From Prince to Mingjun: the Biography of Song Zhenzong Zhao Heng

This book takes the life of Zhao Heng, the third emperor of the Northern Song Dynasty, as the main line, and unfolds a picture of the rise and fall of the dynasty spanning several decades. Starting from a dormitory in Tokyo during the Taiping and Xingguo years, Zhao Heng, whose feet were bound by golden lotus at a young age, established himself with forbearance and benevolence in the undercurrent of the struggle for the throne. He quietly won Taizong's favor amidst the quarrels between brothers and court games, and finally took over the scepter of the Song Dynasty in the third year of Zhidao. After ascending to the throne, he ushered in a prosperous era with the "Xianping Rule": he encouraged agriculture and mulberry trees to fill the streets with the fragrance of rice, reformed the imperial examination to open up pathways for poor families, revised the law to make prisons less grievances, and when the Liao army was suppressing the border, he shed his weakness at the top of Chanzhou City, and exchanged the "Chanyuan Alliance" for a hundred years of peace with the emperor's personal conquest. However, there are also undercurrents behind the prosperous age: the emotional vacancy left by the death of Queen Guo allowed the extremely intelligent Liu E to gradually ascend to the center of power; the auspicious farce of the arrival of the "Book of Heaven" led to the extravagance of the Zen ceremony and the Yuqing Zhaoying Palace; the decline of virtuous ministers such as Li Hang and Kou Zhun quietly changed the atmosphere of the court. From the hidden dragon in the abyss to the helm in the prosperous times, to the interweaving of merits and demerits in his later years, this book not only outlines the growth and choices of an emperor, but also restores the fireworks in the streets, court disputes and cultural grand events in the early Northern Song Dynasty in a delicate way. In the folds of history, it explores the secret logic of a dynasty's succession from prosperity to prosperity.