The three need-nots
The opposition wielded celestial anomalies, ancestral statutes, and public opinion as weapons, and Wang Anshi swept all three aside in a sentence: "Heaven’s portents are not to be feared, the ways of the ancestors are not to be followed, the words of men are not to be heeded." In an age that held the resonance of Heaven and man and the ancestors’ institutions as supreme authority, this was a demolition job on the level of thought. For just this reason he became the "obstinate chancellor" in the old party’s telling — the History of Song cast the reforms as the root cause of the Northern Song’s fall, a charge he bore for eight hundred years.
A quarrel between gentlemen
Wang Anshi and Sima Guang were utterly opposed in politics yet respected each other in private — Sima Guang said "Jiefu has much that surpasses others in prose and integrity," and Wang Anshi judged "Sima Junshi is a gentleman." Su Shi, demoted for half his life for opposing the new laws, made a special visit to Wang Anshi at Jinling after Wang had left office, and the two roamed the hills exchanging poems. When Su Shi was jailed and nearly died in the Crow Terrace poetry case, the retired Wang Anshi memorialized to save him: "How can a sage age put a talented scholar to death?" Politics stayed politics, and character stayed character — the most dignified page of the Northern Song factional strife.