Eight
The Historian as Critic: Li Hsin-ch'uan and the Dilemmas of Statecraft in Southern Sung China

John W. Chaffee

When in the late Ch'ing dynasty Li Hsin-ch'uan's (1167-1244) long-lost history of the early Southern Sung, the Record of Important Affairs Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Era (Chien-yen i-lai hsi-nien yao-lu ), was rediscovered and published for the first time in over six hundred years, the editor wrote in his preface that beyond its value as a source for Sung history "it is particularly beneficial for the study of statecraft" (yu yu pi yü ching-shih chih hsueh ).^[1] This remark is striking, for Li has not usually been considered a "statecraft" thinker; nor did he ever, to the best of my knowledge, use the term ching-shih ("world-ordering") to describe his concerns. Yet it is not surprising, for Li was a historian whose sharply defined interests in contemporary history and problems of government could have proved attractive to Ch'ing statecraft thinkers.

Unlike many of his peers, Li had little interest in a life devoted to painting, art, philosophical discourse, or even, for many years, government service. Grand works of historical synthesis like Ssu-ma Kuang's Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (Tzu-chih t'ung-chien ) or the didactic Neo-Confucian "String and Mesh of the Comprehensive Mirror " (Tzu-chih

[1] Wang Te-i, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," appended to Li Hsin-ch'uan, Chien-yen i-lai hsi-nien yao-lu (hereafter HNYL ), 200 ch. (Taipei: Wen-hai ch'u-pan she, 1968), pp. 6775-76. The editor was one Hsiao P'an of Jen-shou in Szechwan, and I have been unable to discover other information about him. It is noteworthy, however, that he used two versions of the Yao-lu in producing his: one from the library of a Yen family of Hsin-fan (also in Szechwan), which was copied from a version of a Yu family in Shanghai, the other a handcopy purchased by the late Ch'ing reformer Chang Chih-tung. (Ibid.)

t'ung-chien kang-mu ), initiated (though not written) by Chu Hsi (1130-1200),^[2] held little attraction for him. No more did the histories of dynasties past. His concern, rather, was with the Sung, specifically with the time since the "southward crossing" (nan-tu ) that marked the beginning of Southern Sung, with its political and institutional history, and finally with achieving the greatest possible exactitude of historical detail.

In his preoccupation with recent history, Li Hsin-ch'uan was not alone. Whether because of the lack of dynastic history projects—the official histories of the T'ang and Five Dynasties having long since been written—or because printing and the blossoming of scholarship had multiplied the sources and increased the challenge of writing modern history, many of the best histories written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries dealt with the Sung, such as those by Li T'ao (1115-1184), Wang Ch'eng (d. ca. 1200), Chen Te-hsiu (1178-1235), and Hsu Meng-hsin (1126-1207).^[3] Yet none of them, except possibly Li T'ao, could compare with Li Hsin-ch'uan in singularity of purpose or magnitude of accomplishment.

Like Li T'ao, Li Hsin-ch'uan was a man of Szechwan, born in 1167 in Ching-yen county of Lung-chou, a salt-producing prefecture in the western part of the Red Basin. His family's rise to bureaucratic prominence appears to have begun with his father, Li Shun-ch'en (d. 1182),^[4] an 1166 chin-shih who served with distinction in local Szechwan posts before taking a position at the capital in 1179, where he remained until his death three years later.^[5] The author of a well-regarded book on the Classic of Changes ,^[6] Shun-ch'en was also known as an ardent patriot.^[7] When he took up his duties in the

[2] See Yves Hervouet, ed., A Sung Bibliography (Bibliographie des Song ) (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1978), pp. 75-76.

[3] These were the Hsu tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien , 520 ch., the Tung-tu shih-lueh , 130 ch., the Huang-ch'ao pien-nien kang-mu pei-yao , 30 ch., and the San-ch'ao pei-meng hui-pien , 250 ch.

[4] For Shun-ch'en's biography, see T'o T'o et al., Sung shih (hereafter SS ), 495 ch. (Taipei: I-wen yin-shu kuan, 1962) 404/7b-8b; Lou Yueh, "Li shih Ssu-chung t'ing-chi," Kung-k'uei chi (hereafter KKC ), 112 ch. (TSCC ed.), 60:812-13; and Wang Te-i, "Li Hsiu-yen hsien-sheng nien-p'u" (hereafter Nien-p'u), addendum to the HNYL , pp. 6700-10. Of the earlier history of his family, we know only the names of his grandfather and great-grandfather (Li Fa and Li Hsi).

[5] Nien-p'u, p. 6707. This was as an administrator in the Accounting Office. He also served as an examining official in 1180 and 1181 and was named the Imperial Clan Registrar (Tsung-shih-ssu chu-pu ) in 1181. Ibid., pp. 6708-9.

[6] This was the I pen-chuan , 30 ch. For Lou Yueh's high opinion of it, see KKC 60:812.

[7] This was owing mainly to a lengthy essay written in 1162 upon the accession of the emperor Hsiao-tsung, in which Li argued the restorationist cause by way of ten examples of' southern military victories during the Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties periods (Chiang-tung sheng hou chih chien shih p'ien , in Nien-p'u, p. 6701); and to an examination-policy-question essay in 1166 so bellicose in its condemnation of the peace-making the court was then undertaking with the Chin that his examination rank was reduced (SS 404/7b; Nien-p'u, p. 6701).

capital he was accompanied by Hsin-ch'uan and two younger sons, Tao-ch'uan and Hsing-ch'uan, and it was there that Hsin-ch'uan's devotion to history began.

When I, Hsin-ch'uan, was fourteen or fifteen years of age, I accompanied my late father to an official post at the temporary capital [Hang-chou], and there I had an opportunity to steal a look at imperial records stored in secret in golden cupboards in a stone room.^[8] While leaving we passed by the court, where I overheard the discussions of renowned high ministers. Each recalled that for the period since the crossing of the river, annals had yet to be prepared. As a result, the actions of brilliant sovereigns, virtuous ministers, famous Confucians, and fierce generals were still a jumble and had yet to be made manifest. For a span of seventy years, the history of the military and of taxation, changes in the systems of rites and music, and the records of officials had all been lost. This was extremely regrettable.^[9]

Hsin-ch'uan made it his calling to rectify this situation and spent the next thirty years in private scholarship, interrupted only by one, unsuccessful try at the examinations in 1196. For many years he was overshadowed by his brothers, both of whom obtained the chin-shih degree. Little is known about the younger, Hsing-ch'uan, but Tao-ch'uan had a distinguished career as an official and was known as a loyalist, as an author, and as a prominent supporter of Tao-hsueh , the Learning of the Way, in the early thirteenth century. His collected sayings of Chu Hsi (Chu-tzu yü-lu ) became the prototype for the later standard collection of Chu's talk, the Categorized Conversations of Master Chu (Chu-tzu yü-lei ).^[10]

Li Hsin-ch'uan did become an official in 1225, but this did not disrupt his scholarship: now he worked as an official rather than a private historian. His output was impressive. This included eleven histories, nine of them

[8] This was possible because his father, Li Shun-ch'en, was then the registrar of imperial clan affairs (tsung-cheng-ssu chu-pu ). See "Li shih Ssu-chung t'ing chi," KKC 60:812.

[9] Li Hsin-ch'uan, Preface to vol. 1 of Chien-yen i-lai ch'ao-yeh tsa-chi (hereafter CYTC ), 20 ch. (TSCC ed.). He was writing in 1202.

[10] Already in 1204 Li Tao-ch'uan made a claim to a voice in state affairs by publishing Ten Studies of Chiang-tung (Chiang-tung shih-kao i shu ), a book whose title echoed his father's essay (n. 7 above) but which, instead of analyzing famous battles, discussed the military and fiscal preparations needed for recovery of the north. After serving in local posts, Tao-ch'uan, partly in recognition of his outspoken loyalty during the Wu Hsi rebellion of 1206, was promoted to professor of the Imperial University, from which in 1211 he submitted a memorial advocating the Neo-Confucian interpretation of history and proposing that Chu Hsi's commentaries on the Four Books be taught in the university (Tao-ming lu [Chih-pu-tsu chai ts'ung-shu ed.], hereafter TML , 8/6b-9a; see also Nien-p'u, pp. 6720-21). This was accepted in part, and he went on to serve as tea and salt supervisor for Chiang-nan-tung, where he fell afoul of an impeachment; he was en route to a local post at the time of his death in 1266. The most complete account of Tao-ch'uan's life is Huang Kan, Mien-chai chi (SKCS ed.) 38/24b-33a. See also SS 436/17a-19b, and Nien-p'u, passim, especially pp. 6728-32.

dealing exclusively with the Southern Sung; four works on the classics; and his collected shorter writings.^[11] All that remain today are four: Li's magisterial history of the first thirty-seven years of the Southern Sung, the two-hundred-chapter Record of Important Affairs , mentioned above; his study of Southern Sung institutions and history, the Miscellaneous Records from Court and Country Since the Beginning of the Chien-yen Period (Chien-yen i-lai ch'ao-yeh tsa-chi ) in two parts of twenty chapters each;^[12] the Correction of Errors in Old Information (Chiu-wen cheng-wu ), four chapters, which contains miscellaneous historical notes for the Northern and early Southern Sung;^[13] and his history of the Tao-hsueh movement, the Record of the Way and Its Fate (Tao ming lu ), covering the 140 years from the naming of Ch'eng I as imperial tutor to the emperor Li-tsung's edict praising Tao-hsueh .^[14] Such is the value of these works, however, as to make Li probably our most important source for the history of the early Southern Sung.

