is probably best described as Pyrrhic

for the Chinese state. Today then, we'll be going through the later middle period of Emperor Ren Zong's time on the throne of Song, and right off the bat, I'll say that in terms of formulating how exactly this episode was going to be constructed, I found this one more problematic than most. This is more than anything because in spite of his long tenure of rule, the majority of stuff that actually happened to Ranzong and his government has already taken place. How does one get particularly enthralled by things that almost happened, or reforms that were begun but then never fully implemented?

It proved itself to be quite the puzzle, and in terms of how I attempted to solve it, it's a bit more split-brained in terms of its focus than most episodes I've put out so far. So, let me just lay it out ahead of time. First, we will be tackling Ren Zong yet again, just for continuity's sake. Then, we're going to get into the rise of Neo-Confucianism, and finally, plunging southward to witness one of the great insurrections by a minority people along Song's border with the Dai Viet Kingdom. So sit back, relax, and I hope you enjoy.

Suffice it to say that the 5th decade of the 11th century was a pretty rough time for the Chinese population. Apart from the Tangut War and the continual saber-rattling and troop buildups between Song and the Qitan Liao to the north, environmental problems were continually sweeping across the land and its people, particularly in the southern regions of the empire like Sichuan, Liangzhe, and Jiangnan. Famines and pestilence were doing quite the job of making everyone's lives miserable. These, coupled with wartime rates of taxation, led to large-scale peasant uprisings, troop mutinies, and banditry throughout the south, as desperate and dissatisfied people were forced to look outside of the law for solutions to their problem. These issues were

further exacerbated within Kaifeng by the government's apparent inability to mobilize an effective response to the crises, largely owing to the court ministers remaining intractable in their opposition to one another, divided largely along two major points of contention. First, reformists versus conservatives, and centralists versus localists, on the other hand. Both of these competing factions are difficult to follow, as opponents of one group could at times find themselves on the same side within the context of the other issue, and vice versa. But all were on display during the events of 1043-1045, a period known as the Chainley Reforms. The reforms themselves, as we will see,

would wind up being far more conceptual than actual. After all, they had only a two-year window in which their backers enjoyed the emperor's support, not much time by any standard, and especially given the scope of the proposed changes. But they were more important in terms of what they signaled about the future of the empire. From Professor McGrath, quote, This was the first Confucian political movement of the empire. From Professor McGrath, quote, this was the first Confucian political movement of the dynasty, a manifestation not only of the revival of Confucian political discourse, but also of the political coming of age of a cohort of local and regional elites who owed

their success to the examination system and to the economic and institutional developments that made learning, examinations, and government service the premierism is back in a big way. But what exactly does that mean? Well, what we're seeing in the 1040s is something of the debutante ball of the school of thought known as Song Ming Lixue, meaning, literally, Song and Ming Dynasty Study of Rational Idealism. Well, it actually gets a bit more complicated than that since the idea of Li requires a bit more unpacking than rational idealism might suggest, but we will get to that. In any case, it's come to be more commonly referred to as Neo-Confucianism in English.

Now, this is not to say that Neo-Confucian thought was only just now being developed. No, that had been ongoing for more than two centuries at this point, back at least to the Tang Dynasty officials and philosophers Li Ao and Han Yu. But it really was only now, in the 11th century, that China had put itself back on solid enough political and military footing to start rolling out much in the way of new or new-ish philosophies. Perhaps most accurately, rolling out patches to very, very old philosophies. As I mentioned before, the central tenet of Neo-Confucianism, so much that its name revolves around the word itself, is the concept of Li. So what is Li? It is, as the eminent scholar of Chinese philosophy, Professor Wing Tse-Chan,

put it in his A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, a quote, metaphysical concept of principle, end quote, and related to, though as we will see distinct from, the Buddhist concept of principle, confusingly also called Li. Being a metaphysical concept, though, any single word is not going to adequately describe what it really means. And so we now turn to the philosopher Alan Watts in his essay entitled Taoism. And it is extensive, but it's really well put. He says, quote, The Tao is a certain kind of order, and this kind of order is not quite what we call order when we arrange everything geometrically into boxes or into rows.

That is a very crude kind of order, but when you look at a plant, it is perfectly obvious that the plant has order. We recognize at once that it is not a mess, but it is not symmetrical, and it is not geometrical looking. The plant looks like a Chinese drawing because they appreciated this kind of non-symmetrical order so much that it became an integral part of their painting. In the Chinese language, this is called Li, and the character for Li means markings in jade. It is also the grains in wood and the fiber in muscle. We could say too that clouds have Li, marble has Li, and the human body has Li. We all recognize it, and the artist copies it whether he is a landscape painter, a portrait painter, an abstract painter, or a non-objective painter.

