The History of China - #164 - S. Song 7: Out With the New, In With the Old

Episode Date: April 21, 2019

Neo-Confucianism has made a strong comeback through the synthesis of its various doctrines under the philosophical guidance of Zhu Xi of the Southern Song court. He and his likeminded ministers seek to bring back the perfection of eras gone by by being perfectly morally upright, and expecting everyone else to do the same. But when it turns out that certain other loose-living party-boys like Chancellor Han Tuozhou and Emperor Ningzong aren’t so thrilled about their buzzkilling ways, it will set up a massive conflict at court. Time Period Covered: 1194-1202 CE Major Historical Figures: Emperor Ningzong Chancellor Han Tuohzou Minister Zhu Xi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 164, Out with the New, In with the Old. Last time, we dealt with two Southern Song emperors with diametrically opposed views on how to treat their fathers. First, there had been Xiaozong, the filial, under which the Chinese Empire had experienced an almost three-decade-long golden age. After his adoptive father, the retired emperor Gaozong, had died in 1187, he found he just could not go on without dear old dad, and he retired himself just two years later. He had left control over the realm to his third son, Guangzong, who, thanks to both his own neuroses and his vindictive empress,

came to so despise his father over the course of his short reign that he refused to even attend Xiaozong's funeral in 1194. This had sealed his fate, and he was shortly thereafter ousted and forced to abdicate in favor of his only surviving son, the 24-year-old Prince Zhao Kuo, who would be enthroned that same year as Emperor Ningzong. Like almost all Song monarchs, Ningzong had lived his whole life as a palace-bound prince, pampered and cared for, yet without any meaningful life experiences, outside influences, or any sense of life outside of the ever-watchful and exacting demands of his family and courtiers. In the grand sweep of Chinese rulers, Ning Zong ranks pretty low down, deficient in personal fortitude, emotional stability, and self-confidence. Yet for all of

that, because he comes right on the heels of probably the Southern Song's worst emperor, his father, Ning Zong tends to come out looking fairly good by comparison, if not exactly smelling like a rose. Whatever you wind up wanting to say about the guy, hey, at least he wasn't as bad as that nutball Guangzong. But today's story isn't actually about Ning Zong or his feeble personality. In fact, in order to tell this tale, we're going to have to cover some older territory, because today we're going to be discussing Neo-Confucianism and its resurgence at the end of the 12th century. Wait, wait, don't press the skip

track button just yet. Remember the rice episode? Trust me on this. Stick with me and you will be a great sage equal of heaven in no time flat. We're going to be skipping around a little in time over the course of the prior couple of centuries at first, because in spite of the name, by the 1190s, Neo-Confucianism isn't very Neo anymore. Before getting into the nuts and bolts of the name, by the 1190s, Neo-Confucianism isn't very Neo anymore. Before getting into the nuts and bolts of the tale at hand today, it behooves me to reintroduce you to just what exactly Neo-Confucianism is. It has, after all, been about 20 episodes and changed since I really last talked about it, even in passing, all the way back in number 143.

Alright, so at its broadest, Neo-Confucianism is an umbrella term for the many and varied schools of thought that were attempting to revitalize and revive the ancient Confucian philosophies of life, and then to apply them to their own contemporary society. Efforts at this had begun as early as the mid-8th century during the Tang Dynasty, under scholar-offic officials like Hanyu and the Ao. Hanyu is particularly well-remembered both for his literary accomplishments he's often put on par with the likes of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dante in terms of ongoing cultural influence. He's also very notable for his particularly fiery condemnation of the quote-unquote barbarian

superstition of Buddhism encroaching into the empire, leading ultimately to the instigation of the third great anti-Buddhist persecution under Emperor Tang Wuzong. Things didn't really start picking up steam, though, until the Song Dynasty in the early 11th century, when guys like Zhou Zhunyi came up with the ideas to integrate Buddhist and Taoist imagery, elements, and ideas into their old philosophies, giving them a nice veneer of mysticism while retaining Confucianism's emphasis on practical morality and ethics, in lieu of the other's more esoteric and otherworldly foci. To that end, let me briefly re-summarize the core tenets of Confucianism, ancient and neo both.

