ABSTRACT
While their principally accepted form is temporal, historical boundaries can nonetheless manifest themselves in numerous other ways. In fact, when we consider them in apposition to demarcations that are spatial, ethnic, linguistic (including terminological), or intellectual in their parameters, purely temporal boundaries can sometimes appear wholly indeterminate and even deceptive in nature. In the present chapter, by bringing the influence of this host of alternative historical demarcations to bear on the subject, I attempt to expose the fundamental indeterminacy of a particular temporal boundary, one that is so widely acknowledged as to be taken for granted. My chief focus of concern is with the emergence of the early or Northern Song (Bei Song) dynasty (960-1126). As is already at this early stage implied, I am far less concerned with the welldocumented establishment of this dynasty as a political entity than I am with its largely unexplored emergence as a fixture of political consciousness. Hence, given the potentially ethereal nature of this goal, some of my observations may themselves occupy the uncertain ground between the verifiably expressed and the merely subtly intimated. Nevertheless, I hope to show that, at least in its inception, the so-called “Northern” Song was every bit as much of a construction of a peculiar conclave of individual minds as it was a simple matter of a failed strategy of appeasement at court and capitulation on the battlefield.
