The Villages World Of The Southern Song China

This essay aims to start with the villages, the life space for the majority in the Southern Song dynasty. On the basis of background exploration, the essay investigates the interpersonal relationships as well as the interactions and conversations between the government and common people, in the hope of conjuring up a superficial impression of the villages in the Southern Song China, and leading us to experience the colorful and complicated things and people in that dynasty.The current understanding towards the villages in the Southern Song dynasty is still something too abstract. The investigators mainly concentrate on the villagers, the issues and the orders in the village, ignoring the substantially existent living places. Due to this, on the discussion of the villages in the Southern Song dynasty, the investigation into the natural distribution becomes vitally necessary and indispensable. The developments of the villages and their distributions all have a dynamic evolution, regardless of an endless space or a tiny place. With the growth of population and the development of social economy, villages had begun to appear in places with required conditions for human habitation in the Southern Song dynasty at different degrees of density. But there was a great difference between different areas, which constituted different living space.In order to be closer to the living places for people in the Song China, we also have to explore the concrete residential environment and the sights of the villages. We get to know something about the basic elements, such as ecology, lands, houses and roads through the description of Song people. Though we can not pay attention to all sides, we can have an approximate impression through the exploration of the several aspects, and on this basis, we can think about the relationship between the residential environment and life.Besides living places, human being is indispensable to the infrastructure of village sights. The collective settlements were originally formed by habitants, and people in all walks who lived in the village became interdependent to each other, forming the interpersonal networks because of their livelihood. However, the formation of a village was not because of the assimilation of single persons, but families, the basic units of villages. Families with different sizes, with similarity but also with great difference, composed the complicated relation networks. And then, based on this, greater combinations were realized according to different relationships and aims.But, villages did not only belong to a certain era, for they were not only the living space for common people, but also the territory under the control of the royalty. Having been grouped sectionalized by the government, people's understanding towards the society in villages became multivariate. And in the multivariate society, the regulations and rules created by the government became the basic mechanism in the villages' administration. What's more, the spontaneous restricts and customs between villages were also binding on the villagers, which harmoniously combined with the legal ties.It was the interdependent natural substantives and social connotation together that composed the villages in Southern Song dynasty, which reflected a various and colorful historic picture.