It is first and last focused on the physical world and the present life. This is in marked contrast to the ethos of Buddhism, Taoism, as well as Hinduism, and at least two-thirds of the major Abrahamic religions to boot, which prioritize the existence of something that comes after or beyond this plane of reality, over the here and now. Confucius himself was famously silent on the topic of the supernatural or the hereafter. The Analects rarely bring up the topic at all, and in both cases, Confucius dismisses it pretty much out of hand. In Book 7, for instance, it says, quote, the master did not speak of strange occurrences, feats of strength, political disruptions,

and spirits, end quote. And in Book 11, one of his disciples asks about serving the spirits. Confucius' response is probably the most emblematic way of putting his whole worldview. While you are not yet able to serve men, how could you be able to serve the spirits? The disciple pressed. May I ask about death? The master replied, when you do not yet understand life, how could you understand death? In other words, don't worry about all that. What you need to worry about is the here and now. In fact, one of Confucianism's greatest philosophical adversaries, Moism, would eventually quip that Confucianism's strict adherence to li, rituals and rites, while continuing to avoid and downplay the topic of the metaphysical,

was as bizarre as fishermen, quote, In any case, Confucianism's focus on this present reality was expressed through deep concern over human relationships, adherence to one's hierarchical duties and right principles, and stringent inner morality and self-discipline to bring out the best, not only in oneself, but also throughout society. Or, as Hanyu put it in an essay explaining the Analects, and in terms that would make even the most stringent of Song and Ming neo-Confucianists proud, quote, though sage embraces integrity and enlightenment as his true nature. He takes as his base the perfect virtue.

This is equilibrium and harmony. He generates these inside and gives them form outside. They do not proceed from thought, yet all is in order. This mind-heart set on evil has no way to develop in him, and preferable behavior cannot be applied to him. So only the sage commits no errors. End quote. Put in slightly simpler terms, a Confucian scholar seeks to perfect himself and the world around him by cultivating personal integrity in himself and

those around him. By unyielding commitment to the duties, responsibilities, and principles of order and righteousness, his inner virtue can manifest as increased goodness and order in the world around him. Put even more simply, he's kind of like an atheistic paladin in silks who put all of his skill points into poetry rather than combat, which is to say he's not very fun at parties. As I hope I've talked enough about that most of you will recall, Confucianism had been in a running war of ideas with both Taoism and Buddhism for nigh on a millennium by the Song Dynasty. And while the intermixture of symbols and imagery often allows us to imagine that there must have been a significant degree of syncretism between the religions slash philosophies, doing that too much really underplays how much of a war that war of ideas really was. As we've talked about at length, it had resulted

several times in violent and deadly purges against one or more of those sects. Typically, Buddhism was on the receiving end, since it was more easily singled out for being a foreign ideology. Even so, Confucianism had long ago fallen out of fashion among the populace at large, and was mostly confined to the literati and intelligentsia class of scholar-officials who had to commit it, after all, to memory in order to pass their civil service examinations. For the common person, however, the philosophy of duty, principle, and moral uprightness didn't do much. It didn't explain why they were here, it didn't provide much of anything in the way of spiritual comfort, and it flew in the face of hundreds of years of civil

wars, disasters, and strife. After all, if virtue beget virtue, as Confucius had said, shouldn't things have gotten, you know, better over time? Buddhism, at least, said that you could improve your life every go-round and eventually reach godhood. Taoists used crazy magic spells and said that you'd get to rejoin the great universal ultimate mind. Both, in their way, kind of like chicken soup for the soul. They made you feel good. Or at least, not so bad about life. Meanwhile, Confucians pretty much just said,

be good for goodness sake, and mind your manners. That's less like chicken soup and more like a cup of tepid water for the soul. That had been one of those major issues that Zhou Dunyi had tried to counteract with his appropriation of Buddhist and Taoist symbols and the pseudo-mysticization of Confucianism in the 1100s, with things like the Taiji II, a.ji II, aka the yin-yang symbol. The mid-10th century had seen an uptick in interest in Confucianism following the spread of printing, and especially the printing of the classics. From Carter and Goodrich,

quote, the printing of the classics was one of the forces that restored Confucian literature and teaching to its place in national and popular regard that it had held before the advent of Buddhism, and a classical renaissance followed that can only be compared to the renaissance that came in Europe after the rediscovery of its classical literature. And that there too was aided by the invention of printing." Of course, Confucianism wasn't the only ideology that experienced a resurgence in popularity with the introduction of large-scale printing operations. Buddhism, and especially the Chan school, better known in the West by its Japanese name, Zen Buddhism,

