Rewriting Tang Dynastic History through Biography

Among the many epistemic shifts of the Tang-Song transition, which marks the end of “medieval” and the beginning of early modern China, we can count the emergence of an 11th-century historiography that was both ideological and pragmatic in aim, crafted to provide Song dynasty rulers with better models for rulership and administration. The state-sponsored revision and replacement of the 945 Old Tang History with the New Tang History of 1060 played a critical role in this watershed in Chinese historiography. This paper examines the role that the hundreds of revised biographies of the New Tang History, edited by the Northern Song scholar Song Qi (998-1061), played in rewriting the standard history of the Tang dynasty. In his revisions to the Old Tang History biographies, Song Qi took partial, sometimes confused accounts and gave them new rhetorical energy, narrative coherence, and clearer moral lessons. Heroes became more visibly heroic; villains more purely villainous; and the relative contributions of individuals were weighed within the biographies and in the “historian’s evaluation” (zan) that concluded each chapter. This paper will focus on the ways that Song Qi’s chapter-concluding evaluations wrote individual lives into overarching metanarratives of Tang history, which spanned the early 7th through the end of the 9th century. Whether or not his conclusions were uniformly supported by the evidence, by consistently stepping out of the framework of an individual life and inscribing biographical subjects into these metanarratives, Song Qi transformed the historian’s evaluation into a more powerful didactic tool to meet the aims of a new Song dynasty historiography.