Zhao Kuangyin founds the Song dynasty: the Chenqiao mutiny

Zhao Kuangyin, born in 927 at Luoyang into a military family, joined the army of Guo Wei and rose under Chai Rong (Emperor Shizong of the Later Zhou) to command the palace army. When Chai Rong died in 959, his young son Guo Zongxun succeeded him. On 31 January 960, the first day of the lunar year, the prefectures of Zhen and Ding reported that the Khitans had invaded and that Northern Han troops had joined them, and Zhao was sent north. On the evening of 2 February the army camped at the Chenqiao post station; that night, according to the Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian, the officers agreed to make him emperor, and his younger brother Zhao Kuangyi and his adviser Zhao Pu made them promise to keep the troops from plundering the capital.

At dawn on 3 February the officers burst into Zhao’s quarters; someone draped a yellow imperial robe over him, and the army hailed him as emperor. Zhao made them swear to obey him, to harm neither the young emperor and the empress dowager nor the officials, and not to loot the capital, and led them back to Kaifeng. The only serious resistance came from the commander Han Tong, who was killed with his wife and children. In the afternoon, in the Chongyuan Hall, the academician Tao Gu produced from his sleeve the Zhou emperor’s edict of abdication; Zhao received it kneeling and took the throne; the deposed child was made Prince of Zheng. On 4 February the new dynasty was named Song, after the prefecture where Zhao had held his military governorship, and an amnesty and a new era were proclaimed. It was said that on the day the Mandate changed hands the markets of the capital did not even close. Modern accounts sometimes give 2 February, the evening the army reached Chenqiao, or 4 February, the day the dynasty was named.

Song historians presented Zhao as a reluctant hero forced into power by his troops; most modern historians believe that he and his circle engineered the mutiny, the yellow robe may well be a later embellishment, and Lau Nap-yin and Huang Kuan-chung, writing in the Cambridge History of China, suggest that the northern invasion may never have taken place. Zhao, known as Emperor Taizu, crushed the revolts of Li Yun and Li Chongjin within months, in 961 removed his leading generals from the palace army — according to a famous later story, persuading them over wine — and conquered Jingnan and the former Chu lands (963), Later Shu (965), the Southern Han (971) and the Southern Tang (975). His brother and successor Taizong received the submission of Wuyue in 978 and took the Northern Han in 979, but failed to win back the Sixteen Prefectures from the Liao.