Bibliographical Essay

The secondary source scholarship devoted at least in part to the dynamism in relations between Chinese rebel insurgencies of the ‘medieval' or ‘middle imperial' centuries (roughly the ninth to fourteenth centuries) and the armies of the imperial state as instruments in quashing them has surged markedly of late, with this chapter profiting appreciably from this.

With respect to the ninth-century situation, by far the most illuminating of these emergent works here drawn upon is Nicolas Tackett's The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), which will assuredly serve as an inspirational beacon for all future studies on its namesake subject generally and on the disruptive influence of the rebel qua ruler Huang Chao (d. 884) in particular. An additional recent work of importance is A Portrait of Five Dynasties China: From the Memoirs of Wang Renyu (880-956) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) by Glen Dudbridge. Despite focusing more fully on the ensuing, intensely divisive period of Five Dynasties (907-60) that succeeded the Tang dynasty (618-907), through the compelling retrospective insights afforded by his diaries, the roving scholarofficial Wang Renyu, via Dudbridge's lucid translation and interpretation, conveys across time to us the devastating impact of Huang Chao, whose tenure as a fleetingly victorious usurper intersected with Wang's own birth and earliest formative years.

For the purpose of enhancing our knowledge on the subsequent rebellion led by Fang La (d. 1121) at the close of the initial or Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), we have long had to depend principally on two seminal articles published in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies by the scholar Kao Yu-kung [Gao Yougong] in the 1960s - namely, his ‘A Study of the Fang La Rebellion', HJAS 24 (1962-3), 17-63 and ‘Source Materials on the Fang La Rebellion', HJAS 26 (1966), 211-41. However, to this monographic and still essential scholarship in English on Fang La may now be added several studies that are more broadly focused on the history of Chinese sectarian violence as a whole.

These works advance our understanding not merely of Fang La but also of traditional Chinese religious heresy, violence - whether perpetrated by the populace or exacted against it in reaction by the state - and the inextricable and frequently combustible relationship between the two. Notable among these later studies are Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture edited by Jonathan N. Lipman and Stevan Harrell (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990); Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History by Hubert Seiwert, with Ma Xisha (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China edited by Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004); and The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture by Richard Von Glahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). However, newer still are those works that specifically facilitate our appreciation of the historical context that spawned the insurrection of Fang La as well as the numerous would-be similar uprisings that arose to shape and, from the standpoint of the state, plague China's late medieval age. Two prime examples of this growing fund of illuminating secondary literature are Emperor Huizong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and The Reunification of China: Peace through War under the Song Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) by Peter Lorge.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

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