Song China: Insiders versus Outsiders

Economic Progress

Chinese merchants, like those from India and the Islamic world, participated in Afro-Eurasia’s powerful long-distance trade. Yet China’s commercial successes could not have occurred without the country’s strong agrarian base—especially its vast wheat, millet, and rice fields, which fed a population that reached 120 million. Crop cultivation benefited from breakthroughs in metalworking that produced stronger iron plows, which Song farmers harnessed to sturdy water buffalo to extend the agricultural frontier.

MAP 10.4 | East Asia in 1000 CE

Manufacturing also flourished. With the use of piston-driven bellows to force air into furnaces, Song iron production in the eleventh century equaled that of Europe in the early eighteenth century. In the early tenth century CE, Chinese alchemists mixed saltpeter with sulfur and charcoal to produce a product that would burn and could be deployed on the battlefield: gunpowder. Song entrepreneurs were soon inventing a remarkable array of incendiary devices that flowed from their mastery of techniques for controlling explosions and high heat. At the same time, artisans were producing increasingly light, durable, and exquisitely beautiful porcelains. Chinese pottery had long been exported to the west (recall the tens of thousands of early ninth-century CE mass-produced Changsha pieces found in the Belitung shipwreck described earlier in this chapter), but Song pottery was much finer and more delicate. Before long, Song porcelain was the envy of all Afro-Eurasia (hence the modern term china for fine dishes). Also flowing from the artisans’ skillful hands were vast amounts of clothing and handicrafts, made from the fibers cultivated by Song farmers. In effect, the Song Chinese oversaw the world’s first manufacturing revolution, producing finished goods on a large scale for consumption far and wide.

MAP 10.5 | East Asia in 1200

MONEY AND INFLATION Expanding commerce transformed the role of money and its wide circulation. By now the Song government was annually minting nearly 2 million strings of currency, each containing 1,000 copper coins. As the economy grew, the supply of metal currency could not match the demand, which fueled East Asia’s desire for gold from East Africa. At the same time, merchant guilds in northwestern Shanxi developed the first letters of exchange, called flying cash. These letters linked northern traders with their colleagues in the south. Before long, printed money became more common than minted coins for trading purposes. Even the government collected more than half its tax revenues in cash rather than grain and cloth. The government also issued more notes to pay its bills—a practice that ultimately contributed to runaway inflation.

New Elites

Song emperors built on Tang political institutions by expanding a central bureaucracy of scholar-officials chosen even more extensively through competitive civil service examinations. Zhao Kuangyin, or Emperor Taizu (r. 960–976 CE), himself administered the final test for all who had passed the highest-level palace examination. In subsequent dynasties, the emperor was the nation’s premier examiner, symbolically demanding oaths of allegiance from successful candidates. By 1100, these ranks of learned men had accumulated sufficient power to become China’s new ruling elite.

Expansion of the civil service examination system was crucial to a shift in power from the still-powerful hereditary aristocracy to a less wealthy but more highly schooled class of scholar-officials. Consider the career of the Northern Song reformer Wang Anshi (1021–1086), who ascended to power from a commoner family outside of Hangzhou in the east. He owed his success to gaining high marks in Song state examinations—a not insignificant achievement, for in nearby Fujian Province alone, of the roughly 18,000 candidates who gathered triennially to take the provincial examination, over 90 percent failed! After gaining the emperor’s ear, Wang eventually used his position to challenge the political and cultural influence of the old Tang dynasty elites from the northwest.

China’s Neighbors: Nomads, Japan, and Southeast Asia

China’s prosperity influenced its neighbors and its interactions with them. As the Song flourished, nomads on the outskirts closely eyed the Chinese successes. To the north, nomadic societies formed their own dynasties and adopted Chinese institutions. These non-Chinese nomads sought both to copy China proper and to conquer it.

Despite its sophisticated weapons, the Song army could not match its enemies on the steppe when the latter united against it. Steel tips improved the arrows that the Song soldiers shot from their crossbows, and flamethrowers and “crouching tiger catapults” sent incendiary bombs streaking into their enemies’ ranks. But none of these breakthroughs were unique. Warrior neighbors on the steppe mastered the new arts of war more fully than did the Song military.

