318 t He F i v e Dy na s t i e s anD t He s ong Dy na s t y
Rising five thousand fathoms Hua Mountain
brushes against the heavens.
Our former dynasty’s subjects have used up their tears
amid barbarian dust,
As southward they look for the imperial army,
another year has passed!
[QSS 39:25.24780; JNSGJZ 25.1774]秋夜將曉, 出籬門迎凉有感
(qiū yè jiāng xiăo, chū lí mén yíng liáng yŏu găn)
three ten thousand miles Yellow River eastward enter sea 三萬里河東入海
(sān wàn lĭ hé dōng rù hăi)
five thousand fathoms sacred mountain upward rub heaven 五千仞嶽上摩天^
(wŭ qiān rèn yuè shàng mó tiān)
residual people tears use up barbarian dust inside 遺民淚盡胡塵裏^
(yí mín lèi jìn hú chén lĭ)
southward gaze royal army another one year 南望王師又一年^
(nán wàng wáng shī yòu yī nián)
[Tonal pattern II, see p. 170]
Lu You (1125–1209), who composed this poem, was but one year old when the Jur-
chen armies invaded the Song empire from the northeast; sacked the capital, Bian-
liang (Kaifeng); and captured the reigning emperor (Qinzong, r. 1125–1126) and his
father (Huizong, r. 1100–1125) and took them and other members of the imperial
family back north as prisoners. This was not a temporary national humiliation.
The new emperor retreated to the south of the Yangtze River and eventually estab-
lished a new capital at Lin’an (present-day Hangzhou). The Southern Song even-
tually concluded a peace treaty with the invaders that effectively ceded to them the
cultural heartland of the Yellow River plain, where the Chinese capitals had always
been located. The Southern Song would never regain the north, although during
Lu You’s lifetime there were periodic calls from frustrated statesmen to attempt to
do just that. The effect of the disaster of 1126 lasted until a greater one struck in the
1270s, when Khublai Khan (d. 1294) sent his armies against the Southern Song.
By conquering the dynasty, he completed the Mongol conquest of the great eastern
empires (the Western Liao, Xi Xia, and Jin), which his grandfather Genghis (ca.
1167–1227) and his uncle Ögödei (d. 1241) had begun, consolidating control over
the entirety (and more) of the lands that had once been under Chinese control. It
would be another hundred years before the Chinese rose up and put an end to the
Mongol Yuan dynasty. The invasion of 1126 thus marked the start of two and a half
centuries of foreign domination of northern China.
When Emperor Gaozong (r. 1127–1163) fled south across the Yangtze in 1127,
hundreds of thousands of people—officials, their families, and virtually anyone
else who could manage to leave the north—followed suit. But millions of their