The Song Dynasty, General History of China (960-1279).

However brilliant it was, the Song Dynasty (960-1279), one of the longest in imperial China, ruled only over central China and even only southern China from the 12th century. Constantly constrained by the power of the steppe empires, born like it from the decomposition of the immense Tang empire, the Song empire had to deal as equals with the Khitan-Liao (907-1125) then the Jurchen-Jin (1115-1234) in the North, or the Xi-Xia (1032-1227) in the Northwest. The tension between the universal vocation of its imperial enterprise and the incompleteness of its sovereignty partly explains the economic, commercial and financial dynamism that made Song China a land and maritime crossroads, linking North Asia to the South Seas. Above all, the institutional and technical innovations that multiplied between the 10th and 13th centuries, as well as the intellectual creativity stimulated, among other factors, by the rise of examinations, laid the foundations of a new bureaucratic regime, the very one that was to dominate the government of China until the end of the empire in 1911.
This book offers a synthesis of the works that have renewed the history of the period since Chinese historians regained their place in the international community, some forty years ago.