The History of China - #144 - N. Song 11: Only A Northern Song

Episode Date: June 30, 2018

"Like milk on a hot day in San Diego, it turned out that Emperor Yingzong was a bad choice." Time Period Covered: 1063-1067 CE Important Historial Figures: Song: Emperor Renzong (Zhao Zhen)[r. 1022-1063] Emperor Yingzong (Zhao Shu)[r. 1063-1067] Emperor Shenzong (Zhao Xu) [r. 1067-1085] Empress Cao [1016-1079] Chancellor Han Qi（韩琦）[1008-1075] Prime Minister Fu Bi Chief Censor Sima Guang [1019-1086] Minister Ouyang Xiu [1007-1072] Western Xia: Li Liangzuo (Weiming Liangzuo)[b. 1046, r. 1048-1067] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 144, Only a Northern Song Life and death in the pre-modern world were intimately intertwined in a way that is often difficult for the modern mind, or at least to those of us in the developed world with access to high-speed internet, hospitals, Uber, and antibiotics, to truly comprehend. It was the great equalizer. Whether one was of the lowest caste in society or the highest echelons of nobility,

disease and death took very little notice and laid low pauper and prince alike. Disease was as endemic and sudden as it was mysterious and inexplicable. It could be caused by things as obvious as malnutrition or open wounds left to fester, or could steal in silently and invisibly, seemingly without rhyme or reason, striking down the infirm and the strong alike while leaving others unaccountably untouched, save for their grief at those suddenly taken away forever. Plagues and pestilence were common, if terrible, occurrences, and nowhere as much as the densely populated urban centers of China, where the whirl and rush of humanity and commerce

mixed together with its own refuse, as well as those of the animals that lived and died in close proximity, shared their food and sleeping places, and mingled their own filth with that of the people. This, of course, included those animals that humans wanted to have around, goats, pigs, oxen, ducks, chickens, and the like, but also, all the more, those species that have lived alongside humanity as long as there has been humanity, rats, insects, feral dogs and cats, and even wild birds that could act as disease vectors. Little of this, as we all know, was well understood prior to the 19th and 20th centuries, all know, was well understood prior to the 19th and 20th centuries. But one fact was well understood, that the most dangerous time in a human's life

was the first few years of it. Early childhood death was, prior to the advent of modern medicines and vaccinations, the absolute largest killer on planet Earth, and is, in fact, the single biggest factor in the low average life expectancy among pre-modern populations. Make no mistake, when we look at those figures and see the average life expectancy of pre-modern China or wherever to be 35, let's say, that's not saying that people were hitting their 35th birthday and just dropping stone dead right after blowing out the candles. If a young human could make it to about age 5, barring catastrophe or war, they still have a pretty good chance of making it to age 60 or 70. It's just that so many infants and toddlers succumbed to childhood illnesses that it drags down the average significantly. Which is why, with the advent of modern medicines

and vaccinations, we see the worldwide average lifespan more than double virtually overnight. Now, I'm not saying all this just as a pro-vaccination infomercial, though while I'm here, get your kids vaccinated, folks. Measles, mumps, rubella, and polio are not pretty ways to go out. Instead, I launched today's shows on this footing as an attempt to understand and thus explain how and why it was that when Emperor Ren Zong of Song died in the year 1063 at the age of 52, and after 41 dithering, dawdling, largely unimpressive years on the throne. He was forced to pass his rulership of the empire, not to one of his sons, but instead one of his cousins, or to be specific, his first cousin once removed, aka his paternal cousin's son,

Zhao Zhongshi, or as he'd been renamed the year prior, Zhao Shi. Ren Zong had gone forth and multiplied, make no mistake. He's recorded as having 16 children, three with his third and final empress, and 13 among seven of his consorts. Yet by the time when his health took a terminal dip, beginning in 1055, ten of those children had already died, including all three of the sons he would ever have, with at least four yet to be born. In fact, only five of his children would outlive their father,

and of them, just four would survive to adulthood, all of them daughters. So yes, for you math majors out there, that is a 75% childhood death rate for the richest, most powerful man and family in the hemisphere, and quite possibly the world. It's little wonder, then, that not just in China, but many parts of the underdeveloped or pre-modern world, it was, and sometimes remains, customary to delay giving newborns a proper name until their first birthday, or even beyond. No reason to get too attached to something that you have between a 50-75% chance of having to bury within a year. Anyways, beginning in 1055, with his long, slow descent into more abundancy, Ranzong, or more properly his advisors,