They are all trying to express the essence of Li. The interesting thing is that although we all know what it is, there is no way of defining it, because Dao is the course, and we can also call Li the water course, and the patterns of Li are the patterns of flowing water. We see those patterns of flow memorialized, as it were, as sculptures in the grain of wood, which is the flow of sap, in marble, in bones, in muscles. All these things are patterned according to the basic principles of flow. In the patterns of flowing water, you will find all kinds of motifs from Chinese art, immediately recognizable, including the S-curve in the circle of the Yang Yin. So Li means the

order of flow, the wonderful dancing pattern of liquid, because Laozi likens Dao to water. The Great Dao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, Because Laozi likens Tao to water. Now, through all this, you might be saying to yourself, Hey, I thought you just said this was Confucianism. Where do these people get off talking about the Tao? That just sounds like Taoism with extra steps. And you're not wrong. Like a river cascading against a rock or taffy left too long on a dashboard in the hot summer sun, the influence of Taoism and Buddhism had irrevocably changed Confucianism and forced it to adapt or die.

Here really is where the likes of Hanyu and Liao stood out, for as Chan notes, their contributions to actual philosophy were negligible. Quote, There was nothing new in their theories of human nature, and the dualism of good nature and evil feelings was but a continuation of a worn-out theory some 800 years old. End quote. Rather, by their efforts, they staked out a position for Confucianism, from which it could begin taking on many of the forms and ideas of its competing philosophies, while still retaining a quintessentially defining element of itself.

Whereas Buddhism answered the questions of existence with silence and annihilation, and Taoism with inaction, Neo-Confucianism was able to retain its central focus on the far more worldly and immediate, human and social morality. Again, from Chan, quote, regulation of the family, ordering of the state, and of bringing peace to the world, as both Han and Li did. They did much to retain the real strength of the Confucian system, end quote. In other words, even if they might start to sound and look more and more alike, their answers to the fundamental questions of life remained miles apart. If asked, what is the purpose of life, a Buddhist might say, to recognize and accept one's own impermanence

and to seek the dissolution of self and desire. Now, go meditate in the monastery for a while. While a Taoist might reply, to exist in pure accordance with nature and thereby to realize the absolute folly of such a question, now go stare at a cave wall for a few years. But Confucianism, for all the Buddhist and Taoist forms

it would pick up over the course of its revitalization into the 11th century and beyond, would, when posed with the same question, reply quite differently. Why, that's simple. To make yourself, your family, and your society better, more harmonious, and more peaceful. To live morally and well within the bounds of your society. Now go start improving things. We can begin to see then why Confucianists' direct and clear answer to such a question might start to sound more appealing to the average Joe than the ambiguous, purely metaphysical hoodoo of the former two. To say

that that is how things sat with the philosophies for the next couple of centuries would be absurdly reductive and inaccurate. But for our purposes at least, it behooves us to jump back to the 11th century and the entrance of the next great contributor to the re-emergence of Confucian thought, Zhou Dunyi, the great pioneer of Neo-Confucianism. Though he never held high office over the course of his life, and indeed never managed to pass the top-level Jin Shi examination, marking one out as an advanced scholar. The Hunan native, born as and until a name change in 1063 to avoid the imperial name taboo known as Zou Dan Shi, would be remembered as the man who most infused Confucian thought with its Taoist elements and

forms, while at the same time shedding such ideas of their fantastical and mystical notions in favor of a more sober and rational outlook. Zhou's major infusion into Confucianism was the Taoist concept of wu zhi, the ultimate of non-being, as laid out by Laozi himself from the Tao Te Ching. Non-being is the term given to that from which heaven and earth sprang. Being is the term given to the mother that rears all things. The two are the same, End quote. recognition of ugliness. When they know the good as the good, there arises the perception of evil. Therefore, being and non-being produce each other. The inclusion of such Taoist elements wasn't new to Confucian perceptions, but Zhou had an unusual focus on them. Specifically, the tenets found in the ancient classic of the I Ching, aka the Book of Changes. His focus was revolutionary to the Confucian understanding

and approach to the world around him. As a result, Zhou's writings and philosophies, syncretic blending of Taoist naturalistic metaphysics with classical Confucian concern with human ethics, through that blend he would come to the conclusion that, quote, the many are ultimately one, and the one is actually differentiated into many, and that, quote, the many are ultimately one, and the one is actually differentiated into many, and that, quote, the one and many each has its own correct state of being, end quote. This would be laid out in his treatise, the Taiji Tushuo, or An Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate, also known as the Great Polarity. This argued that the metaphysics, ethics, and cosmology itself were one and the same and inseparable, a concept embodied by a

