The tenth to thirteenth centuries were formative in the creation of what we now know as Chinese cuisine, including its rich regional diversity. The foods that people in the Song, Liao, and Jin ate were dependent on what the natural environment provided or what could be acquired through trade. But food and drink were also products of cultural preferences that evolved over time and came to identify economic, social, and ethnic difference. Song, Khitan, and Jurchen foodways differed significantly, rooted in the experiences of steppe and agrarian life as well as the diversity of cultures. People encountered unfamiliar food and drink in the cities andthrough diplomatic and commercial exchanges between Song and its neighbors. The food and drink people consumed were also deeply tied to the theory and practice of Chinese medicine, which reached new levels of standardization and sophistication during the Song and Jin. How were medical traditions transmitted through texts and teachers? How did the state promote and regulate medical knowledge and practice? The spread of printing and commercial publishing made information about food and medicine more widely available to the literate, and others could gain access to this knowledge through oral and visual transmission.

The eleventh century was a period of intense political conflict and two major reform movements as well as war with the Tangut Xi Xia. Supported by the emperor, Wang Anshi’s mid-eleventh-century program of reforms proposed to increase dramatically the power of the state to intervene in the economy and in society as a whole. Although these reforms were rescinded, and pro- and anti-reform factions took turns in power, Wang’s reform set in motion political debates that would rage for centuries after. A major reorganization of the government designed to rationalize the functions of an increasingly complex bureaucracy took place in the late eleventh century. Encounters with rising steppe empires circumscribed political debates at court throughout the Northern Song. The Khitan Liao Empire was destroyed by one of its own vassal peoples, the Jurchen, who then created their own empire and occupied the northern territory of the Song. This marked the fall of the Northern Song, with its capital at Kaifeng in the north, and the founding of the Southern Song, with the emperor’s “temporary residence” in the Yangzi delta city of Hangzhou. The Jurchen Jin was in turn defeated by the rising Mongols, who then conquered the Southern Song.