began to ruminate on the fact that he no longer had a direct successor, and barring a good flip of the progeny coin, which again would come up unfailingly girl four more times before he finally kicked the bucket, they would have a potential succession crisis on their hands if they didn't prepare for that eventuality. Thus, it was agreed that the emperor would bring in two young members of his extended family to groom as his potential successors, of which it was cousin Zhao Zhongshi, then 26 years old, who would be selected as the designated heir. Michael McGrath notes that, much like Ren Zong himself, Crown Prince Zhong Shi

wasn't exactly the most worldly individual. Quote, father, Taizong, and even great-granduncle Taizu. Even Renzong traveled further afield than Yingzong, traveling once to Gong County, where the imperial tombs were located, only 75 miles from the capital Kaifeng. End quote. He'd actually initially come to live in the palace as of 1035, when he'd have been just six, and was placed into the care and custody of Renzong's third and final wife, the Empress Cao. This state of affairs would last for about four years, until the birth of Ren Zong's third and final wife, the Empress Cao. This state of affairs would last for about four years, until the birth of Ren Zong's second son in 1039, wherein the nine- or ten-year-old was shipped back to his birth family at the so-called Hostel for Imperial Clansmen outside of the palace proper. There he would remain until he was

called back to the palace in 1055 once again. His grooming process was interrupted again in 1059 by the death of his father Zhao Yunrong, posthumously the Prince of Pu. As was customary for a dutifully filial son, Zhao Zhongshi stopped all other business to observe a full 27 months of ritual mourning for his father, meaning that it wasn't until the autumn of 1062 when he was at last formally designated as the Taizhe by the now clearly dying Ranzong. It was in the course of this ceremony that he likewise shed his birth name, Zhongshe, and was granted the new name, Shu, meaning dawn light. Things proceeded far more quickly than anyone had anticipated for the newly designated heir,

however. Rather than, as he expected, being able to resume mourning for his father, he was summoned to the throne in the first months of 1063 to await the imminent passing of his adoptive father. From McGrath, quote, The week before he died, he appeared to have recovered, but then, on the night of April 30th, 1063, he rose suddenly from his bed to seek medicine and called for the Empress Cao. End quote. By the time she'd been roused from her chambers and made her way to the Emperor's, he seemed to have been stricken dumb, as he could do nothing but point to his chest with apparent discomfort. Physicians were summoned at once and they plied their arts, giving the sovereign medicinal herbs and attempting to unblock the flow of his qi by burning dried mugwort incense near key points of

his body, a practice known as moxibustion. Nothing, however, proved useful in easing the emperor's symptoms, and by midnight, he had succumbed to death. Though virtually all of the court ministers wished to make official reports of the sovereign's passing at once, Empress Cao forbade it until the following morning, determining that she would need the hours until dawn to secure the succession order only so recently determined. After ensuring the cooperation of key officials within the government, Crown Prince Zhao Shu was now summoned to the throne room and informed that he was now the Emperor of Song. In shock, he replied, I can't! I can't! And then he turned to leave. The chancellor and

prime minister, Han Che and Zeng Gongliang, took hold of him and loosened his hair while someone else placed the imperial robe on him. As dawn broke across Kaifeng, the whole of the imperial court, all senior-ranked imperial clansmen, military officers, and court ministers were called into the throne room in order to formally receive the decree of enthroning Yingzong as their new sovereign. Following the declaration, Yingzong quietly accepted the ceremonial pledges of fealty from all present. But when this was at last concluded, he turned to Chancellor Han Che and declared that he intended to hand over full control of the empire's affairs to Han while he observed a three-year period of mourning for his imperial father. It was only at this strong insistence of his collective counselors that,

well, sire, you can't just do that, that he at last relented and agreed to do the job for which he'd been selected. It is notable, though, that this would mark the second time in less than a day that he'd tried to slip out of the role, and in hindsight, maybe it would have been for the better if his ministers had actually listened. Because, like milk on a hot day in San Diego, it turned out that Yingzong was a bad choice. His first three days as sovereign passed relatively uneventfully, with the business of the court entirely preoccupied

