Bibliographical Essay

Modern historians of early medieval China have given little direct attention to the topic of state-sanctioned violence. In contrast, scholars of the pre-imperial period embrace this theme because of the contemporary approbation of warfare and human sacrifice serving the ancestral cult.

The two authors who have made the greatest contributions to explaining early medieval violence primarily analyse the causes of political instability, and secondarily describe the concomitant bloodshed. Andrew Chittick, Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison, 400-600 ce (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010) studies a local garrison's relationship with the courts of the Southern Dynasties and argues that when a patron's ties with military clients dissolved, the dispersed warriors instigated civil wars and dynastic changes. Andrew Eisenberg, Kingship in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 2008) describes elite politics as a manifestation of classic Weberian patrimonialism and argues that rulers consciously manipulated factional rivalries with violent results.

Most of the evidence to write this chapter was gathered from narratives of political and institutional history, particularly The Cambridge History of China (CHC), which at the time of writing still did not have a volume published on the Six Dynasties (220-581). To fill this lacuna, I relied mainly on Eisenberg's and Chittick's above-mentioned books, and works of Scott Pearce including his monumental dissertation, ‘The Yu-wen Regime in Sixth Century China', unpublished PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1987.

Two noteworthy works on later political history include David McMullen, ‘Put Not Your Trust in Princes: A Political Analysis of the Imperial Clan from 755 to 805', Tang Studies 36.1 (2018), 1-56. and Hongjie Wang, Power and Politics in Tenth-Century China: The Former Shu Regime (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2011). About a third of McMullen's magisterial article is devoted to imperfect policy solutions to the internecine violence of the Tang imperial lineage during the eighth century. Wang's book is the most detailed study in English of a southern state.

For the harem, Keith McMahon, Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) provides a great deal of incidental information about the violence inherent to power struggles in the palace. R. W. L. Guisso, Wu Tse-t'ien and the Politics of Legitimation in T'ang China (Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1978) and N. Harry Rothschild, Wu Zhao: China's Only Female Emperor (New York: Longman, 2008) provide information on Empress Wu's exercise of violence.