Abstract

During the eleventh century, literati of the Song Empire (960–1279) tried, for the first time, to capture the experience of urban space in writing. Rather than a purely literary experiment, this effort constituted part of an attempt to discern a universal moral pattern in the apparent chaos of city life. Whoever succeeded in representing the city in a manner that was both accurate and coherent, both comprehensive and dynamic, would thereby demonstrate a complete understanding of economic activity, the necessary basis for perfect governance and lasting order. Because money and commerce brought to urban residents the goods they required to survive, literati reasoned that money and commerce must be beneficent, and because they were beneficent, they must conform to natural principles, as all that was enduringly sustaining of life and well-being must be rooted in nature. And because money and commerce conformed to a natural pattern, the city must function like a living organism. In the 1030s and 1040s, literati were confident that they stood near the discovery of this enduring moral pattern, and to the restoration of the perfect governance of antiquity. By the end of the eleventh century, however, their hopes were defeated through violent debate. In exile and retirement, discouraged men began to seek the pattern of all things in themselves rather than in society, and resolved to establish moral order in their family and community rather than throughout the empire. This endeavour turned them back toward the countryside, away from the city. A literary and intellectual history of the city in the eleventh century thus traces a shift in the care of the self, from an ambition of securing the prosperous health of the empire and its subjects through universal policy, to an attempt to approach universal truth through individual cultivation and local action.

Keywords: Song Dynasty, urban literature, natural analogy, financial reform, intellectual crisis