The Song Economic Revolution

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.

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.

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.

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.