symbol of Zhou's own creation, the Taiji-Tu, known in the West as the Yin-Yang symbol. The symbol we're all most familiar with, that one for instance that adorns the flag of South Korea, is actually only part of the Taiji tomb, the second of five parts to be specific. The full diagram depicts Zhou Zhenni's theory of creation, and it is as followed. In the beginning, there was the great ultimate being and non-being, the Wuji and the Taiji, which is depicted as an empty circle. Yet because of the overwhelming energy contained by the great ultimate, it began to move and coalesce, swirling and rippling into two opposite but complementary and dualistic aspects. The very action of motion and of being became the yang, positive, energetic,

bright, hot, and tough. Yet as the yang moved and reached the limits of its energy, it would revert in due course to its tranquil, negative, dark, cool, and yielding aspect, the yin. The yin would in turn reach its limit and cycle back to the yang, in a never-ending cycle of mutual generation. Through this eternal cycle of transformation, permutations of those energy states emerged, the wuxing, or five elements, of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. The five elements were further divided into the principles of heaven, or qian, which is established as the male element, and earth, or kun, consisting of the female aspect of existence. The bagua, or eight principles, fire and water naturally belonging to themselves,

and earth and mountain likewise belonging to the earth element. But the other four are somewhat more curious in their attribution. Both the sky and lake belong to the metal, while thunder and wind are of the wood. Yeah, I guess just go with it. Finally, the fifth circle represented the multiplicity of all things derived of those elements and principles, the sheng hu wu wan, or as it has been rendered into modern Chinese, hua sheng wan wu, literally the ten thousand permutations. Alone among the myriad forms of creation, humanity received the five elements in their most perfect forms, marking it out as the most excellent and intelligent of all creation. From the Taiji Tushuo, quote,

His physical form appears when the spirit develops consciousness. The five moral principles of his nature—humanity, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness—are aroused by and react to the external world and engage in activity. Good and evil are distinguished, and human affairs take place. The character of the sage is identical with that of heaven and earth. His brilliancy is identical with that of the sun and moon. His order is identical with that of the four seasons. And his good and evil fortunes are identical with those of spiritual beings.

The superior man cultivates these moral qualities and enjoys good fortune, whereas the inferior man violates them and suffers evil fortune. End quote. Now, it must be said that the Taiji too, stemming as it did from Taoist philosophy, has been used extensively within Taoism, especially in their practitioner's never-ending quest for an elixir of immortality. But that was not the purpose of Zhou Dunyin, nor how he understood his diagram. Rather than looking at it in a metaphysical or spiritual sense, Zhou applied the concept of the Taiji II towards rational philosophy and practical applicability. Again, that is one of the core differences between Taoism and Neo-Confucianism.

Emphasis on passivity and esotericism in the former versus active application and practical worldliness in the case of the latter. Zhou would also speak to the interaction of what would become the three prime underpinnings of Neo-Confucian thought, that of Li, principle, the nature of things, and of destiny. Zhou Dunyi was not, of course, the end-all be-all of philosophical development of the burgeoning Neo-Confucian school. Further developments would be made by his contemporaries like Cheng Yi-Chuan. But it wouldn't be until the following century in the career of Zhu Xi that the nature of the Great Ultimate itself, as well as its relationship to the principle and of sincerity, would be further clarified.

Zhu passed his imperial examination at the age of 19 in the year 1148, during the reign of the first emperor of the southern Song, Gao Zong, who will be, for those of you keeping track at home, our current emperor, Ren Zong's great-great-grand-nephew. As his career progressed, Zhu Xi came to de-emphasize the I Ching in his teachings, and instead began emphasizing that his students study what are collectively known today as the Four Books, that is, the Analects of Confucius, of course, as well as the Book of Mencius, The Great Learning, and finally, the book he placed particular import on, the Zhong Yong, or The Doctrine of the Mean, written by Confucius' grandson, Kong Ji. Though his focus on these books

was not widely adopted during his lifetime, in the centuries to come, Zhu Xi's curriculum and the extensive commentaries he wrote to accompany each of the four books would become the standard of Neo-Confucian education across the empire, with the four books would become the standard of Neo-Confucian education across the empire, with the four books serving as the cornerstone of the imperial examination system all the way until 1905. It would be from his readings of the Doctrine of the Mean that Zhu Xi would expound on the notion of sincerity as fundamental to Confucian philosophy. Zhu described the principle of sincerity as being tranquil, which, according to Chan, quote, betrays more Taoist influence. But, to him, sincerity was

