Qìngyuán dǎngjìn 慶元黨禁
The Proscription of the Qìng-yuán Faction by 滄州樵叟 (撰; pseudonym, “the Cāngzhōu Woodcutter”)
About the work
A one-juàn documentary record of the wěixué 偽學 (“false learning”) proscription of Qìngyuán 2 (1196) under Níngzōng 寧宗, instigated by Hán Tuōzhòu 韓侂冑 — one of the great factional persecutions of the Sòng. The work is anonymous in the Sòngshǐ yìwénzhì but bears in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn the attribution “Cāngzhōu qiáosǒu 滄州樵叟” (the Cāngzhōu Woodcutter), a pseudonym; the Sìkù editors note that this is the same hand as the anonymous Shàoxīng zhènglùn 紹興正論 (the parallel record of the Shàoxīng persecution under Qín Huì). The preface is dated Chúnxī yǐsì — but this must be an error: Chúnxī yǐsì would be 1185, before the proscription it records, which is impossible. The Sìkù editors gloss the date as a slip for Chúnyòu yǐsì (= Chúnyòu 5 = 1245) or Chúnyòu rényín (= 1242) — well after the proscription’s lifting in 1202; the date bracket here is set conservatively to Chúnyòu 2 = 1242 = rényín. The Yùtí (Imperial Title) by the Qiánlóng emperor on the work’s reception into the Sìkù makes the work a peg for a long verse-and-prose meditation on the Sòng factional disasters: he holds Zhào Rǔyú 趙汝愚 as much as Hán Tuōzhòu accountable, faulting Zhào for using the eunuchs’ channel through Empress Xiè 慈福 to push through Níngzōng’s accession, thereby giving Hán the leverage that founded his subsequent influence. The body of the work lists 59 men proscribed: chancellors (Zhào Rǔyú, Liú Zhèng 留正, Wáng Lìn 王藺, Zhōu Bìdà 周必大), dàizhì and above 13 men (including Zhū Xī), other officials 31 (including Liú Guāngzǔ 劉光祖), military men 3, tàixué students 6 (including Yáng Hóngzhōng 楊宏中), private scholars 2 (Cài Yuándìng 蔡元定 and Lǚ Zǔjiǎn 呂祖儉).
Tiyao
Qìngyuán dǎngjìn in one juàn, no compiler’s name. The Sòngshǐ yìwénzhì does not record it. It appears in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn with the heading “compiled by Cāngzhōu qiáosǒu” — the same hand as Shàoxīng zhènglùn. The preface is dated Chúnxī yǐsì; this must be a slip — the most plausible reconstruction is that the work was made under Lǐzōng’s reign (the eighteenth year, hence the editor’s gloss “Sòng Lǐzōng shíbā nián”); the proscription was begun in Qìngyuán 2, eighth month, and lifted in Jiātài 2 (1202), second month — so the work was made forty-some years after the lifting of the ban. Throughout the Sòng, the loyal and the perfidious took turns; factional disasters followed each other; great national debate had already once flared in the Yuányòu registers; after the southern crossing, peace having been concluded and the foreign threat momentarily eased, ruler and ministers all rejoiced as if “swallows nesting in a hall,” forgetting prior cautions and repeating the same path: rushing for fame, holding ever louder positions, networking sympathies, mixing the worthy and the wicked, the shallow and the showy strove for affiliation, factionalism finally hardened, and xiǎorén exploited the weaknesses to lift the proscription as a trap; orchids and weeds burned together; the dynasty thereby found itself at last beyond rescue. The Chūnqiū presses the worthy, and we cannot saddle Hán Tuōzhòu alone with the responsibility for the disaster. Moreover, in the moment of Guāngzōng’s transfer of the throne to Níngzōng, Zhào Rǔyú and others worked through xiāorén and managed the affair improperly; in this they bear particular blame for poor governance. We respectfully read His Majesty’s Yùtí poem with its repeated insistence on the “opening of the gate to thieves” — a deeply admonitory verdict for all time. The lecturers can no longer evade it with airy rhetoric. — In the body of the book, 59 of the wěidǎng are recorded; for instance Yáng Wànlǐ 楊萬里 was at one time dismissed under the proscription but does not appear in the registers. The principles of inclusion-and-exclusion are also somewhat opaque. But of those whose biographies are in the Sòngshǐ, fewer than three or four in ten are here; the rest are men whose names and offices the Shǐ fails to record, whose general outline can only be glimpsed through this book — to ancient-historical study this is genuinely useful. As to those like Xuē Shūsì 薛叔似, who in old age changed his loyalties and attached to the powerful, or Huángfǔ Bīn 皇甫斌, vulgar in his climb and disastrous in war — after Hán Tuōzhòu fell, these men are again listed among Hán’s faction with Zhāng Yán 張巖 and Xǔ Jízhī 許及之, and are punished and demoted: the duplicity of yīnyáng turns is past tracking, yet their names too appear in this book. Is this not evidence of how thick the followers’ ranks were, and how owls and phoenixes flocked together? In sum: the scholar who professes principle should be devoted to inward cultivation reaching to far ends; he who manages affairs should pursue practical merit. Merely to chase after protecting-the-Way repute — gathering disciples and lecturing on philosophy — has never failed to bring fire and water in collision and disaster down upon the dynasty. The Eastern Hàn, taking no caution from the zònghéng debates of the Warring States, split into north-and-south factions and fell. The Northern Sòng, taking no caution from the Eastern Hàn’s dǎnggù, split into LuòShǔ factions and fell. The Southern Sòng, taking no caution from the Yuányòu defeat, raised the wěixué proscription and fell. The Míng, taking no caution from the Qìngyuán loss, [continues — the tiyao here truncates in the source].
Abstract
The Qìngyuán dǎngjìn is the principal documentary record of the wěixué proscription of 1196–1202, listing the 59 men formally proscribed and providing brief background on their offences. The work is anonymous and pseudonymous (compiled under the pen-name Cāngzhōu qiáosǒu), and the preface date is corrupt — but on the Sìkù editors’ analysis the work was prepared under Lǐzōng (date bracket here 1242), retrospectively documenting the proscription about 40 years after its lifting. As a zhuànjì it preserves names not in the Sòngshǐ and is therefore an essential supplement; as a polemical document it has been read by every subsequent commentator on Sòng factionalism. The Qiánlóng emperor’s Yùtí (preserved at the head of the WYG copy) develops a sophisticated argument that distributes responsibility for the Sòng’s late-twelfth-century factional disasters between Hán Tuōzhòu and Zhào Rǔyú, an analysis that has been influential in subsequent Chinese historiography.
Translations and research
- The standard study is James T. C. Liu, “How Did a Neo-Confucian School Become the State Orthodoxy?,” Philosophy East and West 23 (1973), 483–505.
- Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy (HUP, 1992), discusses the proscription extensively.
- Robert Hartwell’s prosopographical Sòng database draws on the work’s name-lists.
- The Sì-kù tíyào notice is in 史部·傳記類三·總錄之屬.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù editors’ parallel between the Eastern Hàn dǎnggù (proscription of factions), the Northern-Sòng LuòShǔ split, the Southern-Sòng wěixué jìn, and the late-Míng Dōnglín — concluding (the truncated final clause) that each successive dynasty failed to learn from its predecessor’s factional disaster — is one of the more developed Sìkù editorial historical-pattern arguments and reflects the Qiánlóng court’s active interest in the historiography of factionalism.
Links
- Wilkinson 2018, Chinese History: A New Manual §49.