Jia Sidao - His Career
Part 2 of a Series on Jia Sidao, one of the worst ministers in Chinese history
(Jia Sidao inspecting Song soldiers, from the historically inaccurate TV series: Marco Polo)
See Part 1 - Jia Sidao’s family
See Part 3 - Jia Sidao’s career as written by Feng Menglong
This essay was written as a companion to the story by Feng Menglong titled Zheng Huchen Seeks Revenge in Mumian Temple. Translated by Yang & Yang and found in their book Stories Old & New (2000).
In this section, the Sage will describe the real history of Jia Sidao.
The Real Career of Jia Sidao
See The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 5 - Part 1, Chapters 11 and 12.
Jia Sidao held a number of government posts which required hard work. He was rarely in the capital and instead he was stationed in more distant regional offices. He worked closely with Song military officials and he was effective. While his meteoric rise in the government can be partially explained by the aid of his cousin, Jia Yuhua - the favored consort of the Huangdi, she died in 1247 while Jia Sidao continued to be promoted. Sidao was appointed vice-minster for the Bureau of Military Affairs in 1254, seven years after his cousin had died and the Huangdi had long moved on to a new most-favored consort.
Jia Sidao maintained good relations with Song generals and he served for a year as the supreme commander of the border region where the Mongols were attacking Chinese defenses. The ruler of the Mongol Empire, Mongke Khan died in 1259 where Jia Sidao was in command and this ended the Mongol assault for the next six years, because the Mongol leadership fought a civil war over who would take over for Mongke Khan. The Sage thinks Jia Sidao can take some credit for this victory.
Due in part to his victory over the Mongols, in 1260 Sidao was promoted to the top position in the Song government: Right Chancellor.
Note that in the government of the Tang and the Song, the Huangdi was usually assisted by two chancellors: the Right and the Left. The Chinese had developed the idea of division of power because centuries of experience had revealed the danger of concentrating power in hands of one man - who could easily take over and kill the Huangdi - see Wang Mang for one example. However, the system of two Chancellors and two top generals in every army was far from ideal. Many times, one of the two Chancellors became the major power and the other man was reduced to a mere figurehead. Jia Sidao did this. He took over the government and was the effective ruler of Song China from 1260 until his ouster in 1274.
In 1263, after years of planning, Sidao instituted a major land reform to boost government revenues. Clearly, something needed to be done as the Song government was facing enormous expenses and declining revenues. Sidao’s strategy for land reform was good in theory but in practice it was implemented in a way that made most people angry. It is likely that any land reform would have generated significant opposition and to be fair, Sidao at least attempted a solution where previous chancellors had simply kicked the can down the road. However, you don’t win wars by failure and Sidao’s land reform failed. Worse, his land reform provoked significant backlash. Many wealthy Song land owners seem to have come to the conclusion that life under the Mongols would be better than under the dictatorial Jia Sidao.
With regard to the military, Jia Sidao’s great failure was that he could not build an army which deterred the Mongols. He had five years of relative peace to work with, but his efforts were mis-directed and ineffective. Instead of building up and training a great militarily with e’sprite de corps and an aggressive mind-set, Sidao spent millions of taels of silver building up walls on cities which he thought would be attacked. Walls are useful, but a military which could cut enemy supply lines, and win battles was the only chance the Song had for victory.
True, following Mongke Khan’s death the Mongol empire had fractured and after a four-year civil war, the winner, Kublai Khan, ended up in control over significantly less territory than his father or grandfather had ruled. However, even the reduced empire of Kublai Khan was much larger than Song China with a near equal population and similar sized economy. One key advantage the Mongols had over the Song was a tradition of military success. The Song Dynasty hadn’t won a major war since 980 while Mongol armies had won victories across Asia, the Middle East, and in Europe from 1200 to 1260.
Given the Song’s history, only a remarkable military leader - like Yue Fei reborn -could have transformed the Song military into an army which Kublai Khan would have feared. Jia Sidao was not that man and he did not promote military men with ability.
As to diplomacy, Jia Sidao was a typical Chinese leader - too arrogant to actually negotiate with non-Chinese rulers. Every nation in East Asia came under attack from the Mongols: Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Da Li, Champa, Khmer, etc. These nations needed the Song to organize a strategy against their common enemy. Sidao utterly failed to do this and so the Mongols were free to attack each nation one at a time without fear of being attacked themselves.
When the Mongols renewed their offensive against the Song in 1264, Sidao failed to mount any effective military operations against them. Instead the Song military grimly held onto cities for months, even years, in the face of Mongol sieges and resulting starvation, followed by wholesale massacres when the cities finally fell. Sidao came up with no solutions and the one time he personally led an army against the Mongols, it was immediately defeated with a massive loss of life. Clearly Sidao had appointed terrible generals and had no skill in command.
Jia Sidao partially retired in 1268 and yet he remained the chief minister in the Song government, ruling - badly - from his personal palace on a hill in Hongzhuo (said to be more grand than the Huangdi’s palace). Sidao was finally ousted from power, his massive estates confiscated, and then he murdered by an official in 1274. The fall of the Song was nearly certain when he died. As Professor Davis writes: [Sidao] may not have set out to destroy the dynasty, but certain of his actions had precisely that effect and can only be explained in terms of gross lack of judgment.
The Song capital surrendered to the Mongol army in February of 1276 and the long misery of Mongol misrule over China would last until 1362.
In retrospect, Jia Sidao should never have been promoted to the position of Right Chancellor and even if promoted, he should have been removed when his land reform policy provoked nearly universal condemnation in 1263. That he held onto power for 11 more years in which nothing worked shows that he was skilled at only one thing: maintaining power while his country burned.
In Part 3, the Sage talks about how Feng tells the story of Jia Sidao, from the perspective of a man living as the Ming Dynasty as it was falling apart in 1624.