with making funeral and tomb arrangements for the late Gran Zong, a project that saw some 48,000 soldiers tasked with the tomb's construction, at a cost of approximately 1.5 million strings of cash, 2.5 million bolts of silk, and 50,000 ounces of silver, a cost that McGrath refers to as modest. But on the evening of his fourth day as emperor, Ying Zong was discovered in his chambers suffering, apparently, with some form of psychotic break. He lost the power of speech and the ability to recognize people, and when the royal physicians, mere days ago themselves demoted and dismissed from the palace entirely for their failure to save the last emperor's life, were now recalled to attend to the current emperor's condition,

they found him ranting, shouting incoherently, and walking about wildly and unable to control his behavior. At an absolute loss for what this was or how to treat it, there was little the physicians could do but try to placate the uncontrollable monarch before he hurt himself or someone else. When after several days he still showed no signs of having regained his mental faculties, it would be to the Empress Dowager Cao, Long Yingzong's quasi-maternal caretaker, who would now be called upon to take control of his government as Imperial Regent, until he could make a full recovery. Cao's regency would last for nearly a year, until the spring of 1064, when Yingzong was deemed of sufficiently sound mind by Chancellor Han Shi,

that he and the other ministers now demanded that Empress Cao once more cede command of the government to its rightful sovereign. But it seems that the court, whatever its pretension to the contrary in order to get the Empress back out of power as quickly as possible, was under few illusions about the precarious state of their new and mentally unstable emperor. Fortunately for them, there was not the same issue of succession with Yingzong as there had been with Renzong. Yingzong had three living sons, the eldest of which, Zhao Zhongjun, then 15 or 16, was immediately promoted and designated the heir apparent, though this was not yet, and it turned out never would be, followed up by a formal investiture to Taizi.

Yingzong's ever-so-brief time on the throne was primarily documented by questions of ritual and filial propriety between his birth father, the Prince of Pu, and his adoptive imperial father, Ren Zong. And to be fair, that is all pretty dull stuff. I'm not gonna lie, so let's just move along. His reign's sole international scuffle was with the old bugaboo to the northwest, Western Xia, and its ruling Tangut emperors. And that whole state, were we to get on our trusty steed and ride on over, we would find it had not too terribly long ago been in the middle of its own weird succession crisis as well. Following the death of the state's founding emperor, Li Yuanhao,

a.k.a. Wei Ming Yuanhao, aing Yuanhao, aka Tuoba Yuanhao, aka Emperor Zhengzong, back in 1048, after a series of attempted assassinations by his empress's powerful clan, following his evident intent to loosen their influence over him by taking a new wife as his empress from a different clan. It all gets very complicated and quite incestuous, but suffice it to say, he managed to avoid assassination by the Yelli clan elders, demoted his Yelli empress, promoted his new wife, and then got the hots for another concubine, this time from the Mozang clan, promoted her, and had a son called Liangzuo, apparently so named after the river alongside which he'd been born. Now, this might have occurred in the

early months of 1047, or maybe 1048, you know, dates kind of get shaky on the step after all. But in any case, either a few months after, or a few months before his newest son, Liang Zuo, had been born, Yuan Hao finally met his end by the blade of his elder son from the first, and now disgraced, Ye Li Empress. The former heir stabbed at his father, cutting his nose before fleeing. Not far, though, because he was soon caught and along with the rest of his clan promptly executed. Nevertheless, Yuan Hao's nasal wound festered and he shortly succumbed to infection. Thus it was that the throne of Xia, such as it was, was left to the bastard infant of the Mozang

consort, after the Mozang clan elder put him forth as a candidate for succession, which, probably as much to his surprise as everyone else's, aroused no dissent from the other clan heads. Well, okay, they all seem to have shrugged. Baby puppet emperor it is. After all, we're not aware of that ever producing negative consequences. We are, after all, completely illiterate stepfolk. So I'm sure that you've got all that, but just to recap, as of 1065, Song China is under the control of a mentally unstable Ying Zong, while Western Xia is under the once nominal but by now actual command, following the murder of his grandfather and very possibly mother,

of the 17-year-old Emperor Liang Zuo, whom Ruth Donald writes of was a king, quote, reviled by contemporary Chinese writers as a stubborn, reckless youngster and unworthy successor to his father, end quote. The acrimony between the two states is evident by their near-continuous trading of insults and diplomatic barbs marked by the Tangut emissaries to the north, demanding that they be given the same diplomatic status and dignities granted to their Khitan Liao counterparts, to which the Song court replied in effect, yeah, listen, you don't seem to quite understand here. The Liao are, like, really scary, and you are like a mosquito buzzing around our ear. The War of Words began to heat up beginning in 1064, when Emperor Liang Zuo led his Tangut cavalry in a series of raids into Chinese territories along the Shanxi border regions.