not just tranquility. It is the foundation of moral nature and the source of all activities. It is true substance and unerring. It is pure and perfectly good. The concept is so important that it has often been considered the foundation of his teaching, end quote. Sincerity, he taught, was the starting and ending point on the path to sagehood, end quote. Without sincerity, the five constant virtues and all activities will be wrong. They will be depraved and obstructed, end quote. To Jushi, only through sincerity could one be able to detect the subtle, incipient activating force, or qi, of good and evil and make the choice in one direction or the other. This once again shows the dualistic nature

of reality in the Neo-Confucian's eyes. Sincerity was in reality tranquil, and yet in its function active and dynamic. This also put it at odds once again with the traditional Taoist philosophy, which stressed tranquility and inaction in all things. No, no, no, Confucianism was a doing man's philosophy. To the minds of those like Zhou Dunyi and Zhu Xi, such sincerity and action rejected the Taoist overemphasis on the internal to the neglect of the external. The ideal being is the sage, and the highest ideal the mean, correctness, humanity, and righteousness, which means that the sage equally stresses the internal and external life. This would be summed up in the doctrine of the Neo-Confucian philosopher brothers, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, which quipped, quote,

Seriousness to straighten the internal life, and righteousness to square the external life, end quote. Well, I trust you all have a far deeper understanding of the metaphysics of Confucianism now. So with that in mind, and knowing that this philosophy is going to continue to expand its influence over the imperial court in the decades and century to come, and therefore we will have more chances to elaborate on these ideas, let's go ahead and get back to the administration of Emperor Ren Zong as of the year 1045. Suffice it to say that in spite of two years of imperial backing, the Qingli reforms ran out of steam well before

they had the chance to really bring about any major changes to the dynasty, much to its ultimate chagrin. This had much to do with the vexing political, social, and economic problems of the age that we've already talked about at fair length, as it also did a rather botched rollout by its own advocates that polarized much of the imperial gentry against their plans. Unfortunately for us, for Emperor Ranzong, and for Song China as a whole, the emperor giving up on his support for the reforms and their failure in 1045 marked just about the last even remotely impactful or interesting thing that would go on during the reign of Ren Zong, and marks what McGrath terms his period of inertial administration that would

last until his death 18 years later in 1063. McGrath writes, quote, despite episodes of factional conflict, favoritism, and crisis, these high officials preserved an appearance of administrative order. Officials regularly pointed out areas of excessive expenditure, but spending was not curtailed, end quote. Above all, Ren Zong came to desire peace and quiet among his officials, so much so that he adopted the troublesome habit of dismissing outright those officials who argued issues too forcefully, or who he came to see as behaving in a partisan manner, which, frankly, stymied discussion of the pressing issues of the day. Renzong's progressive withdrawal from public affairs was probably accelerated in 1055 with the death of his prime consort and probably love of his life, and more so in 1056 when he was

greatly weakened by an illness, leaving most decisions to those ministers he had specifically selected for their passivity and reliance on routine and precedent, rather than risk putting their careers on the line by, you know, rocking the boat. The consequence of that court-wide policy of inaction is probably best and most terribly displayed in its response to the repeated flooding of the Yellow River, or rather, its almost complete lack of response. The ever-unpredictable river underwent major and terribly destructive shifts in its course at least four times over the course of Ranzong's reign, in 1036, 1048, 1056,

and 1060, and each time was met with minimal imperial aid and an almost total lack of infrastructural repair or preparation for the inevitable next time. McGrath points to a study by a German historian, Klaus Flessel, called The Yellow River and Historical Hydrotechnology in China, showing that, had the imperial court cared to, it had all of the technological knowledge and experience available to control the constant overflowing of the river's banks. What was lacking was imperial and central government commitment. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile,

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Things did heat up in the south of China during this period, and during Ranzong's reign, there were no fewer than seven multi-year conflicts with various peoples, both within the empire and along its periphery. From 1038 to 1039, conflict erupted between the Song and the native tribes of Anhua County in western Guangnan. Then, beginning in 1043, the minority Yao people of Guiyang rebelled against imperial rule, a conflict that would occupy the armies of the south for nearly eight years, all the way up until 1051. Right in the middle of that, between 1044 and 1045, the local populace of Yizhou, once again in western Guangnan, rose up and provoked an imperial response yet again, as for a further three years. And then between 1058 and 1061, the indigenous people of Yongzhou. Yet it was only the uprising led by Nong Zhigao in western Guangnan between 1049 and 1053 that would grow beyond local incidents and actually pose significant risk to the stability of the wider dynasty. And I have to say that I was just tickled pink to find in the course of my research that

some of the major sources on the Zhuang people and of Nong Zhigao himself come from none other than my undergraduate history professor, Capstone Advisor, and the man who got me interested enough in China and its history to actually go there and live for a year after my graduation, which has since turned into nine and counting. The late, great Professor Jeffrey Barlow. So much of what I'm about to say comes from him, and I could not be happier about that. Nong Zhigao was born the son of a local leader of the Zhuang people along the border between Song China and the Li Dynasty of Dai Koviet, then known as Guangyuan Province, within the jurisdiction of the Song, but today the Kaobang Province of northern Vietnam, abutting the Guangxi Autonomous

