June wasn’t an a particularly auspicious month for the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Thursday marked the founding of the Southern Song by what was left of the Song court who had just been chased out of the north by the Jurchens. In the confusion, they left behind two emperors, Song Huizong (Zhao Ji 1082-1135, whom Chinese historians frequently blame for spending too much time painting and not enough time worrying about invaders from the north) and his son Song Qinzong (Zhao Huan 1100-1161). Huizong had already abdicated in favor of the Qinzong as the Jurchens began heading south (here son, my gift to you: an empire about to fall), thus giving Qinzong the honor of presiding over the sack of the Song capital, Kaifeng. Taken prisoner by the Jurchen, both Qinzong and Huizong were demoted to the status of commoners, and on this date in 1161, Qinzong died in his cold and remote exile in northern Manchuria.
If it only ended there…Today is also marks the beginning of the end for the Song Dynasty. The penultimate ruler, the child emperor Song Duanzong (Zhao Shi 1268-1278), took “power” on June 14, 1276 while, yet again, the Song court was on the run, this time from the Mongols. Zhao Shi and his younger brother Zhao Bing (1271-1279) had been spirited out of the Southern Song capital of Lin’an (present day Hangzhou) just ahead of the Khan’s forces. The surviving civil and military officials tried unsuccessfully to reestablish the Song court, first at Fuzhou and then in Guangdong, where Song Duanzong died of illness in 1278. After Duanzong’s death, his brother Zhao Bing was named ‘emperor,’ though his empire mostly consisted of a boat floating off the coast of Southern China. According to legend in 1279, with enemy forces closing in, a minister loyal to the Song scooped up the child emperor Bing in his arms and jumped into the sea to prevent the last Song scion from falling into the hands of the foreign invaders, thus marking the effective end of Song rule.
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Image top right, Song Duanzong, Zhao Shi
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