was already popular among the artists and intellectual classes, and was quick to propagate itself via the written word to an even wider audience. Thus, among both schools of thought, two central questions emerged. Which set of teachings would be able to reach a wider audience first, and which one could better adapt their teaching methodologies, which up until now had been conducted largely face-to-face, to this more indirect written medium? Getting back to the late 12th century and the Southern Song court, our two primary opponents today are going to be two of its top imperial officials. The first I'll introduce is Zhu Xi, an eminent Confucian scholar and proponent of Dao Shui. Incidentally, this is a confusing term that Richard Davis uses in his chapter on

the topic to great extent, but you'll often see it sprinkled elsewhere. Dao Shui makes it sound like I'm talking about Daoism, when in fact it's Jushi's own stitched-together school of Neo-Confucianist thought that largely united and synthesized the earlier versions. Thus, the term Daoshui and Neo-Confucianism are pretty much interchangeable, as standing in contrast to the term for traditional Confucianism, Ruxui. Nevertheless, I'll be doing my best to make sure that I'm being clear in referring to it simply as Neo-Confucianism, and when you hear Daoshui in a quote this episode, just know that it means Neo-Confucian. Zhu Xi stands at the high heights of Neo-Confucianism right alongside

Han Yu, Li Ao, and Zhou Zhuan Yi, because he, more than anyone else, is credited with synthesizing the various elements, ideas, and methodologies that had been bubbling up over the prior several centuries into a coherent and ultimately satisfying rebuttal to Taoist and Buddhist mysticism, and making possible the ascendancy of Confucian thought among the Chinese populace in the Song and Ming eras. Zhu, like most great Confucian scholars, first and foremost considered his profession as that of a teacher. Quote, Zhu Xi thought of himself, like Confucius, as the bearer of tradition rather than as the founder or originator of a new doctrine. Content with the modest title of teacher and transmitter, he was a scholar who devoted himself to editing texts, compiling anthologies, and writing commentaries on the classics instead of writing treatises to advance his own theories. Indeed, he thought of himself as little more than a mere translator.

Had he lived today, he'd probably be something like, oh, a history podcaster. De Berry writes, though, Yet for all that, in true Confucian tradition, scholar must go the credit of instigating a virtual revolution in education, end quote. Yet for all that, in true Confucian tradition, De Berry points out that Zhu was not a visionary in the typical sense of the term. A visionary, after all, if we're talking in the sense of people like Gates, Musk, and Jobs, looks to the future and tries to anticipate what the people will need the day after tomorrow. Zhu Xi, and Confucianists in general, for that matter, are almost precisely the opposite, philosophically. They look to the models of the past to inform the compelling needs of the present,

and, as with questions of spirituality, shied away from offering guesses on what might come next. In Zhu's own words, quote, We must only proceed from what we understand, in what is near to us, and move from there. It's like words, quote, This isn't to say that he was purely looking backwards while blindly staggering forward up the staircase. Instead, by looking to the ideals of the past, and the perfect sages of human virtue that it contained, the perfectibility of current and future humans

could be striven for, even if one did not know what ultimate form that might take. Thus, in spite of the fact that more than a few scholars have referred to people like Zhu Shi and other integral Confucian philosophers as innovative or innovators, the very basis of their philosophy seems to belie that designation. They seem to almost be anti-innovators, and any neological shifts or quirks are purely incidental to their central purpose of getting back to that initial perfect socio-political order as arranged and defined by the ancients. We're going to get back to Zhu Xi and his quote-unquote innovations in a little bit, but let me first introduce the other contender in this heavyweight contest. His name is Han Tuozhou, the imperial grand chancellor from the time of Ningzong's

enthronement in 1194, all the way until his own eventual death in 1207. He's known for two things in the course of his career. First, being of a staunchly anti-Neo-Confucian mentality that would pit him against not only Zhu Xi, but also a significant chunk of the imperial court. And second, stoking the Song Empire's lingering hopes of reconquering the north from the Jurchen, and thereby provoking the first offensive against the Jin dynasty in Song's political history. But that is a story for next episode.

