according to Chinese economist Professor Yang Xiaokai 杨小凯 (who recently passed away), the Song dynasty already an advanced contract-based system and the sophisticated technology and commercial knowledge necessary for Industrial revolution. However, because Song did not provide patents (legal protection) for individual invention and the law necessary to protect firms, industrial revolution was not able to be taken place in China at that time.
In short, during the Song period, these advanced technology were not able to be fully utilized to transform the economy into large-scale commercial/industrial production by entrepreneurs. This was mainly due to the lack of appropriate legal infrastructure.
In Song China, it is speculated that they were on the verge of an Industrial revolution some 700-900 years before Europe. Sadly the Mongols came along and mucked things up.
The Chinese beat the Europeans to steel by 1000 years.
Under the Song, China produced some 125,000 tons of cast iron a year.
The country had large coal reserves comparable to Europe.
The Chinese were the first to use paper currency.
Chinese investors divided investments between ships, and many ships had multiple investors.
The Chinese had gunpowder since the beginning of the 9th century, whereas Europe didn't have gunpowder until the middle of the 13th.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_industrialization#Historical_precursors_of _industrialization
-http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/chinas-forgotten-industrial-revolution/
-http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/danielvenn/entry/why_did_the/
What if the industrial revolution that began in Song China didn't stop (assuming some sort of prevention of the mongol conquests)? Would it have remained contained to China, or would traders from India, Arabia, and Italy have taken some information home with them?
INTRODUCTION
The Song Dynasty did not dominate East Asia the way the [Chinese] Tang Dynasty [618-907 AD] had, or even rule all areas occupied largely by Chinese speakers. Northern Vietnam defended its independence. The Khitan Liao Dynasty held territory in the northeast down to modern Datong and Beijing, and the Tangut Xia Dynasty held a smaller territory in the northwest. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Song had new northern rivals, the Jurchens and then the Mongols, who took even larger parts of China proper. The Song period is, as a result, conventionally divided into the Northern Song (960-1127), when the Song capital was in Kaifeng and Liao was its chief rival, and the Southern Song (1127-1279), when the capital had been moved to Hangzhou and it confronted Jin on its northern border.
Modern historians have been fascinated by the evidence that Song China was the most advanced society in the world in its day, and many have drawn attention to all that seems progressive in this period: the introduction of paper money, the spread of printing, and increases in literacy, the growth of cities, the expansion of the examination system, the decline of aristocratic attitudes, and so on. These successes naturally raise questions. Why couldn't Song China turn its economic might into military might? How did the increasing importance of the examination system in elite lives affect the operation of the bureaucracy? Why was factionalism such a problem? Because printing led to many more works surviving from the Song than earlier periods, historians have also been able to ask questions they could not ask for earlier periods for lack of sources. What can we learn of daily life among different groups - elite and commoner, men and women, peasants and townsmen? How does Song society, economy, or culture look from the local level?
THE FOUNDING OF THE SONG DYNASTY
The founder of the Song Dynasty, Zhao Kuangyin, was a general whose troops put him on the throne when their previous ruler was succeeded by a child. Known as Taizu (r. 960-976), he set himself the task of making sure that no army would ever again be in a position to oust the rightful heir. He retired or rotated his own generals and assigned civil officials to supervise them, thus subordinating the armed forces to the civil bureaucracy.
Curbing generals ended warlordism but did not solve the problem of defending against the Khitans' Liao Dynasty to the north. During the 5 Dynasties, Liao was able to gain control of a strip of land in north China (the northern parts of Shanxi and Hebei) that had long been considered part of China proper (and was referred to by Song as the Sixteen Prefectures). Taizu and his younger brother Taizong made very effort to defeat Liao. They wanted to reclaim the Sixteen Prefectures because this area included the line of the Great Wall, the mountains and mountain passes that had been central to Chinese defense against northerners since before the Han Dynasty. However, although the Liao ruled over a population tiny by Chinese standards, their horsemen were more than a match for the Chinese armies. After a Liao invasion of 1004 came within a hundred miles of Kaifeng, the Song settled with Liao, agreeing to pay tribute to Liao in exchange for Liao's maintaining the peace. Each year Song was to send Liao 100,000 ounces of silver and 200,000 bolts of silk. In 1042 this sum was increased to 500,000 units.
The payments to the Liao and Xia probably did not damage the overall Chinese economy. Even after the tribute to Liao was raised to 500,000 units, it did not result in an increase in Liao's bullion holdings since Song exports to Liao normally exceeded their imports by a large margin, which meant that the silver sent to Liao found its way back into China as payment for Chinese goods, a little like foreign aid today. At the time, however, the pro-war irrendentists felt humiliated by these treaties and thought it only common sense that payments to Liao and Xia helped them and harmed Song.
The pro-peace accomodationists, however, could juslty point out that tribute was much less costly than war. During the reigns of the first three emperors, the size of the armed forces increased rapidly, to almost 1 million by 1022. By that time the military was consuming three-quarters of the tax revenues. By constrast, even counting the expenses of the exchange of embassies, the cost of maintaining peaceful relations with the Liao consumed no more than 2 or 3 percent of the state's annual revenues.