As a result, China drew on its economic success (and the innovation of paper money) to “buy off” the borderlanders. For example, after losing North China to the Khitan Liao dynasty, the Song agreed to make annual payments of 100,000 ounces of silver and 200,000 bolts of silk. The treaty allowed them to live in relative peace for more than a century. Securing peace meant emptying the state coffers and then printing more paper money. This short-term solution, however, led to economic instability (particularly inflation) and military weakness, especially as the Song forces were cut off, via the steppe nomads, from their supply of horses for warfare purposes.

Feeling the pull of China’s economic and political gravity, cultures around China consolidated their own internal political authority and redefined their own identities in order to keep China from swallowing them up. At the same time, they increased their commercial transactions with China. In Japan, for instance, leaders distanced themselves from Chinese influences, but they also developed a strong sense of their islands’ distinctive identity. Even so, the long-standing dominance of Chinese ways remained apparent at virtually every level of Japanese society and was most pronounced at the imperial court in the capital city of Heian (present-day Kyoto), which was modeled after the Chinese capital city of Chang’an. Outside Kyoto, however, a less China-centered way of life existed and began to impose itself on the center. Here, local notables, mainly military leaders and large landowners, began to challenge the imperial court for dominance. This challenge was accompanied by the arrival of an important new social group in Japanese society—samurai warriors. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, Japan had multiple sources of political and cultural power: an imperial family with prestige but little authority; an endangered and declining aristocracy; powerful landowning notables based in the provinces; and a rising and increasingly ambitious class of samurai.

During the Song period, Southeast Asia became a crossroads of Afro-Eurasian influences. The Malay Peninsula became home to many entrepôts for traders shuttling between India and China, because it connected the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea. (See Map 10.6.) Consequently, Southeast Asia was characterized by a fusion of religions and cultural influences: Vedic Brahmanism in Bali and other islands, Islam in Java and Sumatra, and Mahayana Buddhism in Vietnam and other parts of mainland Southeast Asia. Important Vedic and Buddhist kingdoms emerged in Southeast Asia. The most powerful and wealthy of these kingdoms was the Khmer Empire (889–1431 CE), with its capital at Angkor, in present-day Cambodia. Public works and magnificent temples dedicated to the revived Vedic gods from India went hand in hand with the earlier influence of Indian Buddhism. One of the greatest temple complexes in Angkor—Angkor Wat—exemplified the Khmers’ heavy borrowing from Vedic Indian architecture and the revival of the Hindu pantheon within the Khmer royal state. Kingdoms like the Khmer Empire functioned as political buffers between the strong states of China and India and brought stability and further commercial prosperity to the region.

MAP 10.6 | Southeast Asia, 1000–1300 CE

Expanding China

Paradoxically, the increasing exchange between outsiders and insiders within China hardened the lines that divided them and gave residents of China’s interior a highly developed sense of themselves as a distinctive people possessing a superior culture. Exchanges with outsiders nurtured a “Chinese” identity among those who considered themselves true insiders and referred to themselves as Han. Song Chinese grew increasingly suspicious and resentful toward the outsiders living in their midst. They called these outsiders “barbarians” and treated them accordingly.

Print culture crystallized the distinct Chinese identity. Of all Afro-Eurasian societies in 1300, the Chinese were the most advanced in their use of printing, book publishing, and circulation, a result of the invention of a movable type printing press by the artisan Bi Sheng around 1040. Song dynasty printed books established classical Chinese as the common language of educated classes in East Asia. The Song government used its plentiful supply of paper to print books, especially medical texts, and to distribute calendars. The private publishing industry expanded, and printing houses throughout the country produced Confucian classics, works on history, philosophical treatises, and literature—all of which figured in the civil examinations. Buddhist publications, too, were available everywhere.

In many respects, the Song period represented China’s greatest age. China’s resources, its huge population base coupled with a strong agrarian economy, and its strong foreign trade and diplomatic relations made China the wealthiest of the four major cultural spheres. And its common language and Confucian civil service system, which enabled a transfer of power from hereditary aristocrats to Confucian scholars, made it the most unified. As a result, China’s influence on the surrounding region was tremendous.