Though this was low-level enough to merit only a local response in the form of peasant recruitment across the region, the continuous nature of the raids, as well as their mounting successes, capped off by their capture and burning of Dashun City and its surrounding forts, did, by 1066, prompt the central government to take a more direct hand in quelling this growing conflict from the upstart western state. This stemmed largely from the very justifiable fear that further Tangut meddling across the Song western borders ran the distinct possibility of disrupting the ever-precarious Chinese line on warhorses from the Ordos region, a possibility too terrible to even comprehend. When the Tangut force, numbering perhaps 20,000, surrounded the local garrison force, the siege was relieved by the arrival of Song cavalry that not only broke the Xia lines but

managed to put a crossbolt into the shoulder of Liang Zuo, forcing his withdrawal and possibly even his eventual death the following year via complications from the wound. The culmination of this border spat came as a result of the fact that the time of the annual payment slash tribute to Xia from Song was due to be delivered soon, prompting Chancellor Han Shi to suggest that they threatened to withhold the delivery of the tea and silver unless the impudent 19-year-old Tangut ruler backed down already. When the military commissioner disagreed with the plan, stating that such a move would likely only provoke further conflict with Xisha, citing the two states' costly and embarrassing conflict between 1038 and 1039.

To this, Han Shi sarcastically replied that he had expected the so-called war specialists to at least understand that that was then and this is now, and that the game had substantively changed. Now, the Song forces were far larger and more capable of dealing with Tangut strategies, and moreover, everyone knew that Liang Zuo was no Li Yuan Hao on the battlefield. Emperor Ying Zong, now with his own health in sharp decline, opted to go with Han Che's bolder strategy of threatening to withhold the tribute payment. From McGrath, quote, when the letter was delivered to Liangzuo threatening to withhold the much

desired annual tribute of tea and silver, Liangzuo backed off, concocting a story that a Song border official had started the confrontation. By this time, Yingzong was bedridden. During one morning audience, Han Che tapped on the screen in front of the emperor's bed to ask the news from the Western Front. Yingzong exerted himself to look at Han Che and told him, It was as you predicted. End quote. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile, these people created one of the most enduring and significant cultures.

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With the war concluded, it became the preeminent task of the Kaifeng government to prepare for what was increasingly understood to be the inevitable, that after less than three years on the throne, more than half of which he'd been, well, little more than a raving invalid, Emperor Yingzong was dying. In April 1066, the heir, Zhao Shu, was married to the granddaughter of an eminent official specifically selected for her family's bona fides. And before going any further, let me just address the fact that Yingzong's given name is Zhao Shu, and his son's name is Zhao Shu. They're different, and you're probably just going to have to trust me on that. Anyways, as the year wore on, Yingzong's health slipped further and further away,

rendering him by November once again unable to speak and only able to weakly write or gesture in reply to questions. When asked by Zhao Shu what he could do to aid his ailing father, Chancellor Han Shi replied that he hoped the prince would stay by his father's side day and night. Zhao replied that, well, of course he would, since that was the duty of his as Yingzong's son to care for him in his time of need. To which Han replied that, no, that's not really what I meant. Instead, it was a question of the succession. As you recall, though Zhao Shu had been tapped as the heir apparent, he'd never been formally

made Taizi, meaning that there was the potential for a period of vulnerability, or heaven forbid, a full-blown power vacuum should the emperor succumb and his chosen successor not be immediately at hand for coronation. With his son present, Yingzong continued to decline over the winter, before finally dying in his bed on January 25, 1067, at the age of only 36. Thus it was that at 19 years of age, Zhao Shu would ascend the throne of Song as its sixth emperor, Shenzong. He did so under a cloud of acute shame for his country's foreign humiliations and a fierce ambition to redress the crises that beset his empire since the time of his granduncle, Shenzong. This was rendered all the more critical by the fact that his father had only been allowed to sit the throne for a scant three years,

