6
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms
and the Song Dynasty
Very little changed immediately after the official end of the Tang Dynasty
in 907. Tang central authority had evaporated well before the Later Liang
Dynasty was established putatively on the ruins of the Tang Dynasty. In
reality, the government of the Liang Dynasty controlled only a large part of
north China, with powerful enemies on its northern border; it had no
authority in south China. A new steppe empire, the Kitan, was also
established in 907 , and it would play an active role in Chinese politics
until the beginning of the eleventh century. Southern China and Sichuan
were governed by a number of different states, with rulers claiming a wide
variety of titles from emperor on down. Just as the north would see a
succession of imperial houses, so too would those states in the south and
Sichuan see a succession of rulers and imperial houses.
Atfirst, this multistate environment seemed likely to replay the centuries
of struggle for dominance of the Six Dynasties period. Many of the same
forces and divisions were in place. Türkic elites with extensive involvement
in north China were locked in a struggle with other Türkic, steppe, and
Chinese elites to control the government, and southern elites largely gov-
erned their own states. But this time the period of division lasted onlyfifty
years, a lifetime for many, yet otherwise a relatively brief interregnum over
the course of Chinese history. The new dynasty that emerged in 960 , the
Song Dynasty, was, like so many things in Chinese history, both very
familiar and very different from the dynasties that had preceded it. Most
notably, in sharp contrast to the Tang, there was no Türkic influence
within the imperial families or the elites, and a new bureaucratic elite
emerged in the late tenth century who earned their positions not from
aristocratic pedigree, but from passing civil service exams alone.
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