SONG'S RIVALS: LIAO AND XIA
[I will skip this part of the chapter explaining the events, actions, and lifestyles of the nomadic-overlords of the Liao and Xia dynasties to the north. Although it is interesting in regards to how the steppe nomads coped with ruling settled, agricultural and urbane Chinese people to the north, along with how they dealt with the Song diplomatically, it has almost nothing to do with the point of this thread, although it does describe a semi-successful war campaign of the Song against the Xia. Anyways, moving on...]
A NEW ERA
The pace of change was rapid from the late Tang into the early Song period, and by the mid-eleventh century, China in many ways was a much more modern society, with cities and commerce transforming its economy and printing and examinations transforming elite culture.
THE MEDIEVAL CHINESE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION
In 742 China's population was approximately 50 million, very close to what it had been in 2 CE [AD]. Over the next three centuries, with the expansion of rice cultivation in central and south China, the country's food supply steadily increased, and so did its population. Song population reached about 100 million in 1102. China was certainly the largest country in the world at the time; its population undoubtedly exceeded that of all of Europe (as it has ever since).
How did China's economy sustain such growth? Agricultural prosperity and denser settlement patterns fostered commercialization of the economy. In many regions farmers found that producing for the market made possible a better life, and therefore they no longer aimed at self-sufficiency. Peasants in more densely populated regions with numerous markets sold their surpluses and bought charcoal, tea, oil, and wine. In many places, farmers purchased grain and grew commercial crops, such as sugar, oranges, cotton, silk, and tea. The need to transport these products stimulated the inland and coastal shipping industries, creating jobs for shipbuilders and sailors. Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who wrote of his visit to China in the late thirteenth century, was astounded at the boat traffic on the Yangzi River. He claimed to have seen no fewer than fifteen thousand vessels docked at a single city on the river.
As more goods were bought and sold, demand for money grew enormously, leading eventually to the creation of the world's first paper money. The late Tang government had abandoned the use of bolts of silk as supplementary currency, which increased the demand for copper coins. By 1085 the output of currency had increased ten-fold since Tang times to more than 6 billion coins a year. To avoid the weight and bulk of coins for large transactions, local merchants in late Tang times started trading receipts from deposit shops where they had left money or goods. The early Song authorities awarded a small set of shops a monopoly on the issuance of these certificates of deposit, and in the 1120s the government took over the system, producing the world's first government-issued paper money.
Marco Polo wrote one of the earliest descriptions of how Chinese paper money was issued:
The coinageof this paper money is authenticated as much form and ceremony as if it were actually of pure gold or silver; for to each note a number of officers, specially appointed, not only subscribe their names, but affix their signets also; and when this has been regularly done by the whole of them, the principal officer...having dipped into vermilion the royal seal committed to his custody, stamps with it the piece of paper, so that the form of the seal tinged with the vermilion remains impressed upon it.
With the intensification of trade, merchants became progressively more specialized and organized. They set up partnerships and joint stock companies, with a separation of owners (shareholders) and managers. In the large cities, merchants were organized into guilds according to the type of product sold; they periodically set prices and arranged sales from wholesalers to shop owners. When the government requisitioned goods or assessed taxes, it dealt with the guild heads.
The Song also witnessed many advances in industrial techniques. Papermaking flourished with the demand for paper for books, documents, money, and wrapping paper. Heavy industry, especially iron, also grew at an astounding pace. With advances in metallurgy, iron production reached around 125,000 tons per year in 1078, a sixfold increase over the output in 800. At first, charcoal was used in the production process, leading to deforestation of parts of north China. By the end of the eleventh century, however, bituminous coke had largely taken the place of charcoal.
Much of this iron was put to military purposes. Mass production methods were used to make iron armor in small, medium, and large sizes. High-quality steel for swords was made through high-temperature metallurgy. Huge bellows, often driven by water wheels, were used to superheat the molten ore. The needs of the army also brought Chinese engineers to experiment with the use of gunpowder. In the wars against the Jurchens in the twelfth century, those defending a besieged city used gunpowder to propel projectiles at the enemy.
The quickening of the economy fueled the growth of great cities, especially the two capitals, Kaifeng and Hangzhou. The Song broke all earlier precedents and did not select either Chang'an or Luoyang as its capital, but a city that had prospered because of its location near the northern end of the Grand Canal. The Tang capital, Chang'an, had been a planned city, laid out on a rectangular grid, with the walls built far out to allow expansion. Kaifeng, by contrast, grew over time as its economy developed. The city did not have the clearly demarcated wards of the Tang capital, and officials found themselves in frequent contact with ordinary city residents. The curfew was abolished in 1063, and from then on, many businesses in the entertainment quarters stayed open all night.