One of the things most interesting about Tuozhou, however, is that in spite of the fact that he would rise to the highest possible echelons of administrative power, and in an amazingly short time, he'd do so without ever seeking or receiving a civil service examination credential. That's right, he held no degree, he passed no examination, yet he was also by no means a self-made man. His career had been made possible by that third opening, family connections, specifically that of his niece, the Lady Han, who would shortly become Empress Han to Emperor Ningdong. And who doesn't love a little nepotism? Well, Confucians, that's who. The nearly unprecedented rise to fame and fortune of this mediocre and untested officer must have been a complete slap in the face to those who had had to earn their titles and positions through years and decades

of hard work. But there it was. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the center of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to Season 1 to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America and in the Caribbean,

the first steps of the East India Company and the political battles between King and Parliament. Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution and regicide, which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the fledgling empire. In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax. The inciting incident that would touch off this conflict came in 1194,

just after the death of Xiaozong and the enrollment of Guangzong. Because the newly sitting emperor would have nothing to do with his father's funeral, the rites and mourning fell largely to Xiaozong's grandson, the eventual Ningzong, and the preparations for the actual burial to the court. Upon visiting the proposed imperial burial site, though, Minister Zhu Xi concluded that Thus, Zhu requested that a new divination be taken and a better site chosen. Subsequent disagreement over this course of action formed a rift in the imperial court that pitted those ministers like Zhu who thought that ritual integrity should be foremost, even if it delayed the funeral and cost more, and those for whom the initial site was deemed

good enough. Though ultimately the issue would be resolved by proceeding as initially planned, the acrimony resulted in a shake-up of the court that allowed a relatively low-level official like Han Tuozhou to climb the ranks, and thereafter position himself to play kingmaker in the subsequent succession of Ningzong to the throne, following the mad emperor Guangzong's ouster. Ironically, in spite of this, Ningzong did not initially trust or particularly like Tuozhou, offering him only a minor promotion for his services. Yet, by the end of the year, things had completely flipped. From Davis,

The court began to make wide-ranging decisions on the advice of Han Tuozhou without consulting the chief counselor. When other officials, justifiably concerned of this sudden and strange upending of the court's bureaucratic ordering, voiced their concerns, Ningzong is written to have replied without reservation, I trust Tuozhou with the utmost sincerity. There is confidence and no doubt, end quote. How had he managed to effect such a meteoric rise? It is possible that Tojo's niece, the new Empress Han, might have had something to do with it. But Davis points out that that was unlikely. Unlike her immediate predecessor, the widely reviled Empress Li, Empress Han shunned politics or using her position for personal or familial gain. Davis writes, quote,

A more likely reason for Han Tuojiu's assent is Ning Zong's changing attitude toward his distant clansmen, Zhao Ruyu, and his supporters, whose demands on his conduct the emperor found unreasonably burdensome, end quote. Thus, their incessant, and to Ning Zong's ears, petty and politically motivated, criticism of Han might have actually elevated him in the eyes of the throne. Ultimately, Zhao and his followers' collective inability to stop criticizing and demanding the demotion or removal of Han Tuozhou would backfire spectacularly in their faces. Following the demotion of one of their number in late 1194, Zhao Ruoyu and several of his ilk protested to the emperor and threatened to resign if the demotion order was not rescinded. Though the resignations were denied, so too was

their demand. Many of his fellows would in short order find themselves demoted or transferred out of the capital into provincial posts. Han Tuozhou had endured this attempt on his career and emerged all the more as the emperor's golden boy. And Zhao's attempt had cost a galaxy of prestigious officials their very careers. By January of 1195, Zhao stood virtually alone against Han, and was himself dismissed shortly thereafter. Those fool enough to rise in defense of the ministers who'd been punished by the throne likewise found themselves exiled to the remote south, and by 1196, there was no one left to stand against Han Tuozhou and his power over Emperor Ningzong. With all serious opposition to his control over the Song government now swept away,

Tuo Zhou sought to further bolster his career path, as well as ensure that his enemies could never return to power, by effecting a much more widespread and substantive purge of the imperial court. An evergreen target for purging was any group of ministers who could be successfully deemed a clique or political party, since, after all, all ought to be united in their loyalty to the throne, not to a petty group of partisans. Han would turn his gun sights on the body of officials that identified with Zhu Xi's rising branch of Neo-Confucian thought, Daoxue, which he deemed somehow as conspiratorial

to the state, which is to say, maybe against him personally. Not content to settle for individual denunciations or humiliations, instead, Han sought to paint the entire movement as anti-imperial. It would prove to be a plan so phenomenally ill-conceived and disastrous that he would be compelled in the end to undo his own deed. As a contemporaneous diarist and minister, Peng Guanyin, noted in late 1194, quoting the late great Ouyang Xiu, quote,

So what was Han's problem with the Neo-Confucianism and its devotees like Zhu Xi? What made them at least seem like a good target for a career opportunist like Tuozhou? Well, they tended to do a really good job of pissing just about everyone around them off. Like its traditional forebearer, Neo-Confucianist Daoxue sought to revive the rites, rituals, institutions, and morals of antiquity, and then to strictly apply them to modern society. The past, they said, was a simpler time, full of clear, beautiful art and literature, simple universal codes of morality.