It should be remembered that the writing of history was a political and not just a scholarly act. The historian described and judged the past, considered to be a mirror for the present. When one dealt with the recent past, as Li did, the mirror of history could easily become a lens for examining current issues. That had its dangers, especially for those who were not official historians. When in 1205 an acquaintance warned Li that powerful ministers were often hostile to "private histories," he was alarmed enough to break off collecting materials for the second volume of the Miscellaneous Records until after the death of the dictatorial chief councillor Han T'o-chou two years later.^[15] Generally, however, Li persevered, convinced that there were many events of the recent past "that are unheard of and unknown."^[16] events that his contemporaries needed to understand.

Most of his contemporaries were receptive.^[17] In 1212 the military commissioner of T'ung-ch'uan circuit, Hsu I (d. 1219), submitted a memorial asking that the Record of Important Affairs be submitted for imperial consid-

[11] See Wang Te-i, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," pp. 6771-88, cited in note 1 above.

[12] See note 5 above. The two parts are dated 1202 and 1216. Li is said to have written a third and fourth part as well, but these are now lost. See Hervouet, Sung Bibliography , pp. 179-80.

[13] Written in 1244; all extant editions are from the Yung-lo ta-tien .

[14] This was written in 1239, with eleven items in chapter 10 added during the Yüan. In addition to these three works, there still exists a 3-chapter fragment of Li's 22-chapter history of Hsiao-tsung's reign, the Hsiao-tsung yao-lüeh ch'u ts'ao . See Wang, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," p. 6780.

[15] Preface (1216) to volume 2 of CYTC . See "Chia-t'ai chin ssu-shih," CYTC 1.6:88-89, for Li's own account of Southern Sung prohibitions of private histories.

[16] Preface to volume 1 of CYTC .

[17] Li's biography in the Yüan Sung Dynastic History provides a more mixed evaluation, describing him as talented and truthful but also criticizing him for overemphasizing Szechwanese and underrepresenting southeastern literati. SS 438/11a.

eration. Hsu effusively praised the exhaustive character of Li's research and the judiciousness of his historical judgments, and he pointed out that Li, having long ago turned his back on the examinations, was without political ambitions.^[18] More praise came from Lou Yueh (1137-1213).^[19] Then came imperial recognition of Li's work, numerous recommendations from highly placed friends, and eventually a career as an official historian, which began in 1226 and lasted until shortly before his death.^[20]

Although our knowledge of Li Hsin-ch'uan's life is sketchy,^[21] two aspects stand out. First is the profound intellectual influence of his father and brother. In his father we see the likely inspiration for his interests in history and the Book of Changes as well as his concern with the threat of the Chin. And in Tao-ch'uan he had an example of courageous loyalty to the dynasty as well as a connection to the Tao-hsueh movement, with which he himself became increasingly identified late in life. It was with some justice that Lou Yueh viewed Hsin-ch'uan's scholarship as part of the Li family learning.^[22] Second, since Hsin-ch'uan's life alternated between the local elite society of Szechwan and the higher circles of Hang-chou society, his writing tended to focus on either the capital bureaucracy and court or Szechwan. His work in the archives and his many personal contacts at court led him to view matters of government largely from the point of view of an insider. But Sze-chwan was special, so much so that his Yuan biographer charged that "in his annals he constantly esteems the literati of Szechwan and is contemptuous of those from the southeast."^[23]

While I would take issue with the substance of this charge, it is true that much of Hsin-ch'uan's most detailed and valuable writing concerns the history of his southwestern region. Moreover, even when he was living in Hang-chou, fellow Szechwanese seem to have formed a critical, though by no means exclusive, core of his relationships there,^[24] and when he was even-

[18] CYTC , introductory chapter (chüan shou ), pp. 1-2.

[19] Lou wrote that although he had never met Li Hsin-ch'uan, he had read all of his Record of Important Affairs and "thenceforth knew that the rewards of Heaven would basically be free from error" (i.e., errors in the judgments of history: the phrase in Chinese is Jan-hou chih t'ien chih pao-shih pen wu ch'a-t'e ). See "Li shih Ssu-chung t'ing-chi," KKC 60:812. For other praise by Li's contemporaries for his historical work, see Wang, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," p. 6779.

[20] Mien-chai chi 35; Nien-p'u, p. 6731. For other praise by Li's contemporaries for his historical work, see Wang, "Li Hsin-ch'uan chu-shu k'ao," p. 6779.

[21] In his fourteen-year official career he served alternately in Szechwan (1226-1231, 1233-1238) and the capital (1231-1233, 1238-1240) and rose to the position of director of the Imperial Library. His formal retirement actually occurred in 1243, after three years of a temple guardianship. Nien-p'u, pp. 6738-65.

[22] KKC 60:812. For an earlier reference to Lou's essay, see note 19.

[23] SS 438/11a.

[24] For example, when Li Shun-ch'en died in Lin-an in 1182, the Szechwan literati there collectively aided the family and sent the Li boys back to Szechwan with their father's body. Nien-p'u, p. 6709.

tually named an official, his many recommendors were overwhelmingly officials from Szechwan.^[25] Thus, much as his family helped to shape his intellectual concerns, his long residence in Szechwan and the capital provided a focus for much of his writing. Also leaving traces on his writing and thinking were such major events as the disastrous war begun by Han T'o-chou in 1206, which called into question the previous restorationist consensus. Earlier he had also watched the prohibition of Tao-hsueh as "spurious learning" (wei-hsueh ) from 1195 to 1205, and later would see it enshrined by the state under the emperor Li-tsung ("Ancestor of Principle," r. 1225-1264).

Li Hsin-ch'uan was one of those rare historians whose works were widely read and influential in his own day. But just what was his influence, and what influence could he have hoped to exert? What, in fact, was he saying about the problems of government in his time? How is his work related to the intellectual and political life of his time, particularly to the Tao-hsueh movement? Here I make an attempt to explore the answers to these questions, based on a reading of his various prefaces, his one extant memorial (from 1238), the Record of the Way and Its Fate , and the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , particularly its sections on the court, political affairs, the government, and the military.

A Neo-Confucian Historian?

When toward the end of his life Li Hsin-ch'uan was preparing his history of the Neo-Confucian movement, the Record of the Way and Its Fate , it must have seemed to him and others that he was ideally suited for the task. As a young man he had witnessed, at least from afar, some of the movement's stormiest periods, and had written about it as early as 1202, in the first part of the Miscellaneous Records from Court and Country . As the director of the Imperial Library and dean of Chinese historians, he had at his disposal all of the relevant documents from the imperial archives. As the brother of Li Tao-ch'uan and as a friend and collaborator of the late Huang Kan he had had close ties with core members of the movement.^[26] Finally, Li's political benefactors were men such as Yü Ssu, Hung Ch'i-k'uei, and particularly Wei Liao-weng, who rose under Cheng Ch'ing-chih in the early 1230s, when the Neo-Confucians' influence at the court reached its apogee.^[27]

[25] Eighteen of the 26 mentioned in Ts'ui Ch'ing-hsien, Kung yen-hsing lu (quoted in Nien-p'u, pp. 6738-40) have entries in Ch'ang Pi-te et al., Sung-jen chuan-chi tzu-liao suo-yin (Taipei: Ting-wen shu-chü, 1974-76), and of them, 14 were from Szechwan and another had served there.

[26] Together Li and Huang had edited Chu Hsi's Chou-i pen-i and Li Tao-ch'uan's Recorded Conversations of Master Chu in 1219; see Nien-p'u, pp. 6733-34. In addition, Li Hsing-ch'uan in 1238 wrote a continuation to the Yü-lu , the Chu-tzu yü-lu hou-hsü , in 41 chapters (ibid., p. 6757).

[27] Ibid., p. 6751.

While Hsin-ch'uan's promotions at the Imperial Library occurred slightly later, his association with these Neo-Confucian ministers was clear.

