On Banished Officials To South Of The Five Ridges In Song Dynasty

In Song Dynasty, owing to the very different geographical climate as well as the backward economic and cultural situation compared with North China, areas south of the Five Ridges became the important exiling places. The rigorous official-demoting policy in Song Dynasty was the legal basis and the system background of numerous banished officials to South of the Five Ridges.This dissertation focuses on the observation of the banished officials to the South of the Five Ridges in Song Dynasty. The research involved the status of the scholar-officials in Song Dynasty, the evolution and undulation of the political history in Northern and Southern Song Dynasties, the exploration of banished officials as a group and their cultural and social activities, thus to give a further comprehension of the contribution of these officials to the society in the South of the Five Ridges.From plenty of historical records, the author dug out 491 banished officials with inscrolled stories and made out a list of these officials. This list indicates that there were intimate relationship between those officials and the development of political history in Song Dynasty. Both the clique faction and the tyrannical politics made many political losers exiled to the south of the Five Ridges. The history of their experience was actually an epitome of the politics in that period. The distribution of those officials often had a reverse relation with the developing level of the economy and culture in the south of the Five Ridges in Song dynasty.The history of the banished officials to the South of the Five Ridges in Song Dynasty was also a history of their mentality. Being exiled to the South of the Five Ridges, these banished officials reacted quite differently from the psychological and behavioral perspectives. Many of them got over the adversity through mutual supporting, encouragement, and correspondence. This dissertation adopted group research to discover how the life experience of an individual had manifested the mental and behavioral characteristics of the group.Though being exiled, many of the officials still cared about the economy of the South of the Five Ridges by advocating agricultural development; protected the local people from invaders and thieves; contributed medicine and money to help the poor; worked hard with the land and gave lectures. They promoted the political, economical and cultural developments of the south of the Five Ridges by advising the local officials and setting an example for whatever they advocated. Nowadays, a lot of relics related to the banished officials are of precious historical and cultural value and have become tourist resources.Those officials created gorgeous exiling culture, which is of significant importance on the exiling history of China. Their continuous writing created numerous literal and academic works, which are an essential part of the literal and academic history to the South of the Five Ridges.