1 - The Song State Compendium

Summary

Chapter 2 traces the history of the compilation of the Song State Compendium (Song huiyao), a production of the court historiographical operation that was intended as a reference collection of existing precedents for use by court officials. First compiled in 1044, the Compendium was updated about a dozen times throughout the dynasty. An examination of these updatings, however, reveals how dominant political coalitions constantly revised the work to accommodate their historiographical needs. None of these individually revised compendia survive in their original form. The second part of this chapter therefore shows that the presently existing Recovered Draft of the Song State Compendium (Song huiyao jigao) does not represent a systematic, consistent collection of primary documents but derives from a project initiated by Zhao Ruyu (1140–1196) in 1180 to compile a subset of Compendium material that would support the political goals of a coalition of literati officials, many of whom were associated with the Learning of the Way (daoxue) movement. An analysis of the chronological coverage of this surviving body of Compendium material demonstrates how it relates to the once primary archival base of Song state historiography. The chapter concludes with a history of the convoluted transmission of this recovered material to the present and the implications of this fragmentary transmission for modern scholarly use of the work.