The medieval economic revolution shifted the economic center of China south to the Yangzi River drainage area. Rice, which grew there, provides more calories per unit of land than wheat or millet does and therefore allows denser settlements. Moreover, the milder temperatures of the south often allowed two crops to be grown on the same plot of land. The abundance of rivers and streams in the south facilitated shipping, which reduced the cost of transportation and thus made regional specialization economically more feasible.
INTERNATIONAL TRADE
During the tenth through thirteenth centuries, trade connected all of the states we now classify under China (Song, Liao, Xia, Jin), the less politically important Dali state in the region of modern Yunnan, the oasis city-states of Central Asia, and the other major countries of East Asia, notably Korea and Japan. Maritime trade routes also connected all of these places to Southeast Asia and the societies of the Indian Ocean.
Trade between Song and its northern neighbors was stimulated by the indemnities Song paid to them. These states were given the means to buy Song products, and the Song set up supervised markets along the border to encourage this trade. The Song government collected tariffs on this trade, and the trade itself helped sustain Song China's economic growth. Chinese goods that flowed north in large quantities included tea, silk, copper coin (widely used as a currency outside of China), paper and printed books, porcelain, lacquerware, jewelry, rice and other grains, and ginger and other spices. The return flow included some of the silver that had originated with the Song and the horses that Song desperately needed for its armies, but also other animals such as camels and sheep, as well as goods that had traveled across the Silk Road, including fine Indian and Persian cotton cloth, precious gems, incense, and perfumes.
During Song times, maritime trade for the first time exceeded overland foreign trade. The Song government sent missions to Southeast Asian countries to encourage their traders to come to China. Chinese junks were seen throughout the Indian Ocean and began to displace Indian and Arab merchants in the South Seas. Shards of Song Chinese porcelain have been found as far away as East Africa. Chinese junks were larger than the ships of most of their competitors, such as the Indians and Arabs, and had many technical advances, including water-proofing with tong oil, watertight bulkheads, sounding lines to determine depth, and stern-mounted rudders for improved steering. Some of these ships were powered by both oars and sails and were large enough to hold several hundred men. Also important to oceangoing transport was the perfection of the compass. The way a magnetic needle would point north had been known for centuries, but in Song times the needle was reduced in size and attached to a fixed stem (rather than floating in water). In some cases it was put in a small protective case with a glass top, making it suitable for navigation at sea. The first reports of a compass used in this way date to 1119. An early twelfth-century Chinese writer gave two reasons that the ships engaged in maritime trade had to be large and carry several hundred sailors. First, they had to be ready to fight off pirates. Second, high volume was needed so that there would still be a profit after giving substantial "gifts" to the authorities at every port they visited. The most common product carried by the ships, this author reported, was Chinese ceramics.
In 1125 the superintendent of customs at Quanzhou, named Zhao Rukua, wrote an account of the countries with which Chinese merchants traded and the goods they offered for sale. It includes sketches of major trading cities from Srivijaya (modern Indonesia) to Malabar, Cairo, and Baghdad. Pearls were said to come from the Persian Gulf, ivory from Aden, myrrh from Somalia, pepper from Java and Sumatra, cotton from the various kingdoms of India, and so on. Marco Polo a few decades later wrote glowingly of the Chinese pepper trade, saying that for each load of pepper sent to Christendom, a hundred were sent to China. On his own travels home via the sea route, he reported seeing many merchants from southern China plying a thriving trade.
Much money could be made from the sea trade, but there were also great risks, so investors usually divided their investment among many ships, and each ship had many investors behind it. One observer thought eagerness to invest in overseas trade was leading to an outflow of copper cash. He wrote, "People along the coast are on intimate terms with the merchants who engage in overseas trade, either because they are fellow-countrymen or personal acquaintances...[They give the merchants] money to take with them on their ships for the purchase and return conveyance of foreign goods. They invest from ten to a hundred strings of cash, and regularly make profits of several hundred percent."
In 1973 a Song ship that had been ship-wrecked in 1277 was excavated off the south China coast. It was 78 feet long and 29 feet wide and had twelve bulkheads. Inside them were the luxury objects that the Song imported: over five thousand pounds of fragrant wood from Southeast Asia, pepper, betel nut, corwries, tortoise-shell, cinnabar, and ambergris from Somalia.
THE SONG SCHOLAR-OFFICIAL CLASS
The Song period saw the full flowering of one of the most distinctive features of Chinese civilization: the scholar-official class certified through highly competitive civil service examinations. Compared to its Tang counterpart, the Song Chinese scholar-official class was larger, better educated, and less aristrocratic in its habits. The legitimacy of the power of this class was enhanced by its Confucian commitment to public service and by the ostensibly fair and objective ways through which its members gained access to ranks and honors.
The spread of printing aided the expansion of the educated class. In China, as in Europe centuries later, the introduction of printing dramatically lowered the price of books. Song scholars could afford to buy many more books than their counterparts in earlier dynasties. Song publishers printed the classics in huge editions. Works on philosophy, science, and medicine were avidly consumed, as were Buddhist texts. Han and Tang poetry and historical works were used as models by Song writers.
