In 1000, 1100, 1200, and 1300, China was the most advanced place in the world. Marco Polo (1254-1324) recognized this when he got to China in the late 13th century after traveling through much of Asia. In what is now Europe, this was the period now referred to as the “high” Middle Ages, which fostered the Crusades and witnessed the rise of Venice, the mercantile center that was Marco Polo’s home.
A magnificent picture scroll painted by a Chinese artist in the 12th century provides us with a look at society and urban life in China during this time. For several centuries the Chinese economy had grown spectacularly. During the Song (Sung) Dynasty (960-1276), technology was highly advanced in fields as diverse as agriculture, iron-working, and printing. Indeed, scholars today talk of a Song economic revolution.
The population grew rapidly during this time, and more and more people lived in cities. The Song system of government was also advanced for its time. The upper-levels of the government were staffed by highly educated scholar-officials selected through competitive written examinations.
Yet, despite its political and economic strengths, Song China was not able to dominate its neighbors militarily. Central to its engagement with the outside world were efforts to maintain peace with its powerful northern neighbors and extend its trading networks.
Many ways of living and acting that Westerners now see as most thoroughly “Chinese,” or even characteristically East Asian, did not appear before the Song. The Chinese, we know, are rice eaters and tea drinkers; but most Chinese in the Tang and before at wheat and millet and drank wine, in that respect looking perhaps more “Western” than “Eastern”; rice and tea became dominant food and drink in the Song.
China’s population, we know, is huge, and tends to “explode”; its first explosion occurred in the Song. The Chinese, we know, are “Confucians”; but the kind of Confucianism that served as government orthodoxy throughout late-imperial times was a Song reinvention. Chinese women, we may know, bound their feet; but they did not bind them until the Song. Even the “Chinese” roof with its turned-up corners is by origin a Song Chinese roof.
Between 750 and 1100, China’s population doubled, money supply grew tenfold, paper money came into use, and trade and industry grew rapidly. There was no single cause of this great transformation. Advances in technology helped, especially in agricultural technology, and each advance helped foster others.
In 742 China’s population was approximately 50 million, very close to what it had been in 2 CE. Over the next three centuries, with the expansion of rice cultivation in central and south China, the country’s food supply steadily grew, allowing its population to grow as well. By 1100, the population reached 100 million. China was certainly the largest country in the world at the time. Its population probably already exceeded that of all of Europe, as it has in more recent centuries.
Farmers in Song China did not aim at self-sufficiency. They had found that producing for the market made possible a better life. Farmers sold their surpluses in nearby markets and bought charcoal, tea, oil, and wine. Some of the products on sale in the city depicted in the scroll would have come from nearby farms, but others came from far away. In many places, farmers specialized in commercial crops, such as sugar, oranges, cotton, silk, and tea.
Merchants in the cities became progressively more specialized and organized. They set up partnerships and joint stock companies, with a separation between owners (shareholders) and managers. In large cities merchants were organized into guilds according to the type of product they sold. Guilds arranged sales from wholesalers to shop owners and periodically set prices. When the government wanted to requisition supplies or assess taxes, it dealt with the guild heads.
As the economy became more commercialized, the need for transport grew. In the scroll, we see goods carried in backpacks, larger wheelbarrows, wagons, and on donkeys and camels. Camels carried goods from Inner Asia or further west across large desserts.
Water transport, however, has always been far cheaper than going over land. The South, with its many rivers and waterways, had an advantage in this respect, but northern cities, too, were served by water transport, often canals. The Grand Canal linked the North to the Yangzi River region. One section of the Beijing Qingming scroll shows men unloading bales of grain from a river boat, as a merchant, seated, directs them.
Marco Polo was astounded at the boat traffic on the Yangzi River. He claimed to have seen no fewer than 15,000 vessels at one city on the river, and said other towns had even more.
For centuries, the basic unit of currency in China was the bronze or copper coin with a hole in the center for stringing. Large transactions were calculated in terms of strings of coins, but given their weight these were cumbersome to carry long distances. As trade increased, demand for money grew enormously, so the government minted more and more coins. By 1085 the output of coins had increased tenfold since Tang times to more than 6 billion coins a year. The use of paper currency was initiated by merchants. To avoid having to carry thousands of strings of coins long distances, merchants in late Tang times (c. 900 CE) 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 issuing of these certificates of deposit, and in the 1120s the government took over the system, producing the world’s first government-issued paper money.
During Song times, heavy industry — especially the iron industry — grew astoundingly. Iron production reached around 125,000 tons per year in 1078 CE, a sixfold increase over the output in 800 CE. Iron and steel were put to many uses, ranging from nails and tools to the chains for suspension bridges and Buddhist statues. The army was a large consumer: steel tips increased the effectiveness of Song arrows; 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 waterwheels, were used to superheat the molten ore.
At first charcoal was used in the production process, leading to deforestation of large parts of north China. By the end of the 11th century, however, coal had largely taken the place of charcoal.
The common people mostly wore clothes made of plant fibers such as hemp and ramie, and, at the end of the period, cotton — but the most highly prized fabric at home and abroad was silk. The feeding of silkworms (which devoured vast quantities of mulberry leaves), the cleaning of their trays, the unraveling of the cocoons, the reeling and spinning of the silk filaments — all this was women’s work, as was the weaving of plain cloth on simple home looms. Professional weavers, mostly men working in government or private workshops, operated complex looms (see right) to weave the fancy damasks, brocades, and gauzes favored by the elite.
In English, “china” has become synonymous with dinnerware. Already in Song times China was a ceramics-exporting country. Song kilns produced many kinds of cups, bowls, and plates, as well as boxes, ink slabs, and pillows (headrests). Techniques of decoration ranged from painting and carving to stamping and molding. Some kilns could produce as many as 20,000 objects a day for sale at home and abroad. Shards of Song porcelain have been found all over Asia.
Trade between the Song dynasty and its northern neighbors was stimulated by the payments Song made to them. The Song set up supervised markets along the border to encourage this trade. Chinese goods that flowed north in large quantities included tea, silk, copper coins (widely used as a currency outside of China), paper and printed books, porcelain, lacquerware, jewelry, rice and other grains, 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 camel 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.