The Age of Confucian Rule constitutes a welcome and important addition to the field of Song history. Although the publication in early 2009 of the chronological Song volume of the Cambridge History of China (Volume 5, Part 1, The Sung Dynasty and Its Predecessors, 907–1279, ed. Denis Twitchett and Paul Jakob Smith [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008]) provided a much-needed narrative history of the dynasty, its great length (1,094 pages) may deter all but the most assiduous of readers from a beginning-to-end reading. Dieter Kuhn, by contrast, offers a four-chapter survey of Song history followed by eight chapters on a wide range of topics—not unlike the annals and treatises format of the dynastic histories—all in less than three hundred pages of text. The result is an excellent introduction to the Song period for specialists and nonspecialists alike.
The writing of history is all about choices, and Professor Kuhn in...
