Chapter 3, “Inner versus Outer – The Politics of Political Space,” reviews the spatial dynamics of the Song court that are reflected in the conceptual and spatial dichotomy between inner and outer (nei/wai 內/外) and posits the inner and outer courts as competing and separate political and administrative centers of imperial technocratic versus Confucian institutionalist governance. Most critical was the intermediate, overlapping space where the emperor served as the sanctioned conduit between these two administrative spheres of Song governance. This chapter counters the contention that “the Song had no inner court,” which is itself merely a modern extension of the rhetorical claim that the Song monarchs succeeded in curtailing the political reach of the affinal kinsmen, female bureaucrats, and eunuchs who administered the mechanics and politics of the inner court. On the contrary, this chapter concludes that over the course of the dynasty court administration shifted progressively away from outer towards the imperial palace’s inner space and thus accorded more control over vital governmental functions to the non-literati operatives of the inner court.

Chapter 8, “The Confucian Challenge,” focuses on how the Qingli (1041–1049) reformers sought to strengthen existing agencies and procedures and build new ones that would transform Confucian principles into an active Confucian institutionalism – a functioning administrative system. The advent of a strident Confucianism among a small subset of officials in the 1020s and 1030s directly challenged the ecumenical premises and administrative practices of the Song founders. I focus on how committed Confucian literati worked through four institutions – the Secretariat (Zhongshu 中書), the Censorate (Yushitai御史臺), the Bureau of Policy Criticism (Jianyuan 諫院), and the Academies and Institutes (guan’ge 館閣) – to create a new conception of Song “shared governance” (gongzhi tianxia 共治天下). These efforts attempted to replace the earlier notion of personal loyalty to the ruler with a broader concept of loyalty to principles and practices often described as the “essential body of the state” (guoti 國體) or as “public, or impartial, opinion” (gonglun 共論). The moral attainments of Confucian education replaced raw “talent” as a basic qualification for office. The notion of guoti gave preference to ordered hierarchies of offices, each with a defined relationship to the other.

The final chapter, “The Rhythms of Song History” demonstrates that the positive Taizu–Qingli–Yuanyou axis of political value and the negative “lineage of evil” axis fused to create an image of dynastic history as a perpetual oscillation between political and moral florescence and decline. This last chapter postulates that these undulating historiographical cycles reflect not the moral battles between Confucian good and evil but the truly historical, political struggles between two conceptions of the Song state, one a kind of technocratic patrimonialism, the other a Confucian institutionalism. Transitions between these two modalities of governance produced the historical revisionism that gave eventual rise to the grand allegory. These were the Qingli period, the Yuanyou period, the early (pre-Qin Gui) Shaoxing period (1131–1138), and the Jiading (1208–1224) period. All of these eras experienced either defensive or offensive wars that sparked domestic political upheavals, and these political conflicts then generated historiographical revisionism. This chapter, and the book, concludes with a one paragraph summary of the allegory written using the rhetoric of Song Confucianism and the same paragraph then translated into the language of modern social science. This juxtaposition demonstrates the continuing influence of the grand allegory until modern times.