Huizong Emperor

The Huizong Emperor, whose personal name was Zhao Ji (趙佶), was born in 1082 and died in 1135. He was the eighth emperor of the Song dynasty and the penultimate ruler of the Northern Song, reigning from 1100 to 1126.

Huizong was among the most gifted artists ever to rule China: a painter of birds and flowers, the creator of the "slender gold" style of calligraphy, the author of a treatise on tea and a great collector. His court is the one most closely associated with Ru ware, the rarest of Song ceramics. As a ruler he failed. He left government to favourites, spent heavily on palaces and gardens, and allied with the Jurchens against the Liao, a decision that cost the dynasty the north and Huizong his freedom.

Accession and Government

Zhao Ji was the eleventh son of Emperor Shenzong and held the title Prince of Duan. When his half-brother, Emperor Zhezong, died early in 1100 without a surviving son, Shenzong's widow, Empress Dowager Xiang, chose Zhao Ji as the next emperor. The chancellor Zhang Dun objected that the prince was too frivolous to rule, but he was overruled.

Empress Dowager Xiang shared in the government for the first months of the reign and died early in 1101. The first months of the reign were an attempt to heal the quarrel between reformers and conservatives that had divided the court since Shenzong's New Policies, and the era name for 1101, Jianzhong Jingguo, spoke of establishing a middle course. The truce did not last.

Cai Jing and the Return of Reform

From 1102 Huizong took the side of the reformers. The new era name, Chongning, meaning "honouring Xining", looked back to the reforms of his father's Xining era, and Cai Jing became chancellor. Cai Jing dominated the government for most of the next two decades. Leading conservatives, living and dead, were listed as members of a banned "Yuanyou faction", their names were carved on steles across the empire, and the writings of men such as Su Shi were proscribed.

Huizong also favoured Daoism, building temples and in 1117 taking a Daoist title as lord of the teaching. Political disputes were left unresolved, and favourites such as the eunuch Tong Guan, who commanded the armies of the north-west, received exceptional power.

The Genyue Garden and the Rebellion of Fang La

Huizong's greatest extravagance was the Genyue, an artificial mountain garden built in the north-east of the capital, Kaifeng, from 1117. Rare rocks and plants were shipped north for it from the south-east by the "Flower and Rock Network", run from Suzhou by Zhu Mian, and the demands fell heavily on the people of the region. In 1120 a rebellion led by Fang La broke out in Zhejiang, fed in part by anger at these exactions. Tong Guan suppressed it in 1121, at great cost.

The Alliance with the Jurchens

In 1115 the Jurchen leader Aguda founded the Jin dynasty and began to break the power of the Liao. Huizong saw a chance to recover the Sixteen Prefectures around modern Beijing, which the Liao had held since before the Song was founded. In 1120 the Song and Jin agreed to attack the Liao together, an agreement known as the Alliance Conducted at Sea, because the envoys crossed the Bohai Gulf by ship.

The Song campaigns against the Liao southern capital, Yanjing, failed in 1122. The Jin took the city themselves and handed it over in 1123 only in return for heavy payments, after carrying off much of its population and wealth. The victory over the Liao was an illusion: the weakness of the Song armies had been exposed, and once the last Liao emperor was captured in 1125 the Jin turned on their ally.

Huizong and Ru Ware

Whatever his failures as a ruler, Huizong shaped the taste of his age more than any other Song emperor. He painted birds and flowers with close observation and fine colour, and his calligraphy, in the thin, wiry style known as "slender gold" (shoujin ti), is instantly recognisable. Auspicious Cranes, dated 1112 and now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, is among the paintings associated with him, though many works bearing his inscription are thought to have been painted by artists of his academy.

He was also a collector on a vast scale. The Xuanhe catalogue of the imperial paintings lists more than six thousand works, and a companion catalogue illustrated hundreds of ancient bronzes in the palace. This antiquarian interest reached the potters too: archaic bronze shapes appear in court ceramics of the period and later in the Guan wares of the Southern Song.

The Painting Academy

Huizong did not found the imperial painting academy, which existed before his reign, but he reorganised and expanded it. In 1104 he set up a school of painting, and court painters were given official ranks. Candidates were examined with a line of poetry as their subject, and the prize went to the most inventive way of suggesting it. The young Wang Ximeng painted his great landscape, A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, in 1113 under the emperor's guidance.

The Treatise on Tea

Huizong was a devoted tea drinker and wrote the Treatise on Tea (Daguan Chalun), which takes its name from the Daguan era (1107–1110). It describes how the finest tea was grown, picked, pressed and prepared, and how powdered tea was whisked in the bowl into a thick froth. Huizong wrote that the best bowls were blue-black, with fine streaks running through the glaze, because they showed the froth to advantage. He was describing the "hare's fur" bowls of the Jian kilns in Fujian, the most prized tea bowls of the Song.

Ru Ware and the Court Kilns

Ru ware was made for the Northern Song court at Qingliangsi in Baofeng county, Henan, a kiln site identified only in the 1980s. It is most closely associated with Huizong's court, though production seems to have begun before he came to the throne, and it probably ended with the Jurchen conquest. The Southern Song writer Ye Zhi recorded that the court ordered green wares from Ruzhou because the white Ding wares had rough, unglazed rims.

The Ru glaze is an opaque, soft bluish grey to pale blue-green, with a gentle sheen and usually a fine crackle, over a light grey body. Most pieces were glazed all over and fired standing on tiny spurs, which left small oval scars on the base. The shapes are small and simple: dishes, brush washers, bowls, bottles and a few vases. Fewer than a hundred genuine pieces are generally accepted, almost all of them in museums.

Ye Zhi also records that an official kiln was set up at Kaifeng itself in the Zhenghe era (1111–1118). No site has been securely identified, and what it made is still debated. After 1127 the idea of a kiln run for the court passed south, to the Guan kilns founded under Huizong's son Gaozong at Hangzhou.

Ru ware carries no reign mark, and no piece can be tied to Huizong himself. Our guide to the five great kilns of the Song compares Ru with Guan, Ge, Jun and Ding, and Song celadons from other kilns are represented in our Song dynasty porcelain collection.

Abdication, Captivity and Death

The Jin invaded in the winter of 1125, taking the Song's welcome to a Liao defector as their pretext. As their armies approached Kaifeng in January 1126, Huizong abdicated in favour of his eldest son, Zhao Huan, who reigned as Emperor Qinzong, and left the capital for the south. The new emperor punished the ministers blamed for the disaster, among them Cai Jing and Tong Guan.

Officials who stayed behind, led by Li Gang, organised the defence of the city. The Jin withdrew without taking it, but only after the Song had agreed to a humiliating settlement: a huge indemnity in gold, silver and silk and the promise of three northern prefectures. Huizong returned to Kaifeng in the spring.

When the Song failed to hand over the prefectures, the Jin invaded again in the autumn of 1126, and the capital fell in January 1127. In the spring the Jin carried north Huizong, Qinzong, the empresses, thousands of members of the imperial clan and the palace collections. This disaster, the Jingkang Incident, ended the Northern Song.

In captivity Huizong was given the mocking title "Duke of Muddled Virtue" (Hunde gong) and was moved to ever more remote places in the north-east. He died in 1135 at Wuguocheng, in present-day Heilongjiang, at the age of fifty-two. His remains were returned to the south under the peace of 1142 and buried near Shaoxing in Zhejiang.

One of his sons, Zhao Gou, escaped capture and founded the Southern Song as Emperor Gaozong. Later historians judged Huizong harshly as a ruler, but his paintings, his calligraphy and the wares made for his court have kept his name alive among collectors.