Emperor Bing

Zhao Bing (趙昺, 1272–1279) was the last emperor of the Song dynasty: the eighteenth Song emperor and the ninth and last ruler of the Southern Song. A son of Emperor Duzong, he was placed on the throne as a small child in 1278, when the Song court had already lost its capital to the Mongols and was retreating along the southern coast. He reigned for less than a year under the era name Xiangxing (祥興). In March 1279 the last Song fleet was destroyed by the forces of the Yuan dynasty at the Battle of Yamen, and the boy emperor died in the sea with his chancellor, Lu Xiufu.

Flight from Lin'an

By the mid-1270s the armies of Kublai Khan, who had proclaimed the Yuan dynasty in 1271, were advancing down the Yangzi. Around February 1276 the Song capital, Lin'an (modern Hangzhou), fell to the Mongol army under General Bayan, and the young Emperor Gong was taken north as a captive.

His half-brothers Zhao Shi, the elder, and Zhao Bing, the younger, escaped to the south. Loyal officials gathered round them, among them Lu Xiufu, Chen Yizhong, Zhang Shijie and Zhao Shi's uncle Yang Liangjie, and the scholar-official Wen Tianxiang later joined them after escaping from Mongol custody. On the way south Zhao Shi was named Grand Marshal and Zhao Bing Vice Grand Marshal.

In June 1276 the seven-year-old Zhao Shi was enthroned at Fuzhou. He is known to history as Emperor Duanzong, and Zhao Bing's title was later changed to Prince of Wei. The Mongols sent their armies south to destroy this last Song court, which retreated by sea along the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong.

Enthronement at Gangzhou

Duanzong died in 1278, after two years on the run. Morale collapsed, many soldiers deserted, and some at court were ready to give up the struggle. Lu Xiufu persuaded them to fight on, and Zhao Bing was enthroned at Gangzhou, an island off the coast of Guangdong whose exact location is debated; some identify it with Lantau Island, now part of Hong Kong. The new reign took the era name Xiangxing, and Gangzhou was renamed Xianglong County.

Lu Xiufu governed in the boy's name, and Zhang Shijie commanded the army and fleet. Later in 1278 the court moved to Yamen, a sheltered anchorage on the western side of the Pearl River delta, where it hoped to hold out against the Yuan. Around the turn of the year Wen Tianxiang, who had been fighting on land, was captured. Held on the Yuan fleet, he refused to write to Zhang Shijie urging surrender and offered instead his poem "Crossing the Lingding Sea", which closes with the wish to leave a loyal heart shining in the pages of history. He was executed in Dadu (Beijing) in 1283, having refused to serve the Yuan.

The Battle of Yamen

The Battle of Yamen, also called the Naval Battle of Mount Ya, was the last stand of the Song. The Yuan fleet arrived early in 1279 under Zhang Hongfan, a northern Chinese general in Mongol service. Although the Song had more ships, Zhang Shijie chose to fight a defensive battle: he chained his fleet together in a long line, with the emperor's ship among them. The Yuan blockaded the anchorage and cut the Song off from fresh water and firewood on the shore, so that the crews were reduced to drinking seawater and many fell ill.

The final attack came on 19 March 1279. Yuan ships struck the chained line from two directions, and the Song fleet, unable to manoeuvre, was overwhelmed. As the line broke, Zhang Shijie, knowing the battle was lost, chose his best soldiers and took a dozen ships out of the formation in an attempt to break through and save the emperor, but he could not reach him.

The Death of Emperor Bing

Lu Xiufu would not let the emperor fall into Yuan hands. According to the traditional account, he took the seven-year-old Zhao Bing on his back and leapt with him from the ship into the sea. Many officials and members of the court followed them. When the news reached Duanzong's mother, the empress dowager, she too drowned herself, and Zhang Shijie died soon afterwards when his ship was caught in a storm. With them ended the Song dynasty, founded in 960.

The tomb traditionally held to be that of Zhao Bing is at Chiwan, in the Nanshan District of Shenzhen. It was restored and expanded in 1984.

With the fall of the Southern Song, Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty ruled the whole of China. Kublai and his successors held power until 1368, when the Ming dynasty was founded by the Hongwu Emperor.

Porcelain at the End of the Song

The fall of the Song did not interrupt the great kilns of the south. The Longquan kilns of Zhejiang, whose blue-green celadons were among the finest achievements of the Southern Song, went on working under the Yuan, as did the potters of Jingdezhen, who made a pale bluish-white porcelain known as qingbai. For that reason many celadons can be dated only broadly to the Song or Yuan, as with the celadon vase with carved peony medallions in our collection. None of these pieces can be linked to the court of Emperor Bing. More celadons of the period can be seen in our Song dynasty porcelain collection.