Inked: Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire’s Penal-Military Complex

Harvard East Asian Monographs #461

by Elad Alyagon

Inked is a social history of common soldiers of the Song Dynasty, most of whom would have been recognized by their tattooed bodies. Overlooked in the historical record, tattoos were an indelible aspect of the Song world, and their ubiquity was tied to the rise of the penal–military complex, a vast system for social control, warfare, and labor.

Although much has been written about the institutional, strategic, and political aspects of the history of the Song and its military, this book is a first-of-its-kind investigation into the lives of the people who fought for the state. Elad Alyagon examines the army as a meeting place between marginalized social groups and elites. In the process, he shows the military to be a space where a new criminalized lower class was molded in a constant struggle between common soldiers and the agents of the Song state. For the millions of people caught in the orbit of this system―the tattooed soldiers, their families, and their neighbors―the Song period was no age of benevolence, but one of servitude, violence, and resistance. Inked is their story.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, China

276 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2023

Reviews

[AlmantasVT · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible, harrowing, powerful read. An antidote to the tedious intellectual self-aggrandizement of typical Song histories, that accept an obviously false narrative that Song officials were morally and intellectually representative of an entire society, as opposed to the leaders of a society where they benefited and others paid. Alyagon is unfortunately limited by the nature of the source base from giving us a portrayal of the Song soldier in their own words, but he is able, through the simple act of asking “is any of this just,” give us a great deal of sympathy for the men - and their wives, daughters, and sons - who found themselves enmeshed in the grand penal-military complex of the Song dynasty. At its most extreme, the 65 million people of the Southern Song included 1.4 million soldiers - and likely a further 3-4 million of their family members trapped in the penal-military complex, giving us upwards of 7% of the entire population of China inside the penal-military complex.

This book s a reminder of why I love non fiction so much: this was a social organization more strange, more bizarre, more outside of what I could have predicted than anything I’ve seen in any scifi or fantasy series. Hive-minds and Levelupocracies and gender fluid mansions and space vampires are all more similar to my present society than what Song dynasty did to its own soldiers. I can see the sense, the logic to why the Song did what they did, and how those decisions lead into the total extinction of the Song state. The Song wanted long-term military professionals, the preceding period had made temporary levying unattractive. The length of service, 40 years, necessitated that the men in service could not simply be in service but had to be integrated into the economy, both formally and in social reproduction, aka they had to have families. This meant both that the soldiers were citizen-soldiers at all times, but also that the commanders stood to economically benefit from larger troop deployments. At the same time, the use of tattoos as social signifiers, as punishments, and as tools to prevent desertion all conspired to keep soldiers in an underclass that was ripe for exploitation by the civil servants charged with leading them. Not temporary conscripts, nor citizen-soldiers of good standing, nor militia, nor warrior-aristocrats, the Song convict-soldier complex is an astonishing feat of mass cruelty that deserves our study and our memorialization.

[Sophie Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alyagon paints a detailed picture of the Song’s military penal complex, but often falls into a black and white worldview of the evil officials suppressing the soldiers and at times lacks context for some anecdotes