Song Dynasty (960-1279): Commerce, Science and Culture in China

The Song dynasty ruled China from 960 to 1279, founded when the general Zhao Kuangyin was proclaimed emperor by his own troops. Though it never matched the military reach of the Tang, the Song presided over one of the most dynamic periods in world history before modern times: a commercial revolution, paper money, printed books, gunpowder weapons and a flowering of art and philosophy. Historians often describe it as the closest any pre-modern society came to an early modern economy.

Background: China divided

When the Tang dynasty collapsed in 907, China split into rival regimes, the period known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. In the north, five short-lived dynasties replaced each other through coups, while southern kingdoms such as the Southern Tang and Wuyue governed prosperous regions.

The last northern dynasty, the Later Zhou, began to restore order under Emperor Shizong (Chai Rong), who reformed the army and won territory from the Southern Tang. When he died in 959, he left a six-year-old heir. His palace army commander, Zhao Kuangyin, was the most powerful soldier at court.

The Chenqiao mutiny of 960

Early in 960, after reports of an attack by the Khitan Liao and Northern Han, Zhao Kuangyin led an army north from the capital Kaifeng. At Chenqiao, a post station a short march away, his officers draped him in a yellow imperial robe and proclaimed him emperor. Traditional accounts say he accepted only reluctantly, but most historians suspect the event was planned, probably with the help of his brother Zhao Guangyi and adviser Zhao Pu.

The army returned to Kaifeng, the child emperor abdicated, and Zhao Kuangyin was enthroned in early February 960. He named his dynasty Song, after the region where he had held military command. The coup was almost bloodless, and the deposed Zhou family was treated well.

Securing the dynasty

Zhao Kuangyin, known by his temple name Taizu, knew that generals had made and unmade every dynasty since the Tang. A famous story tells how in 961 he invited his leading commanders to a banquet and persuaded them to retire with rich rewards, an episode called “dismissing the generals over a cup of wine”. The tale may be embellished, but the policy was real: the best troops were concentrated in the capital, commanders were rotated, and civil officials were placed above soldiers.

Taizu then conquered the southern kingdoms one by one: Jingnan and Hunan in 963, Later Shu in 965, Southern Han in 971 and Southern Tang in 975. After his sudden death in 976, his brother became Emperor Taizong. Wuyue submitted in 978 and Northern Han fell in 979. Taizong’s attempt the same year to recover the Sixteen Prefectures around modern Beijing from the Liao ended in defeat at the Gaoliang River.

Government by scholars

The Song greatly expanded the civil service examinations. Candidates competed in written tests on the Confucian classics, and in some years hundreds of men passed the highest jinshi degree. Names on papers were hidden and scripts recopied to reduce favouritism. A new class of scholar-officials, many from families without aristocratic pedigree, came to dominate government.

This system produced remarkable statesmen and writers, among them Fan Zhongyan, Ouyang Xiu, the poet Su Shi and the historian Sima Guang, whose chronicle Zizhi Tongjian (completed 1084) covered 1,362 years of Chinese history. It also produced bitter factional fights, especially over the reforms of Wang Anshi from 1069, which tried to strengthen state finances and the army through loans to farmers, new taxes and local militias.

A commercial revolution

The Song economy grew dramatically. New early-ripening rice from Champa, introduced in the early 11th century, allowed double cropping in the south. China’s population is estimated to have passed 100 million around 1100, roughly double the level of the mid-Tang.

Cities outgrew their old walled wards and curfews. Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital, may have held around one million people with its suburbs, though estimates vary, and the Southern Song capital Hangzhou was probably of similar size in the 13th century. Markets stayed open at night, and tea houses, restaurants and theatres served urban crowds. The handscroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival, painted by Zhang Zeduan in the early 12th century, shows this bustling world.

Commerce reached the countryside as well. Periodic rural markets multiplied, farmers specialised in cash crops such as tea, sugar cane and silk, and merchants formed guilds and partnerships. The state drew a growing share of its revenue from commercial taxes and monopolies on salt, tea and alcohol rather than from land alone.

