From Tang to Song: Transmissions and Inventions in China’s Middle Period, Volume 1

This volume addresses social, cultural, and artistic change during China’s middle period across the Tang dynasty (618–907), the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–960), and the succeeding Song dynasty (960–1279).

Focusing on historiography, political thought, literati culture, and visual arts, the essays demonstrate how disparate the initiating moments and timelines of change were in different social, cultural, or geographic domains. This volume proposes deconstructing distinct processes of change that trace unique temporal arcs, allowing for new hypotheses regarding causal relations. This approach reveals that many perceived “transmissions” from Tang through Song are better understood as retrospective tenth-century or Song “inventions.” The contributing scholars represent many spheres of the field and span several scholarly generations, deploying methodological approaches that encompass cross-genre examinations of canonical and less-studied sources alongside digital humanities techniques.

Accessible to scholars and students of middle period China at all levels, this volume introduces readers to key figures, texts, and debates from Tang to Song while proposing new frameworks and raising important new questions for multiple fields.

Robert Hymes is Carpentier Professor of Chinese history at Columbia University. His work has focused on the social and cultural history of middle period China, studying elite culture, family and kinship, religion, and medicine among other topics. He is currently pursuing two projects, on the East Asian origins of the Black Death and on the problem of “belief” in the middle period. His monographs Statesmen and Gentlemen (1986) and Way and Byway (2002) won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.

Anna M. Shields is Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University, and her work focuses on Tang, tenth century, and Song literature and literary history. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Religion and Literature in Medieval China: The Way and the Words (with Gil Raz, 2023), and “Avatars of Li Bai: Producing Tang Poets in the Northern Song Dynasty,” forthcoming in Imperial Authority and Cultures of Learning in Byzantium and Tang and Song China.