by heaven, before dying, a sign that could be taken as nothing but ominous for the dynasty as a whole. The issues that threatened the very foundation of the Song regime were threefold. Its military, financial, and bureaucratic institutions were all in dire need of reform at best, and complete overhaul at worst. All of the problems his father had been so incapable of dealing with only now even more intensified in the absence of timely redress. From Paul Yakov Smith, The four-year-long war with the Tangut Shi Sha between 1038 and 1044 had demonstrated that the Song's mercenary armies were unfit for active combat.

Although the Song mustered some 1.25 million men against the 826,000 Tanga troops, the aged and inexperienced Song soldiers, hired from among the flotsam of the marketplace, were likely to scatter at their first sight of a Tanga soldier. End quote. But there was, even now, little to be done. With the Liao staring down Chinese redoubts from the north and the Xia established as another powerful and effectively co-equal neighbor to the west in the Ordos, Song ministers saw little alternative to maintaining their huge, if unreliable, standing armies in the north. Efforts were made to pair the size of the regular imperial troops, but by the mid-1060s, the court still had 1,162,000 men on the rolls, over half of whom, 663,000, were costly imperial troops, end quote.

Maintaining such a staggering force was, of course, massively expensive. The Song government had no choice but to successively raise the tax burden on its citizenry. In some regions, such as the northernmost circuits like Shanxi, Hebei, and Hadong, as much as 50% of what were initially called, and meant to be, temporary emergency measures. But when peace brought little respite from the military maintenance cost, those temporary measures all too often became permanent fixtures. Even under such onerous burdens, though, more and more of the state's revenues were eaten into year by year by the bloated military defense budget. Quote, by 1065, defense expenditures consumed 50 of the state's 60 million strings of cash income, 83%, while the government registered its first overall financial

deficit. End quote. This was all just made even worse by the fact that within just three years of Ren Zong's death and the costly process of an imperial funeral and tomb construction, yet another one now needed to be arranged. Chen Zong did his best to minimize the financial impact of this inevitable cost by issuing a proclamation stipulating that Ying Zong's funerary costs be capped at no more than one-third of Ren Zong's. Nevertheless, from Smith, The budgetary crisis was further exacerbated by the spiraling number of supernumerary officials. That is to say, officials appointed beyond the actual requirements of government operation. You know, like having 16 departmental managers, all with the same titles, and who you all get to hear from individually if you forget to attach the new cover page to the TPS report.

As we've discussed before, the expansion of the official graduation rate from the civil service examinations had meant a ballooning number of quote-unquote qualified candidates all tripping over each other for one of the few posts available. The solution, at least at the time, had seemed to be, well, just make more posts available and occupy them with busy work or something. I don't know. In practice, of course, that had resulted in the ballooning of the imperial bureaucracy as a whole and all of the costs associated with those new positions. From about 9,800 officeholders at the turn of the 11th century to just six decades later, there being almost triple that, about 24,000. The cost went beyond these merely financial burdens, though, and spilled over into job effectiveness and morale for those very officials. Again, from Smith, quote, poor career prospects and the long waiting period between

posts undermined the morale of the civil service, especially the majority of civil servants in the junior or executory, Xuanuán rán, division. The professional spirit of these men could erode if they were kept too long in lowly provincial posts or forced to go without posts altogether. Yet the court had to be wary of promoting too many junior men to the much smaller senior or administrative division, jīngqiao guán, the critical kài guán promotion, where appropriate posts were even rarer. That's right, it's the all-too-familiar problem of, well, we've got a glut of qualified applicants, so you need five years of experience minimum for this entry-level position. Indeed, contemporary commentators lamented that,

even taking the supernumerary positions into account, there remained at least 10 applicants for every position available within the bureaucracy, an unsustainable imbalance to say the least. This led, unsurprisingly, to large and increasing levels of favoritism and nepotism to creep into the process. As Ouyang Shou, who is not only the author of the new book of Tang, from which we've drawn extensively, but at this time an assistant chancellor, Hanlin academician, vice commissioner of military affairs, and vice Revenues, lamented that good learning and reputation no longer mattered when seeking official appointments, but now only family connections, thus leaving the most able and steadfast ministers dispirited and the might-have-been rising stars languishing at the bottom rungs of the bureaucratic ladder.

