Local Elites in Song-Yuan China

The Song-Yuan period is part of the larger time frame that historians now call the “middle period” (roughly 8th–15th centuries). As compared to the two great and unified dynasties of Han and Tang that came before, the Song dynasty (960–1279) is often perceived to be a militarily weak regime that eventually fell prey to its stronger neighbors, including the Khitan Liao (916–1125), the Tangut Xi Xia (1038–1227), the Jurchen Jin (1115–1234), and finally the Mongol Yuan (1271–1368). We now know that such conventional view of Song military strength is misguided. Yet the Song was unique in its ability to institute a civil order based on the collective visions of the literati (shi士) class. In the Southern Song, the literati were leaders of the local society, often acting as the link between the state and the populace. Even after the establishment of the Yuan, many of these literati families survived and continued to thrive under the new Mongol regime. While new political circumstances may have altered their strategies, their commitments to building a local power base persisted. However, the literati class in the north was weak and local power was concentrated in the hands of non-literati groups, one of which was the religious elites. There, Buddhist monks and Daoist priests took on roles to direct and manage local affairs, tasks typically performed by the literati in the south. Historical sources from the 9th century onward also documented the growing importance of a group of militarized local strongmen known as tuhao土豪. While some of them had converted and assumed literati status and left their power base to pursue an official career, others continued to hold on to their local base. In late 12th and early 13th centuries, many of these local magnates in north China took advantage of the power vacuum at the local level created by the Mongol invasion and established semi-independent political domains that lasted for about half a century. This north-south divide in the elites’ local activism reveals deep-rooted regional variations in the middle period, which continued to shape late imperial Chinese society.