Historians of pre-modern China have one of the largest collections of official historiography to work with. Between the Han (206 BCE-220) and the Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties, the courts ruling over Chinese territories compiled comprehensive histories of their immediate predecessors and wrote drafts of their own official dynastic history. The official histories, twenty-five in total, take up thousands of volumes (39,966,334 characters in the digital version available from Academia Sinica in Taiwan) but only a tiny fraction of this material is available in western languages. Apart from the earliest histories, the dynastic histories are largely inaccessible to audiences illiterate in classical Chinese. Until the publication of Richard Davis' Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, there was not a single work in English that exposed a western audience to the dynastic histories of medieval China in their full complexity.
The lack of full-scale western translations of the dynastic histories is partly due to the magnitude of the originals. The histories typically include annalistic chronologies of each emperor's reign, large numbers of biographies, treatises on subjects of interest to the court such as astronomy, economy or the recruitment and organization of the civil service, and tables such as a genealogical table of the imperial family. Ouyang Xiu's history (1007-1072), published posthumously in 1077, is much shorter than other dynastic histories of the medieval and late imperial period. It is the third shortest of all twenty-five histories. Richard Davis' translation, 602 pages long, covers, in his own estimate, around two thirds of the original text.
The lack of full-scale translations is also due to the narrowly defined uses the dynastic histories have been put to among western academics. Most recent translations render specific treatises or biographies in English while omitting their larger historiographical context. The combined translation of annals, biographies and accounts of hereditary houses makes Davis' translation the only useful introduction to the genre of the dynastic history in medieval times. The annals (Chapters 1-12, pp. 1-116) recount the rise to power of dynastic founders and usurpers, and list the court activities that follow once they have ascended the imperial throne. The summary descriptions of royalty deaths and accessions, court ritual, civil and military appointments, court intrigue, warfare, natural disasters, rebellions, and diplomacy in the annals are complemented by accounts in the biographies of members of the imperial families (Chapters 13-20, pp. 117-190), and other participants in court life and politics (military commanders, ministers and high officials, eunuchs, actors and musicians; Chapters 21-57, pp. 191-466).
Because of his primary interest in "politics and personality" (XVI), Davis elected not to include the treatises on astronomy and administrative geography; the supplementary chapters on non-Chinese peoples were left out as well. While the decision not to include the treatises is understandable given their lack of descriptive detail, the omission of the three chapters on non-Chinese peoples on the grounds that they do not lend themselves well to translation (XVI) and contain many mistakes (LXVIII) is regrettable. These chapters vividly depict Ouyang's understanding of the peoples with whom the northern and southern dynasties frequently interacted in the tenth century, and they reflect the parameters that shaped eleventh-century literate understanding of these same peoples. While Davis rightly underscores that Ouyang Xiu's historical craft is most evident in his biographical accounts and in the exploration of personality that pervades all translated chapters, the omitted chapters signal that the writing of dynastic history involved more.
With the exception of the treatises and the appendix, Davis' work achieves its goals of comprehensiveness and representative selection. Historical Records of the Five Dynasties includes examples from all the different categories of biographies included in the original. Subjects from different dynasties were selected when available, and all selected biographies are translated in full. Davis also ought to be applauded for his decision to translate the commentaries and notes included in the original version. In the commentaries attached to individual biographical entries or to full chapters, Ouyang Xiu reflected on the meaning of the recorded events. Only in the commentaries did the historian speak explicitly in his own voice. They provided the space for the moralistic evaluations of personalities and human actions, the drawing of conclusions of the long-term impact of individual events, as well as the criticism of standard official historiography. In one of the commentaries, for example, Ouyang Xiu elaborated on his misgivings on the importance attached to omens in the court diaries that formed the primary source material for the annals. (519-520) The notes sometimes provide background information to the events recounted in the main text, but are mostly valuable as illustrations of the historiographical assumptions underlying the compilation of Ouyang's history. In the notes a student of Ouyang's explained the rationale behind the selection of events and the different wording used to describe similar events. One note, for example, commented on the selection of military campaigns, "The Five Dynasties being an age of turmoil, its armies had scarcely a day of rest, so every military action cannot possibly be mentioned. Therefore, when armies deployed are neither victorious nor vanquished, when cities under assault are neither won nor lost, then no citation is made" (p. 16, n. xiii).
