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Chinese writers long theorized nature, political authority, and bodily health through images of functional networks — of rivers, official posts, and vessels — and of vitalities circulating through these — as crop-nourishing waters, order-fostering virtues, and life-quickening breaths. In this project I examine early Song period (960-1279) policy experiments that re-formulated the connections between the polity and the moral and physical health of commoners, identifying new obstructions to the authority of the state, especially between the influences of northern “Chinese” mores and southern “barbarian” and commoner customs. The court and local officials attempted to break through these barriers and extend the reach of their authority through the empire-wide distribution of medical and ritual knowledge, often using the concrete media of pharmaceutical texts and drugs. Where earlier theories had more optimistically envisioned a gradual thinning of imperial potencies as they emanated downward and outward, Song officials and rulers write of “blockages” to be more actively and forcefully “penetrated.”
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