China

Five Dynasties, Ten Kingdoms, and Song periods

A comprehensive survey from the fall of the Tang to the Mongol conquest of the Nan Song is The Cambridge History of China, vol. 5, part 1, The Sung Dynasty and Its Precursors, 907–1279, ed. by Denis Twitchett and Paul Jakov Smith (2009). Edward H. Schafer, The Empire of Min (1954), has an excellent sinological summary on this kingdom in the South. Works on conquest dynasties in the North include Hok-lam Chan, The Historiography of the Chin Dynasty: Three Studies (1970), and Legitimation in Imperial China: Discussions Under the Jurchen-Chin Dynasty, 1115–1234 (l984); and Jing-shen Tao, The Jurchen in Twelfth-Century China: A Study of Sinicization (1976). The significance of the Song and varying interpretations are given in James T.C. Liu and Peter J. Golas (eds.), Change in Sung China: Innovation or Renovation? (1969); Edward A. Kracke, Jr., Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067 (1953, reissued 1968); two works attempting to relate general trends through historical figures, James T.C. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu, an Eleventh-Century Neo-Confucianist, trans. from the Chinese (1967), and Reform in Sung China: Wang An-shih (1021–1086) and His New Policies (1959); and Brian E. McKnight, Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China (1971). Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276 (1962; originally published in French, 1959), provides vivid descriptions. Also useful are Patricia Buckley Ebrey (ed. and trans.), Family and Property in Sung China: Yüan Ts’ai’s Precepts for Social Life (1984); Thomas H.S. Lee, Government Education and Examinations in Sung China (1985); Brian E. McKnight (trans.), The Washing Away of Wrongs: Forensic Medicine in Thirteenth-Century China (1981); and Bettine Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960–1368) (2001).