Region of modern China. His father, Nong Chuanfu, was the head of the powerful Nong clan. The origins of the Nong are summed up with the statement from the Yuan-era history of Song, quote, the Guangyuan Zhou mon-barbarian Nong clan came from the southwest of Yongzhou and held the districts there. The terrain was steep mountains and inaccessible valleys. It produced gold and cinnabar. A good many people lived there. They wore their hair long and fastened their clothes on the left. They loved to fight and struggle and regarded death lightly. End quote.

Coming into his own as of the age of 17 in the year 1042, Nong followed in his father's footsteps and proclaimed his people's independence from both Song and Dai Koviet. From Barlow, quote, Nong Zhigao may have, in effect, declared fealty to the more distant Dali in Yunnan, earlier called Nanjiao, in hopes that his aegis might protect Nong autonomy from the encroaching Chinese and Vietnamese, end quote. This early effort, again like his father before him, earned him arrest and imprisonment by Viet troops, and he spent the next several years

interred in the dungeons of the Viet capital Hanoi, then called Thang Long, or the Rising Dragon City, a fate that proved to be markedly less severe than that of his father Tran Phu, who had been executed for his treason against the Viet Emperor in 1039. Rather than death, the Viet Emperor proffered another solution to his ongoing Nong problem. Dai Kovyet may simply be able to overlook Zhigao's treasonous self-aggrandizement and even went so far as to offer him formal control over several districts, enthiefing him as the tai bao, or protector, of the region the following year. Nevertheless, from the period of his capture in 1042 until 1048, he seems to have remained a guest of the Viet Emperor in Hanoi

to ensure that he didn't go getting any funny ideas. But his stint in the Hanoi Hilton seems to have done nothing to curb Nong's imperial ambitions. Shortly after his release from prison in 1048, he was right back at it, this time proclaiming the formation of the Nantian Guo, or the Kingdom of the Southern Heavens, in the fall of 1049 within the Yongzhou Prefecture, a territory under the control of the Song but nominally also claimed by the Li Emperor. McGrath writes of this region, quote, Yongzhou was a large frontier territory of nearly 5,800 square miles, with two counties, one outpost, one gold market, and 60 settlements of local non-Chinese with a registered

population of approximately 5,000 households, end quote. Which is to say it was pretty much a great big empty space with less than one family per square mile on average. From Barlow, quote, the repeated risings of the Nong are not easily explained. It is true that the expansion of China and Vietnam was eroding the autonomy of the chieftains, and this may lie in part behind the sudden aspirations of the Nong to create an autonomous state. However, there is no indication that the tribute which they paid was particularly onerous, nor that their local authority was significantly compromised by either the Vietnamese or the more distant Chinese. The simplest explanation seems to be that the Nong chieftains aspired to kingship and complete independence because of the models presented by both China and Vietnam.

The fact that later Zhigao tried to carve a state out of China further supports this supposition, but neither the Chinese nor the Vietnamese would permit the rise of a third state in the frontier zone. End quote. This repeat of his treason against the dual thrones of China and Dai Viet prompted much the same reaction. The Li Emperor once again sent troops to put down this challenge to his imperial authority, and Song Ranzong did, as per usual, nothing at all. Though the Viet army did overrun Nong's stronghold, it failed to capture the self-proclaimed king this time, and succeeded only in pushing him further north into Song territory.

Though he sought the Song emperor's aid by appealing through the southern city of Nanning, then called Yong City or Yongzhou, for imperial aid in his quest against the Viettes, nevertheless, he was flatly reb quest against the Viettes. Nevertheless, he was flatly rebuffed by the Chinese officials there, who refused to even receive him to hear his plea. After an impressive display of military might, though, the officials within Yong, clearly seeing that their own meager garrison was woefully undermanned to face down the implied threat, at last admitted Nong Zhigao and gave him an audience. There, Zhigao reassured the

officials that he had not come to make war, but to merely petition. Pacified by their response, he presented a substantial tribute and then returned to his stronghold. Yet, in spite of their assurance that Nong's petition to the throne would be sent along to Kaifeng for Renzong's perusal, that seems to have never happened. Barlow posits that the southern Chinese officials may have in fact feared potential reprisals from Dai Koviet should they be found to have received and rendered aid to a frontier lord fleeing their justice. This was no idle threat. After all, such things were not without precedent along the Song-Viet border. In 1004, only two years after the creation of the Viet Kingdom, Vietnamese forces had sacked the

