Emperor Huizong had neglected the frontiers and the armies, admitting, ‘I inherited a great flourishing empire but I myself was a mediocre person not up to the job.’ In 1125, after a twenty-year war, Jurchen semi-nomads from Manchuria destroyed and replaced the Khitan as the rulers of northern China, declared their own Jin empire and invaded Song. The unthinkable happened quickly: the barbarians, using Song military technology learned from prisoners, besieged the capital Kaifeng. In 1127, they stormed the city, rounding up princesses, concubines and actor-singers of the court, mass-raping women and then forcing Emperor Huizong, 14,000 courtiers and women on a snowy death march northwards. The emperor’s consort was raped and miscarried, then was forced to sing before the Jurchen commander. ‘Once I lived in heaven above in pearl palaces and jade towers,’ she wrote. ‘Now I live among grass and brambles, my blue robe soaked in tears.’ But she refused to perform. She had nothing left to lose. The empress committed suicide; princesses were sold for ten ounces of gold.
As the Jurchen advanced, the poetess Li and her husband loaded fifteen carts of antiques and books and headed southwards. But the Jurchens burned much of their collection. As they trudged among crowds of refugees, her husband Zhao, in an unconscious statement of Song delicacy, told her to ‘discard furniture, then clothes, then books, then antiques’ but to ‘carry the most treasured items with you’ so ‘you can live or die with them’. But he died of dysentery while writing a poem and still holding his writing brush.
The emperor also died; a world was dying, but one of the emperor’s sons escaped to the south. Gaozong re-established the Mandate of Heaven. He had lost of much of China but crossed the Yangtse and established the Song at a new capital, Linan (Hangzhou), where many of the poets and polymaths of Kaifeng now settled. The poetess Li joined them. Aged forty-eight, she remarried disastrously. Her new husband was a mendacious mountebank and their union lasted just a hundred days. ‘At my advanced age, I’d married a worthless shyster,’ who beat her. She won a divorce (not because of his violence but because of his social lies). Finally liberated, she wrote disdainfully of the useless politicians of her time:
Our high-ranking ministers still run away in all directions;
Images of the great steeds of the old heroes fill my eyes.
In these dangerous times where can we find real horses like them?
As the Song developed new paddle-powered battleships that used the latest bomb-throwing trebuchets and specially trained marines, they defeated the Jurchens. Guangzhou (Canton) and their southern ports sent huge dhows filled with luxuries to Egypt and to Iraq, where an upstart family of Turks was taking over the caliphate.
* In 1044, a printed technical guide the
* A people from Tibetan-Burman marches who had moved into north-western China.
* The nine guests of Chinese culture were good wine, poetry, zither music, calligraphy, the boardgame weiqi (Go), Buddhist meditation, tea, alchemy and talking with close friends. As a man devoted to scientific enquiry Shen Gua observed that there were phenomena that could not be easily defined: ‘Most people can only judge of things by the experiences of ordinary life, but phenomena outside the scope of this are really quite numerous. How insecure it is to investigate natural principles using only the light of common knowledge …’
* In the 780s, King Indra, the Sailendra maharaja of both Mataram and Srivijaya, a Buddhist who may have planned the great Javan temple of Borobudur, ruled much of mainland south-east Asia as well as Indonesia. A Cambodian prince may have served as Indra’s general, having perhaps started as a hostage or prisoner. Either set up by Indra or having escaped from his clutches, the prince established himself as ruler of Kambujadesa (Cambodia) around 781 – just as Haroun was dominating western Asia and Charlemagne was conquering Europe. In 802, on a sacred hill, and now styling himself Jayavarman II, he crowned himself