Trade needed money on an enormous scale. The state minted billions of copper coins, and when coins ran short merchants in Sichuan used paper deposit certificates. In 1024 the government took over their issue, creating the jiaozi, the world’s first state-issued paper money. Overseas trade flourished through ports such as Guangzhou and Quanzhou, supervised by maritime trade offices, with junks sailing to South-east Asia, India and the Persian Gulf.

Science, technology and thought

Many of China’s best-known inventions came to maturity under the Song. The Wujing Zongyao, a military manual completed in 1044, contains the earliest known written formulas for gunpowder. Fire arrows, bombs and later the fire lance were used in Song wars.

Around 1040 the craftsman Bi Sheng invented movable type made of baked clay, while woodblock printing made books cheap and plentiful. The scholar Shen Kuo described the magnetic needle compass in his Dream Pool Essays of 1088, and by around 1100 compasses were being used for navigation at sea. In the same period Su Song built a great astronomical clock tower driven by a water wheel at Kaifeng.

Industry grew too. Iron production in the late 11th century has been estimated at well over 100,000 tons a year, a figure Europe did not reach for centuries. Much of it was smelted with coal, which was also used to heat homes in Kaifeng as nearby forests were exhausted. Song kilns such as those at Jingdezhen produced fine porcelain and stoneware in vast quantities for home and export.

Song painters made landscape the highest form of Chinese art, from the monumental mountains of Fan Kuan to the misty, intimate scenes of the Southern Song academy. Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126) was himself a gifted painter and calligrapher.

In philosophy, thinkers such as Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers and above all Zhu Xi (1130–1200) created Neo-Confucianism, a system combining Confucian ethics with a theory of the universe. Zhu Xi’s commentaries on the Four Books later became the basis of the examinations and shaped thought in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam for centuries.

Northern enemies and the fall of the Song

Peace with the Liao came at a price. The Treaty of Chanyuan of 1005 obliged the Song to send annual payments of 100,000 taels of silver and 200,000 bolts of silk. The Tangut state of Western Xia, proclaimed in 1038, fought costly wars with the Song in the 1040s.

In the early 12th century the Song allied with the rising Jurchen people against the Liao, but the Jurchens, who founded the Jin dynasty, turned on their ally. In the Jingkang incident of 1127 they captured Kaifeng and carried off the retired emperor Huizong and Emperor Qinzong. A surviving prince re-established the dynasty in the south, which from 1138 had its capital at Hangzhou, then called Lin’an. The general Yue Fei won victories against the Jin but was executed in 1142, after a peace that fixed the border along the Huai River.

The Southern Song built a permanent navy and remained wealthy, but a new power arose in the north. The Song joined the Mongols in the final campaign against the Jin, which was destroyed in 1234. When Song armies then tried to reoccupy Kaifeng and Luoyang the same year, they were driven out, and open war with the Mongols followed. The Song resisted for more than four decades, helped by fortified cities, river fleets and gunpowder weapons. The long siege of Xiangyang (1268–1273) opened the Yangtze to Kublai Khan’s armies, Hangzhou surrendered in 1276, and loyalists fighting for child emperors were finally defeated at the Battle of Yamen in 1279.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 960, February: Zhao Kuangyin is enthroned after the Chenqiao mutiny, founding the Song.
• 979: Northern Han falls; Song reunification of China proper is complete.
• 1005: Treaty of Chanyuan with the Liao.
• 1024: The state begins issuing jiaozi paper money in Sichuan.
• 1044: The Wujing Zongyao records gunpowder formulas.
• 1069: Wang Anshi begins his New Policies.
• 1127: The Jurchen Jin capture Kaifeng; the Southern Song begins.
• 1138: Hangzhou (Lin’an) becomes the Southern Song capital.
• 1276: Hangzhou surrenders to the Mongols.
• 1279: The Battle of Yamen ends the Song dynasty.

Why it matters

The Song dynasty showed what a pre-industrial society could achieve through markets, money, printing and education. Its inventions travelled across Eurasia, its Neo-Confucian philosophy shaped East Asia for centuries, and its model of government by examination-selected scholars defined imperial China until the 20th century.