Tradition and turmoil in South China in the ninth and tenth centuries
The aristocratic houses of the Jin 晉(265–420 CE) through the Tang 唐 (618–906) Dynasties in China participated in an exclusive court culture where pedigree and cultural refinement were the primary means to claim political office, as well as the basis of elite social relations. By the end of this period, many great houses had maintained traditions of literary cultivation and government service for hundreds of years. This stability was reinforced by the political system and its record-keeping practices. Successive courts maintained records of each family’s history of merit, partitioning them into nine ranks (jiu pin 九品) that became relatively fixed measures of status, and which were used to determine placement in government service and negotiate marriages.
The nine rank system was effectively a compromise between the relatively weak imperial houses of the Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties and the relatively strong aristocrats of this era: documentation of formal status and promise of position in exchange for supporting the dynasty. Despite gradual introduction of newly prominent houses and removal of those in decline, the system helped maintain the status of old families and made it hard for new ones to join the ranks of the aristocracy. In the Tang the imperial house was stronger than any of its predecessors and less dependent on the old clans; a growing economy and increased distribution of texts also allowed more new families to claim wealth and education, and warfare created opportunities for others to rise to rank through military valor. Nonetheless, ancient houses continued to dominate positions at court — largely through their exclusive pedigrees as ranked clans — even as the countryside produced more new blood.
Starting in the eighth century and culminating in the ninth and tenth centuries, a series of crises challenged and finally ended the dominance of the Tang court and its aristocracy. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763 challenged the authority of the imperial court and effectively removed large portions of the empire from its control. The Huang Chao Rebellion of 874–884, historically considered less important than An Lushan, has recently been shown to have killed many of the highest-level aristocrats when it captured the two capitals of Chang’an and Luoyang in 880. This was followed by nearly a century of warfare between rival claimants to the imperial throne — a succession of five states in the North, and ten in the South. The upheaval and multiple courts of the late Tang and especially the so-called “Five Dynasties and Ten States” (wudai shiguo 五代十國) provided opportunities for many new families to rise to prominence, whether through wealth, valor or bureaucratic service.
Comparing family histories to the master narratives
Older scholarship based largely on retrospective accounts from the eleventh century long held that the Tang aristocracy declined in the late eighth century in the wake of the An Lushan Rebellion, while more recent work has demonstrated that the late ninth century Huang Chao Rebellion was actually a more important event in their demise, largely because it killed a great number of courtiers during the capture of the two capitals. But many aristocratic families were still able to adapt to the changing circumstances of the ninth and tenth centuries and beyond.
Turning our attention to the regional picture in South China this latter narrative of resilience holds strongly. While the events of this period were quite disruptive in South China, some of its regional aristocrats were able to preserve their institutions and records until much later periods. Throughout the Song 宋 (approx. 976–1279 in South China), Yuan 元 (1279–1368 in the South), and Ming 明 (1368–1644), Ji’an 吉安 in central Jiangxi maintained a particular reputation as a place with great continuity and tradition. Approximately half of the leading families of fifteenth century Ji’an claimed pre-Song ancestry in the region. Some of these lineages were able to provide written documents as proof of their early ancestry, while others relied on oral traditions and the remains of tombs and other edifices as evidence.
There are few original documents remaining from this period, but enough were transmitted second-hand to Song descendants and ultimately to their more distant heirs in the Ming to leave scattered evidence of the period. Such records as survive demonstrate the continuation of pre-Song traditions in Song Ji’an and show a distinct progress of history in the interior south. Pre-Song migrants to central Jiangxi showed substantial resilience in adapting to the shifting social worlds of the ninth and tenth century; many their descendants reinvented themselves as scholars and officials along the Song model, and many recompiled genealogies to ensure that their traditions were passed on to descendants and their lineages remained unbroken.
A closer look at this scattered evidence reveals that the late ninth and tenth centuries were less disruptive to the South than in the North. While rival armies raged repeatedly across the North China Plain, the South was relatively peaceful for most of the period after Huang Chao’s capture of many southern cities in 878–9. The century between 880 and 980 nonetheless featured substantial turnover in the local elite. Of the “old families” in post-Song Ji’an, a nontrivial number claimed descent from great clans of the Tang, but for the most part their local power and pedigree stemmed from positions they attained under the Chu 楚 (907–951), Wu 吳 (907–937) and Southern Tang 南唐 (937–975) states that dominated the South after the Tang fell. Some of this may have been related to the Huang Chao rebellion — Ji’an itself was sacked in 878 — but more of it was related to later events.
