Every once in a long while, a book comes along that challenges the basic assumptions of an entire field. Hartman shows convincingly that much of what historians think happened during the Song dynasty (960–1279) did not occur as recorded, whether in surviving primary sources or in the English- and Chinese-language secondary sources based on them.
His key insight? The sources reflect the time in which they were composed—not the times that they purport to describe. Why has it taken so long for Song historians to realize it? We have long known that the written record is heavily edited, as the standard descriptions of how the History Office, first established in the Tang dynasty (618–907), reveal. Every day, two court historians drew up records of the emperor’s actions (“The Diary of Activity and Repose,” qijuzhu), which they then revised into monthly summaries. Combining these summaries with records from other offices...