China's Path to the Tang Dynasty: The Legacy of the Southern Dynasties

Could Liu Yu, the Song Emperor Wu, who was invincible on the battlefield, have unified the country?

How could Xie Lingyun spend all day wandering the mountains and composing poetry while still serving at court?

Why did Emperor Wu of Liang give himself to a Buddhist temple, forcing his ministers to spend a fortune buying him back?

Was the Hou Jing Rebellion merely a regional calamity, or did it affect the entire country?

Besides Zu Chongzhi's calculation of pi, what other achievements did the Southern Dynasties produce?

The Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties were a famous era of division in Chinese history, a time of reexamining values and rebuilding institutions, as well as a period of major cultural clashes and ethnic integration. The Southern Dynasties began in 420, when Liu Yu usurped the Eastern Jin and established Liu Song, and ended in 589, when the Sui destroyed Chen. They spanned four dynasties, Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen, over a total of 170 years. Throughout this period of division, wars between north and south broke out continually. One astonishing ruler followed another, alongside Southern Dynasties court women with distinctive, sometimes jaw-dropping, personalities, and aristocratic clans who thought the world of themselves. They will all appear here, one by one. This book presents the refined and elegant culture of the Southern Dynasties, life and the economy in the south, and the final years of the Southern Dynasties as they really were.