Emperor Ningzong of Song
Ningzong came to the throne in a coup conducted by his own officials and left it thirty years later with the Mongols across the frontier. He was installed in 1194 when the chief councillor and the empress dowager persuaded his father to abdicate, and he governed for the whole of his reign through chancellors who were stronger than he was. The first of them banned the school of moral philosophy that would later become state orthodoxy, listing fifty-nine of its scholars as a seditious faction and barring them from office, then launched an unprovoked war to recover the north in 1206 which failed completely. The peace terms required an indemnity, an increase in the annual tribute, and the chancellor's head, which was duly sent to the Jurchen court in a box. His second chancellor governed for the next seventeen years by the opposite method - conciliation abroad, patronage at home, and the rehabilitation of the philosophers his predecessor had proscribed, which is how their teaching became the basis of the examinations for the next seven hundred years. The event that mattered was outside anyone's control. In 1211 a confederation of steppe tribes that had been unified five years earlier crossed the Jurchen frontier and began the campaign that would take the northern capital in 1215 and destroy the Jin state within two decades. The Song court watched an enemy it had fought for a century being dismantled by a power it did not understand, and drew the conclusion that the enemy of its enemy was an opportunity. It allied with the Mongols against the Jin, which worked, and then found itself sharing a frontier with them. Ningzong died in 1224 and his dynasty outlived him by fifty-five years.
- Lived: 1168 CE – 1224 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
