Emperor Gaozong of Song
Gaozong was the ninth son and the only one left, and he spent thirty-five years making sure the empire he refounded would never try to win back what it had lost. In 1127 the Jurchen armies took the Song capital and carried north the retired emperor, the reigning emperor, the empresses, the consorts, the princes and some fourteen thousand others, in one of the completest humiliations any Chinese dynasty suffered. Gaozong survived because he was on a diplomatic errand outside the city and was not in it. He was proclaimed emperor in the south, spent the first years of his reign in flight - at one point aboard ship off the coast while Jurchen cavalry searched the shore - and eventually fixed a capital at Hangzhou which he insisted on calling a temporary residence for the rest of his life. What he built there was the wealthiest state in the world. The southern Song had perhaps a third of the territory and more revenue than the whole empire had raised before, from maritime trade, paper money, porcelain, printing and an agriculture of early-ripening rice that fed cities of a million people. It was also permanently on the defensive, paying tribute in silver and silk to a northern power it addressed as an uncle. That settlement had a price he was willing to pay. His most successful general was recovering territory in the north when Gaozong recalled him with twelve urgent orders in a single day, had him imprisoned, and allowed him to be executed on a charge his own chancellor admitted was unproven. The reason was not cowardice but arithmetic: a war of reconquest that succeeded would return the captive emperor whose throne he occupied. He abdicated in 1162 in favour of an adopted heir and lived twenty-five years more, and the general he killed has been a national byword for loyalty betrayed ever since.
- Lived: 1107 CE – 1187 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
