Song dynasty

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Song dynasty ruled China from 960 to 1279, and within that span it created the world's first government-issued paper money, built the world's first permanent standing navy, and recorded the oldest surviving formula for gunpowder. China's economy during the 12th century was roughly three times larger than that of all Europe combined. The Northern Song census counted 20 million households, double what the Han and Tang dynasties had ever recorded. Yet this was also a dynasty in near-constant peril, pressing against hostile states to the north and eventually losing its homeland entirely, forced to govern from a city south of the Yangtze. How did a dynasty that could not hold its own capital become the most economically and intellectually productive society on earth? That is the central puzzle of the Song.

• 2. A Dynasty Under Siege

  ›

  Emperor Taizu of Song usurped the throne of the Later Zhou dynasty and spent sixteen years reuniting much of the territory once held by the Han and Tang empires. He built his capital at Kaifeng, promoted the civil service examination over military rank, and commissioned works like the astronomical clock tower designed by the engineer Zhang Sixun. He also inherited dangerous neighbors. The ethnic Khitan Liao dynasty held the Sixteen Prefectures in the northeast, a territory under Khitan control since 938 that was traditionally considered part of China proper.

  Song forces were repulsed when they tried to take those territories back, and the Liao conducted aggressive yearly campaigns into Song territory until 1005, when the Shanyuan Treaty ended the border clashes. The agreement forced the Song to pay tribute to the Liao and to recognize the Liao state as a diplomatic equal. To slow future cavalry raids, the Song planted an extensive defensive forest along the border.

  The western frontier was equally troubled. A campaign led by the polymath general Shen Kuo (1031-1095) against the Tangut Western Xia ultimately failed after a rival officer disobeyed direct orders. Two wars with the Vietnamese kingdom of Dai Viet followed, the second running from 1075 to 1077. Song commander Guo Kui (1022-1088) pushed as far as Thang Long, what is now Hanoi, before both sides accepted a mutual exchange of prisoners and territory in 1082.

  The dynasty's greatest internal crisis came from political faction warfare. Chancellor Fan Zhongyan (989-1052) attempted his Qingli Reforms, then was forced out of office. Wang Anshi (1021-1086) introduced the New Policies with Emperor Shenzong's backing, creating the Reform faction, which was countered by the Conservatives led by historian and Chancellor Sima Guang (1019-1086). The famous poet and statesman Su Shi (1037-1101) was jailed and exiled for criticizing Wang's program. As each faction drove the other into exile, the dynasty's administrative coherence eroded.

• 3. The Fall of the North

  ›

  Cai Jing (1047-1126), appointed by Emperor Zhezong and still in power until 1125, tolerated corruption and encouraged Emperor Huizong to neglect governance for artistic pursuits. A peasant rebellion headed by Fang La broke out in Zhejiang and Fujian in 1120, attributed to heavy taxation and concentrated land ownership. While the court was absorbed in these crises, a subject tribe of the Liao called the Jurchen rebelled and formed their own Jin dynasty.

  Song official Tong Guan (1054-1126) advised Emperor Huizong to ally with the Jurchen against the Liao. The joint campaign, called the Alliance Conducted at Sea, toppled the Liao by 1125. But during that campaign Song forces removed the defensive forest along their northern border. The Jurchen commanders had now observed Song military weakness firsthand. They broke the alliance immediately.

  In the Jingkang Incident of 1127, the Jin army marched straight across the unprotected North China Plain and captured Kaifeng. They took not only the capital but the retired Emperor Huizong, his successor Emperor Qinzong, and most of the imperial court. The remaining Song forces regrouped under the self-proclaimed Emperor Gaozong (1127-1162) and withdrew south of the Yangtze, establishing a new capital at Lin'an, now called Hangzhou.

  The Jin dynasty claimed to have replaced the Song as rightful rulers of China proper. Following the theory of the Five Elements, they chose earth as their dynastic element and yellow as their royal color, since earth follows fire in the elemental sequence and fire had been the Song's element.

• 4. The Southern Resilience

  ›

  Pushed south of the Huai River, the Southern Song (1127-1279) built an economy that rivaled anything the north had produced. The government funded massive shipbuilding programs, improved harbors at major international seaports including Quanzhou, Guangzhou, and Xiamen, and constructed beacons and seaport warehouses to support overseas trade reaching the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.

  In 1132 the Song established China's first permanent navy, with its headquarters at Dinghai. That navy proved its worth in 1161 at the Battle of Tangdao and the Battle of Caishi on the Yangtze. Jin forces under Wanyan Liang commanded 70,000 men on 600 warships. Song forces numbered just 3,000 men on 120 warships. The Song won both battles by deploying fast paddle-wheel ships armed with traction trebuchets that launched gunpowder bombs. A century after the navy's founding, it had grown to 52,000 fighting marines.

  The Mongols, under Genghis Khan (r. 1206-1227), first invaded the Jin in 1205 and 1209. By 1233-34, under Ogedei Khan, both the Jin and Western Xia had fallen to Mongol forces. The Mongols had allied with the Song, but the alliance broke when Song forces moved to recapture the former imperial capitals of Kaifeng, Luoyang, and Chang'an at the Jin's collapse.

