Among the many epistemic shifts of the Tang-Song transition, which marks the end of “medieval” and the beginning of early modern China, we can count the emergence of an 11th-century historiography that was both ideological and pragmatic in aim, crafted to provide Song dynasty rulers with better models for rulership and administration. The state-sponsored revision and replacement of the 945 Old Tang History with the New Tang History of 1060 played a critical role in this watershed in Chinese historiography. This paper examines the role that the chapter-ending “evaluations” to the revised biographies of the New Tang History, edited by the Northern Song scholar Song Qi (998-1061), played in rewriting the standard history of the Tang dynasty. In his newly written evaluations, Song Qi gave the biographies new rhetorical energy, narrative coherence, and clearer moral lessons. Heroes became more visibly heroic; villains more purely villainous; and the relative contributions of individuals were calibrated in the metanarratives of the dynasty’s three hundred years. Whether or not Song Qi’s more sweeping conclusions were uniformly supported by the evidence, by stepping out of the framework of an individual life and inscribing biographical subjects into these metanarratives, Song Qi transformed the historian’s evaluation into a more powerful tool in a new Song dynasty historiography.
