4 - The Daoxue Historians

Summary

“The Daoxue Historians” defines the existence of a distinctive historiography associated with the Southern Song intellectual movement known as the Learning of the Way (daoxue). Understood traditionally as a philosophical movement within Song Confucianism, this chapter accentuates the political aspects of daoxue and the need of its advocates for a historiography that supported their political goals. This chapter examines the historical writings of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), Chen Jun (1174–1244), and Lü Zhong (fl. 1250) as instrumental to the formation of a metanarrative of Song history that became codified in the official Song History (Songshi) of 1345. Drawing on Hartman’s previous scholarship, this chapter focuses on the centrality of works written in the “outline and details” (gangmu) format, first devised by Zhu Xi, as a rhetorical vehicle for this metanarrative. The annalistic “outline and detail” histories, covering the period from 960 through 1189, completed by Chen Jun about 1229, constitute the first privately compiled history of Song from its inception to the writer’s own day. This chapter frames these gangmu histories as “pedagogical,” since they were often intended for instructional purposes, as opposed to the “documentary” focus of the Sichuan school. Lü Zhong’s Lectures on Song History, essentially an extended commentary on Chen Jun’s history, illustrates the pedagogical nature of these works. The chapter closes with a summary of the goals and methods of daoxue historiography.