The demand for books was fueled in part by eagerness to compete in the civil service examinations. From the point of view of the early Song emperors, the purpose of written examinations was to identify capable men. So long as the successful candidates were literate, intelligent, and willing to work hard and obey the rules, the rulers had reason to be satisfied with the results, even if some able men were overlooked. From the point of view of those aspiring to office, however, issues of equity loomed large. Was everyone given an equal chance? Did examiners favor those they knew? Why should skills in poetry be tested when officials did not have to compose poems as part of their jobs? To increase confidence in the objectivity of the examiners, the names of the test takers were replaced with numbers and clerks recopied each exam so that handwriting could not be recognized.
The Song examination system recruited four to five times more jinshi ("presented scholars," the highest examination degree) per year than the Tang system had. Yet increasing the number of jinshi did not lower the prestige of the degree. Rather, it encouraged more men to enter the competition. Early in the twelfth century, fewer than 30,000 men took the prefectural exams, which increased to nearly 80,000 by the end of that century and to about 400,000 by the dynasty's end [1279 AD]. Because the number of available posts did not change, each candidate's chances of passing plummeted, reaching as low as 1 in 333 in some prefectures. Men often took the examinations several times and were on average a little over thirty years old when they succeeded.
Young men whose fathers or grandfathers had risen to high rank in the government did not have to take the examinations to get a government post; they could instead take advantage of the privilege higher officials had of nominating sons and grandsons for civil service appointment. Around 40 percent or more of posts in Song times were filled in this way. Men who started their careers through privilege usually had to begin at the very bottom, serving as sheriffs in remote places, and they might well spend their entire careers in country-level posts, never rising above magistrate. They may have spent much of their career collecting taxes and hearing legal cases. It is no wonder then that most sons of the officials were willing to at least try the civil service examinations.
In the 1950s and 1960s western historians stressed the meritocratic side of the Chinese examination system and the social mobility it fostered. Lists of examination graduates showed that only about half had a father, grandfather, or great-grandfather who had served as an official. In recent decades, it has been more common to stress the advantages official families had in placing their sons in government posts and that even those who had served in office might have an uncle or a maternal grandfather who had done so. If the comparison is to other premodern societies, including Korea and Japan, Song China was exceptional in the opportunities it offered to intelligent, hard-working young men without powerful relatives. However, no one should assume that mobility through education occured with the frequency it does in modern society.
Families able to educate their sons were generally landholders. When the Song elite is looked at from the perspective of the local community, families prominent for generations are more striking than new men. In a country with twenty thousand households, a dozen or so family lines might account for nearly all those who gained national notice. Still, because property had to be divided among sons every generation, downward social mobility was always a possibility if nothing was done to add to the family's income or property every generation. Yuan Cai, writing in the late twelfth century, stressed the importance of finding ways to increase the family's property. When one brother had private funds from office, he should not convert it into gold and silver in order to hide it, but should invest it so that it would grow:
For instance, if he had 100,000 strings worth of gold and silver and used this money to buy productive property, in a year he would gain 10,000 strings; after ten years or so, he would have regained the 100,000 strings and what would be divided among the family would be interest. If it were invested in a pawn broking business, in three years the interest would equal the capital. He would still have the 100,000 strings, and the rest, being interest, could be divided. Moreover, it could be doubled again in another three years, ad infinitum.
Members of the Song scholar-official class would rarely have spent their entire lives in their home countries or prefectures. Many traveled considerable distances to study with well-known teachers. If they succeeded in the first stage of the examinations, they had to travel to the capital for the next stage, held every three years. A large proportion of those who succeeded began their careers in country or prefectural posts, and over the next ten or twenty years might criss-cross the empire several times, returning to the capital between assignments. Travel to a new post might take a month or more, during which time the official would call on his colleagues in the places he passed. When Lu You left his home country in 1170 to take up an assignment in Sichuan, he spent 157 days on the road and called on dozens of officials, retired officials, and Buddhist and Daoist clergy along the way. He also had the chance to visit many sites made famous by earlier visitors who had written poems or essays about them.
Many Song men of letters were adept at a wide range of arts and sciences. One of the most versatile was Shen Gua, who tried his hand at everything from mathematics, engineering, medicine, divination, and archeology to military strategy and diplomacy. On an assignment to inspect the frontier, he made a relief map of wood and glue-soaked sawdust to show the mountains, roads, rivers, and passes. He once computed the total number of possible situations on a game board and another time the longest possible military campaign given the limits of human carriers who had to carry their own food as well as food for the soldiers. Interest in the natural world, of the sort Shen Gua displayed, was not as common among the educated elite in Song times as interest in arts and art collecting. The remarkable poet and statesman Su Shi wrote glowingly of paintings doen by scholars, who could imbue their paintings with ideas, making them much better than paintings that merely conveyed outward appearance, the sort of paintings that professional painters made. His friend Mi Fu, a passionate collector, woulld call on collectors to view and discuss their treasures. Often he would borrow piecees to study and copy. When he came across something that excited him, he made every effort to acquire it, generally by offering a trade.
