Stages of Decline

Abstract

After the fall of the Northern Song [Formula: see text] (960–1127) capital of Kaifeng [Formula: see text] to Jurchen invaders in 1127, diasporic literati of the Southern Song dynasty [Formula: see text] (1127–1279) recreated and revisited its lost sites through textual commemoration, especially in memorabilia literature (biji [Formula: see text], lit. ‘brush notes’). As knowledge of the city passed from communicative memory into cultural memory, its decline and destruction became the focus of nostalgia and indignation for Yue Ke [Formula: see text] (1183–1234), the author of the Pillar Histories (Ting shi [Formula: see text]), a collection of counter-narratives of Northern Song history that expressed the shared experience of social trauma induced by dynastic collapse. Disconnected from their spatial context and even from historical fact, the city’s memory sites became stages for amoralistic declension narrative, in which the city’s destruction and occupation was assumed to have been instigated by the decadence of the imperial court of the passive Emperor Huizong [Formula: see text] (r. 1100–26) and his ‘nefarious ministers’. The most colourful elements of Yue’s ludic and fantastical narratives became the focus of his indignation, which encouraged his readers to denounce the traitors who had betrayed the empire by inviting the Jurchen invasion. In the Pillar Histories, Yue deployed textual imaginaries of nostalgia as forms of resistance by re-contesting the past events that led to dynastic collapse. By reconstructing the city in the cultural memory of his fellow diasporic literati, Yue was creating a vision of an ideal political, cultural and moral community that once existed at the dynasty’s inception, and might be reconstituted in the future, if and when Song subjects recaptured their lost homeland.