| Instructor: Patricia Ebrey | Office: 338 Thomson Hall |
| Email: ebrey@u.washington.edu | Phone: 685-1528 |
| Home page: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~ebrey/ | Office Hours: Wednesday 10-12 |
The Song period (960-1279) is often considered the era when the traditional Chinese state worked best. None of the emperors was a cruel tyrant; indeed, most conscientiously listened to their officials and tried to find solutions to the problems facing them. No eunuchs, empresses, or consort families dominated the court; rather a series of extremely impressive scholar-statesmen served as policy advisors at court. Moreover, the state managed not to stifle the economy, even if it did not solve its own financial problems. Its one big failing was military; it remained vulnerable on its northern border, could not dominate its neighbors, and maintained peace only when it made hefty tribute payments.
The goal of this seminar will be to consider how the make-up of this state impinged on the lives of Chinese at all social levels. How did its monetary and tax policies affect people’s livelihoods? How did its methods of enforcing law and order impinge on local society? How did its civil service recruitment system affect the size and intellectual orientation of the elite? How did state rituals and other symbolic activities of the political center shape people’s notions of identity? How did the power of the state to regulate, promote, or repress religious practices influence what people believed or did?
Requirements:
Students will be expected to attend regularly and to have read the assigned readings carefully enough to actively engage in discussion. Each student will be expected to direct the discussion of one reading sometime during the quarter, distributing questions to the other students by email the night before. Assigned reading has been kept to a minimum so that students will be able to devote at least half their time to their research project, which should be on a topic closely related to the theme of this course. The research project will involve two components, a 4-5 page analytical review of a relevant book (with a ten minute presentation in the class), and a research paper that draws on more varied sources. For undergraduates and graduate students signing up for 3 hours, the target length of the research paper is 10-15 pages, for graduate students signing up for 6 hours, 15-25 pages.
Readings: A packet of readings can be purchased at ?
class schedule
October 1: Introduction: What Questions Should We Ask About Song Society?
October 8 Political and Military History
Huang, Ray, China: A Macro History, pp. 107-36.
Forage, Paul C. "The Sino-Tangut War of 1081-1085," Journal of Asian History, 25 (1991), 1-27.
October 15 The Central Government and the Civil Service
Kracke, Edward A. Jr. 1968. Civil Service in Sung China: 960-1067. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monographs, 13. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-102.
Liu, James T. C. 1962. "An Administrative Cycle in Chinese History: The Case of Northern Sung Emperors." Journal of Asian Studies 21, no. 2: 137-52.
Davis, Richard L. 1986. Court and Family in Sung China, 960-1279: Bureaucratic Success and Kinship Fortunes for the Shih of Ming-chou. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hymes, Robert P. 1986. Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions, ed. Denis Twitchett. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lo, Winston W. 1987. An Introduction to the Civil Service of Sung China, with an Emphasis on Its Personnel Administration. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Read:
Book Reviews:
McKnight, Brian E. 1992. Law and Order in Sung China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
von Glahn, Richard. 1987. The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song times. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 123. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University.
October 29 The Government and the Economy
Read:
Smith, Paul J. 1993. "State Power and Economic Activism during the New Policies, 1068-1085," in Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 76-127.
Book Reviews:
Smith, Paul. 1991. Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship and the Sichuan Tea and Horse Trade, 1074-1224. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University.
Cahill, Suzanne. 1980. "Taoism at the Sung Court: The Heavenly Text Affair of 1008." Bulletin of Sung and Yüan Studies 16: 23-44.
Fisher, Carney T. 1987. "The Ritual Dispute of Sung Ying-Tsung.". Papers on Far Eastern History 36: 109-38.
Bol, Peter K. "Government, Society, and State: On the Political Visions of Ssu-ma Kuang and Wang An-shih," in Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 128-192.
Davis, Richard L. 1997. Wind Against the Mountain: The Crises of Politics and Culture in Thirteenth-Century China. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1996.
Liu, James T. C. 1988. China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Tillman, Hoyt Cleveland. 1982. Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch'en Liang's Challenge to Chu Hsi. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University.
November 19 The State and Religion
Read:
Ch'en, Kenneth K. S. 1956. "The Sale of Monk Certificates.". Harvard Theological Review 49, no. 4: 307-27.
Huang Chi-chiang, 1994. "Imperial Rulership and Buddhism in the Early Northern Song," in Imperial Rulership and Cultural Change in Traditional China Seattle: University of Washington Press. 144-87.
Boltz, Judith Magee. 1993. "Not by the Seal of Office Alone: New Weapons in Battles with the Supernatural," in Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Pp. 241-306.
Book Reviews:
Dunnell, Ruth. 1996. The Great State of White and High. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
November 26 Work on papers—no class.
December 3 Student presentations – double session
December 8 Papers due by 3 PM in Ebrey's mailbox at 411 Thomson