In short, during the Song period, these advanced technology were not able to be fully utilized to transform the economy into large-scale commercial/industrial production by entrepreneurs. This was mainly due to the lack of appropriate legal infrastructure.
In Song China, it is speculated that they were on the verge of an Industrial revolution some 700-900 years before Europe. Sadly the Mongols came along and mucked things up.
The Chinese beat the Europeans to steel by 1000 years.
Under the Song, China produced some 125,000 tons of cast iron a year.
The country had large coal reserves comparable to Europe.
The Chinese were the first to use paper currency.
Chinese investors divided investments between ships, and many ships had multiple investors.
The Chinese had gunpowder since the beginning of the 9th century, whereas Europe didn't have gunpowder until the middle of the 13th.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_industrialization#Historical_precursors_of _industrialization
-http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/chinas-forgotten-industrial-revolution/
-http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/danielvenn/entry/why_did_the/
What if the industrial revolution that began in Song China didn't stop (assuming some sort of prevention of the mongol conquests)? Would it have remained contained to China, or would traders from India, Arabia, and Italy have taken some information home with them?
INTRODUCTION
The Song Dynasty did not dominate East Asia the way the [Chinese] Tang Dynasty [618-907 AD] had, or even rule all areas occupied largely by Chinese speakers. Northern Vietnam defended its independence. The Khitan Liao Dynasty held territory in the northeast down to modern Datong and Beijing, and the Tangut Xia Dynasty held a smaller territory in the northwest. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Song had new northern rivals, the Jurchens and then the Mongols, who took even larger parts of China proper. The Song period is, as a result, conventionally divided into the Northern Song (960-1127), when the Song capital was in Kaifeng and Liao was its chief rival, and the Southern Song (1127-1279), when the capital had been moved to Hangzhou and it confronted Jin on its northern border.
Modern historians have been fascinated by the evidence that Song China was the most advanced society in the world in its day, and many have drawn attention to all that seems progressive in this period: the introduction of paper money, the spread of printing, and increases in literacy, the growth of cities, the expansion of the examination system, the decline of aristocratic attitudes, and so on. These successes naturally raise questions. Why couldn't Song China turn its economic might into military might? How did the increasing importance of the examination system in elite lives affect the operation of the bureaucracy? Why was factionalism such a problem? Because printing led to many more works surviving from the Song than earlier periods, historians have also been able to ask questions they could not ask for earlier periods for lack of sources. What can we learn of daily life among different groups - elite and commoner, men and women, peasants and townsmen? How does Song society, economy, or culture look from the local level?
THE FOUNDING OF THE SONG DYNASTY
The founder of the Song Dynasty, Zhao Kuangyin, was a general whose troops put him on the throne when their previous ruler was succeeded by a child. Known as Taizu (r. 960-976), he set himself the task of making sure that no army would ever again be in a position to oust the rightful heir. He retired or rotated his own generals and assigned civil officials to supervise them, thus subordinating the armed forces to the civil bureaucracy.
Curbing generals ended warlordism but did not solve the problem of defending against the Khitans' Liao Dynasty to the north. During the 5 Dynasties, Liao was able to gain control of a strip of land in north China (the northern parts of Shanxi and Hebei) that had long been considered part of China proper (and was referred to by Song as the Sixteen Prefectures). Taizu and his younger brother Taizong made very effort to defeat Liao. They wanted to reclaim the Sixteen Prefectures because this area included the line of the Great Wall, the mountains and mountain passes that had been central to Chinese defense against northerners since before the Han Dynasty. However, although the Liao ruled over a population tiny by Chinese standards, their horsemen were more than a match for the Chinese armies. After a Liao invasion of 1004 came within a hundred miles of Kaifeng, the Song settled with Liao, agreeing to pay tribute to Liao in exchange for Liao's maintaining the peace. Each year Song was to send Liao 100,000 ounces of silver and 200,000 bolts of silk. In 1042 this sum was increased to 500,000 units.
The payments to the Liao and Xia probably did not damage the overall Chinese economy. Even after the tribute to Liao was raised to 500,000 units, it did not result in an increase in Liao's bullion holdings since Song exports to Liao normally exceeded their imports by a large margin, which meant that the silver sent to Liao found its way back into China as payment for Chinese goods, a little like foreign aid today. At the time, however, the pro-war irrendentists felt humiliated by these treaties and thought it only common sense that payments to Liao and Xia helped them and harmed Song.
The pro-peace accomodationists, however, could juslty point out that tribute was much less costly than war. During the reigns of the first three emperors, the size of the armed forces increased rapidly, to almost 1 million by 1022. By that time the military was consuming three-quarters of the tax revenues. By constrast, even counting the expenses of the exchange of embassies, the cost of maintaining peaceful relations with the Liao consumed no more than 2 or 3 percent of the state's annual revenues.
