Strange Weather: Art, Politics, and Climate Change at the Court of Northern Song Emperor Huizong

By examining these instances and their potent functions in determining court politics, we are provided with a singular portrait of a court where belief in the power of omens and signs in nature was endemic and was manipulated constantly by the political and moral interpretation of natural events such as the appearances of comets or sunspots or even uncommon weather phenomena. According to the Xuanhe huapu [Painting catalogue of the Xuanhe period] (Table 1), among Yan Su’s 燕肅 (961–1040) 27 landscape paintings, 19 are snowscapes.7 Of Xu Daoning’s and Song Di’s 宋迪 (ca. 1015–ca. Based on the evidence of tree-ring variations and other scientific measurements, paleometeorologists have been able to identify an earlier period of relatively high temperatures, which they refer to as the Medieval Warm Period.10 Snowfalls during the Warm Period were regarded as “Auspicious Snows” and, in fact, emperors frequently assembled their ministers to pray for snow or ordered landscape paintings on the theme of Appreciating the Snowfalls.11 With the especially severe dip in temperatures around 1100–1127, heavy snowfalls and snow-related catastrophes caused conspicuous damage to crops throughout the empire, initiating a crisis in agriculture, food supply, transportation, and, as a result, the social order.12 According to the Dongjing menghualu [Glorious dreams of the eastern capital], during Huizong’s reign, the winter months in the capital, Kaifeng, were too cold to cultivate any vegetables.13 In the tropical region of Fujian, millions of lychee fruit trees over ten counties were frozen.14 By 1110, the terrible snowstorms created a famine that turned millions into refugees (Appendix II). [...]the Cold Period was a major contributing factor in the eventual collapse of the Northern Song (Figs. 9–10; Appendix III).15 If we look again at Returning Boat on a Snowy River and its colophon of 1110/3/1, we note that the date corresponds exactly to the height of the Cold Period and the disasters that it wrought.