Nevertheless, it remains a question whether Li Hsin-ch'uan was Neo-Confucian in his thought. He most certainly was an ardent Confucian, and as such he frequently attacked Buddhism. In the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , he relates with evident approval Shih Hao's objection to an attempt to reconcile Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism by the emperor Hsiao-tsung, who argued that Buddhism cultivated the heart, Taoism nurtured life, and Confucianism governed the world. All three, responded Shih, were the proper domain of Confucianism, which used the investigation of things to bring peace to the world.^[28] In discussing the famed attack on Chu Hsi by Lin Li (chin-shih 1142) in 1188, Li traces Lin's opposition to Tao-hsueh back to 1170, when he had Supported a minister charged with publicly (and thus improperly) mourning the death of his deceased brother, a Buddhist monk^[29] Li attacks Buddhist monastaries for maintaining vast landholdings harmful to the people.^[30] Most revealing is an essay Li wrote, ironically, for a Buddhist temple in Hu-chou in 1234. He did so quite unwillingly and used the occasion to denounce Buddhism and the monk, one Tsung Wei, who had persuaded him to write it. At one point he says to Wei: "The country establishes schools in the prefectures and counties in order to clarify human relationships; this is the proper business of Confucians. In establishing schools, is there any reason not to oppose the flourishing of monks?"^[31]

There is also little doubt that Li Hsin-ch'uan sympathized politically and identified personally with the Tao-hsueh scholars. This is evident already in 1202, before the formal lifting of the "spurious learning" prohibition. In his generally gloomy essay on the "rise and decline of Tao-hsueh, " he praises Chou Pi-ta (1126-1204), who was left chief councillor in 1188-1189, as "a minister who gathered together the worthies, and under whom the scholars of the four quarters increased at court."^[32] In other essays, too,

[28] "Yüan-tao pien i ming san-chiao lun," CYTC 2.3:379-80. Hsiao-tsung relented to the extent of changing the name of his essay from "Distinctions within the Original Tao" to "A Discussion of the Three Teachings."

[29] The minister was the left chief councillor Ch'en Chün-ch'ing, his accuser Yü Yun-wen. See "Yeh Cheng-tse lun Lin Huang-chung hsi Wei Tao-hsueh chih mu i fei cheng-jen," CYTC 2.7:432-34. Wang Te-i notes that the item's last sentence, which explicitly traces the beginning of the false-learning prohibition, is missing from the earliest edition of the CYTC . ("Ch'ao-yeh tsa-chi i-chi hsiao-k'an chi" [appended to the CYTC ], p. 636.) Nevertheless, the Ch'en anecdote, which is appended to Li's account of the 1188 memorial, was evidently included to help explain Lin's opposition to Tao-hsueh .

[30] "Seng-ssu ch'ang-chu-t'ien," CYTC 1.16:231.

[31] "An-chi chou Wu-ch'eng hsien Nan-lin Pao-kuo-ssu chi," from Hu-chou fu-chih chin-shih chih . Quoted in Nien-p'u, pp. 6752-53.

[32] "Tao-hsueh hsing-fei," CYTC 1.6:79-80.

he consistently defends those attacked as supporters of Tao-hsueh and criticizes those who attacked them.^[33]

And yet one looks in vain in Li for the hallmarks of much of Neo-Confucian writing: an emphasis upon self-cultivation and the quest for sagehood, a concern with the history of the transhistorical Tao, and a search for principles (or coherence) both within history and in the universe at large. Despite his partiality to governmental and Szechwanese affairs, Li was remarkably catholic in his interests and generally made no attempt to fit his findings to some preconceived pattern. He repeatedly voiced his concern over the loss of historical records, however inconsequential they might appear. Even in his preface to the Record of the Way and Its Fate , Li cites as one reason for the work the sheer importance of gathering materials.^[34] He is ever concerned with particulars. Perhaps a "true" Tao-hsueh man could even have applied to Li Hsin-ch'uan Ch'eng Hao's criticism of Hsieh Liang-tso (1059-1103): "When I studied in Lo-yang I recorded the good deeds of the ancients in one volume. When Master Ch'eng Hao saw it, he said that I was trifling with things and losing my purpose."^[35]

Along with a certain cast of mind and range of interests, the followers of Tao-hsueh had from earlier in Southern Sung shared a public program. A good idea of their agenda is conveyed in Li Tao-ch'uan's memorial of 1211, included by Li Hsin-ch'uan in the Record of the Way and Its Fate . If one compares this memorial with Hsin-ch'uan's preface to the Record itself, the special political ramifications of Hsin-ch'uan's own intellectual stance stand out in sharp relief.^[36] We may consider the memorial first. Tao-ch'uan begins by asserting that the ordering of the world is tied to human talent and so in turn to the clarity of learning. But learning had declined after Confucius and Mencius and was only regained in the Sung, when in Ho-nan and Lo-yang great Confucianists again made the learning of Confucius and Mencius clear to the world. Yet the flourishing of talent and good government of the world that followed as a result had recently been negated: "Powerful officials have seen to it that this learning is prohibited, and for more than ten years, the literati's vital forces (ch'i ) have daily declined,

[33] See CYTC 1.6:80-81 ("Hsueh-t'ang wu-shih-chiu jen hsing-ming"); 1.6:81-82 ("Yü-pi chih yen chiu shih"); 2.7:432-34 ("Yeh Cheng-tse lun Lin Huang-chung hsi Wei Tao-hsueh chih mu i fei cheng-jen"); and 2.8:444-48 ("Hui-an hsien-sheng fei su-yin"), the last a defenseof Chu Hsi's frequent refusals to accept appointments.

[34] TML , Preface, 1a.

[35] Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien, Reflections on Things at Hand , Wing-tsit Chan, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 52.

[36] "Li Chung-kuan chi hsia ch'u hsüeh-chin chih chao fen Chu-tzu Ssu-shu ting Chou Shao Ch'eng Chang wu hsien-sheng ts'ung-ssu," TML 8/6b-9a. Most of it is also quoted in Nien-p'u, pp. 6720-21.

their discussions have daily grown more vulgar, and their spirit has daily deteriorated."^[37]

What then is to be done? Tao-ch'uan has three suggestions. First, the emperor should formally and publicly rescind the prohibition against "spurious learning" and declare it mistaken, so as to dispel any fears that it might be renewed. Second, Chu Hsi's commentaries on the Four Books should be distributed to the Imperial University for use in its curriculum. Why Chu's commentaries? Through a process of chain reasoning, Tao-ch'uan argues that the greatest form of learning is to arrive at the highest goodness, that this is best done through the reading of books, that among books none are better than the sages' classics, first among which are the Four Books, and finally that these are best explained by Chu's commentaries. Were they to be used, it would improve education not only at the university but among all the literati. Third, sacrifices should be established to Chou Tun-i, Shao Yung, the Ch'eng brothers, and Chang Tsai at the Temple to Confucius, as a way of "manifesting the sagely dynasty's intention to exalt Confucianism and rectify learning." If the emperor should undertake these changes, Tao-ch'uan assures him, "The hearts of men will rise and we should see the world's talents increasing day by day and the world's governance improving year by year."

Except for the establishment of Chu's commentaries on the Analects and Mencius as part of the educational curriculum, Tao-ch'uan's proposals were not accepted, apparently because of the continuing influence at court of opponents of Neo-Confucianism,^[38] but they are noteworthy for framing a Neo-Confucian agenda and one that was eventually to be realized (though not fully in the Sung). The agenda is largely educational and ceremonial, not specifically political. By 1239, when Li Hsin-ch'uan wrote his preface to the Record of the Way and Its Fate , the court had become far more accommodating to Neo-Confucianism, and precisely along educational and ceremonial lines. Li-tsung's accession, his 1224 edict in praise of the Ch'eng brothers and Neo-Confucianism, and the promotion of leading Neo-Confucian scholars, all had made Neo-Confucianism the new orthodoxy. But whether that orthodoxy had any influence on policy is questionable.^[39] The question itself points to the paradox facing Li Hsin-ch'uan. For while Neo-Confucianism had gained ritual and intellectual acceptance— significantly, the "rise and decline of Tao-hsueh " of his 1202 writing had become "the decline and rise of Tao-hsueh " in his 1239 preface^[40] —this had not

[37] TML 8/7a.

[38] That, at least, is Wang Te-i's explanation. Nien-p'u, p. 6721. On the commentaries, see TML 8/10a and n.15 above.

[39] See James T. C. Liu, "How Did a Neo-Confucian School Become the State Orthodoxy?" Philosophy East and West 23 (1973): 501-3.

[40] CYTC 1.6:79-80; TML , Preface 1a.

resulted in improved governance. To the contrary, as Hsin-ch'uan had suggested in his memorial of 1238, the problems of the empire were almost unprecedented in their gravity.