It was just all around better than the complicated and corrupt whirl and rush of what the centuries had devolved that ancient perfection into here and now. And if we could just imitate the ancients closely enough, then we could get back to that golden age. To Neo-Confucians, it was a beautiful idea and a noble cause. To pretty much everyone else, it was about as pretentious, unrealistic, and irritating as listening to a Silicon Valley corporate mission statement that uses words like synergy, scalability, and vertical integration.

Davis writes, The sanctimonious frugality of Daoshui adherents could often appear excessive. At one point, palace library executive Hu Hong paid a social call upon Zhu Xi at Fuzhou. He received memorably wretched meals, about which he later commented with indignation, there's not even that much shortage in the mountains, end quote. Nor were family members exempt from such penny-pinching. Once again, Zhu Xi was infamous for providing only the coarsest and most miserly of rice gruel for his own mother, an action taken by almost everyone else as being terribly lacking in proper filial piety.

As we saw in the last episode, filial piety was nothing if not to be taken lightly in Song China, nor today for that matter, and had been grounds for the forcible removal from office of the prior emperor. Thus, though being stingy with meals might seem like a real jerk move to us, it's hardly something that we'd go on shouting about at official functions or demanding that an individual be held to professional account today. But to the wider Song society, it demonstrated a fundamental lack of virtue or values that the rest of society found of fundamental importance. Moreover, Zhu Xi wasn't here to make friends. If anything, he seemed dead set on making all of the professional enemies that he possibly could. Quote, the liberties taken by Zhu Xi in criticizing others and his apparent lack of restraint also

came at great cost to his career. As a regional official, he denounced corrupt and negligent bureaucrats with uncommon frequency. His scrutiny often extended beyond subordinates to include their superiors. This was highly irregular conduct for a non-censorial official and raised questions about his motives. Were they personal or political? End quote. Now you may well be sitting there and thinking to yourself, okay, he was calling out corruption and professional negligence. What could possibly be wrong with that? And yeah, for the most part, I personally agree with you, as have many other later writers about Zhu Xi and his career. He put himself out there, on the line, took the career

hits in stride, and called him like he saw him, with moral alacrity and courage. Good for him. But to everyone else around him at the time, he was something of a Dwight Schrute, socially oblivious, lacking in common sense, utterly self-righteous, and excessively contentious. You've got to go along to get along in a system like the imperial court, and Zhu Xi had made it perfectly clear that he had zero intention of going along with anything that he didn't deem moral. Quote, At court, exaggerated stress on moral purity wore thin the welcome for Daoshui proponents, for their criticism even extended to the emperor.

Worse yet, their criticism often appeared totally unjustified. Daoshui proponents idealized an austere lifestyle, an impugned indulgence in wine or women, especially by the Son of Heaven, as he should personify the noblest of human virtues. At some point, even the emperor is going to be like, dude, shut up and let me enjoy my wine. It's little wonder, then, why a guy like Han Tuoji was able to pretty easily point and say, yeah, screw those guys. In stark contrast to the puritanical moralism of the Neo-Confucians, Han was rather infamously morally indifferent to many of the standards of the era.

Whereas it was customary for even the wealthiest men to take only one primary wife, well, he might also keep a few concubines. Han had four, all of whom he insisted on calling as such, by the title of furen, or madam. And this is not to say that he didn't also have his own harem of concubines, or secondary wives. No, he kept ten of those, which was far in excess of what was normal even for high officials. And on top of that, he also had innumerable liaisons, girlfriends, and other dalliances. Quote, Moreover, as first Emperor Guangzong and then Ningzong had slipped into similar habits and vices,

the Neo-Confucians were more and more certain that it was the undue influence of Tuozhou that was to blame for their divine monarch's fall from grace. For their part, neither of these emperors held any particular love for the adherents of Neo-Confucianism, forcibly inserting themselves into their own personal lives, and just always really harshing everyone's buzz. Probably the most notable incidents for Ningzong all revolved around the issue of ritual mourning periods for family members. When his grandfather had died in 1194, Ningzong had been compelled to observe years of fastidious ritual as his father steadfastly refused. In 1197, his grandmother, the Empress Dowager Wu, died, necessitating once again a protracted mourning period,

