ABSTRACT
The Sung dynasty's Confucian revival announced the second golden age of the tradition. Historically, the Sung dynasty marks a sociological and historical watershed in the development of Chinese culture that had begun in the late T'ang. The Sung is an era when great social change was conjoined with equally dramatic intellectual transformation. A major canonical and philosophical illustration of radical purism is illustrated by the way Chu Hsi radically and definitively reordered Confucian education and even modified the nature of the canon. Up to the Sung, Confucian scholars had worked with the various texts known as the Confucian classics. In the 1120s, the Sung dynasty allied itself to a proto-Manchu tribal confederation in the hope of regaining land lost in North China to the Liao dynasty during the wars of the early 1120s. Unfortunately, the new Manchurian Chin dynasty was successful in destroying the older Liao along the northern frontier.