How, then, does Li Hsin-ch'uan resolve this paradox? He does so through a continued commitment to Tao-hsueh , but one which differs from that of Li Tao-ch'uan and other adherents of the Ch'eng-Chu school in several important particulars. First, like Tao-ch'uan, he appeals to the authority of the sage philosophers, but his argument then takes a different turn:

Master Ch'eng said, "After the death of the Duke of Chou, the Way was inactive; after Mencius died, learning was not transmitted." The Way (Tao ) is learning (hsueh ) and learning is the Way. But why did Master Ch'eng distinguish them? In general, the task of sages and worthies [in positions] above is to realize their Way through acting righteously, and the task of sages and worthies [in positions] below is to arrive at their Way through learning. Rejecting the Way is not learning; rejecting learning is not the Way. Therefore learning, the Way, and loving men constitute the teaching of the sage-teachers, and guiding [others] in illuminating Tao-hsueh (or the Way and learning) is the responsibility of the former worthies. The two are never separated.^[41]

In thus playing with the Tao-hsueh name, Li Hsin-ch'uan was creating a dichotomous unity of the Way and learning, which had not, to the best of my knowledge, appeared elsewhere in Neo-Confucian writing. That his intentions were more than purely philosophical is clear in the succeeding passage, in which he takes supporters as well as opponents of Tao-hsueh to task: "Unfortunately, over the past several decades, artful, heterodox, and flattering small men have used the name of Tao-hsueh to ruin superior men, and [even] those called the disciples of the superior men have lacked a profound knowledge of what is the Way and what is learning."^[42]

Second, Li Hsin-ch'uan argues that a proper understanding of history requires recognition of the roles played by both fate (or the decree of Heaven) and human agency. He cites the Confucian dictum "If the Way is to advance, it is so decreed; if the Way is to fail, it is so decreed" and shortly thereafter elaborates, with a qualification: "In general, what is connected to the security of the world and to the prosperity of the state is made by Heaven and is not something conferred by the followers of Ts'ai Ching, Ch'in Kuei, or Han T'o-chou. However, the influences [of such people] remain."^[43]

This reference to three (in Li's eyes) villainous chief councillors serves as a prelude to Hsin-ch'uan's own history of Tao-hsueh during the Sung:

[41] TML , Preface 1a-b.

[42] Ibid., 1b.

[43] Ibid., 2a.

The rise and fall of Tao-hsueh during the Yuan-yu era (1086-1093) was related to the presence and absence of Ssu-ma Wen-cheng (Ssu-ma Kuang); the rise and fall of Tao-hsueh during Shao-hsing (1131-1162) was related to the employment and banishment of Chao Chung-chien (Chao Ting); and the rise and fall of Tao-hsueh during Ch'ing-yuan (1195-1200) was related to the staying and retiring of Chao Chung-ting (Chao Ju-yü). At those times [i.e., when they were gone], the Tao-hsueh of the sages and worthies encountered extreme difficulty, yet righteousness and principle within men's hearts could not be taken and destroyed. Mencius said, "Between the sage and the Way of Heaven is fate (lit. "the decree"), but therein also lies human nature. Therefore the gentleman does not describe it as fate."^[44] According to Confucius, those who possess the world and the state can know what should be guarded against. According to Mencius, those who cultivate their characters and protect the Way can know their responsibilities.^[45]

Li's argument here is that while fate (or Heaven) determines the general course of history and the Way, people make a difference and must not allow fatalism to suppress their sense of moral obligation. Indeed, he ends his preface with a stirring plea against hypocrisy and opportunism:

Turning to the gentlemen of this generation, some first declare their adherence [to the Way] and later deviate, while others start with doubts but end in belief. Considering each, those who adhere and then deviate all issue forth according to selfish concerns of short-term advantage, while those who doubt and then believe proceed through exciting their minds and [maintaining their] patience to expanding the limits of what is possible and resting in that.^[46]

Disparaging those who toady to their contemporaries for personal gain, Li says that the ideal of seeing the light of the good, steeling one's heart, and acting without regard to life and death or fortune and calamity can best be realized through the Way and learning, or Tao-hsueh .

Returning to Li Hsin-ch'uan's paradox—how to reconcile the apparently successful rise of Neo-Confucianism with alarming contemporary problems—his answer, I suggest, was to cast doubt on the permanence of that rise. In contrast to the linear character of Li Tao-ch'uan's history of the Way, in which the fulfillment of the rediscovered Way had been hampered by the "spurious learning" prohibition, but could certainly be realized,^[47] Hsin-ch'uan describes an episodic process of rise and fall in

[44] This is from VII, B, 24, 2 of Mencius ; D. C. Lau, trans., Mencius (London: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 198-99. Ibid., 1b.

[45] TML , Preface 2a.

[46] Ibid., 2a-b.

[47] Similarly, Yuan historians in explaining Li-tsung's personal shortcomings portrayed his sanctioning of Neo-Confucianism as a critical, if partial, step in the creation of a Neo-Confucian state. SS 45/19b. Cited by Liu, "State Orthodoxy," p. 504.

which a successful outcome is by no means certain. Characteristically for him, the heart of that process lies not among the philosophers and literati of the countryside but at court among those who govern: thus his references to the leading political figures Ssu-ma Kuang, Chao Ting, and Chao Ju-yü.^[48]

To be sure, learning as well as the (active, political) Way were essential if Tao-hsueh was to succeed, and throughout the Record of the Way and Its Fate we are treated to vivid portraits of scholars pursuing their learning, often amidst persecution and suffering: of Ch'eng I after he was forbidden to teach, of the efforts of his disciple Yin T'un to protect Ch'eng's family at the fall of the Northern Sung, of Chu Hsi's desertion by students at the height of the "spurious learning" persecution, and of his steadfastness at the time of his death.^[49] They are overshadowed, however, by the politicians. In marked contrast to Huang Tsung-hsi's seventeenth century Sung-Yuan hsueh-an , which has greatly influenced subsequent interpretations of Sung Neo-Confucianism and which focuses upon major thinkers and their intellectual descendants, the Way and Its Fate is organized around official documents concerning the Neo-Confucians sent to and from the court. Even apart from the sources, there is ample evidence to support the conclusion that in the dialectic between learning and (the enacting of) the Way, Li's highest interest and sympathies lay with the latter. Although he includes in the Way and Its Fate an intellectual genealogy of the Neo-Confucians and also a geographical analysis of the Neo-Confucian movement,^[50] the rest of his commentary, as well as his accounts of Tao-hsueh in the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , concentrate upon court politics and policy, not upon ideas. Even his treatment of Chu Hsi is revealing, for he is at pains to explain Chu's repeated reluctance to hold office and bemoans his lack of political success.^[51] After describing Chu's death in 1200, Li writes:

In the course of four reigns, [Chu Hsi] served outside [the capital] for only nine periods of evaluation and stood in court for forty-four days. [This shows] the difficulty of enacting the Way. That such a man maintained the transmission of the Way and established the utmost humanity to become the great master of a myriad generations, and yet was not employed [in government], this magnifies [our] loss.^[52]

[48] One might even speculate that he was alluding in these references to the demotions, beginning in 1236, of Neo-Confucian ministers, including his friend and benefactor Wei Liaoweng, who was forced to resign his post as Inspector of the Armies for Chiang-nan, Huai-nan, Ching-hsi, and Ching-hu, and died shortly thereafter. Nien-p'u, pp. 6755-57. On the reversal of Neo-Confucian fortunes in the late 1230s, see Liu, "State Orthodoxy." TML , Preface 2a-b.

[49] TML 2/5a-7a; 3/16b-18a; 7B/3b-4a; 7B/22b-24a.

[50] See TML 5/2a-3a and 7b/20a.

[51] See especially "Hui-an hsien-sheng fei su-yin," CYTC 2.8:444-48.

[52] TML 7b/24a.

It would be misleading to interpret the Way and Its Fate or Li's other writing as simply a call to action, but they are partly that. It is clear that he saw the political realm as primary. Within that realm he certainly sided with the cause of Tao-hsueh , but even there that support could be qualified, for he mistrusted labels. Just as men like Han T'o-chou would mislabel their opponents and pervert the truth, so could men claim the learning of the Way, only to turn their backs on it later, or even proclaim it with cynical and selfish intentions. As we shall see in the next section, Li like many other Southern Sung thinkers also mistrusted grand plans for reform of government—the shadow of Wang An-shih loomed large—though often not specific reforms. Institutions, structures, and history mattered, to be sure, and often helped determine the success or failure of undertakings. What mattered most, however, was the talent, learning, and above all the righteousness of individuals, and this was true whether one was dealing with local administration, finance, the military, or the affairs of court—or the learning of the Way.

