Vermilion Gates and Embroidered Doors: Survival in the Northern Song Household Wars

During the reign of Emperor Renzong in the Northern Song, in Bianjing, modern-day Kaifeng, lived the Su family, a middle-ranking bureaucratic household headed by a seventh-rank Assistant Director of the Court of Sacrificial Worship. According to the regulations in the Treatise on Carriages and Robes in the History of Song, the Su family residence was called a “mansion.” It had four sections: the gatehouse, the outer reception rooms, the rear hall, and the back garden. Covered corridors connected the halls to the bedrooms, with side rooms and courtyards on either side. At the time, the first signs of a struggle between old and new factions were emerging at court. Marriage alliances among scholar-official families were frequent, and domestic affairs in the inner quarters were deeply bound up with political interests.