The above quotation points to the second major contribution of Davis' translation. Historical Records of the Five Dynasties is not only the best introduction to Chinese dynastic historiography in medieval times, but also an excellent and first-hand account of a century scarcely discussed in Chinese history textbooks and scholarly monographs. The tenth century has been treated as the end of the cosmopolitan empire of Tang (618-907) and the beginning of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), but not as the century of military kingdoms, five in the north and ten in the south (not counting the failed imperial ambitions of other military commanders). The story of the Five Dynasties (Chapters 1-57, pp. 1-466) and the Ten Kingdoms [[1]] (Chapters 58-70, pp. 467-602) reveals a world in which, as in the words attributed to An Chongrong, a governor nicknamed the "Iron Barbarian," "Pedigree is scarcely necessary to become Son of Heaven. A man needs only strong armies and stout horses!" (418) The biographies predominantly hail and criticize the careers of military commanders, while the annals and accounts of the hereditary houses recount emperors' and kings' military prowess or lack thereof. Historical Records of the Five Dynasties is a procession of short-lived dynastic houses embroiled in violent internal and external conflicts. It offers a spellbinding narrative of violence and deceit that contrasts sharply with the standard image of long-lasting empires and civil over military administration in the pre-modern Chinese world.
Davis' translation allows readers to savor a reading of the history of the tenth century that prevailed among late imperial Chinese literati. Ouyang Xiu's account was officially recognized as "The New History of the Five Dynasties," replacing the older and much larger edition of the history of the Five Dynasties compiled by historians employed by the Song court. From the late eleventh century onwards it has shaped the interpretation of the tenth-century Chinese world, casting it as a cautionary tale of the dangers that befell dynastic houses that neglected the observation of the Confucian principles that structured the familial, societal and political order. The moralistic tenor of Ouyang's historiography rarely surfaces explicitly in the historical narratives but pervades the commentary. The Confucian apologetics in the commentary underscores the discontinuities between the tenth-century world and the eleventh-century empire reunified and pacified under the Song emperors: "Through a century of contests among men of valor, mountains and rivers were sealed so tight that neither wind nor air could pass. There is a saying: 'When a fresh wind arises, perpetrators of darkness will submit; when the sun and moon come out, torches will be extinguished'" (467). In addition to the discontinuities Ouyang observed between the divided Chinese world of the tenth century and the reunified empire of the eleventh century, the attentive reader will also be alerted to the political continuities. Ouyang's comments on the shaping influence of the northern and southern courts on Song administrative organization and diplomatic relations merit the careful consideration of historians of Song China who tend to see the institutions developed under the Song as the foundations of late imperial Chinese society.
Davis' Historical Records of the Five Dynasties is a must for historians of medieval and late imperial China. It provides rich source material for medieval historians interested in the comparative study of court life, military history or historiography. The translation is exquisite. Davis' rendering rivals the clarity and fluency for which Ouyang Xiu's style of classical Chinese received high acclaim in Song China and beyond. With the exception of a handful of transliteration problems, the editing is flawless.[[2]] Researchers of Chinese history may regret the editor's decision not to include Chinese characters for personal and place names in the main text. The glossary is furthermore limited to the names of those with biographical entries, omitting persons without an entry such as the Khitan ruler Yelü Deguang who appears a dozen times and proves to be a character that may arouse the curiosity of some historians, including the reviewer. Historical Records of the Five Dynasties includes introductory and supplementary materials (maps, list of kingdoms and rulers, a detailed chronology, a list of district commands, a list of administrative offices, glossaries, and a general introduction) to ease the reader's excursion into the complex history of the tenth century.
NOTES
[[1]] Ouyang Xiu recognized the northern kingdoms as legitimate successors to the Tang Empire. The southern kingdoms received no such recognition among historians, even though most of their rulers (seven out of ten) made the same claims to imperial rule as those ruling in the north.
[[2]] Some personal names are transliterated inconsistently (e.g., pp. 506, 575, 600). Pinyin transliteration requires the separation of syllables by apostrophe where confusion is possible. This transliteration rule is applied inconsistently throughout the work. For example, "Deng Chune" refers to Deng Chu'ne and not Deng Chun'e (548-549).