Chinese border town of Hong Chai for just such a transgression. Nong Gia Giao had failed to find a protector who might permit the Nong to retain a high degree of autonomy. The Vietnamese themselves would not tolerate any such pretensions, and the Chinese feared the Vietnamese enough and dared not support the Nong in their ambitions. The only alternative was to declare openly independence at the expense of both the Vietnamese and Chinese claims in the region. Thus, Nong's third and most successful attempt in state building would begin in 1052 with his proclamation of the great southern kingdom, Da Nanguo, and this time taking imperial rather than merely royal title and establishing his own calendar. He would declare himself Renhui Huangdi, the benevolent

and kind emperor. And then, in his benevolence and kindness, he took his Zhuang army of about five to ten thousand and besieged the prefectural capital of Yangzhou, forcing the city to its knees after a short siege. The Chinese troops were woefully understaffed and under-equipped to have been much more than a local police force, often even lacking in such basics as armor. Moreover, as Nong has surely noted, most of the cities and settlements scattered along the southern rivers lacked any sort of fortification to repel his force. It would be easy picking, and he was only just getting started.

Over the course of the following three weeks, Nong's army marched almost 185 miles down the Pearl River's tributaries and capturing and sacking the lightly defended settlements at Hangzhou, Gongzhou, Tengzhou, Wuzhou, Fengzhou, Kangzhou, Duanzhou, and capping off his expedition with the 58-day siege of the jewel of the Pearl River itself, Guangzhou, beginning in the 7th month of 1052. Again, from Barlow, quote, large crossbows and stored food and water. This was the first well-defended city the Zhuang had faced, and Nong Zhigao bogged down in a prolonged siege. Regional forces gathered and began to envelop the rebels. After 57 days, the Zhuang had to withdraw." Still, in the interim, his forces had made a thorough sweep of the outer regions of the city and its surrounding areas, plundering anything that wasn't nailed down. As you might well imagine, the stunning capture of

this enormous area, and so quickly, stirred even Emperor Ranzong out of his inertial inaction, and he finally ordered on the 28th day of Nong's campaign against his territories, the prefect of Guizhou, a nearby city untouched thus far by Nong's army, to lead a campaign against the rebel emperor and put him down, as well as dispatching a member of his own court, Yu Jing, as the intendant of pacification in Guangnan. An enormous bounty was placed on the head of Zhigao, offering the sum of 3,000 strings of cash and 2,000 bolts of silk and a high official post for the warlord's head. Further rewards were placed on the heads of his mother and closest advisor, Anong, which was 3,000 cash and a lesser imperial post, a clear indication of just how dangerous the Song court had come to regard

Jigao's shrewd and intelligent mother. Her bounty ranked well above the other two death marks placed by the Song court against Nong's advisors, two turncoat Cantonese officials now aiding the rebel Zhuang emperor. They each were deemed worth a mere 1,000 strings of cash apiece. And just to throw that into some sort of modern economic perspective, bare subsistent level cost of a citizen in a major city in the 11th century China was around 7 to 8 strings of cash per year. So, yeah, these rewards were nothing to sneeze at. Nong and his army, having withdrawn from Guangzhou, now rapidly moved northward, encountering, engaging, and handily defeating a string of Song forces sent against them due to his army's superior mobility.

From there, he turned southwest, suddenly compelled to retake the Yong prefectural capital, as it had been reclaimed by Song forces in his absence. Once that had been accomplished, he ordered his men to immediately begin construction of a fleet of ships, and announcing his plan to sail that fleet down the Pearl River, storm and capture Guangzhou, and establish the state of Nanyue from there. Again from Barlow, quote, We see that Nong Zhigao perhaps understood not only the economic value of Guangzhou, but that, unless he held it, he would always be vulnerable to Chinese thrusts staged from the southeast, as well as through coming down from Hunan, end quote.