Perceptions of Government

In the second book of the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , Li Hsinch'uan recounts a revealing exchange in the summer of 1177 between Emperor Hsiao-tsung and two officials from the Bureau of Military Affairs, Wang Huai (1126-1189) and Chao Hsiung (1129-1193).^[53] The conversation began with an exchange of information about current agricultural conditions: a plague of locusts in Huai-pei and a plentiful harvest of silkworms and wheat, which had lowered prices for silk and grain. But a reference by Wang and Chao to the Mencian claim that the Way of Kings began with the masses' suffering neither hunger nor cold^[54] elicited a complaint from the emperor about the shih-ta-fu (literati and officials) of the day: "In the present generation of shih-ta-fu , many are ashamed to talk about agriculture. Now agriculture is the foundation of the state. The shih-ta-fu enjoy lofty discussions (kao-lun ) but pay no attention to real [matters]. They are ashamed to talk of them." When the ministers concurred on the importance of agriculture by citing Mencius,^[55] Hsiao-tsung elaborated upon his criticisms:

Today the shin-ta-fu secretly take the airs of Western Chin and use the flattering and obstructive speech of Wang Yen. Do they not know that the Rites of

[53] "Hsiao-tsung lun shih-ta-fu wei yu Hsi Chin feng," CYTC 2.3:378-79.

[54] Mencius I, i, 3; Lau translation, p. 51.

[55] Specifically his prescription for a well-ordered society, in which families cultivated five mou of mulberry trees and a hundred mou of fields. Mencius I, i, 3; Lau translation, p. 51.

Chou speaks of finance, as does the Book of Changes , and that the Duke of Chou and Confucius never neglected matters of finance?

To Wang's and Chao's protests that although such a state of affairs had previously existed, things had improved under Hsiao-tsung's benign influence, he replied:

In recent years there has been some slight change, but it is far from complete. . . . The shih-ta-fu shun talk of restoration, [as if] not knowing that of their family's [i.e., the Sung's] one hundred mou of fields, fifty have been usurped. . . . With regard to their own families' affairs, shih-ta-fu are all extremely knowledgeable; concerning the affairs of the state, they avoid speaking. . . When [you] ministers see the shih-ta-fu , you may convey to them my words.

Hsiao-tsung's analogy to Western Chin is striking, for the obvious and common Southern Sung analogy was to the Eastern Chin, the first of the southern dynasties.^[56] Although he was in part attempting to steel the shih-ta-fu's resolve in the cause of restoration, by invoking the Western Chin he was also raising the possibility of dynastic collapse if the shih-ta-fu proved unwilling to reform. Moreover, the emperor referred to Wang Yen (256-311), a brilliant Neo-Taoist "pure talk" (ch'ing-t'an ) devotee and one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, who at the fall of the Western Chin was bitterly blamed for having caused it.^[57] This was a barb aimed not only at ministers given to vague generalities, but possibly also at Neo-Confucians talking—vacuously, it seemed to some—of principle and the Way.

In any event, Li Hsin-ch'uan shared Hsiao-tsung's dislike of "lofty discussions" or, in his historical writings at least, of philosophical speculation. Like many other Chinese historians, he was at heart a student of government, and his writings are filled with institutional detail and illustrative anecdote. The Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country itself is more a handbook of government than "miscellaneous records from the court and countryside." Although its two parts differ in the amount of space given to specific topics, each comprises twenty chapters arranged to form an orderly topical progression: imperial virtue, sacrifices and ancestral temples, rites, enactments, court business, current affairs, miscellaneous matters, recent history, bureaucratic organization, recruitment, finance, the military, and border defense. Throughout there is an underlying concern with the func-

[56] For example, Li Shun-ch'en's above-mentioned "Chiang-tung sheng hou chih chien shih p'ien" was set in a north-south framework, and several of his examples came from the Eastern Chin.

[57] See Hsiao Kung-ch'uan, A History of Chinese Political Thought . Volume 1: From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century A.D ., trans. F. W. Mote (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 646-47, on the issue of Wang's guilt.

tioning of court, palace, bureaucracy, and army, and with their structures and procedures. Like a modern political scientist, Li explores how decisions were made, how policies were implemented, and how information moved through the bureaucracy and empire. For example, in an entry on postal communications between Lin-an and Szechwan, he describes the government's attempts to maintain an express system for imperial pardons, urgent military messages, and the like. Mail from Hang-chou to Ch'eng-tu was supposed to take eighteen days, but with delays and general inefficiency it actually took as long as two months. In a move that would have warmed the hearts of entrepreneurs anywhere, an enterprising official in Szechwan in the 1190s established a "communications store" (pai-p'u ), using a relay system of forty "hard-walking men," which offered bimonthly service and made the trip in a month. The result, which Li relates with evident approval, was a moneymaking venture and an improvement in the court's knowledge of Szechwan affairs.^[58]

Li Hsin-ch'uan was also remarkably fond of statistics. Thus we see him dwelling, with no apparent purpose, on the number of families producing two or more grand councillors or on the career patterns of outstanding examination graduates.^[59] For scholars in our statistics-conscious day, however, his information is often invaluable and not to be found elsewhere, as when, for example, he provides a breakdown of the civil and military services in 1213 according to method of entry.^[60] Likewise, his chapters on taxation and finance provide a wealth of economic data on a broad range of topics.^[61]

But what were Li Hsin-ch'uan's overall perceptions of the Southern Sung government? Did he view it as basically healthy, despite its problems, or did he, like some modern scholars, see it as being in a state of systemic decline, with a surfeit of clerks and officials, an increasingly demoralized bureaucracy and literati, and a deteriorating military situation? Unfortunately, there are no simple answers to these questions. One problem is that Li had a fierce antipathy to the long chief councillorships of Ch'in Kuei and

[58] "Chin-tzu p'ai," CYTC 2.9:455. Whether or not one can infer Li's own ideas and attitudes from the material in CYTC is a methodological question raised at the Sung Statecraft Conference, for the work is not didactic in the way that the TML , for example, is. The CYTC is, however, educational in purpose, for Li, as was noted earlier, was concerned with instructing his contemporaries in recent history. I believe we may assume, therefore, that items were included in the work because they were instructive. Li frequently appends his own commentary to items, often thereby making explicit his own position, but even where he does not, most items make a particular point. In this case, for example, the inefficiency of the government's express system is sharply contrasted with the speed and efficiency of the pai-p'u .

[59] See CYTC 1.9 and 2.11 for examples. See, too, Yamauchi Masahiro's criticism of Li's occasional problems with statistics in Hervouet, A Sung Bibliography , p. 179.

[60] "Chia-ting ssu-hsüan tsung-shu," CYTC 2.14:528.

[61] See CYTC 1.14-17; 2.16.

Han T'o-chou, so it is difficult to know to what extent his criticisms were aimed at them and to what extent they reflected a sense of general decline. He also avoided large generalizations and was sensitive to the complexities that often undercut them. He has won praise for his willingness to make positive judgments of individuals and their actions.^[62]

Nevertheless, in Li's writing on key issues, such as local government and personnel management, criticism predominates. Most of his accounts of local administration focus on fiscal matters and with few exceptions detail failed attempts at reform. Two such reforms were the boundary-survey system (ching-chieh fa ), intended to strengthen and equalize the agricultural tax base through a comprehensive cadastral survey,^[63] and the charitable-service system of Ch'u-chou, an experiment in financing service obligations through the creation of charitable estates.^[64] In both cases the emperor approved, but attempts to enact the proposed reforms fell victim to local elite resistance and, for the boundary system at least, to opposition within the bureaucracy. Li also describes two administrative innovations that were implemented: a system of evaluating local officials through praise and blame (tsang-fou ) inaugurated by Hsiao-tsung in 1162,^[65] and a requirement that prefects submit five recommendations on how to benefit the people, first instituted in 1156 and later revived in the late 1180s.^[66] But the latter proved inconsequential and the praise-and-blame provision led to abuses by the evaluators. As one prefect impeached under the system told the emperor: "Before the officials I am guilty; before the people I am not."^[67]

Conspicuously absent from Li's treatment of local government in the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country are a number of topics that received detailed attention from other writers: government education, local justice, and agricultural conditions,^[68] as well as voluntary associations of the kind that had been championed by Chu Hsi—local academies, community com-

[62] See Nien-p'u, p. 6699.

[63] "Ching-chieh-fa," CYTC 1.5:69-70. "Fu-chien ching-chieh-fa," CYTC 1.5:74-75, describes unsuccessful attempts in the 1180s and 1190s by prefects in southern Fu-chien (Chu Hsi included) to enact the system, which had originated in the 1140s.

[64] "Ch'u-chou i-i," CYTC 1.7:92-93. For a discussion of this system, see Brian McKnight, Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 168ff. On charitable estates more generally, see chapter 6 in this volume.

[65] There are three items in CYTC on this: "Ch'un-hsi tsang-fou chün-shou," 1.5:75-76; "Ch'ing-yüan pa tsang-fou," 1.6:82; and "Ch'ing-yüan tsang-fou hsien-ling," 1.6:82.

[66] "Pien-min wu shih," CYTC 1.6:84.

[67] CYTC 1.5:76.