Emperor Shenzong himself was in no way put off by such challenges, and in many respects was the opposite of his great-uncle Ranzong's timid, dawdling demeanor. He came into the throne all bravado and fire, seeing himself as the heir to the founders' dreams of recovering the 16 prefectures of Yan Yun occupied from the Khitan Liao in the north, and the Ordis prefecture of Lingzhou lost to the Tanguts in 1001. He came to the throne determined to wipe away generations of shame by not relying on conciliation and passive defense, as had every predecessor since Taizong,

but redefining the political map through conquest and expansion. To put it simply, there was an easy solution that would, in a single stroke, at least according to him, solve the empire's financial, territorial, and prestige-based woes, and that was aggressive expansionism and conquest. Shenzong informed his war minister as such, stating, quote, if we are to raise troops for our frontier campaigns, then our treasuries must be full, end quote. Moreover, Shenzong didn't see himself as some passive agent idling his reign away while his ministers directed his empire for him. He saw himself much more in the vein of the great-great-grandpa

Tai Zong, active, hands-on, and in direct control of the affairs of his state. Though this vision of rule wouldn't fully come to pass for another decade until the dismissal of Wang An Shi in 1076, he nevertheless, quote, ascended the throne with an expansive sense of imperial power and an abiding dissatisfaction with the absolutist powers built up over the years by the great ministers, end quote. Shang Tsung might have expected a sense of enthusiasm to accompany his bold and decisive reform aims since, after all, many of the uppermost government officials had begun their careers as starry-eyed idealists spearheading the abortive reform efforts of the 1040s. Much to his chagrin, though, he was

quickly to find out that time and prominence had dulled their edge and turned many who had once been on the cutting edge of imperial reformism into the arms of stodgy conservatism. As the politician and leading Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi would state to his own students a century later, ministers like Han Shi and Fu Bi, in the course of coming into power themselves, quote, had forgotten the excitement of these early days. Master Fu was afraid of acting and wanted only to read the classics and recite Buddhist sutras, end quote. This was made evident indeed when in 1068, Shenzong approached the prime minister, Fu Bi,

with his plans to retake the 16 prefectures and orders, to which Fu replied, Fu's tutting of the emperor's ambitions were clearly not what Shenzong wanted to hear, and he received the lecture with what's called a stony silence. Fu Bi was hardly alone in his resistance to the young and brash emperor's expansive plans at reconquest. Even our good friend Sima Guang, who we all no doubt remember fondly as the author of the Zizhi Tongjian, but at this time was just now coming into his career as the newly appointed chief censor, stressed the absolute importance of patience over this brash action.

He counseled the emperor that while his goal of making Song great again was all well and good, laudable even, you couldn't just go rushing into something like that all half-cocked and just hope to wing it. Hey, you know, remember literally every other time your ancestors tried to attack into the steppes? Taizong? Renzong? Those ring any bells? Remember how those campaigns all panned out? Defeat after humiliating and costly defeat, all capped off by China having to recognize not just the Khitan but the flippant Tanguts as nominal equals and then pay them for the privilege?

If we go breaking faith with these arrangements now, with our military, finances, and command structure all three dozen kinds of messed up like they are, that's more than likely to break us than it is them. And while we're on the subject, Your Majesty, it's worth noting that for all the pain in the butt he is, the Tangut leader Liang Zuo has never actually broken his end of the vassal-susurrain bargain with us, in that he's never actually tried to declare independence

and keeps referring to himself as your vassal in official communiques. I mean, do you really want to be known as that guy who goes around attacking his own pledged vassals just because they're obnoxious? So I'd like where your head's at, your majesty, but you need to slow your roll. We've got to get the wheels back up on this cart of state before we even think about hitching it up to a warhorse, otherwise this whole thing's going to end in disaster again. Warfare wasn't even the most vexing thing about his cabinet from the young emperor's perspective.

