Liu Song (Southern) Dynasty

A seventh competitor

formationDrafted from Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881)

When the general Liu Yu took the imperial title in 420 and proclaimed himself Kaotsou, founder of the Song dynasty, China was, in Boulger's own phrase, "still as a house divided against itself." Six kingdoms already held the northern provinces, each aspiring to be the one that finally reunited the empire, and Liu Yu's own new state added only a seventh competitor to their number. Their combined weakness, Boulger notes, was itself a kind of safety - none strong enough to overrun the others, all too exhausted for decisive offense - and despite the grandeur of the imperial title Liu Yu now claimed, "the Songs were never more than one ruler among many, and their government always that of only a small section of the Chinese nation."

A general's habits on the throne

Liu Yu had earned real distinction as a commander under the Jin dynasty he now replaced, and his own brief reign showed the same competence in office: frugal, attentive to administration, and loyal enough to the foster-mother who had raised him that his devotion became proverbial among his own contemporaries. What he lacked, in Boulger's reading, was youth - he came to supreme power only late in life, and the caution age had taught him made him reluctant to risk what he had already secured by reaching for more. The one notable event of his three-year reign was grim rather than glorious: the murder of Kongti, the Jin emperor he had deposed, who refused on religious grounds to take his own life when custom expected it of a fallen sovereign, and was killed instead by the guards left to watch him - the only instance, Boulger notes, of a Chinese ruler ever refusing that expected exit.

Thirty years against Wei

peakDrafted from Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881)

Kaotsou's heir Chowti lasted barely a year. His only mark on the record was a disastrous war: the northern king of Wei, Topasse, besieged the fortress of Houlao for seven months and, when it finally fell, won nothing but a pile of ruins. Chowti himself gave the war no real attention, and his own nobles deposed him and had him secretly killed rather than risk his return.

His brother Wenti took the throne in the murderers' debt and immediately turned on them, punishing the men who had made him emperor — the first sign, in Boulger's reading, less of loyalty to a murdered brother than of a new ruler's fear of men who had already shown they could unmake one. It did him no lasting harm. Wenti began his reign, by Boulger's account, "under the fairest auspices," and held the throne for nearly thirty years — the Song dynasty's longest and most stable reign, and the one real period this brief, embattled state had to work with.

Topatao's reply

Wei was ruled through most of Wenti's reign by Topasse's son Topatao, "a man neither less capable nor ambitious than his father," and the two courts spent it circling a single question: who held Honan, the province lying between them.

In 430 Wenti sent an embassy demanding that Topatao hand back the part of Honan south of the Yellow River. The reply was short:

I was not out of my teens when I heard it said on all sides that Honan belonged to my family. Go and tell your master, that if he comes to attack me or mine I shall defend myself; and even if he succeed in seizing this province I shall know how to retake it as soon as the waters of the Hoangho are frozen.

Topatao then withdrew his garrison without a fight, so that Wenti's armies took the province they had come for by simply occupying it — and waited for winter, exactly as promised.

A general executed for winning

The campaign that followed went badly for Wenti in every particular except one. His general Tantaotsi — the same officer who had led the deposition of Chowti — fought thirty engagements in the Tsiho valley without a defeat, and was still forced to retreat for want of supplies once Wei's main army had reoccupied Honan behind him. It was the single competent performance on the Song side in the whole war.

Wenti had him executed anyway. Tantaotsi's success had made him a dangerous man to a court already uneasy about the class of general who could depose an emperor, and his death removed the one commander who had given Wei's army any real trouble. Honan was lost, the campaign's cost in men and treasure had bought nothing, and pretenders claiming the fallen house of Jin rose in several provinces at once.

Hiuy held

Twenty years of uneasy peace followed, each court occupied with its own governance — Wenti encouraging the study of history and limiting how long a magistrate could hold one office, Topatao consolidating what Wei had already taken. It broke in 450, when Topatao crossed the frontier at the head of a hundred thousand men to settle the question of Honan for good.

The invasion stalled at once, held for months before a minor position while Wenti's generals gathered their own forces, and Topatao withdrew short of his goal. Wenti pursued, and the two armies fought twice more to a standstill before the campaign's one lasting episode: the siege of Hiuy, where the defender Tsangchi refused every offer to surrender the fort gracefully and met each of Topatao's engineers with a counter-device of his own. Topatao had publicly sworn to burn him. He gave up the siege having lost twenty thousand men to the sword and more again to disease, and Boulger records that the retreat's disgrace was compounded by outrages on the towns along its line — gains that mended nothing.

Topatao was murdered by his own dissatisfied courtiers the following year, and Wei spent several years absorbed in its own succession before it troubled its southern neighbour again.

The reign's own end

Wenti did not outlive him by much. In 453 his son Liu Shao attacked him in his own palace and had him killed before his eyes, at thirty-five years old — the single most stable reign the Song dynasty would ever have, closed by exactly the kind of violence that had opened it.

Nephews and brothers

endDrafted from Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881)

Liu Shao did not long benefit from killing his own father. His brother Lieousiun defeated him in the field, had him executed with his family, and took the throne himself. Eleven years of assured peace followed — Wei, having just lost Topatao to its own courtiers, showed no interest in its southern neighbour — and the new emperor gave himself up to hunting and to excessive eating and drinking, which brought on the apoplexy that killed him at thirty-five. It was, by the low standard the dynasty was setting for itself, a good death: no blade, no palace conspiracy, just a ruler who stopped governing and was allowed to.

The murders compound

What followed him was not. Fiti, his sixteen-year-old successor, opened his reign with a wholesale massacre of anyone who fell under his suspicion and was murdered by one of his own eunuchs before the year was out. His uncle Mingti, who took the throne next, began by killing fourteen of his own brother's sons outright, for fear they might one day be rivals to his own line — a single admitted act of dynastic slaughter that Boulger records without much need for further comment on the character of the reign it opened. Having no son of his own, Mingti then adopted an heir and secured the succession for him by executing his own remaining brothers as well.

The adopted heir, a second Fiti, proved no better than the first and was murdered after four years by the general Siaotaoching — who, offered the throne outright, ostentatiously declined it, and installed a third adopted son of Mingti's in his place instead, the child Shundi.

A general takes what a general once won

The refusal did not last. In 479 Siaotaoching deposed the boy emperor Shundi and took the throne himself, founding the Southern Qi dynasty in the Song's place — fifty-nine years after Liu Yu's own accession, and by a method that differed from Liu Yu's own founding chiefly in scale rather than kind. The Song had never controlled more than a fraction of a divided China, and after Wenti its own internal history, as Boulger tells it, was less a story of governing that fraction well than of one murdered or deposed emperor after another, until the very weakness that had let Liu Yu seize power in 420 finally caught up with his own descendants.