The Song Ancestor Returns in Glory

Two returns from the dead, one chance to turn the tide. After suffering the anguish of a fallen dynasty when he transmigrated into the body of Emperor Lizong of Song the first time, Song founder Zhao Kuangyin opens his eyes again in the seventeenth year of the Jiading era in the Southern Song. The dying lamps of the Lin’an palace are still before him, the shadow of Shi Miyuan’s tyranny still looms, and the same mess remains: Jin and Mongol forces encircle the realm as the people struggle in poverty. But this time, he is no longer the founding emperor who rushes headlong into action, armed with ambition but little else.

Returning from the despair of the naval defeat at Yashan, he knows the Southern Song’s deep-rooted ills all too well: scholar-officials talk the country to ruin, the imperial guards are rotting away, and the devaluation of Huizi paper money fuels popular resentment. Worse, Mongol cavalry watches from the northern frontier. Concealing his true strength, he lies low in Lizong’s body, sorting loyalists from traitors in a court riddled with Shi Miyuan’s faction and shielding generals such as Meng Gong and Yu Jie. He eases taxes and labor burdens, reforms officialdom, revives Jiangnan’s finances with the “New Ever-Normal Granary Policy,” and rebuilds the imperial guards into elite troops through a revised “Gengshu Rotation System.” Having learned from his previous mistake of allying with the Mongols to destroy the Jin, he first joins forces with Jin to wear down the Mongols, then marches west to destroy Western Xia and sever the Mongols’ right arm. At last, he leads the northern campaign and proclaims “The Humiliation of Jingkang Is Avenged” from the walls of Kaifeng.

From the Huai River to the Yellow River, from the Hexi Corridor to the grasslands south of the Gobi, this twice-transmigrated emperor wields the iron fist forged in the chaos of the Five Dynasties while drawing on the resilience of Southern Song scholar-official politics. Step by step, he restores glory to the remnants of the Song, long confined to the south, and creates an enduring legend of renewal and revival.