[68] The one exception is the entry "Ch'en Tzu-chang kung Shao-hsi yen," CYTC 1.8:101-2, which describes agricultural practices in Huai-nan and recounts the actions of two local magnates, one of whom lost his legs when he refused to give the invading Jurchen information about conditions in the Sung, the other of whom built a dike of several hundred li , which greatly increased the agricultural capacity of the region.

pacts, community granaries,^[69] and altars to former worthies.^[70] Since most discussions of these institutions come to us from the southeast and Li focused upon Szechwan, his silence may in part reflect regional differences. Yet he must have known of his brother Tao-ch'uan's experiences as preceptor of the Feng-chou prefectural school and about the community-granary system, modeled on that of Chu Hsi, that Tao-ch'uan instituted in 1215 while serving in Chiang-hsi.^[71] This suggests, rather, that because his primary concern was the government and its workings, he simply did not include material that was not related directly to it. This primary concern with the doings of the state in this work, however, was not merely the accidental result of what Li happened to be writing about at the moment: as we have seen, it seems to pervade his other writings, including the Record of the Way and Its Fate , where by the nature of the subject one might otherwise least expect to find it.

Fiscal affairs receive a great deal of attention, with four chapters devoted to them in the first volume and one in the second.^[72] The first item, a summary of tax revenues from the beginning of the dynasty to 1194, strikes a somber note as Li describes the continual rise in exactions, interrupted only by the loss of the north, and goes on to discuss the accretion of various irregular taxes. He concludes that these taxes "make difficult the livelihood of the people."^[73] Other entries cover a multitude of topics, with no single unifying theme. Instead, Li pragmatically evaluates individual systems and attempts at reform on their own merits. Usually he talks of structures, but in one interesting case turns to procedures and approves the rejection of a proposed reform in the methods of collection of the basic tax (shang-kung ch'ien ). Submitted by one Sun Ta-ya, a zealous official who had gained prominence by uncovering treacherous activities, it would have followed a Han precedent of collecting the tax monthly instead of yearly, and was rejected on the grounds that it would prove difficult to administer in distant circuits and therefore inequitable.^[74] The general tone of these chapters, however, is decidedly pessimistic, as Li repeatedly expresses concern about

[69] Chu Hsi's support of voluntary community granaries is mentioned briefly in "I-tsang," CYTC 1.15:206-7, but this comes at the end of an account of the government granary system. For more on the granaries, see chapter 5 in this volume.

[70] These are discussed by Robert P. Hymes in "Lu Chiu-yüan, Academies, and the Problem of the Local Community," in Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee, eds., Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 432-56.

[71] Nien-p'u, pp. 6716, 6725.

[72] CYTC 1, ch. 14-17; 2, ch. 16.

[73] "Kuo-ch'u chih Shao-hsi t'ien-hsia sui-shou shu," CYTC 1.14:187. Among the irregular levies Li discusses are the ching-chih , the tsung-chih , and the equitable loan system (ho-mai ).

[74] "Sun Ta-ya hsien chu ts'ui shang-kung-ch'ien wu ko," CYTC 2.16:557-58.

policies that had or would "stir up the people" (jao min ), complains of government waste and inefficiency, and makes observations on the peoples' suffering—both from government practices and from the oppression of powerful families.

Li's views on personnel selection and control are equally bleak, marked by a sense of a cumbersome bureaucracy open to abuse. In his chapters on court affairs and the selection of scholars, he frequently makes the point that there are too many officials.^[75] He did not generally blame the regular examinations; nor did he find recruitment by protection, recommendation, facilitated degrees, and the like intrinsically objectionable; rather, he blamed their overuse. The resulting superfluity of officials produced long waits for posts (five to six years for prefectships in the southeast) and the control of desirable posts by the powerful.^[76] Li also describes ways officials enriched themselves and their friends: taking official funds away with one when leaving office,^[77] lavish gift-giving by prefects and intendants to high officials passing through their territories, and so on.^[78]

In Li's writing on the central government, many of these same themes appear. His interest in institutional processes is evident in his treatment of the chuan-tui system, whereby officials at the capital were required to attend court in rotational sequence.^[79] Used particularly by Hsiao-tsung, who "esteemed human talent," the system, Li says, was popular with talented court scholars, who thus had the opportunity to be seen by the emperor, and unpopular with those of "rough" qualities and with the shih-ta-fu generally, who did their utmost to avoid appearing. He presents a wealth of revealing anecdotes about leading political figures: an allegation that Ch'in Kuei betrayed Yü-wen Hsu-chung, a former Sung official who as a Chin official was serving as a Sung secret agent;^[80] an amusing account of a young Chao Hsiung pumping a Chin envoy for intelligence concerning the Chin;^[81] Chao as chief councillor tenaciously defending his late mentor, Yü Yun-wen (1110-1174), from Hsiao-tsung's criticisms and winning posthumous hon-

[75] And too many clerks. The clerk problem, however, merits only one short note. That is "Chou hsien liu," CYTC 1.12:160-61.

[76] "Chin-sui t'ang-pu yung ch'ieh," CYTC 1.6:58. The Szechwan prefectships for Tzu-chou and Sui-chou were reported to be reserved for protégés of the vice chief councillors. See "Chao Shan-yu ch'a chou feng ts'ai," CYTC 2.8:449-50.

[77] "Chien-ssu chun-shou chih kuan chiao hai k'u-chin," CYTC 1.6:85.

[78] "Yü-pi yen chien-ssu hu-sung chih chin," CYTC 2.12:486. Despite an attempt by the emperor to ban this practice in 1203, Li estimates that the value of such gifts averaged 380 strings of cash but reached as high as 3,400 strings in Ch'eng-tu-fu and double that in Chien-k'ang-fu.

[79] "Pai-kuan chuan-tui," CYTC 1.9:103-4.

[80] "Yü-wen Hsiao-min ssu-shih," CYTC 1.8:95.

[81] "Chao Wen-shu t'an-che ti-ch'ing," CYTC 2.8:440-42.

ors for him.^[82] In a more somber vein, Li portrays a bureaucracy beset by favoritism, whether in the recommendation of men for office, or in showing undue leniency to officials found guilty of rapacity, or in the lax enforcement of the provisions detailing the liability of guarantors for the misdeeds of those they have guaranteed.^[83] It was also a bureaucracy in which, under Han T'o-chou at least, scholarly inquiry was sharply curtailed.^[84]

What are Li's solutions? This is hard to answer, for his language is usually descriptive and rarely prescriptive. However, from his emphasis on the selection and promotion of officials I believe we can infer that much of the answer for him lay in the ancient Confucian dictum of using good men. He praises Hsiao-tsung for working to reduce the size of the bureaucracy,^[85] but his greatest praise is for men like the war hero Chang Chün (1096-1164), whose personnel recommendations Li considers outstanding.^[86] In a slightly different vein, he argues in the Way and Its Fate that following the death of Ch'in Kuei, the continuing influence of Ch'in's faction made a correct discussion of national issues impossible. Only in the countryside, among the "literati of the mountains and forests," was the intellectual climate better.^[87] The right men were not being used.

In 1238, toward the end of his long life, Li Hsin-ch'uan submitted a memorial on current conditions, which remains the most comprehensive political statement that we have from him.^[88] He was writing at a time when the southeast was suffering from drought and economic hardship, a result in part of the Sung's first taste of war with the Mongols,^[89] and his tone was one of alarm:

Your minister has heard that after wars there are necessarily bad years. Now the many who have been killed and the weight of taxes have produced among

[82] "Chang Yu erh ch'eng-hsiang tz'u shih pen-mo," CYTC 2.8:439-40. Shortly before his death, when he was serving as commander of Sung military forces in the west, Yü Yun-wen had incurred Hsiao-tsung's wrath by refusing to invade the Chin on the grounds that the Sung forces were unprepared. This is described in "Hsiao-tsung ch'u Yü ch'eng-hsiang ch'u-shih hui-fu," CYTC 2.8:443.

[83] "Shao-hsi hsü chien-shih Chia-t'ai pa fan-chu," CYTC 1.6:82-83; "Chien-yen chih Chia-t'ai shen yen tsang li chih chin," CYTC 1.6:86-88; "Pao-jen ching-kuan lien-tso," CYTC 1.8:99-100.

[84] This is most apparent in Li's writings on the false-learning prohibition, especially "Hsüeh-tang wu-shih-chiu jen hsing-ming," CYTC 1.6:80-81, but also appears in his description of Han's attempt to control private histories cited in note 9 above.

[85] "Hsiao-tsung ko jung-kuan," CYTC 1.5:71-72.

[86] "Chang Wei-kung chien shih," CYTC 1.8:98.

[87] TML 5:41-42.

[88] SS 438/10a-11a. His memorial is also quoted in full in Nien-p'u, pp. 6698-99 and 6759.

