How do literary works survive periods of political disintegration and warfare? Who preserved, transported, and reassembled books and libraries in the context of mass migration and the emergence of new states? What can new works from such eras tell us about the history of knowledge? This talk approaches these questions in the transformative period in Chinese history known commonly as the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms,” that stretched from the late ninth-century rebellions that brought down the Tang dynasty (618–907) to the founding of the Song dynasty (N. Song, 960–1127; S. Song, 1127–1279). I first weave together the political, social, and material impacts of the “textual diaspora” that accompanied the human diaspora after the fall of the Tang, considering new incentives for collecting and transmitting books in northern and southern tenth-century regional regimes, including the rise of printing. Then I will explore two of the famous compilation projects of the early Northern Song—the collection of stories Extensive Records of the Taiping Reign (Taiping guangji 太平廣記, comp. 978) and the belletristic anthology Glorious Blossoms of the Literary Garden (Wenyuan yinghua 文苑英華, comp. 982–987) as culminations of new trends in tenth-century knowledge practices, underscoring the outsized influence of southern culture and scholarship on both works. The two great compilations were built on a critical century of book collection and selective preservation of literary works—rather than being “Song” conceptions, they represent distinctive, coherent remappings of the Tang cultural heritage with tenth-century origins.