Let us look at this by turning to the prefaces in the literary collections of Wang Zhi 王直, a high official in the early Ming. These were chosen somewhat arbitrarily, because of my impression that Wang was very careful to record place names, dates and chain of documentation. In the early fifteenth century, Wang wrote forwards for thirty-eight lineages local to central Jiangxi, of which thirty-five had enough information to give them approximate dates. Twenty-one dated their first local ancestry to the tenth century or earlier; but of these twenty-one, fourteen dated to the very late ninth or tenth centuries. This yields a rough estimate that about 1/5 locals claimed ancestry predating the fall of the Tang, but closer to 2/5 claimed local ancestry dating from between about 880 and 980 — roughly the century starting with the fall of the Tang and ending with the Song conquest of South China.
There is also good reason to doubt many of the claims to pre-tenth century ancestry, and good reason to believe many of the narratives of tenth-century immigration. Of the houses citing Tang or pre-Tang ancestors, few of them had the documentation to back up these claims. The Xitian Xi 西田習氏 and the Kanxi Liu 龕溪劉氏 both wrote narratives giving very early dates to their local founders, but both of these were based exclusively on oral traditions and might easily have been copied or falsified. The Taihe Chen 泰和陳氏 house claimed descent from a censorial official, but Wang noted that twenty generations were missing from their genealogy. The only house with relatively plausible claims to descend from Tang aristocrats was the Gaoping Guo 高平郭氏, although Wang does not concretely specify what evidence leads him to rate their genealogy so highly. Another house — the Cangqian Zhou 倉前周氏 — boasted a notarized deed from the 740s, but they very well may have been descended from commoners whose prestige only rose later in their history.
The narratives claiming first ancestors immigrating in the tenth century are somewhat more plausible. While they do not necessarily boast more evidence than families claiming even earlier ancestors, they also do not make the same level of claim. The majority of these founding ancestors were relatively minor, local officials in service to one or more of the short-lived states: the first Taoyuan Xiao 桃源蕭氏 in Jiangxi left an unnamed post at the northern state of Liang 梁; the local founder of the Longjiang Peng 龍江彭氏 served the Ma 馬 house in Chu; the Nitian Zhou 泥田周氏 descended from a general of the state of Wu; and a Yang 楊 house and two branches of a Liang 梁 lineage all descended from officials of the Southern Tang.
The migration patterns seen in these narratives of the tenth century further suggest a distinct local history, one in which Ji’an was seen as a haven for families fleeing upheavals in other parts of the south. Unlike much of the North, which was repeatedly ravaged by armies rampaging between Taiyuan, Luoyang and Kaifeng, the South was relatively peaceful. Wars in the South were mainly confined to the Yangzi River region, and many were effectively coups the capitals. This is clearly visible in the narratives conveyed in genealogies. Of the lineages for whom Wang Zhi wrote, the Nanxi Xiao 南溪蕭氏 and Hu 胡氏 houses were both founded by people who fled Changsha when its overlord Ma Yin 馬殷 broke away from the Tang Dynasty in 896. The Longjiang Peng fled Changsha when Ma Yin died in 930. The specificity in naming Ma’s state of Chu — and in the stories offered — suggest that these were genuine received accounts. Compare the narratives of three lines of the Hu house that fled from Changsha:
During the Five Dynasties, When Ma Yin rebelled we fled to Ji’an.
五季時遭馬殷亂辟地扵吉. （Li Shimian 李時勉, Fangjing Hu Genealogy Forward 芳徑胡氏族譜序)
When the Ma House rebelled, we fled to Luling and formed three houses.
馬氏僣亂辟地廬陵分為三族. (Wang Li 王禮, Hexi Hu Genealogy Forward 和溪胡氏族譜序)
The Hu house previously lived in Changsha. When Ma Yin rebelled, three brothers named Gao, Xian and Hao fled to Ji’an.
胡氏先居長沙，馬殷之亂，有兄弟三人曰杲暹昊者始避地來吉 (Wang Zhi 王直, Hu Genealogy Forward 胡氏族譜序)
At a distance of five-hundred years, three different writers, writing for three different branches of the Hu house, using different details and language in their accounts all told fundamentally the same story. When the state of Chu fell following the death of Ma Yin in 951, the ancestors of two related Xiao lineages fled to the Ji’an area, each later gave a different tellings of the same story. One is very brief:
Five brothers fled the Ma Xisheng rebellion.