and then again in 1200 with the near-simultaneous deaths of both his father and mother. Once again, Zhu Xi and his Neo-Confucians stepped in, insisting that he devote literal years of his life to these boring, stodgy, and intrusive rituals. Quote, the strict demands dictated by Daoshui proponents made the emperor's mourning unduly protracted, and he appears never to have forgotten or forgiven them, end quote. Thus, it becomes far more understandable why, when Han Tuozhou pointed his finger at the Neo-Confucians and said, let's get rid of those buzzkills, Emperor Ningzong was like, sounds good to me. It wasn't as though it were some novel idea. Bans on anti-reformist elements, aka Confucians, had been put into place several

times in the past couple of centuries of Song rule, only to be later rescinded. Calls for the censure of Daoxue and the prescription of its adherents began mounting steam around 1195, only to be blocked for the next two years through the repeated intervention of Ningzong's grandmother, the Empress Dowager Wu, who likely recognized the potential ill effects such a sweeping prohibition could have. Yet following her death two years later, there was no one left to speak out for the belief system that seemed to be chiefly centered around being as annoying as possible to everyone around them. In 1198, a partial ban was declared, prescribing 59 specifically named individuals in total. In terms of bans, it was hardly sweeping, nor was it particularly drastic. No piles of severed heads on the Rasta, no pyramid

of skulls, no ever-shifting lists of those declared enemies of the state, not even a good book burning. All in all, a rather dull affair. The prescribed scholars found it difficult to publish their works, but such works were not confiscated or destroyed. Most of the men remained free to travel, retained their official standing and salaries, continued to teach, and even to take and pass additional civil examinations. It was seemingly more than anything

an ad hoc and ill-thought-out or implemented attempt to just get these moralizing killjoys to shut up at court already. Not surprisingly, a partial ban that was neither well-defined nor well-enforced ended in miserable and embarrassing failure. Quote, A poorly defined target group made the ban appear ill-considered and irresponsible. The restrained support of the bureaucracy also undermined its effect. By the end of 1199, less than two years after the ban's imposition,

it was relaxed at the recommendation of the chief counselor, Jing Tang. Rumor had it that even Han Tuozhou had come to regret the action. Zhu Xi's death, a mere several months later in late April of the year 1200, would demonstrate beyond any doubt just how ineffective and counterproductive Han's prescription of him had been. His funeral was widely attended by officials, scholars, and commoners. Han Tuozhou hadn't discredited Zhu or Daoshui, as he'd hoped. In fact, he'd done more to legitimize both than his actual adherents ever could have, and had unwittingly turned Zhu Xi into his primary martyr. The turn of the century from 12th to 13th would mark a string of notable deaths. Zhu Xi would be the first, but quickly into the hereafter followed Jing Tang, and then the retired

emperor Guangzong and his retired empress Li in the summer, to be capped off with Ningzong's own empress Han, Tuozhou's niece, early that winter. This changing of the guard would mark a period of rapprochement between Han Tuozhou and his followers, and the Neo-Confucians he'd briefly and unsuccessfully sought to remove from power. The process was begun in earnest in 1202, with the posthumous restoration of Zhu Xi as imperial academician-in-waiting. Even this, however, would prove to be both a misstep and an abject and embarrassing failure. By drawing these notable scholars back into the imperial fold, he was legitimating them further.

But when the majority opted to instead boycott his administration, rather than rejoining it, Han looked the fool, while the Neo-Confucian's own power and prestige, as men of unbending morality who would not compromise their honor for the sake of mere reward, was further enhanced. Thoroughly snubbed and further humiliated, Han Tojo would begin to seek out a new means of bolstering his political bona fides. The domestic angle clearly wasn't

working out well for him, but what about foreign policy? The Jin dynasty up in the north was looking to have its hands pretty full at the moment, what with the droughts and starvation, outbreaks of rebellion and banditry, and not to mention that something seemed to be drawing their military attention along the northwestern borders. It might be a good time to at long last get the old homeland of the Song Dynasty back from those cultureless barbarians. If Han could do that, his name would be cemented in the histories for all time as a national hero. And so, next time, Han Touzhou is going to bet the farm that he can wage and win an offensive war against the Jin Dynasty and its Jurchen overlords, who've long bledded themselves on the fruits of China's ancestral soils along the Yellow River. Han Tuozhou will

take the fight to the barbarians, and he'll reclaim the North. Or die trying. Thanks for listening. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty, to the infamous reign of terror,

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