SONG'S RIVALS: LIAO AND XIA
[I will skip this part of the chapter explaining the events, actions, and lifestyles of the nomadic-overlords of the Liao and Xia dynasties to the north. Although it is interesting in regards to how the steppe nomads coped with ruling settled, agricultural and urbane Chinese people to the north, along with how they dealt with the Song diplomatically, it has almost nothing to do with the point of this thread, although it does describe a semi-successful war campaign of the Song against the Xia. Anyways, moving on...]
A NEW ERA
The pace of change was rapid from the late Tang into the early Song period, and by the mid-eleventh century, China in many ways was a much more modern society, with cities and commerce transforming its economy and printing and examinations transforming elite culture.
THE MEDIEVAL CHINESE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION
In 742 China's population was approximately 50 million, very close to what it had been in 2 CE [AD]. Over the next three centuries, with the expansion of rice cultivation in central and south China, the country's food supply steadily increased, and so did its population. Song population reached about 100 million in 1102. China was certainly the largest country in the world at the time; its population undoubtedly exceeded that of all of Europe (as it has ever since).
How did China's economy sustain such growth? Agricultural prosperity and denser settlement patterns fostered commercialization of the economy. In many regions farmers found that producing for the market made possible a better life, and therefore they no longer aimed at self-sufficiency. Peasants in more densely populated regions with numerous markets sold their surpluses and bought charcoal, tea, oil, and wine. In many places, farmers purchased grain and grew commercial crops, such as sugar, oranges, cotton, silk, and tea. The need to transport these products stimulated the inland and coastal shipping industries, creating jobs for shipbuilders and sailors. Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who wrote of his visit to China in the late thirteenth century, was astounded at the boat traffic on the Yangzi River. He claimed to have seen no fewer than fifteen thousand vessels docked at a single city on the river.
As more goods were bought and sold, demand for money grew enormously, leading eventually to the creation of the world's first paper money. The late Tang government had abandoned the use of bolts of silk as supplementary currency, which increased the demand for copper coins. By 1085 the output of currency had increased ten-fold since Tang times to more than 6 billion coins a year. To avoid the weight and bulk of coins for large transactions, local merchants in late Tang times started trading receipts from deposit shops where they had left money or goods. The early Song authorities awarded a small set of shops a monopoly on the issuance of these certificates of deposit, and in the 1120s the government took over the system, producing the world's first government-issued paper money.
Marco Polo wrote one of the earliest descriptions of how Chinese paper money was issued:
The coinageof this paper money is authenticated as much form and ceremony as if it were actually of pure gold or silver; for to each note a number of officers, specially appointed, not only subscribe their names, but affix their signets also; and when this has been regularly done by the whole of them, the principal officer...having dipped into vermilion the royal seal committed to his custody, stamps with it the piece of paper, so that the form of the seal tinged with the vermilion remains impressed upon it.
With the intensification of trade, merchants became progressively more specialized and organized. They set up partnerships and joint stock companies, with a separation of owners (shareholders) and managers. In the large cities, merchants were organized into guilds according to the type of product sold; they periodically set prices and arranged sales from wholesalers to shop owners. When the government requisitioned goods or assessed taxes, it dealt with the guild heads.
The Song also witnessed many advances in industrial techniques. Papermaking flourished with the demand for paper for books, documents, money, and wrapping paper. Heavy industry, especially iron, also grew at an astounding pace. With advances in metallurgy, iron production reached around 125,000 tons per year in 1078, a sixfold increase over the output in 800. At first, charcoal was used in the production process, leading to deforestation of parts of north China. By the end of the eleventh century, however, bituminous coke had largely taken the place of charcoal.
Much of this iron was put to military purposes. Mass production methods were used to make iron armor in small, medium, and large sizes. High-quality steel for swords was made through high-temperature metallurgy. Huge bellows, often driven by water wheels, were used to superheat the molten ore. The needs of the army also brought Chinese engineers to experiment with the use of gunpowder. In the wars against the Jurchens in the twelfth century, those defending a besieged city used gunpowder to propel projectiles at the enemy.
The quickening of the economy fueled the growth of great cities, especially the two capitals, Kaifeng and Hangzhou. The Song broke all earlier precedents and did not select either Chang'an or Luoyang as its capital, but a city that had prospered because of its location near the northern end of the Grand Canal. The Tang capital, Chang'an, had been a planned city, laid out on a rectangular grid, with the walls built far out to allow expansion. Kaifeng, by contrast, grew over time as its economy developed. The city did not have the clearly demarcated wards of the Tang capital, and officials found themselves in frequent contact with ordinary city residents. The curfew was abolished in 1063, and from then on, many businesses in the entertainment quarters stayed open all night.
The medieval economic revolution shifted the economic center of China south to the Yangzi River drainage area. Rice, which grew there, provides more calories per unit of land than wheat or millet does and therefore allows denser settlements. Moreover, the milder temperatures of the south often allowed two crops to be grown on the same plot of land. The abundance of rivers and streams in the south facilitated shipping, which reduced the cost of transportation and thus made regional specialization economically more feasible.
INTERNATIONAL TRADE
During the tenth through thirteenth centuries, trade connected all of the states we now classify under China (Song, Liao, Xia, Jin), the less politically important Dali state in the region of modern Yunnan, the oasis city-states of Central Asia, and the other major countries of East Asia, notably Korea and Japan. Maritime trade routes also connected all of these places to Southeast Asia and the societies of the Indian Ocean.
Trade between Song and its northern neighbors was stimulated by the indemnities Song paid to them. These states were given the means to buy Song products, and the Song set up supervised markets along the border to encourage this trade. The Song government collected tariffs on this trade, and the trade itself helped sustain Song China's economic growth. Chinese goods that flowed north in large quantities included tea, silk, copper coin (widely used as a currency outside of China), paper and printed books, porcelain, lacquerware, jewelry, rice and other grains, and ginger and other spices. The return flow included some of the silver that had originated with the Song and the horses that Song desperately needed for its armies, but also other animals such as camels and sheep, as well as goods that had traveled across the Silk Road, including fine Indian and Persian cotton cloth, precious gems, incense, and perfumes.
During Song times, maritime trade for the first time exceeded overland foreign trade. The Song government sent missions to Southeast Asian countries to encourage their traders to come to China. Chinese junks were seen throughout the Indian Ocean and began to displace Indian and Arab merchants in the South Seas. Shards of Song Chinese porcelain have been found as far away as East Africa. Chinese junks were larger than the ships of most of their competitors, such as the Indians and Arabs, and had many technical advances, including water-proofing with tong oil, watertight bulkheads, sounding lines to determine depth, and stern-mounted rudders for improved steering. Some of these ships were powered by both oars and sails and were large enough to hold several hundred men. Also important to oceangoing transport was the perfection of the compass. The way a magnetic needle would point north had been known for centuries, but in Song times the needle was reduced in size and attached to a fixed stem (rather than floating in water). In some cases it was put in a small protective case with a glass top, making it suitable for navigation at sea. The first reports of a compass used in this way date to 1119. An early twelfth-century Chinese writer gave two reasons that the ships engaged in maritime trade had to be large and carry several hundred sailors. First, they had to be ready to fight off pirates. Second, high volume was needed so that there would still be a profit after giving substantial "gifts" to the authorities at every port they visited. The most common product carried by the ships, this author reported, was Chinese ceramics.
In 1125 the superintendent of customs at Quanzhou, named Zhao Rukua, wrote an account of the countries with which Chinese merchants traded and the goods they offered for sale. It includes sketches of major trading cities from Srivijaya (modern Indonesia) to Malabar, Cairo, and Baghdad. Pearls were said to come from the Persian Gulf, ivory from Aden, myrrh from Somalia, pepper from Java and Sumatra, cotton from the various kingdoms of India, and so on. Marco Polo a few decades later wrote glowingly of the Chinese pepper trade, saying that for each load of pepper sent to Christendom, a hundred were sent to China. On his own travels home via the sea route, he reported seeing many merchants from southern China plying a thriving trade.
Much money could be made from the sea trade, but there were also great risks, so investors usually divided their investment among many ships, and each ship had many investors behind it. One observer thought eagerness to invest in overseas trade was leading to an outflow of copper cash. He wrote, "People along the coast are on intimate terms with the merchants who engage in overseas trade, either because they are fellow-countrymen or personal acquaintances...[They give the merchants] money to take with them on their ships for the purchase and return conveyance of foreign goods. They invest from ten to a hundred strings of cash, and regularly make profits of several hundred percent."
In 1973 a Song ship that had been ship-wrecked in 1277 was excavated off the south China coast. It was 78 feet long and 29 feet wide and had twelve bulkheads. Inside them were the luxury objects that the Song imported: over five thousand pounds of fragrant wood from Southeast Asia, pepper, betel nut, corwries, tortoise-shell, cinnabar, and ambergris from Somalia.
THE SONG SCHOLAR-OFFICIAL CLASS
The Song period saw the full flowering of one of the most distinctive features of Chinese civilization: the scholar-official class certified through highly competitive civil service examinations. Compared to its Tang counterpart, the Song Chinese scholar-official class was larger, better educated, and less aristrocratic in its habits. The legitimacy of the power of this class was enhanced by its Confucian commitment to public service and by the ostensibly fair and objective ways through which its members gained access to ranks and honors.
The spread of printing aided the expansion of the educated class. In China, as in Europe centuries later, the introduction of printing dramatically lowered the price of books. Song scholars could afford to buy many more books than their counterparts in earlier dynasties. Song publishers printed the classics in huge editions. Works on philosophy, science, and medicine were avidly consumed, as were Buddhist texts. Han and Tang poetry and historical works were used as models by Song writers.
