It must be Song history week here at the Granite Studio. Yesterday I wrote about Yue Fei and today it’s the Liao and the Jin. On January 28, 1005, the Song Dynasty agreed to the Chanzhou Pact with the Khitan Liao. The agreement fixed the boundary between the Song and the Liao and forced the Song court to pay annual tribute to the Khitan rulers. Also today in 1115, the Jurchen leader, Wányán Āgǔdǎ (完顏阿骨打) established the Jin Dynasty. The Jin conquered the Liao in 1125 and continued southward, taking the Song capital at Kaifeng in 1126. In 1142 a treaty was signed between the Song and the Jin that ceded all of China north of the Huai River to the Jurchens.
On this date in 1662, the Ming loyalist and part-time pirate Zheng Chenggong, better known perhaps as Koxinga, accepted the surrender of the Dutch stronghold at Zeelandia, on the island of Taiwan. Zheng and his family would rule the island for the next two decades until a Qing armada, under the command of Shi Lang, a former comrade of Koxinga’s father, defeated the Zheng family and claimed Taiwan for the Qing Empire. Today China recognizes February 1, two days later when an official declaration of surrender was drafted and signed, as the date when the Chinese “took back” Taiwan from the imperialist powers, though Zheng was half-Japanese, the island was a motley mix of Taiwanese natives, pirates, smugglers, and Han colonists, and prior to 1683, no mainland government had attempted to maintain direct administrative control over the island.
On January 28, 1932, the Japanese began their attack on Shanghai, an event remembered as the January 28 Incident (一·二八事变). Following the Mukden Incident in September, 1931, anti-Japanese feelings swept through China, a general boycott was declared along with sporadic demonstrations and rioting in opposition to Japan’s encroachment on Chinese sovereignty. Tensions were so high in Shanghai that on this date in 1932, the Municipal Government declared a state of emergency, deploying troops to protect the international settlements in the city. Japanese marines also came ashore to reinforce the defenses around the Japanese concession and wound up in a firefight with members of the KMT 19th Route Army. The Japanese used this as a pretext to begin aerial bombing and the deployment of thousands of Japanese troops in an all-out effort to take the city. The KMT army put up stiff resistance but the Nationalist government was finally forced to sign the Shanghai Ceasefire Agreement of May 5, 1932 which ordered Chinese troops to pull out of Shanghai, Suzhou, and Kunshan, and recognize Japanese military control of those cities.
Finally, a passage from Sima Guang’s History as a Mirror 資治通鑒, begun in 1065 and presented to the Song Emperor Shenzong in 1084:
Your official Guang comments, The ancients had a saying that if the ruler is enlightened, the ministers will be honest. That Bei Zhu was given to flattery under the Sui Dynasty but to loyalty under the Tang was not because his personality changed: a ruler who resents hearing of his faults turns loyalty into flattery, but one who is pleased by straight talk turns flattery into loyalty. Thus we know that the ruler is the gnomon [a post for measuring the height of the sun], the minister the shadow. When the gnomon moves, the shadow follows.
- Zhizhi tongjian 192:626, no 16 3:6029, translated and published in Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume I. Wm. de Bary and Irene Bloom, eds. (Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), p. 657