A succession of Song forces were now sent against him, but he defeated them in the mountains around Yong. He had slain the first five commanders sent against him by the court. The emperor dispatched General Di Qing, a career military official from Shanxi, a student of Qin and Han military methods who had fought 25 battles in four years against Western Xia. Di literally had fought his way up through the ranks and early in his career had been tattooed upon his face to prevent him from deserting, a common habit in the Chinese military. Finding this sign of low status incompatible with his acquired offices, Di habitually wore a silver face mask. Di was given carte blanche and gathered some

31,000 men and 32 generals in Hunan province. He enrolled Krak-Fanlua tribal cavalry in the northwest, of whom it was said they were able to ascend and descend mountains as though walking on level ground. The Viet Emperor Li also sent word that he would be willing to supply 20,000 of his own troops to aid the Song expedition to end the Nong threat. But after consulting with his advisors and generals, who warned that it would A. be super embarrassing to have to stoop to accepting foreign troops to beat back this rebellion, and B, at the end of the day, what exactly would stop the Viet troops from simply refusing to go home and triggering a Song-Viet

border war? In light of both of these disturbing possibilities, Yuan Zong politely declined the Viet monarch's offer. The silver-masked General Di would bear his fearsome reputation out against the Zhuang army, quickly understanding that his enemy's main weapon was its mobility, which allowed it to maintain the initiative and keep the Song soldiers forever on their heels. To this challenge, Di enforced a policy of strictest discipline in order to effectively hide the movements of his troops as they positioned themselves to entrap the rebel emperor Nong. And when I say strict, I mean the kind of strict where when one of his generals attacked earlier than he'd been ordered to

with 8,000 men and suffered yet another defeat against a drong force, General Di had the commander and 31 of his subordinate officers beheaded. Di was not playing games. In an absolute triumph of superior logistics, Di made a night march of 25 kilometers and invested the key Kunlun Pass northeast of Yong City. This was a catastrophic loss for the Zhuang. The plains around Nanning are separated by a high range of mountains from the plains to the north and east, and the Kunlun was the only possible route to move large forces swiftly. The long slopes down from the pass gave an incredible advantage to the side which held it. Had Nong

Jigao maintained total freedom of choice in his battlefields, he probably could have bled the Song armies as they marched up and down the countryside badly, in a long series of quick attacks at which the Zhuang had proved themselves masterful. Now, though, with the loss of the commanding high ground of the Kunlun range, Nong found himself reduced to just two choices, and neither of them were particularly appealing. On the one hand, he could fight in defense of his capital at Yong, undergoing a siege for which his army was ill-suited and Di Qing excelled. On the other hand, he could choose to fight on the plains around Nanning, where Di Qing could

take full advantage of his cavalry, a fight against which the Zhuang had little counter and Nong had studiously avoided over the entire course of the conflict up until this point. Now though, faced with two equally distasteful and potentially disastrous options, Nong Jigao decided that if he was at a disadvantage in either case, he might as well retain whatever strengths his army had, and thus opted for a war of movement to undergoing a siege. And so it was that Jigao and his Zhuang troops would face down General Di just north of Yong City in the first month of 1054. Again, from Barlow, quote,

The Zhuang attacked in their classic array, wearing brightly colored uniforms, fighting in units of three. One of the two Song commanders below Di fell in the initial stages of the battle, but experience and discipline told at the last. The shield wall depended, like phalanx warfare, on presenting a large continuous front to the enemy. Any opening in the wall or phalanx gave a determined enemy a chance to penetrate the wall and negate it by enveloping movements to the rear. Such a deployment caught the Zhuang against their own wall and exposed their more lightly armored infantry to the attacks of Han archers or heavy infantry. An opening gambit in such warfare was a continual shifting of the line of battle to try to force the enemy into making a misdeployment which might reveal some weakness

which could be exploited. Di's highly trained men were capable of rapid changes in formation, which confused the Zhuang, who could not maintain their ranks. Di, like the student of war which he was, had perhaps studied the earlier campaigns against the mutineer Chen Jin, for he utilized the tactics which had neutralized the Zhuang shield wall. Seeing an opening in the Zhuang line, Di sent in special contingents of Song infantry, who chalked up the Zhuang shields with heavy swords and axes. The reports of the battle are somewhat murky, but it's probable that at this point, the Han either opened the shield wall sufficiently to permit the Fanluo cavalry to rush in, or they came in an enveloping attack on Jigao's wings. Here, the classical attack of the nomad horse archers was to range behind the enemy line, cutting communication lines and shooting the

enemy from the rear. Caught on all sides, the Zhuang fled, leaving 3,000 dead. It is not possible to accurately determine Nong Jigao's total strength, but it was probably never more than about 10,000 men. While the casualties at the battle for Yong were appreciable, many more men fled the field, indicating that the Zhuang were demoralized by the rapid and flexible assault which Di launched. The Battle of Yongzhou, although it's almost never looked at or well understood in the West,

