Emperor Huizong
Huizong was among the finest painters ever to sit on a throne and lost half of China from it. He came to the Song throne in 1100 without expecting it, and governed as a connoisseur. He reorganised the imperial painting academy and examined its candidates himself on their ability to render a line of poetry; he developed a calligraphic style, slender gold, still recognised and imitated; he assembled catalogues of bronzes and paintings that are primary sources for what the collection contained. He also spent extraordinary sums on the Genyue, an artificial mountain garden in the capital, hauling rare rocks across the country by canal in convoys that became a byword for the burden of the court. The strategic decision was the ruinous one. Seeking the return of territory lost two centuries before, he allied with the Jurchen against the Liao - and the campaign showed the Jurchen that Song armies could not fight. They turned south in 1125. He abdicated in favour of his son as they approached, which changed nothing. In 1127 the Jurchen took Kaifeng and carried off both emperors, the court, the imperial family, the craftsmen and the collections northwards - the Jingkang incident, the most complete humiliation in Chinese dynastic memory. He died in captivity in 1135 in what is now Heilongjiang, having been given the title Marquis of Muddled Virtue by his captors. A surviving son re-established the dynasty south of the Yangtze, where it lasted another hundred and fifty years and where the loss of the north remained the central political question.
- Lived: 1082 CE – 1135 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: head_of_state, painter
