Chinese History · Chronicle V of X
宋 · Song
Gunpowder, the compass and paper money: China's commercial and scientific golden age.
The Northern SongPolitical
The general Zhao Kuangyin reunites most of China and founds the Song, curbing the power of the army for good.
Raised to the throne by his soldiers, Taizu ended the chaos of the Five Dynasties but resolved that no general would ever overthrow him as he had risen. He famously persuaded his commanders to retire, subordinated the military to civilian scholar-officials, and built a state ruled by the brush rather than the sword.
The Northern SongCultural
The Song state issues the world's first government paper money amid a booming economy of cities and trade.
Song China underwent a commercial revolution: great cities of a million souls, bustling markets, ocean-going junks, and a money economy so vibrant that copper coin ran short and the state issued printed notes called jiaozi. Coal and iron industries, water-powered machinery and a national market made Song China the most advanced economy on earth.
The Northern SongCultural
Song engineers harness gunpowder for war, the magnetic compass for navigation, and movable type for printing.
The scholar Shen Kuo described the magnetic compass and movable-type printing in his Dream Pool Essays, while military texts recorded gunpowder weapons — fire-lances, bombs and early rockets. Three of the inventions that would remake the world took mature form under the Song, centuries before they reached Europe.
The Southern SongMilitary
The Jurchen Jin sack Kaifeng and seize north China; the Song court flees south and rules from Hangzhou.
In the Jingkang disaster of 1127 the Jurchen captured the Song capital and two emperors. A prince escaped to refound the dynasty at Hangzhou as the Southern Song. Diminished but immensely rich, it presided over a dazzling maritime and cultural flowering even as it paid tribute to the northern conquerors.
The Southern SongCultural
The philosopher Zhu Xi reshapes Confucian thought into a grand system that will dominate China for centuries.
Zhu Xi synthesized centuries of thought into Neo-Confucianism, giving the old ethics a metaphysical depth drawn partly from Buddhism and Daoism. His commentaries on the Four Books became the basis of the imperial examinations until 1905, shaping the minds of every educated person in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
The Southern SongCultural
Hangzhou grows into perhaps the largest and richest city in the world, a marvel of gardens, markets and art.
The Southern Song capital astonished later visitors like Marco Polo, who called it the finest city in the world. Its landscape painters, its refined porcelain and its printed books mark a cultural summit. Behind the beauty, however, a new power was rising on the steppe that would sweep it all away.
The Mongol ConquestMilitary
At the sea battle of Yamen the last Song resistance is crushed, and all China falls to the Mongols for the first time.
After a decades-long war, Kublai Khan's forces overwhelmed the Southern Song. At Yamen in 1279 a loyal minister leapt into the sea clutching the boy emperor rather than surrender. For the first time in its history, all of China lay under foreign rule — the Mongol Yuan dynasty.
