Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
5.3.
The timeline depicts the episodic character of spatial renovation in Song dynasty
China. The 1,000-plus instances of Song spatial change are clustered into three eras,
each of which lasted for several decades. Short-term politics, catastrophic events, and
long-term structural issues all contributed to the transformation of the Song landscape.
cedures for wresting court control over resources from the tax-farming
warlords who governed much of China in the ninth century. Making
hundreds of adjustments to the spatial landscape during its founding
decades, the Song regime created a unified spatial organization appro-
priate to a single imperial entity: it had a northern defense perimeter,
separate political and commercial cores, and a remote southern frontier.
One-third of all spatial change during this era transpired on the southern
frontier, where the Song court consolidated remote, miasmic, and im-
poverished jurisdictions where civil officials refused to serve. The year
1005, when the Song court signed a peace treaty with its Khitan Liao
neighbors to the north, marks the end of the founding generation, and
spatial change essentially ceased the same year.
The eleventh century saw territorial ramifications resulting from
real hostilities and imagined threats from pastoralist and tribal neigh-
bors. The need to invest in a wartime landscape on the steppes required
consolidating jurisdictions in the imperial core if they were secure and
tendered litle tax revenue while establishing new ones that could assist
the court in capturing new sources of wealth or meeting its military
objectives. During the New Policies reform era of the 1070s, provincial
authority and revenue-sharing mechanisms expanded. As shown in fig-
ure 5.4, the most marginal jurisdictions in north China were abolished,
with the demotions there supporting colonization initiatives and new
