“Scholar-official culture” is an important part of study of Confucianism in the Song and the Ming Dynasty and also a brand-new field of academic study. From this perspective, Zhu Xi's World of History seems to be a historical miniature of the rise and fall of Confucianism in the North and the South Song Dynasty. The book begins with the Confucian view of “taking the nation's destiny as one's own” and “the state's affairs to be discussed by all” and continues with a careful discriminative analysis of the gradual course of dividing into different cliques and finally being abandoned by the label of pseudo-Confucianism. It completely reveals the key malpractice of “being appreciated when alive but being forgotten when dead” in the traditional political institutions.

scholar; state affairs; clique; pseudo-Confucianism; political culture in the Song Dynasty