[89] See Charles A. Peterson, "Old Illusions and New Realities: Sung Foreign Policy, 1217-1234," in Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 204-39.

the people a spirit [ch'i ] of anger and discontent. Superiors acting against the harmony of yin and yang have brought things to this extremity. Your majesty and your great ministers should sweep out the ministers of chaos and begin again with the people on a plan to purify the bad and welcome the good. However, the abuses of law have yet to be lightened and the people's energies have not been inspired toward virtue, so reforms have been impossible, and the peril is extreme.^[90]

The causes of the drought, continues Li, are to be found in various forms of misgovernment: in ever-increasing "equitable" (i.e., forced) purchases of grain, in not returning people and property scattered (by war) to their proper places, in unregulated taxation, in the hoarding of commodities, and in the insatiable appetites of great armies. A grasping and rapacious state, the implicit problem of much of the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , is here explicitly cited as the cause of current misfortunes. However, Li then turns the argument from the state to the emperor himself by citing the example of King T'ang of the Shang dynasty, who had also faced a seven-year drought. T'ang had sacrificed at Sang-lin and accepted responsibility for the six problems of his court, thus ending the drought.^[91] Similarly, Li suggests, the emperor should sacrifice and accept responsibility for the six problems that his court faces: contradictory edicts, unceasing demands upon the people, the profligate building of palaces, a surfeit of concubines, bribery, and the flourishing of sycophants. Correcting just one of them would be sufficient to end the drought; correcting all six would restore Heaven's heart.

Although the emperor accepted Li's memorial, there is no evidence that he reformed his or the empire's ways, for the "Ancestor of Principle" had a rather unprincipled reputation.^[92] What is interesting for our purposes, however, is the way in which Li, for all of his perceptions of social and political problems, took individual virtue as the essential starting point for any solutions. Whether this was because of an aversion to institutional solutions of the Wang An-shih variety shared by many Southern Sung thinkers, or because the examples of Ch'in Kuei and Han T'o-chou made the case for the importance of the virtue of rulers (or its lack) appear self-evident, this view, I would argue, underlay Li's attitude not only toward problems of

[90] SS 438/10a.

[91] The Huai Nan Tzu , Book 9, section 3, 4a, offers this account: "At the time of King T'ang of Yin there was a seven-year drought. When he offered himself as sacrifice on the outer reaches of Sang-lin, the clouds from all quarters of the world gathered and rain fell for hundreds of miles around. Embracing simplicity and offering his sincerity, he moved the heavens and earth." Cited by Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), p. 173.

[92] See Liu, "State Orthodoxy," p. 503, and more recently, Richard L. Davis, Court and Family in Sung China, 960-1279: Bureaucratic Success and Kinship Fortunes for the Shih of Ming-chou (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 131-35.

government but also toward one of the other great issues of his day: the problem of the north.

The Problem of The North

In his bibliographical note to the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , the Japanese scholar Yamauchi Masahiro characterizes Li Hsin-ch'uan's purpose as "to record honestly and without any fear of repression the true facts concerning the governmental organization of his province, using these facts in order to criticize the government for having given in to the State of Chin."^[93] Given the broad range of topics covered by the work, this may be an overstatement, but it is indisputable that Li attached great importance not only to the affairs of Szechwan but also to the challenge of the Chin. As we have seen, he came out of a family tradition of ardent irredentism, and a desire to recover the north appears repeatedly in his other writings.

Particularly revealing of the tumultuous, often disheartening times in which he lived were Li's writings on the Chin, war and peace, and the military. Here we can discern a process of change in his thinking, beginning with the first part of the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country , which appeared in 1202, proceeding through 1216, when the second part was finished, and culminating in his 1238 memorial. Li wrote the first part of Miscellaneous Records near the end of the forty-two-year peace that separated the second and third Chin wars. Han T'o-chou was firmly in power, and the shadow of the "spurious learning" prohibition was only beginning to lift. Li's selections in this part are extremely varied, with many more chapters devoted to institutional and fiscal matters than in the second part.^[94] Indeed, most of his discussion of local government comes from the earlier part. When he addresses the problem of the Chin, it is usually in military terms: analyzing the funding and deployments of armies and navies and the campaigns and battles of the two anti-Chin wars.^[95] His discussion of the peace treaties ending both wars is highly critical of peace advocates (with the general Chang Chün coming in for conspicuous praise both times),^[96] though his position is by no means simple-minded, for he testifies to the Sung's vulnerability in horse procurement,^[97] and to the financial burden

[93] Hervouet, Sung Bibliography , 179.

[94] The first part contained three chapters on government institutions and four on taxation and finances; the second had two and one respectively.

[95] See especially ch. 18 on the military and 19-20 on "border incidents."

[96] See "Lung-hsing ho-i," CYTC 1.5:71; "Ching-k'ang Chien-yen Shao-hsing ta-ch'en ho-chan shou-p'i shuo," CYTC 1.19:289; and "Keng-wei chia-shen ho-chan pen-mo," CYTC 1.20:299-306.

[97] "Ch'uan Ch'in mai ma," CYTC 1.18:278-79. For a lucid recent analysis of this issue, see Paul J. Smith, "Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: The Szechwan Tea Monopoly and the Tsinghai Horse Trade, 1074-1224" (Ph.D, diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983), especially chapter 3.

that an expanded military establishment imposed upon the population.^[98] Nor does he allow his criticism of the Lung-hsing Treaty of 1164 to obscure his general admiration for Hsiao-tsung and his reign.

The second part of the Miscellaneous Records differs dramatically. By 1216 Han T'o-chou had long since fallen, and Shih Mi-yuan (1164-1233) was firmly established as chief councillor, with policies that Li probably considered an improvement—only probably, because he spends little time in dealing with Shih or the Chia-ting (1208-1224) court.^[99] Instead, he concentrates on the 1206-1208 war with the Chin and its ramifications in Szechwan. This war hangs like a pall over Li's writings henceforth. And well it might. For one thing, it ended in defeat, for the Chin responded to the Sung invasion of the north with a counterattack that severely pressed the Sung forces up and down the Yangtze for most of a year, until the assassination of Han T'o-chou made possible a peace agreement, which returned things to roughly the status quo ante. (The Chin received Han's head.) Most distressing of all, this was one war that the Southern Sung had chosen to fight. Buoyed by reports from the north of a restive Chin population on the brink of rebellion, Han's war policy attracted considerable support from leading officials and scholars, including Yeh Shih (1150-1223), who in 1195 had been one of the fifty-nine barred from office because of his support for "spurious learning." Indeed, the edict announcing the war used language of a rather Neo-Confucian character: "Heaven's Way is fond of restoration, and the Middle Kingdom has a principle requiring [that things] be corrected. The people's hearts are devoted to obedience, and ordinary men will all [fight to] avenge their grievances."^[100] Moreover, to underscore the irredentist reasons for the conflict, on the eve of the war the court retracted Ch'in Kuei's noble title of Prince (wang ).^[101]

What went wrong? This question clearly preoccupied Li Hsin-ch'uan in the years that followed, and he offers several answers. The unexpected strength of the Chin and their success at learning of Sung plans in advance through their spies are recognized as factors. More important, in Li's eyes, were the poor leadership of the Sung armies and the villainy of Han T'o-chou. In an essay on the origins of the war, Li describes the cowardly unwillingness of certain officials to take or remain in key command posts in

[98] "Ch'ien-tao nei-wai ta-chün shu," CYTC 1.18:262-63.

[99] Political caution may also have played a role here. It is interesting to note that though the TML includes documents dating as late as 1230, Li's accounts of the political background of events relating to Tao-hsueh essentially end with Han T'o-chou's death.

[100] Cited in Nien-p'u, p. 6717.

[101] CYTC 2.18:577.

Huai-nan.^[102] However, it was Han who, according to Li, bore the greatest responsibility, for during his long years in power he had squandered the empire's resources, and once at war he had recklessly thrown troops into battle without contingency plans for retreat or pity for the people.^[103] He is also portrayed, like Ch'in Kuei, as fearful of competent generals, dismissing Ch'iu Ch'ung (1135-1208), for whom Li has the highest regard, in the midst of the war.^[104] In a scene reminiscent of Julius Caesar's assassination, Han was slain in a palace garden on an early autumn morning as he was going to court, the victim of a plot by fellow ministers, the heir apparent, and the emperor himself. Their explanation was that they were "eliminating cruelty" (ch'ü-hsiung ).^[105]

As bad as the war was, for Li Hsin-ch'uan at his home in Lung-chou the related rebellion of Wu Hsi was far more immediate and threatening. As vice-pacification commissioner for Szechwan and prefect of the strategically critical prefecture of Hsing-chou, Wu Hsi was responsible for Sung forces in the Han River and northern Szechwan, that is, the western flank of Sung defenses. Contrary to normal Sung practice, the position had become almost hereditary, for Wu Hsi's father, Wu T'ing, had held it for nineteen years, from 1175 until his death in 1194. The capable Yang Yu-chung was then appointed and, according to Li, was more honest and more successful at suppressing banditry than Wu T'ing, but because of Kuang-tsung's skepticism regarding the military abilities of civil officials, he was soon replaced by Wu Hsi.^[106] In the discussions preceding the war, Wu Hsi was a vocal supporter of invading the Chin, arguing that his forces could retake Shan-hsi.^[107] Yet in the fourth month of 1206, two months prior to the commencement of hostilities, he sent an envoy to the Chin court proposing that he be named Prince of Shu in return for his support and four prefectures, which he would turn over to them.^[108] The deal was made, and on 12/20 of

[102] He is particularly critical of Cheng T'ing, who was initially the commander in Hsiang-yang, and Hsu Shen-fu, who refused to take a command in Chin-ling chen (near Chien-k'ang fu). "Chia-t'ai k'ai-pien shih shih," CYTC 2.9:456.

