Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
complex pattern of diplomatic relations between the Song and the Liao
eventually emerged during the eleventh century. This diplomacy
involved the frequent dispatch of ad hoc envoys and their retinues
who traveled to the neighboring emperor's court for a time and then
left; the European norm of fixed embassies and permanent residential
diplomacy was almost completely unknown in premodern China, as
the British and other Western nations were to discover during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Two types of traveling embassies were exchanged annually between
the Song and the Liao: birthday felicitation envoys and new year felici-
tation envoys. Several other types of embassies were dispatched on an
irregular, as-needed basis when reigning emperors, empresses, or
dowager empresses passed away and new ones were enthroned. All
of these embassies were of course purely ceremonial, but at a mini-
mum they did maintain yearly diplomatic contact between the two
states and served as reminders of the inviolability of the Shanyuan
Treaty. Other types of embassies conducted substantive, negotiatory
contact between the two states.
Song relations with the Jurchens basically followed the precedents
established after the Shanyuan Treaty. With the exception of the period
from 1142 to the 1160s, when the Song was nominally a vassal to the
Jin, Song and Jin emperors continued to regard and address each other
as equals in their diplomatic communications and ritual.
NEO-CONFUCIANISM
During the late Tang period, a reaction against Buddhism was
developing among China's intellectual elite. An essay written by the
late Tang scholar Han Yu (768-824), encouraging a Tang emperor not
to receive a reputed finger bone of the Buddha as a sacred relic, is
widely regarded as the opening salvo against Buddhism and the
beginning of a Confucian revival that flourished during the sub-
sequent Song period and beyond.
Neo-Confucianism was a rediscovery or reassertion of China's
Confucian past, often seemingly at the expense of the Buddhist herit-
age from India. The Song dynasty framers of Neo-Confucianism
attempted to show that authentic Confucian thought could address
many of the profound cosmological and metaphysical concerns dealt
with by Buddhism. Neo-Confucianists argued that a Confucian cos-
mology could be abstracted from some of the most ancient Chinese
texts, and they eventually identified a corpus of these texts to serve
as an authoritative statement of Confucius's ideology and the very