避馬希聲亂兄弟五人 (Zhou Shixiu 周是修, Shahu Xiao Genalogy Forward 沙湖蕭氏族譜序)
The other gives a more complete telling of the story:
The Xiao house comes from Tang Board of Works Secretary Wenyuan. During the Tang, Ma Yin, the Prince of Chu, led armies to seize Hunan. Wenyuan, who had passed the examinations, was in mourning at home when he was impressed serve in the army. Wenyuan urged Ma Yin to submit to the Tang; Yin used his advice and submitted as Wu’an Military Governor and Prince of Chu, and controlled Hunan as he had before; he further sent a memorial requesting to recruit Wenyuan into the bureaucracy and retain him as a military official. When Yin died, his sons competed and fought one another. Wenyuan feared disaster and with his elder brother Qianyuan and younger brothers Shengyuan, Tiyuan and Baoyuan, planned to flee. They cast their fortune and decided to proceed to the marshes and sandbars of the Jianghan plain, where they stopped and then proceeded to Luyuan in Xichang. After waiting a year, the conflict did not subside, and four of them split up — one lived in Xiafang, Xinyu in Yuanzhou; on in Xiajiang, Xingan in Linjiang; one in Shangzhou in Longquan; and one in Tangxia in Luling. This last one was Grand Secratary Wenyuan.
蕭氏岀唐軍諮酒署工部尚書聞元，當唐之季楚王馬殷以兵據湖南，聞元舉制科居喪扵家強起之叅軍事，聞元勸殷效順扵唐，殷用其計遂拜武安節度使楚王如故領鎮湖南，乃奏授聞元官仍叅軍事，殷卒諸子争立相攻害延無辜，聞元恐禍及與兄荆南節度掌書記乾元及弟聖元體元寳元五人謀避地，筮得坎約值江漢源灘洲沙浦即止旣而偕行至西昌之瀘源止焉，期年峒徭不寧其四人者復散之他一居袁州新喻之下坊，一居臨江新淦之峽江，一居龍泉之上州，一居盧陵之大塘下者，則尚書聞元也
Chen Xun 陳循, Luoxi Xiao Genealogy Forward 螺溪蕭氏譜序
Several other lineages give accounts of fleeing the rise and fall of the Ma house in Chu that are similar in their outlines but different in their details and phrasing.
Four of the other lineages Wang Zhi wrote for probably left Nanjing (then called Jinling 金陵) between the last decades of the Tang and the rise of the Song. Although the details of these moves are less clear, they probably related to politics at the Wu and Southern Tang courts. Two other families claim founders who left the Liang 梁 (907–923) or Wuyue 吴越 (907–978) courts during the tenth century — one after long service as an official, the other a prince given position by the Song in return for his state’s surrender. The relative obscurity of these events and specificity of the details suggests their veracity. Whether or not these lineages themselves made true claims may be questionable, but even if they did not they most certainly copied them from some lineages that experienced these events.
While armies raged across North China, and courtiers plotted at Changsha and Nanjing, central Jiangxi was relatively sheltered from the events of the tenth century; yet this did not mean that the region did not feel repercussions from these distant conflicts. Some older residents of Ji’an, perhaps including descendants of the Tang and pre-Tang elites, held on to their natal homes and did their best to adapt to the tides of history. But increasingly, the leading families of the region were immigrants — officials fleeing the chaos at Changsha, governors posted from Nanjing, and later leaders in the Song military.
Regardless of their earlier ancestry, these families rose to local prominence through their posts in the Chu, Wu and Souther Tang states, or only later in the Song. Despite the military destruction of Ji’an itself being less than in other parts of the former Tang empire, the social changes in the wake of the demise of the Tang ruling estate had major repercussions. Foremost among them was the rise of new families to prominence, enabled by widespread migration and by the opportunities for office offered by the multiple states succeeding the Tang, all of which functioned without clan lists and the corresponding closure of the governing class.
Works Referenced
David Johnson, The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy, Westview Press (1977)
Patricia Ebrey, The Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China, Cambridge (1979)
Peter Lorge, War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, Routledge (2005)
Nicholas Tackett, The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy, Harvard (2014)
Gungwu Wang, The Structure of Power in North China During the Five Dynasties, Stanford (1963)
