The Northern Song fell in the winter of 1127 CE ? the Jingkang Incident. Its emperor was taken captive. Its capital was sacked. Its civilization ? the most commercially sophisticated, most culturally refined the medieval world had produced ? was destroyed in months by a military force it had failed to take seriously.
In The Fall of the Northern Song, E L Hunter reconstructs the catastrophe and its long aftermath, showing how a dynasty fell not because it was weak but because the strengths that had made it extraordinary had also made it unable to defend itself ? and how the civilization that emerged from the wreckage was remade, at terrible cost, into something more durable than what the catastrophe had destroyed. For nine centuries, the fall of the Northern Song has haunted Chinese civilization. This is the story of why.
