Zhao Kuangyin was an aspiring filmmaker. He once watched someone else put on a play. A general’s men draped a dragon robe over their leader and declared him the next emperor. The general resisted, then accepted. But he wasn’t impressed. The pacing had problems. It was too light on emotion. So he decided to remake it himself.
A few years later, he directed the exact same play and cast himself as the lead. Wait, what are you guys doing? Long live the emperor! No, no, I can’t be the emperor. Okay fine, but please behave and don’t pillage the city. Then he cried and reluctantly became the first emperor of the Song dynasty.
Let’s be meta for a bit. Whenever someone founded a new dynasty, they would look at the mistakes made by the previous one and try to correct them. It’s a centuries-long process of trial and error. Mostly error.
Zhao Kuangyin didn’t want the generals to have military power. He didn’t want to give it to the eunuchs either. Basically he thought no one should have power except himself. So he staged another play. He invited his founding team for drinks, then cried and said, what if someone else put a dragon robe on you guys? How about you give your army command to me? The founding team looked at each other and agreed.
He created a system that only Jeff Bezos and he could have come up with. Every three years, they did a personnel turnover on the commanders and their soldiers. He didn’t want the commanders to form bonds with the soldiers. The end result was, the managers didn’t know their employees, and the employees didn’t know their manager.
His brother was also a filmmaker. One night, the two brothers were drinking together. We don’t know what happened, but we heard the sound of an axe chopping. The next day, his brother walked outside, cried, and said, oh no, my brother is dead. The brother became the next emperor. After six years, he took out a box and said, my mom wanted me to be the next emperor after my brother. All the ministers were like, yeah, right.
Remember the natural Great Wall thing that was ceded to the Khitans? Turns out that land also produced good horses, and now the emperor wanted it back. So he invaded Khitan. During the Tang dynasty, Li Shimin had beaten all the barbarian tribes. But it had been 350 years. The tribes were no longer tribes. They had formed their own empires, big enough to rival the Song dynasty.
The Khitan won the battle decisively. So decisively that the Chinese lost everything. The emperor found a donkey cart, drove it back to the capital, and stayed in the palace for the rest of his life. He thought he lost because the Song dynasty didn’t have enough horses, so he collected all the horses in the country and brought them to the capital, only to raise them badly. He also dug holes alongside the border and filled them with water to deter the cavalry. But he forgot that water freezes in winter.
The next emperor was his son. During his reign, the Khitan invaded, and Song technically won the battle. But both sides didn’t want to fight anymore, so they sat down and started negotiating. The Khitan demanded land. Song refused. In the end, Song gave them money and silk.
His son Zhao Zhen was a bit unusual for a good emperor. He couldn’t fight. He couldn’t scheme. He was just… patient and kind to everyone. One night he was hungry, but he didn’t want his chef to make it a habit and kill an extra lamb every night, so he said nothing. The other time when he found sand in his food, he told his servant, don’t tell anyone about this, or you’ll be killed.
You thought Li Shimin was chill for letting his ministers scold him. When Zhao Zhen’s minister spat in his face, he just wiped it away. He had zero military results, but then again, every other Song emperor had zero military results anyway. When he died, even the Khitan emperor cried. Then people gave him the posthumous title “Benevolence”.