was a historically important turning point. Professor Barlow makes the claim that it would not be inappropriate to compare the Song victory at Yongzhou in terms of its era-defining import and historical ramifications to a battle far more well-known in the West, and fought only 12 years after the Zhuang defeat here. That is, the Battle of Hastings, that in 1066 cemented the conquest of England by William of Normandy over Harold Godwinson's Saxon dynasty. Like Hastings, Barlow writes, quote, the defeat at Kunlun opened up Zhuang culture to an invading force which would occupy and totally transform it. It is at Kunlun that the Zhuang were truly

born, as the English were born at Hastings." In the aftermath of the decisive Zhuang defeat, General Di and his army entered Yong and took many members of Zhigao's family captive. Two of them were summarily executed, as were 57 of his high-level officials. Yet Zhigong, his mother, brother, and his sons were able to flee the capture of their city and fled into the mountains, intent on re-equipping, mustering a new force of Zhuang from the surrounding clans, and training them, this time, to be able to counter the cavalry tactics that had just devastated their ranks. It was not, however, to be. It seems as if the lords of two of the preeminent Zhuang clans, that of the Huang and the Cun,

had felt the winds shift and weren't about to stick their necks out for a lost cause. When the surviving Nongs sent out the call for reinforcements to carry on the fight, the lords of Huang and Cun refused to answer, depriving them of the critical mass they so desperately needed to effectively maintain opposition to the Song military might now arrayed against them. Though they held out in the backwoods of Yunnan, continually trying to raise a suitable fighting force, by the following year of 1055, both Zhigao's brother and his son and heir were captured and summarily executed by local Chinese forces. As for Nong Zhigao himself, reports are unclear as to his ultimate fate. Some say that he was killed in an attempt to return to the city of Dali,

which he found on his arrival had succumbed to civil turmoil. But as Song Shi succinctly puts it, quote, his death cannot be known, end quote. In spite of the rather ignominious end, Nong Zhigao's legacy would live on in the cultural memory of southern China, and especially that of the Zhuang people. Seen as a cultural hero, he is venerated across his native province of Taobang, and likely, if perhaps secretly, in Yunnan and Guangxi as well.

Interestingly, it would be in the 20th century that Nong Zhigao's greatest controversy, and perhaps his finest hour, would come to pass. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party of China, of Mao Zedong, set about doing all it could to minimize and denigrate local cultural heroes in a concerted effort to stamp out regionalism and form the myriad peoples of China into a homogenous Chinese proletarian identity. As such, prior to the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, Nong Jigao was dismissed by the Communist Party as merely a self-aggrandized local leader. But the implementation of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution

sought fearsome resistance by the non-Han peoples of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, who rightly viewed the action as a direct and sustained assault on their own cultures and ways of life, nothing less than an attempt by Mao and his Red Guard to erase them as an identity. Faced with this prospect, it's not surprising at all that a historical culture icon like Nong Zhigao, who had faced off against both China and Vietnam against overwhelming odds and who never gave up the fight, even staring down his own ruin and annihilation, would find a lot of traction amongst the contemporary Zhuang people and their neighboring minorities. Following the death of Mao and the

end of his disastrous Cultural Revolution, happily, attitudes in China have shifted dramatically regarding the place of minority peoples and their distinct cultures within Greater China. And with that shift, so too has the memory of Nong Zhigao been resuscitated and polished, albeit with a shiny new coat of Leninism slapped over the top. Nong is now widely seen, as per the official party line at least, as a popular anti-feudal minority hero, with special emphasis placed on the fact that as he had several non-Zhuang and possibly even Han members of his inner circle, he was also a multi-ethnic and proletarian struggle against the bourgeois imperialist dogs. Gosh golly, he's practically a model socialist. In the final estimation, Nong is probably best viewed and understood

neither through the lenses of Chinese or Vietnamese nationalism, nor through the completely ahistorical claims by the CPC as one of their own, gufa, but instead as a leader and warrior for his own people, the Zhuang, and the establisher of his and their own ethnically and culturally independent state that, while defeated and subsequently absorbed into the Chinese state, tellingly even after a millennium, was never digested. As he's written to have declared just prior to the initial capture of Yongzhou, as per his intentions and outlook, quote, Life's goods have been burned in heaven's fires.

There is no way to live. We will seize Yongzhou, base ourselves in Guangzhou, and declare ourselves king. Otherwise, we will die. End quote. And though his bleak outlook might have been true, at least on a personal level, it has not proven so for his people. The Zhuang are still there, where they've been for millennia, clustered in southern China, northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, and they are still fundamentally themselves. Maybe that is, in the end, a victory unto itself. Next time then, we will finally finish off the long, long, oh so long reign

of Emperor Ranzong and get into the kooky antics of his successors, beginning with his half-insane nephew, Yingzong. Thanks for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. 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. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich.

And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.