The Jingkang Incident — the Jurchen Conquest of Northern China
The Jurchen took the Song capital in 1127 and carried the emperor, the retired emperor and some 14,000 members of the court into captivity. The Song had made an alliance with the Jurchen Jin against their old enemies the Liao, on the reasoning that an enemy's enemy would help them recover sixteen northern prefectures lost two centuries earlier. The alliance worked and demonstrated to the Jurchen that the Song army could not fight. They turned south in 1125. Emperor Huizong — an accomplished painter, calligrapher and collector who had spent enormous sums on a garden of rare rocks while the treasury emptied — abdicated in panic in favour of his son and tried to flee. Kaifeng was besieged twice. The first siege in 1126 was lifted by an indemnity so large that it stripped the city; the second ended in the winter when the walls were taken, reportedly after the defenders were persuaded to rely on a Daoist adept who promised to raise a divine army. The city was sacked over months. The two emperors, the empresses, the concubines, princes, princesses, craftsmen and musicians were marched north, the women largely into the Jin harems and laundry service, and Huizong died in captivity in 1135. A surviving son set up a court at Hangzhou and the Southern Song held the Yangtze for another 150 years, wealthy, cultured and militarily defensive. The episode is the standard reference in Chinese writing for national humiliation, and was invoked constantly in the nineteenth century. The loss of the north also moved the centre of Chinese life south permanently. The Yangtze delta became the most populous and productive region in the world, and the rice, canals and maritime trade of the Southern Song supported a level of urban commerce that the north never recovered.
- Year: 1127 CE
- Category: Military
