Dà Jīn diàofá lù 大金弔伐錄
Record of the Great Jīn’s Punitive Campaign of Condolence-and-Chastisement by anonymous Jīn-period compiler
About the work
An anonymous Jīn-period documentary compendium of the formal state correspondence between the Jīn 金 and the Sòng 宋 (and from 1127 between the Jīn and the Jīn-installed Chǔ 楚 / Qí 齊 puppet states) covering the period from the conquest of the Liáo through the deposition of the Sòng emperors. The title (diào fá 弔伐 = “condole and chastise”) frames the Jīn invasions of Sòng as a punitive expedition. The work is essentially a curated archive of the actual diplomatic instruments — guóshū 國書 (state letters), shìzhào 誓詔 (oaths), cèbiǎo 冊表 (patents and memorials), zhuàngzhǐ huīpái 狀指揮牌 (administrative orders), xí 檄 (manifestos) — preserving the originals in their bureaucratic form. Recovered by the Sìkù compilers from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn and arranged into 4 juǎn. It is the principal documentary source surviving in any continuous form for the JīnSòng diplomatic record of the Jìngkāng 靖康 catastrophe and after.
Tiyao
The compiler’s name is not given. The book records the Jīn Tàizǔ and Tàizōng’s punitive campaigns against the Sòng — hence the title “condole and chastise” (diào fá 弔伐). It is presumably a compilation of the documents from the Jīn government archives, edited and arranged. The Jīn and the Sòng had been in diplomatic contact since the Sea-of-Bohai Alliance (hǎi shàng zhī méng 海上之盟); but the older case-files from before Tiānfǔ 6 (1122) do not survive, so only one item at the head of the work briefly outlines the inception of hostilities. From the cession of YānYún 燕雲 in Tiānfǔ 7 (1123), through the renewed campaign against Sòng in Tiānhuì 3 (1125) fourth month, and through the deposition of [the captive Sòng emperors] and installation of [the puppet] Chǔ 楚 in Tiānhuì 5 (1127), all the guóshū, shìzhào, cèbiǎo zòuzhuàng (memorials), zhǐhuī páidié (administrative orders), and xí (manifestos) of the JīnSòng exchange are arranged by year and month, the originals reproduced in full, ending at Prince Kāng’s southern crossing (i.e. Gāozōng’s establishment, 1127). The head and tail are perfectly comprehensive. After this is appended the rescript demoting Huīzōng to Hūndégōng 昏德公 and Qīnzōng to Chónghūnhóu 重昏侯 / Hǎibīnjūn 海濱君, and the various memorials they submitted thereafter. The work ends with the establishment of Liú Yù 劉豫’s Qí 齊 state and the latter’s history. The material recorded is broadly parallel to Xú Mèngshēn 徐夢莘’s Sānzhāo běiméng huìbiān 三朝北盟會編 — though detailed and abbreviated differently in places. We do not know how Mèngshēn obtained his materials. Examining Zhāng Duānyì 張端義’s Guì’ěr jí 貴耳集: “When the Daoist Lord (i.e. Huīzōng) was carried north, on every minor auspicious or inauspicious occasion, sacrifice or seasonal observance, the Jīn ruler invariably bestowed gifts; for every gift one xiè biǎo 謝表 (memorial of thanks) had to be presented; these were assembled into a collection, printed at the Què cháng 搉場 (state-monopoly market), traded as private exchange for forty or fifty years, and every gentleman had a copy. I have once seen one.” Perhaps the present work is also of this same type. Yet Xú Mèngshēn was concerned with diplomatic taboo and could not avoid extensive deletion. This work alone preserves the original documents in full, without addition or subtraction; one can use it to verify and correct the gaps and errors of the standard history, and the antiquarian must consult it. The version preserved in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn gives no chapter divisions; it is unknown how many juǎn the original had. We have edited it carefully and divided it into 4 juǎn, and recorded it in the bibliography.
Abstract
The Dà Jīn diàofá lù is the principal Jīn-period documentary archive of the JīnSòng diplomatic relations from the conquest of the Liáo (1122) to the deposition of the captive Sòng emperors and the installation of the ChǔQí puppet states (1127), with the appended history of the Liú Yù 劉豫 puppet state. It is anonymous and presumably the work of a Jīn-period archivist; the Sìkù compilers identify it as a curated compilation of the state-archive correspondence in its original bureaucratic form (guóshū 國書, shìzhào 誓詔, cèbiǎo 冊表, etc.). Date bracket here is set conservatively from 1127 (the latest core event) to c. 1175 (within Jīn dynasty, before the work’s transmission to private circulation as inferred from Zhāng Duānyì’s 貴耳集 description). The work was recovered by the Sìkù editors from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn and arranged into 4 juǎn; the original juǎn count is unknown. Compared to its principal counterpart Xú Mèngshēn’s 徐夢莘 Sānzhāo běiméng huìbiān 三朝北盟會編 KR2g0035, the Dà Jīn diàofá lù preserves documentary originals in unedited form (Xú Mèngshēn deleted material on diplomatic-taboo grounds); the two are therefore mutually corrective and together form the documentary basis of the modern reconstruction of the Jìngkāng-period diplomatic record. The Sìkù compilers regard it as essential supplementary material to the standard Sòngshǐ and Jīnshǐ.
Translations and research
- Hok-lam Chan. 1984. Legitimation in Imperial China: Discussions under the Jurchen-Chin Dynasty. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Discusses the Dà Jīn diàofá lù as a primary source for Jīn dynastic legitimation rhetoric.
- Tao Jing-shen. 1983. Two Sons of Heaven: Studies in Sung-Liao Relations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
- Herbert Franke. 1976. “The Chin Dynasty,” in Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 4. (Standard treatment of Jīn diplomacy.)
- Modern editions: Dà Jīn diàofá lù jiào bǔ 大金弔伐錄校補, ed. Jīn Shǎoyīng 金少英 and Lǐ Qìnglán 李慶蘭. 2001. Beijing: Zhōnghuá shūjú. The standard modern critical edition.
Other points of interest
The Dà Jīn diàofá lù is one of the very few Jīn-side documentary compilations of an inter-dynastic war to survive even in indirect transmission, and is therefore of considerable importance not only for the Jìngkāng narrative but for the cultural history of Jīn dynastic-rhetorical formulae (the formulaic devices of zhì cí, xí, guóshū, shìzhào) — a documentary register otherwise mostly known only from Sòng-side sources.