A Study Of "Han's Family With Phoenix Trees Around" In Chinese Song Dynasty

Han's(a surname) Family,with Phoenix Trees around,is an extremely typical one in northern Song Dynasty,renowned for politics and learning.The family started to become noble owing to literature from a member called Han Yi and he himself occupied a high position of prime minister in that Dynasty.Of his sons(Han Zong, Han Jang,Han Wei and Han Zhen),two assumed the office of prime minister,one became the vice prime minister and one was the official who wrote rescripts for the emperor.As it were,this family reached the highest nobility and enjoyed the greatest reputation for a long time.In addition,his descendants could also inherit his family tradition—gaining official positions through examination and devoting themselves to the Court as emperor's favorite officials.Because many of his family members held high official positions in the Court,his family has great influence on both politics and learning of that time,which also kept the family's reputation.Therefore,besides their achievement in politics,the learning achieved by Han's Family is worth studying as well.This paper probes into the change of Han's Family and its lineage so as to look at the trace of his family development.It focuses on the studies of the key figure—Han Yi,who made his family eminent,and his sons including Han Zong and Han Jiang, who pushed the family to the peak of nobility and had great influence on the politics of that time.In the middle-late Northern Song Dynasty and after Song Court moved to the South,the Han's family gradually weakened,so the paper analyzes the reason by studying the typical family members then.The family rose again in Han Yuanji's time but it was not as prosperous as it was in Han Jiang's time,therefore,the paper also probes into the situation and analyzes it with the political environment then.In the meantime,the paper makes an all-around study of Han's marriage and his family life and analyzes the influence of marriage and his family life on the up-down development of his family.It makes a survey of the whole social circle of his family and analyzes the positive and negative factors which kept his family ever-unfading with the help of his social circle.Finally,the paper explores the academic achievement of Han's Family and makes a systematic research of the family's existing literature and the lost.It is not difficult for us,following the developing line of Han's family,to understand how his family gradually reached the peak of power from an average family.Chinese imperial examination system and the macro-environment then played an un-substitutive role in the development of eminent families.For example,the ebb and flow of Han's family mirrors the developing track of Song Dynasty from up to down.The appendix is a list of the great events of Han's Family,which will make it easier to understand the move as well as the ebb and flow of the family.