Great Lecture on Chinese History: A Chat about the Five Dynasties

Author: Shen Qiwei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: The History of the Five Dynasties was the modern history of the Song Dynasty, but for some reason, it gradually faded away and eventually disappeared from teahouses and storytelling venues. Although we can still see the surviving fragments of the Song people's New Compendium of the History of the Five Dynasties and the Romance of the Remnants of the Tang and Five Dynasties attributed to Luo Guanzhong, they are both very brief and cannot be compared to Romance of the Three Kingdoms. As a result, people are generally familiar with the history of the Three Kingdoms (often treating the novel as history in modern times), but they are usually quite unfamiliar with the history of the Five Dynasties. The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms were indeed a transitional period between the Tang and Song dynasties, bridging the past and the future. Historians either tend to classify the Five Dynasties as part of the Sui and Tang dynasties (calling it the Sui-Tang-Five Dynasties period) or advocate grouping it with the Liao, Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties as a single phase. According to the author's view, Chinese feudal society can be divided into two periods. After the great peasant uprising at the end of the Tang Dynasty, the feudal aristocratic system of the Middle Ages was completely destroyed, and the distinction between scholars and commoners within the ruling class vanished entirely. Feudal society began to enter its later period. The Five Dynasties marked the beginning of the later period, or rather, a transitional stage between the two periods.