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This book explains in detail eighteen historical relics of the Southern Song Dynasty, and combines the author's experience of visiting historical relics, the current status of the historical relics, and the historical events that occurred here. It introduces readers to the history of the Southern Song Dynasty that is different from the history books through four major themes: "Wars between the Song and Jin Dynasties", "Wars within the Southern Song Dynasty", "Power struggles between Neo-Confucianists and powerful ministers" and "Destruction of the Southern Song Dynasty".

The new masterpiece of Wu Zhengqiang, a famous scholar of Song Dynasty and professor and doctoral supervisor at Zhejiang University, "raises doubts wherever there is no doubt", exposes the lies of historical records and gains insight into the nature of people's hearts. It absorbs a variety of new academic achievements and retells the 300-year history of the Song Dynasty with the power struggle as the main line. Discover the truth about palace politics and tell the history of the Song Dynasty amid high-level power struggles. Palace politics has always been an area that official history has deliberately avoided and covered up. Palace struggles are not just power struggles, but are often the subject of political history. Peel away the layers of fog and see how power flows: Was the tragedy of party politics in the Northern Song Dynasty just because of the scholar's idle talk that harmed the country? How does the tragedy of imperial family ethics directed by the Supreme Emperor determine the fate of the dynasty? The text is clear and fluent, and the discussions are interlocking. It is as charming as reading a detective novel. It is sincerely recommended by Bao Weimin, Yu Yunguo, Li Huarui, Fan Deng, and Zhang Mingyang!

The author of this book spent more than a year and traveled more than 100,000 miles to search for the inscriptions, cliffs, temples, and ruins that have survived to this day in the Northern Song Dynasty. He visited the places where major historical events and famous battles took place, and used this as a context to form a narrative of Song history from another perspective. This book not only records the current situation of cultural relics and sites, but also pays attention to the fireworks of modern life. The comparison of the two creates a deep emotion about the vicissitudes of life. During the search and investigation, we discovered details obscured by traditional historical narratives and explored the possibility of reconstructing the narrative context of Song history.

Based on different forms of historical materials such as strange novels, inscriptions, epitaphs, local chronicles, and genealogies, this book takes places such as Wenzhou and Hangzhou as main cases and attempts to reconstruct the social history of the Song Dynasty from the perspective of text and writing. In the local society of the Song Dynasty, small farmers and wealthy households, petty officials and maritime merchants, shamans and monks, warriors and dignitaries in the city, and emerging groups of scholars jointly constructed the relationships and network structure of local society. Scholar-officials occupy the core position of the national administrative system, but in local society, imperial examination scholars are still an unstable new trend. Sometimes they are isolated from local society, and sometimes they need to interpenetrate with other social groups in order to play an increasingly important role in local society. The change of perspective and the reconstruction of the picture may reveal a richer connotation of Song Dynasty society.