[103] "K'ai-hsi ch'ü-hsiung ho-ti jih-chi," CYTC 2.7:434-37.

[104] "Li Chi-chang lun Ch'iu Tsung-ch'ing pu tang pa tu-fu," CYTC 2.9:456.

[105] Ibid. See Davis, Court and Family , pp. 89-92, for a discussion of the assassination, and Kinugawa Tsuyoshi, "'Kaishi yohei' o megutte," Toyoshi kenkyu 36, no. 3 (1977): 128-51, for a general treatment of the war.

[106] These details are from an item about the dangers of a Wu family hereditary command: "Chao Tzu-chih, Ch'iu Tsung-ch'ing, Yang Ssu-hsün pu yü Wu-shih shih-hsi," CYTC 2.9:453. For Wu's career, the military conditions leading up to the rebellion, and as an analysis of its consequences, see Ihara Hiroshi's articles: "Nan So Shisen ni okeru Goshi no seiryoko; Go Sei no ran zenshi," in Aoyama hakushi koki kinen Sodai shi ronso (Tokyo: Seishin, 1974), pp. 1-33; "Nan So Shisen ni okeru Go Sei no rango no seiji doko," Chuo daigaku bungakubu kiyo shigaku 5 (1980): 105-28.

[107] CYTC 2.18:575.

[108] CYTC 2.18:576. The offer of four prefectures is mentioned in Wu Hsi's biography in SS 475/24a.

that year, Wu received the Chin edict and seals and a week later declared himself Prince of Shu and the rightful ruler of Szechwan under the Chin.^[109]

Wu's rebellion proved a complete failure. Han T'o-chou's reaction on hearing of it was to offer him an enfeoffment of reeds and mud.^[110] The two expeditionary forces Wu Hsi sent from his headquarters in Hsing-chou—to K'uei-chou and Ch'eng-tu—were easily defeated, and three months after his rebellion began he was killed by an underling, An Ping, whose service to the Wus had begun with Wu T'ing but who could not countenance Wu Hsi's rebellion.^[111]

Yet while it lasted, the rebellion severely tested the mettle of the officials and literati of Szechwan, for pending the outcome, to declare oneself for or against it was to risk death. Some, like Li Tao-ch'uan, resigned their posts rather than accept the authority of Wu, and one official, Yang Chen-chung, committed suicide. (In describing them, Li Hsin-ch'uan is quite specific in his judgments of those who were worthy of praise.)^[112] But a number went over and many equivocated. Recounting the loyal response of Yang Chü-yuan, an official in Ch'eng-tu who openly opposed the rebellion, Li notes that only in Ch'eng-tu was the Sung K'ai-hsi reign name maintained.^[113]

Despite the speedy failure of the rebellion, its impact on Szechwan was considerable. The region's fiscal coffers had been emptied, yet heavy military expenses continued, even though Szechwan's director of revenues, Ch'en Feng-ju, had some success in reducing them.^[114] In the meantime, Szechwan literati, Li Hsin-ch'uan among them, produced a flood of accounts and histories of the rebellion. Li mentions some nineteen that he used in writing his own massive account, the Tung-ch'ui t'ai-ting lu .^[115]

It is difficult to say with confidence just how the 1207-1208 war and rebellion changed Li Hsin-ch'uan's thinking about foreign policy and the military. Clearly, however, the entries in the second part of the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country are more parochial. For example, in the chapters on border defense (18-20) most entries deal with uprisings by non-Han groups in southwestern China—though this may be mainly a reflection of Li's long residence there. More important is the apparent silencing of the irredentist ideal, for the war that began with high hopes for the recovery of the north not only fizzled out at great cost but, in Szechwan at least, raised the spectre of dynastic collapse. Li seems also to gain a renewed appreciation for the importance of controlling the military, whose leadership he por-

[109] SS 475/24a; CYTC 2.18:579.

[110] CYTC 2.18:580.

[111] CYTC 2.18:579-80; SS 475/25a-b. An's assassination of Wu is described in "An Kuan-wen chu Hsi shih-shun," CYTC 2.9:457-58.

[112] See especially "Shu-shih li-kung li-chieh ts'u-ti," CYTC 2.9:458-59, and SS 475/25b.

[113] "Tung Chen yen Yang shih-lang wei k'en t'ung-ch'ing," CYTC 2.9:457.

[114] "Ssu-ch'uan hsüan-tsung-ssu k'ang-heng," CYTC 2.16:562.

[115] "Tung Chen yen Yang Shih-lang wei k'en t'ung-ch'ing," CYTC 2.9:457.

trays as frequently corrupt, incompetent, and susceptible to secret plotting with the Chin.^[116] A case in point is his mention of Hsiao-tsung's comparison of Southern Sung literati and officials with those of the Western Chin, noted above. Surely Li's targets here were at least in part those contemporaries who were then rendering the empire vulnerable to the barbarians. Against such fears, his irredentist hopes must have receded into the background.

Too little of Li Hsin-ch'uan's writing after 1216 has come down to us for us to say with certainty whether he maintained this more pessimistic outlook in his later years. As Charles Peterson has shown, irredentism remained a powerful if somewhat chastened force after 1208, sustaining the Sung literati and officials through their long war with the Chin in 1217-1224 and in their final ill-fated forays into the north in 1233-1234, which helped to finish the Chin but which also left the Sung facing the might of the Mongols alone.^[117] Undoubtedly, Li's opinions of these events were complex and varied. But it is noteworthy that in his 1238 memorial, discussed above, his tone is even more pessimistic and his concerns are with the ever-increasing exactions of the government and the discontent of the people, not with strategies for strengthening the military and reconquering the north. Indeed, the military comes in for some of his most trenchant criticism: "All of this arises in the wake of great armies, before their power has dissipated; and the more power they amass, the greater the extremity."^[118]

Li Hsin-ch'uan was writing in the wake of the Mongol advance south of the Huai River in 1236 and the heavy fighting that accompanied it.^[119] This undoubtedly deepened his sense of foreboding. Yet his pessimism here is not unlike that in the second part of the Miscellaneous Records , for in both his concern for the internal health of the empire preempts his irredentism. Only here there is a much greater sense of urgency: he does not say so, but the Mongol threat has called into question the very existence of the Sung.

With that in mind, let us return briefly to the subject of the Record of the Way and Its Fate , which Li was even then compiling. This work may now be viewed not simply as a history of Tao-hsueh but also as an attempt to per-

[116] See, for example, CYTC 2.9:453 and 2.16:562. In addition to Wu Hsi's plots with the Chin, Li describes charges brought against Wang Ta-ts'ai, the Supreme Commandant of the central Yangtze region, who executed a number of his subordinates who had taken part in an abortive though authorized attempt to seize Ch'in-chou in Chin territory in early 1214. CYTC 2.10:467.

[117] "First Sung Reactions to the Mongol Invasion of the North, 1211-17," in John Winthrop Haeger, ed., Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), pp. 215-52, and "Old Illusions and New Realities," in China Among Equals , pp. 204-39.

[118] SS 438/10b.

[119] These events are treated at length by Richard Davis in "Ventures Foiled and Opportunities Missed: The Times of Li-tsung," draft chapter for the Sung volume of The Cambridge History of China .

suade, first, the emperor, and second, court officials, to pay more than lip service to it. While Li may not have been a Tao-hsueh thinker, he was committed to Tao-hsueh as an answer to the problems of the day. This did not mean that it was enough for the court simply to accept Tao-hsueh as the prevailing orthodoxy, for that had happened piecemeal over the preceding thirty years.^[120] Rather, it was necessary for the "sages and worthies above" to realize the Way through righteous action. This prescription was consistent with Li's thought expressed in earlier writings like the Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country . In his late writings, however, driven by events and perhaps by elevation to high official rank, the historian has assumed a minister's voice, the critic has become an advocate.

[120] See TML , ch. 8-10.