No, the thing that really, truly ground his gears about his elder statesmen was the fact that at each and every turn, they attempted to suppress and curtail his ambitious and hands-on approach to govern what was, after all, supposed to be his empire. The high officials had made their bones, after all, among monarchs who had either, in the case of Ren Zong, not cared to, or in the case of Ying Zong, been mentally unable to, run things for themselves. As such, they'd become quite accustomed to being the actual drivers of government policy, and were quite happy with an emperor who would sit there up on his dais and project his aura of government policy, and were quite happy with an emperor who would sit there up on his dais and project his aura of silent majesty. Emphasis on the silent, thank you very much.

Shen Zong, however, was having none of that, much to his minister's continuous vexation. The academician Han Wei, for instance, wrote to the emperor in the second month of 1067, imploring Zheng Zong that, quote, The hundred affairs of government each have their appropriate officials, who exercise their utmost skills to fulfill their duties. There can be no greater sacrifice of the essence of government than for the monarch to take over from his officials in the management of affairs.

End quote. Once again, it was probably Sima Guang who was foremost among those within the upper echelons of government who repeatedly urged his imperial majesty to just butt out already, we've got this. Two months after Han Wei's memorial to Shenzong, Chief Censor Sima, quote, urged Shenzong to issue, yeah, whatever, I do what I want, nobody tells me what to do. Prompting Sima to ride his majesty yet again some four months later, complaining that he was still interfering with normal government operations by sending in agents of his own to investigate affairs, stick their noses into other departments' business, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

Your humble servant begs leave to request that you knock it off already. One might think that given all of this head-butting and intractable criticism of his every desire and impulse, Shenzong might have quickly grown tired of these old fogies whinging about his every move, and had sought to oust them with ministers more amenable to his own theory of imperial governance. But that was not the case. From Smith, quote, Although Shenzong did not get the encouragement he wanted from such men as Fu Bi and Sima Guang, he did not on that account want them out of the way.

On the contrary, he continued to value the opinions of the most fervent critics of his reforming ambitions, and sought to keep the critics by his side. Shenzong kept Fu Bi in the capital until 1072, despite the old man's opposition to change, for example, because he felt that Fubi's prominence helped to hold together all under heaven. And Sima Guang remained Shenzong's closest advisor, perhaps even closer intellectually than Wang Anshe, despite his intransigent opposition to every facet of the emperor's reform agenda. For as Shenzong told Liu Gongzhu in the 10th month of 1067, I want Sima Guang by my side, not for his opinions on affairs of state.

For as they both agreed, Sima, like Wang on Shi, was rather impractical. But because his moral power and learning. So he's almost like a Cato the Younger to Shen Zong's Caesar. Obnoxious, constantly getting in the way, unwilling to budge, unwilling to change with the times, and yet for all that you just gotta respect the heck out of the guy for it. On the other hand, an elder statesman who Shenzong decidedly did not respect the heck out of was none other than his high chancellor Han Che, who had been steadily amassing more and more autocratic power autonomous from the throne for three imperial reigns by this point, and was respected to the point that even Ouyang Xiu,

who rather famously wouldn't even praise his own teachers, had nothing but admiration for Han. Well, Shenzong wasn't so much impressed by this amassment of what he determined were powers that were his to wield by right, as he was irked. Those flames were fanned by Shenzong's own former tutor, another critic of Han Chi's stranglehold on imperial government, Wang Tao. Wang had repeatedly stated to his former pupil that, Since the time of the Jiayu era, Han Chi has monopolized the handles of government, with the result that the monarch's position is weak and the minister's position is strong. Beginning in the third month of 1067, a campaign against Han Che kicked off with Wang Tao filing official impeachment proceedings against the chancellor

and his co-counselor under charges of, quote, taking advantage of a new emperor to violate the rules of office protocol, end quote. The motion was quickly quashed by Shen Zong, who both valued advice even when it was critical, and moreover did not wish to see a factional rift open up in his own court. Nevertheless, under sustained public assault by both Wang Tao's charges and the public's perception that the emperor was no longer on terms with him, Han repeatedly submitted his request to resign from his post, but was denied each time. That is, at least, until a new and rising star among the officialdom sparked the emperor's interest, much as it had many others in the upper echelons. And so, next time, we'll look

into this man who would, in due course, substantively overhaul the ailing Song dynasty's economy, military, and government through a sweeping series of reforms that would come to be known as the New Policies. And that man is Wang Anshi. Thanks for listening. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era,

then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast.