The Song Dynasty

Podcast Transcript

Chinese civilization has endured for more than 3,500 years, driven by a succession of kings, emperors, and sophisticated bureaucracies.

This enduring culture has produced a legacy of profound intellectual and cultural achievements.

Among these eras, the Song Dynasty stands out for overseeing a commercial and urban revolution that produced a stunning array of innovations and technologies and defined China’s golden age.

Learn more about the greatness of Song China on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Song Dynasty ruled China from 960 to 1279. It was a period widely regarded by many historians as the Golden Age of Chinese history.

Explosive population growth was a defining characteristic of the Song Dynasty, acting as the foundation for many of the period’s other hallmarks. Notably, China’s population saw a doubling from the close of the Tang Dynasty to the midpoint of Song rule.

This was mostly due to the introduction of Champa rice.

Champa rice revolutionized Song China. Because this drought-resistant strain matured in only 60 days, it enabled three harvests per year, thereby driving the population to an estimated 100 million by 1100.

This medieval Green Revolution had a substantial impact on China’s urbanization.

Champa rice cultivation required fewer people to produce a surplus of rice. Generating greater food surpluses on the same amount of land reduced the number of people required for farming. This specialization of labor shifted millions of people from rural to urban environments into non-agricultural work.

This increase in non-agricultural labor led to an increase in artisans, craftsmen, and inventors. These classes were the engines of innovation in Song China.

Song China, much like its contemporary middle eastern empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, successfully managed a rapidly expanding urban population. This success led to the development of a vibrant urban culture.

The great Song city of Hangzhou became the world’s largest, with a population estimated at 1 million. The city presented a sprawling urban landscape, which was possible due to urban planning.

The Venetian chronicler Marco Polo described the city as having ten marketplaces capable of accommodating up to 50,000 people.

Song China abandoned the rigid gridlike structure of earlier Chinese metropolises in favor of an open market-based layout. The city would take full advantage of its location on the Qiantang River and turn it into a hub of maritime commerce.

Marco Polo also described a city of 12,000 bridges, many of which allowed massive fleets of ships to sail beneath their spans. Chinese scrolls from the period depict large bridges lined with markets and restaurants.

The city of Hangzhou was located at the southern end of the Grand Canal, a remarkable engineering feat that spaned more than 1,000 miles or 1,700 kilometers, and linked China’s northern and southern halves through a artifical waterway.

Chinese paintings of the time depict massive boat traffic flowing into the city. Marco Polo estimated seeing 15,000 vessels on the river. As is typical of Marco Polo’s accounts, that may be an exaggeration, but we can safely say that Huangzhou was a major center of commercial activity.

Song Dynasty cities were home to the world’s most sophisticated commercial society. Their use of paper currency accelerated the economic revolution taking place in China’s urban centers.

Traditional Chinese currency had been copper coins. As the commercial activity in China increased, so did the demand for coins. Coin production was taxing the system, and continued coin production was not sustainable. Conducting large-scale transactions in coinage was also cumbersome.

To improve the system’s efficiency, the Song government issued paper currency called the Jiaozi, which survived the Mongol invasions and persisted for 300 years before counterfeiting and debasement brought about its demise.

The Jiaozi became the world’s first government-issued paper currency.

The currency was built on earlier regional Chinese paper currencies that functioned like checks. The currency was backed by the government, and holders could exchange it for copper coins of equivalent value.

This type of innovation would not have be possible without earlier Chinese innovations in papermaking and printing, technologies that did not diffuse to Europe until the 1450s.

There is little debate that this was an economic golden age in Chinese history.

The Song Dynasty continued to experience high international demand for its products among Silk Road traders, a trend inherited from earlier eras. Silk, which remained the global standard fabric in the 11th century, was highly valued across the vast region stretching from Europe to East Asia.

The Eurasian trade in silk remained robust, even as the overland Silk Road trade route declined, with activity shifting to maritime routes in the Indian Ocean.

Chinese porcelain, a new export, was sweeping across Asia and the Indian Ocean, becoming a highly sought-after luxury good. Long before the famed Ming period, the Song Dynasty sparked the global fascination with “fine china,” complementing the existing demand for silk.

China, during the Song dynasty, also became a center of technological innovation.

While woodblock printing was common across East Asia for centuries, the Song Dynasty introduced a truly revolutionary shift: movable type. Though this invention is often credited to Johannes Gutenberg in 15th-century Germany, the true pioneer was Bi Sheng, a Song inventor who developed the technology four hundred years earlier.

Perhaps the most consequential Song technological development was the practical application of gunpowder.

While gunpowder had been discovered centuries beforehand, the Song standardized its manufacture and began expanding its use for weapons of war. The Song paved the way for the Islamic gunpowder empires and for Europe’s subsequent expansion of gunpowder use.

The Song dynasty was able to withstand the intense Mongol invasions for more than four decades, largely due to its use of gunpowder weapons.

The Song pioneered a suite of weapons that revolutionized modern warfare. Song engineers turned gunpowder into early forms of grenades, catapults, firearms, cannons, and even land mines.

In one of their greatest technological breakthroughs, Song engineers built on earlier compass technology, which was based on a magnetic iron-ore spoon. In the 11th century, a scientist named Shen Kou invented the first navigational compass, featuring a circular dial marked with degrees of direction.

The compass was a sensation, particularly among East Asian merchants, who used it to navigate the Indian Ocean.

The Chinese compass became the standard in the Eurasian world, influencing later technologies that promoted trade networks in the Indian Ocean, the Islamic Hajj, and the Age of Exploration in Europe.

As their Islamic counterparts in Baghdad did, Song engineers and scientists developed a wide-ranging and impressive body of knowledge and machines.

Song Engineers fascinated by gears developed giant clock towers powered by water. These devices announced the time with assorted figures and thundering gongs.

Chinese scientists focused intently on Astronomy, producing precise celestial maps and explaining the mechanisms behind the world’s tidal system.

One of the most intriguing debates among historians on Song China centers around industrialization.

Late 18th-century Britain is commonly regarded as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, but the Song were remarkably close to having their own Industrial Revolution in the 13th century.

Historians often refer to the process of Song industrialization as proto-industrialization, a nod to how close they were to becoming industrialized, but they fell just short.

This proto-industrialization was largely driven by the Song’s massive-scale production of iron and steel.

The Song Dynasty developed an early form of steel by combining cast and wrought iron during the smelting process. Some estimates suggest that China’s steel production may have been approximately a thousand years ahead of Europe’s.

Chinese iron production reached 125,000 tons per year by the middle of the 11th century, an incredible total for the time. The Chinese used iron and steel to manufacture many other products, including nails for houses.

One of the major drivers of the iron and steel industry in Song China was the construction of numerous bridges that Marco Polo described seeing in urban China.

Coal was the fuel of industrialization. Song China abandoned the use of wood and charcoal due to the massive deforestation they caused, and became heavily reliant on coal.

This use of coal and steel illustrates the similarities between the industrialization in both England and China.

The conditions that led to industrialization in England centuries later were developing in China under the Song. Industrial growth required significant urbanization, which in turn depended on an agricultural revolution for support.

Thanks to the adoption of the aforementioned Champa Rice, the Song achieved substantial increases in agricultural production, thereby enabling proto-industrialization to occur.

The Song dynasty could have achieved industrialization centuries earlier than in Europe, but its efforts were destroyed by the Mongol onslaught of the 13th century.

Had the Mongol invasions not occurred, it is quite possible that industrialization would have originated in China rather than England.

The Song experienced a renaissance in learning and education thanks to the extensive use of paper and printing. These developments dramatically expanded the volume of books in Song China and also improved literacy across the Chinese world. Living in the urban centers of the commercially active Song Dynasty required basic literacy skills.

Perhaps the greatest influence of paper and printing in China was felt in its merit based political system, which was centered around the Chinese Civil Service Exam system. The Chinese had long embraced a system that trained scholars in the moral and ethical principles of Confucian philosophy.

Preparing for the Confucian exams demanded decades of study from students. This extensive process involved memorizing texts, applying their principles to solve moral dilemmas, and even deciphering and interpreting scrambled passages.

The civil service exam system had been a keystone of Chinese political and social life for centuries, but the Song perfected it. The system originated in the Han dynasty, where it produced an educated class of government officials.

The system changed over time. During the Song period the entire governmental bureaucracy was staffed by scholar elites who had passed the exam.

The Song age exam was formalized into a three-tiered exam process. The exam was available to candidates at the local, regional prefecture, and imperial levels.

The exams grew progressively more challenging as one advanced through the system, simultaneously offering greater earning potential and recognition upon success.

Perhaps the most important evolution in the examination system was the Song dynasty’s belief that the examination should be administered solely on the basis of students’ merit.

The Song Dynasty’s expansion of the examination system marked a significant shift toward meritocracy. This contrasts with the late Tang Dynasty, where the system was largely restricted to the Chinese elite, characterized by a much smaller pool of eligible candidates and an extremely low pass rate.

The first Song Emperor, Taizu, issued an edict to reform the imperial examination system, prohibiting court officials from submitting letters of recommendation on behalf of candidates. This action aimed to counteract a bias that had previously benefited candidates primarily from elite families with strong connections within the imperial court.

The Song’s focus was on increasing the availability of examination slots to accommodate more examinees, while also addressing the challenges of governing an ever-expanding Chinese population.

More people meant greater political responsibility; the long-standing practice of having 3,000 bureaucrats govern more than 1,000 provinces and localities has become unsustainable.

The Song Dynasty pushed the idea of a fair, universally accessible examination system to remarkable extremes. To prevent the examining bureaucracy from recognizing well-known names, the exam administration took the extraordinary measure of replacing students’ names with numbers.

If this wasn’t enough, they actually had scribes on hand to recopy exams so that a candidate’s calligraphy was unrecognizable!

Song China was arguably the golden age of China. When we think of the things that made China great, most of them occurred during the Song Dynasty.

Sadly, it all came to an end with the invasion of the Mongols, who established the Yuan Dynasty. Imperial China would endure for centuries after the Mongols, but it would never again reach the heights it had under the Song.