Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms ed. by Peter Lorge (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms ed. by Peter Lorge Nicolas Tackett Peter Lorge, editor. Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. $52.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-962-996-418-4. This edited volume is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms studies. The book begins with an “Introduction” by the editor, who argues forcefully for treating the tenth century as more than a mere blip between two great dynasties. The century was marked by [End Page 377] important developments that had a lasting impact on the politics, culture, and intellectual trends of the subsequent Song dynasty. Moreover, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period is interesting as a “heuristic unit” (p. 5), partly by revealing why “having a center did matter” (p. 10), and why the decline of a hegemonic center could spur regionalism and innovation alike. The “Introduction” is followed by seven articles, all written by specialists of the Middle Period (including the two authors of the “Five Dynasties” and “Southern Kingdoms” chapters of the recent Volume 5, Part One, of the Cambridge History of China). Naomi Standen’s article provides an excellent case example in support of a thesis she first proposed in her monograph Unbounded Loyalty—that the transition from the Five Dynasties to the Song involved a transformation in notions of loyalty, from one based on reciprocal and conditional master-servant relationships to one based on “single-master loyalty.” Standen focuses on a detailed analysis of the career of Zhao Dejun 趙德鈞, who served under a series of regime leaders before turning against the Later Tang on the eve of its overthrow by Zhao’s rival, the Later Jin founder Shi Jingtang 石敬瑭. By comparing accounts of Zhao’s career in the earlier tenth-century history Jiu Wudai shi 舊五代史 with accounts in the eleventh-century chronicle Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑, Standen provides good evidence that changing ideas of loyalty led to a later revisionist critique of Zhao’s apparent disloyalty. The next piece, by Hugh Clark, explores the “rogues” and “scoundrels” who founded the new regimes emerging in the post-Huang Chao era. Clark is especially interested in assessing these men and their activities from the perspective of classic theories of peasant rebellions, by Eric Hobsbawm and others. He pays particular attention to Qian Liu 錢鏐, Yang Xingmi 楊行密, Wang Jian 王建, Wang Chao 王潮, and Liu Yin 劉隱, founders of five of the southern kingdoms. Most of such men were “outlaws” in the sense that their bases of power lay entirely outside both the regular bureaucracy of the Tang and the provincial jiedushi 節度使 governments. To what extent were such men “primitive rebels”? To what extent were they mere predators? Johannes Kurz then gives us a new biography of Han Xizai 韓熙載, one of the more important officials of the Southern Tang state and the subject of an infamous painting depicting his night revels. Rather than focusing exclusively on his decadent private life, for which Han Xizai remains well-known to this day in popular culture, Kurz also provides an overview of Han’s early life and of his career. He suggests that Han may have been unfairly criticized—Han’s [End Page 378] hedonism may have constituted a stratagem for avoiding office; moreover, scandalous evening gatherings were not at all atypical of Southern Tang literati culture. De-nin Lee, in her piece, seeks to complicate existing accounts of the development of painting during the Tang-Song interregnum by looking beyond the established canon centered on the courts of Shu and Southern Tang. Lee’s focus is on the stunning early Liao murals from Baoshan 寶山 Tomb 2, excavated in Inner Mongolia in the early 1990s. On the basis of poems inscribed onto the tomb wall, she interprets the more prominent painting—of several elegant ladies in an exotic garden setting—as representing the story of the loyal wife Su Hui 蘇蕙 (of the Jin dynasty). This mural suggests the need both to appreciate the heterogeneity of tenth-century painting, and to recognize that Shu and Southern Tang were neither the only bastions of Tang culture, nor the primary sites of artistic innovation. Ruth Mostern’s article assesses the ways in which the...