Very little changed immediately after the official end of the Tang Dynasty in 907. Tang central authority had evaporated well before the Later Liang Dynasty was established putatively on the ruins of the Tang Dynasty. In reality, the government of the Liang Dynasty controlled only a large part of north China, with powerful enemies on its northern border; it had no authority in south China. A new steppe empire, the Kitan, was also established in 907, and it would play an active role in Chinese politics until the beginning of the eleventh century. Southern China and Sichuan were governed by a number of different states, with rulers claiming a wide variety of titles from emperor on down. Just as the north would see a succession of imperial houses, so too would those states in the south and Sichuan see a succession of rulers and imperial houses.

At first, this multistate environment seemed likely to replay the centuries of struggle for dominance of the Six Dynasties period. Many of the same forces and divisions were in place. Türkic elites with extensive involvement in north China were locked in a struggle with other Türkic, steppe, and Chinese elites to control the government, and southern elites largely governed their own states. But this time the period of division lasted only fifty years, a lifetime for many, yet otherwise a relatively brief interregnum over the course of Chinese history. The new dynasty that emerged in 960, the Song Dynasty, was, like so many things in Chinese history, both very familiar and very different from the dynasties that had preceded it. Most notably, in sharp contrast to the Tang, there was no Türkic influence within the imperial families or the elites, and a new bureaucratic elite emerged in the late tenth century who earned their positions not from aristocratic pedigree, but from passing civil service exams alone.