  On the 11th of August 1259, Mongke Khan died during the siege of Diaoyu Castle in Chongqing. His successor Kublai Khan besieged Xiangyang from 1268 to 1273, blockading the Yangtze with his navy. In 1275, a Song army of 130,000 troops under Chancellor Jia Sidao was defeated by Kublai's commander-in-chief, general Bayan. By 1276 most Song territory, including Lin'an, had fallen. At the Battle of Yamen on the Pearl River Delta in 1279, the last emperor, the 7-year-old Zhao Bing, died by suicide along with Prime Minister Lu Xiufu and approximately 1,300 members of the royal clan.

• 5. Economy and Innovation

  ›

  The factory at Hangzhou employed more than a thousand workers a day in 1175, all of them producing paper money. The Song invented government-issued banknotes, called Jiaozi, and established several paper-money factories in cities including Huizhou, Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Anqi. In 1085 alone, the minted output of copper currency reached roughly six billion coins. In 1120 the Song government collected 18,000,000 ounces of silver in taxes.

  The Moroccan geographer al-Idrisi wrote in 1154 about the scale of Chinese merchant vessels in the Indian Ocean and their annual voyages carrying iron, swords, silk, velvet, and porcelain to Aden in Yemen, the Indus River, and the Euphrates. Song merchants invested in joint stock companies and multiple sailing vessels simultaneously. Artisans and merchants formed guilds the state had to negotiate with when setting wages and prices.

  The iron industry illustrates the dynasty's productive capacity. The Song economy was stable enough to produce enormous quantities of iron products each year. Large-scale deforestation threatened to exhaust charcoal supplies until an 11th-century shift to coal in blast furnaces for smelting cast iron resolved the crisis. New canals moved iron products from smelting centers to the capital market. The population of Hangzhou grew from 200,000 at the start of the 12th century to 500,000 around 1170 and over a million a century later, fed by this productive base.

• 6. Science, Printing, and Ideas

  ›

  Shen Kuo (1031-1095) was the first to identify magnetic declination of true north while experimenting with a compass. He improved the astronomical sighting tube, invented a new overflow-tank clepsydra with higher-order interpolation for measuring time, performed optical experiments with the camera obscura, and theorized that geographical climates shift gradually over time. His 1088 Dream Pool Essays also contained the first written description of movable type printing, invented by the artisan Bi Sheng (990-1051).

  Su Song (1020-1101) completed a hydraulic-powered astronomical clock tower in Kaifeng, described in his horology treatise of 1092. The tower's rotating gear wheel carried 133 clock-jack mannequins timed to pass shuttered windows while ringing gongs, banging drums, and displaying announcement plaques. Su published a celestial atlas of five star charts using a cylindrical projection similar to the Mercator projection Gerardus Mercator would introduce in 1569.

  The Wujing Zongyao of 1044 provided the first recorded formulas for gunpowder, along with detailed descriptions of double-piston flamethrowers and instructions for their maintenance. By 1259, the official Li Zengbo recorded that the city of Qingzhou was manufacturing one to two thousand iron-cased bombshells a month, dispatching ten to twenty thousand at a time to Xiangyang and Yingzhou.

  Movable type expanded literacy. The number of candidates taking prefectural civil service exams rose from 30,000 per year in the early 11th century to 400,000 by the late 13th century. The philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200) built the Neo-Confucian doctrine on a new emphasis on the Four Books. By 1241, under Emperor Lizong's sponsorship, Zhu's commentary on those texts became a standard requirement for the civil service examinations. Japan and Korea both adopted Zhu Xi's teaching, the Japanese calling it Shushigaku and the Koreans Jujahak.

• 7. Society, Law, and Daily Life

  ›

  Kaifeng and Hangzhou each held populations of over a million at their peaks, making them among the largest cities on earth in that era. The Song government ran retirement homes, public clinics, and paupers' graveyards. A postal network modeled on the Han dynasty system (202 BCE to 220 CE) employed thousands of workers at post offices and larger postal stations across the empire.

  The four largest drama theatres in Kaifeng could hold audiences of several thousand each. City entertainment quarters offered puppeteers, acrobats, sword swallowers, snake charmers, storytellers, and tea houses. People joined tea clubs, exotic food clubs, antiquarian and art collectors' clubs, horse-loving clubs, poetry clubs, and music clubs. Theatrical actors spoke Classical Chinese on stage, not the vernacular language of daily life.

  The physician and judge Song Ci (1186-1249) wrote a pioneering work of forensic science on the examination of corpses to determine cause of death, whether by strangulation, poisoning, drowning, or blows, and to distinguish murder from suicide or accident. He stressed the importance of proper coroner's conduct and accurate recording by official clerks. Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays had earlier argued against traditional Chinese beliefs about anatomy, possibly encouraging post-mortem autopsies from the 12th century onward.

  Champa rice, introduced to China from Vietnam's Kingdom of Champa by Emperor Zhenzong in 1011, was drought-resistant and could yield two harvests a year instead of one. That agricultural shift, combined with expanded rice cultivation and early-ripening varieties from Southeast and South Asia, doubled China's population between the 10th and 11th centuries. The Northern Song census recorded 20 million households. The poet Li Qingzhao (1084-1151), famous even in her own lifetime, represents the period's notable literary women; the mother of Shen Kuo taught him the essentials of military strategy before his formal education began.