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This chapter identifies the legacies of 17th‐century Chan Buddhism as expansion of Chan influence in Chinese culture and society, integration of monastic practice, and intensive networking by dharma transmission. The chapter argues that Chan Buddhism has a larger role in the history of Chinese Buddhism because it not only bridged the gap between Buddhism and Chinese culture and society and also unified the Buddhist world by systemizing monastic rituals and spreading dharma transmission. The reinvention of Chan also shows that there was a boundary within Chinese society to limit the growth of Buddhism and a general pattern of Buddhist revival can be discerned.

This chapter provides an overview of book's main themes. This book demonstrates how and why members of the sociopolitical elite of the late Northern Song, in their public role as imperial bureaucrats, employed a shared discourse of authority that imagined political authority from the imperial court's perspective and almost unequivocally condemned ministerial factions as disloyal and treacherous. By focusing on the politics of factional theory and rhetoric, it hopes to elucidate the linkages between Northern Song political and intellectual history, by explaining how conflicting factionalists could share a common language of faction. It analyzes the political writings of such intellectual and literary luminaries as Ouyang Xiu, Wang Anshi, Sima Guang, Su Shi, Cheng Yi, and many others in an effort to reconstruct the intellectual contexts within which ministers produced faction theory and factional rhetoric.

This chapter embeds the findings of the present study about Northern Song factionalism within a broader historical context. It explains how and why the factional rhetoric and political associations in late imperial Chinese history can illuminate the boundaries of Northern Song discourses of authority. First, it compares the language of the Northern Song factional conflict with the political rhetoric of the True Way Learning (Daoxue) fellowship of the Southern Song. Second, it compares the political organizations of the Northern and Southern Song with those of the Yuan and Ming dynasties, which were dramatically different in both kind and scale. It also briefly explains how the term dang re-entered modern Chinese as a neutralized descriptor of political “parties” in the early twentieth century; how the Nationalist and Communist leaders envisioned the party as the central organizational element of a modern Chinese nation-state; and how the one-party states they built could not tolerate the existence of autonomous political associations.

Chapter 6 explores the contrasting evidence for activity spanning the Han, Six Dynasties–Tang, and Song–Yuan periods at Sha Po. The study of structural remains and artefactual evidence associated with Sha Po’s Six Dynasties–Tang kiln-based coastal industry is supported by the results of a programme of thermoluminescence dating of kiln remains. Collectively, the evidence suggests that Sha Po was a planned and imperially controlled kiln complex directed towards the production of salt, with lime as a process-related by-product. In a pattern typical across Hong Kong, the industry’s post-abandonment phase is associated with Northern Song and some Southern Song–Yuan ceramics.

This chapter establishes the broad parameters that bounded the political imaginations of the Northern Song by demonstrating how factionalists defined and interpreted factionalism in public and private rhetorical settings. By rereading and reinterpreting a shared corpus of classical and historical texts, faction theorists and factional rhetoricians manipulated these textual authorities to demarcate the boundaries of the political community between factions of petty men and factionless superior men. First, they interpolated fragments of classical texts as authoritative injunctions against factionalism, frequently decontextualizing them and reading them anachronistically, in order to claim that factionalism was a deviation from ancient ideals of rulership and ministerial loyalty. Second, faction theorists and factional rhetoricians compared the present to past factional conflicts, which they blamed for undermining and destroying the Han and Tang imperial polities, and warned that factions of petty men would do the same to the Song dynasty. Reformist and antireformist ministers, along with their monarchical audience, shared these classical and historical frames of reference, which bounded their conceptions of political action and organization by locating the imperial court as the central source of authority, and by empowering the monarch as the ultimate arbiter of faction.

This chapter conducts a broad diachronic study of Northern Song “Discourses on Factions,” explaining how five representative faction theorists imagined the hierarchical relationship between monarchical and ministerial authority. It opens with a court dialogue of 1044, in which Grand Councilor Fan Zhongyan admitted to Emperor Renzong that his Qingli reforming coalition was indeed a faction. In his exceptional “Discourse on Factions” (Pengdang lun) that followed, Ouyang Xiu used classical hermeneutics and historical analogies in a game-changing attempt to normalize and justify the existence of factional affiliations in the service of shared ideological aims. He theorized that true factions of superior men served the public good of the dynasty, as opposed to the false factions of petty men. But after Renzong dismissed Fan's reforming bloc from court, theorists unequivocally condemned factions as malevolent and destructive. In their “Discourses on Factions,” written subsequently, Sima Guang, Su Shi, and Qin Guan all warned of the danger that bureaucratic factions presented to dynastic survival, taking the perspective of past, current, and future rulers. While each of these theorists defined and interpreted faction in different ways, they employed similar classical authorities and historical analogies in a court-centered discourse of authority, in which they urged monarchs to employ factionless superior men and expel factious petty men to ensure dynastic survival.

This chapter analyzes when reformists fought their way back from exile to dominate the post-reform phase. When Xuanren died in 1093, Zhezong inaugurated his personal rule and committed himself to an ideological program of “restoration” (shaoshu), rehabilitating the reformists and reviving the New Policies. Seeking revenge for Cai Que's death, Zhang Dun formed a vertical alliance with the emperor and persuaded him to systematically purge the antireformists from court. The surviving antireformists were later blacklisted, and their leaders were indicted on trumped-up charges of treason and factionalism in the Korean Relations Institute (Tongwen guan) inquisition; they were ultimately deported to Lingnan. When Zhezong died without an heir in 1100, Shenzong's consort Empress Dowager Qinsheng (1045–1101) assumed the regency for his younger brother Emperor Huizong and began to rehabilitate a new generation of antireformists. When Qinsheng died in 1101, Huizong began his personal rule, resolving to revive and expand reformist governance under the influence of his councilor, Cai Jing. Prosecuting the most brutal and comprehensive political purge in the history of the dynasty, Huizong promulgated three separate factional blacklists (dangji) between 1102 and 1104, banning more than 300 antireformists and their descendants from officeholding as a “faction.” In these proscriptions, which represented the endgame of the factional conflict, most of the antireform opposition were exiled en masse to fringe prefectures, where they were subject to movement restrictions, and an unknown number died. The silencing of political and ideological dissent enabled the Cai Jing ministry to revive and extend the New Policies and to build a patronage machine that monopolized power for twenty-five years, with minimal interruptions, almost until the fall of the Northern Song.

This study inquires into the historical question of how the politics surrounding death rituals contributed to the revival of Confucianism. It examines major changes in ritual performance both at the imperial court and in society at large during the reigns from Zhenzong to Shenzong. It investigates how polarizing debates about death rituals introduced new terrain for political power dynamics between monarchy and officialdom, and between groups of politically and intellectually divided court officials. In order to answer why death rituals in particular became focal points of contention, it delineates the social imaginaries implied in the distinct death rituals preferred by three powerful and competing social groups—emperors, scholar-officials, and rich merchants. It also aims to engage the theoretical question of how diverse social groups’ contentions over ritual were enmeshed in the struggle over social imaginaries between groups as they envisioned different construction of social reality.