The demand for books was fueled in part by eagerness to compete in the civil service examinations. From the point of view of the early Song emperors, the purpose of written examinations was to identify capable men. So long as the successful candidates were literate, intelligent, and willing to work hard and obey the rules, the rulers had reason to be satisfied with the results, even if some able men were overlooked. From the point of view of those aspiring to office, however, issues of equity loomed large. Was everyone given an equal chance? Did examiners favor those they knew? Why should skills in poetry be tested when officials did not have to compose poems as part of their jobs? To increase confidence in the objectivity of the examiners, the names of the test takers were replaced with numbers and clerks recopied each exam so that handwriting could not be recognized.
The Song examination system recruited four to five times more jinshi ("presented scholars," the highest examination degree) per year than the Tang system had. Yet increasing the number of jinshi did not lower the prestige of the degree. Rather, it encouraged more men to enter the competition. Early in the twelfth century, fewer than 30,000 men took the prefectural exams, which increased to nearly 80,000 by the end of that century and to about 400,000 by the dynasty's end [1279 AD]. Because the number of available posts did not change, each candidate's chances of passing plummeted, reaching as low as 1 in 333 in some prefectures. Men often took the examinations several times and were on average a little over thirty years old when they succeeded.
Young men whose fathers or grandfathers had risen to high rank in the government did not have to take the examinations to get a government post; they could instead take advantage of the privilege higher officials had of nominating sons and grandsons for civil service appointment. Around 40 percent or more of posts in Song times were filled in this way. Men who started their careers through privilege usually had to begin at the very bottom, serving as sheriffs in remote places, and they might well spend their entire careers in country-level posts, never rising above magistrate. They may have spent much of their career collecting taxes and hearing legal cases. It is no wonder then that most sons of the officials were willing to at least try the civil service examinations.
In the 1950s and 1960s western historians stressed the meritocratic side of the Chinese examination system and the social mobility it fostered. Lists of examination graduates showed that only about half had a father, grandfather, or great-grandfather who had served as an official. In recent decades, it has been more common to stress the advantages official families had in placing their sons in government posts and that even those who had served in office might have an uncle or a maternal grandfather who had done so. If the comparison is to other premodern societies, including Korea and Japan, Song China was exceptional in the opportunities it offered to intelligent, hard-working young men without powerful relatives. However, no one should assume that mobility through education occured with the frequency it does in modern society.
Families able to educate their sons were generally landholders. When the Song elite is looked at from the perspective of the local community, families prominent for generations are more striking than new men. In a country with twenty thousand households, a dozen or so family lines might account for nearly all those who gained national notice. Still, because property had to be divided among sons every generation, downward social mobility was always a possibility if nothing was done to add to the family's income or property every generation. Yuan Cai, writing in the late twelfth century, stressed the importance of finding ways to increase the family's property. When one brother had private funds from office, he should not convert it into gold and silver in order to hide it, but should invest it so that it would grow:
For instance, if he had 100,000 strings worth of gold and silver and used this money to buy productive property, in a year he would gain 10,000 strings; after ten years or so, he would have regained the 100,000 strings and what would be divided among the family would be interest. If it were invested in a pawn broking business, in three years the interest would equal the capital. He would still have the 100,000 strings, and the rest, being interest, could be divided. Moreover, it could be doubled again in another three years, ad infinitum.
Members of the Song scholar-official class would rarely have spent their entire lives in their home countries or prefectures. Many traveled considerable distances to study with well-known teachers. If they succeeded in the first stage of the examinations, they had to travel to the capital for the next stage, held every three years. A large proportion of those who succeeded began their careers in country or prefectural posts, and over the next ten or twenty years might criss-cross the empire several times, returning to the capital between assignments. Travel to a new post might take a month or more, during which time the official would call on his colleagues in the places he passed. When Lu You left his home country in 1170 to take up an assignment in Sichuan, he spent 157 days on the road and called on dozens of officials, retired officials, and Buddhist and Daoist clergy along the way. He also had the chance to visit many sites made famous by earlier visitors who had written poems or essays about them.
Many Song men of letters were adept at a wide range of arts and sciences. One of the most versatile was Shen Gua, who tried his hand at everything from mathematics, engineering, medicine, divination, and archeology to military strategy and diplomacy. On an assignment to inspect the frontier, he made a relief map of wood and glue-soaked sawdust to show the mountains, roads, rivers, and passes. He once computed the total number of possible situations on a game board and another time the longest possible military campaign given the limits of human carriers who had to carry their own food as well as food for the soldiers. Interest in the natural world, of the sort Shen Gua displayed, was not as common among the educated elite in Song times as interest in arts and art collecting. The remarkable poet and statesman Su Shi wrote glowingly of paintings doen by scholars, who could imbue their paintings with ideas, making them much better than paintings that merely conveyed outward appearance, the sort of paintings that professional painters made. His friend Mi Fu, a passionate collector, woulld call on collectors to view and discuss their treasures. Often he would borrow piecees to study and copy. When he came across something that excited him, he made every effort to acquire it, generally by offering a trade.
