The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

After the battle there were still powerful, independent kingdoms to the north and south, but it was a huge moment in Chinese history, for Shizong’s army had defeated the combined force of his two most powerful enemies. He now asked to see plans for military campaigns to eliminate the many individual kingdoms and recreate one unified empire.

As always in Chinese history, the name taken by the new dynasty was of great historical significance. Song (as we saw above here) was the name of the regional state that ruled the Yellow River plain after the defeat of the Shang dynasty in 1045 BCE.

It would take two more decades to crush their surrounding enemies, culminating in the conquest of the powerful ‘Later Tang’ state in the south in the winter of 975, although the true founding was only celebrated in 1005, almost a century after the fall of the Great Tang.

Despite the Song dynasty’s reputation as an age of peace and cultural brilliance, therefore, its foundation was achieved by relentless warfare.

In one notorious example of psychological warfare south of the Yangtze, one Song general had a group of ‘fat prisoners’ shared out, killed and eaten by his forces in front of his captives, who were then freed to take back the news of the chilling show of terror.

and by 982 Song power extended over most of south China. But north China was never brought under their rule, the powerful Liao kingdom’s capital remaining near the site later known as Beijing.

The population doubled in a century – over a quarter of the world may have lived in China at this time; some have thought as many as one third.

China, though, never lost touch with its ‘classical’ past, the cultural bedrock laid down under the Han, nor its great ‘medieval’ flowering under the Tang.

In the Song, China’s commercial economy and technological achievements far outstripped the medieval West.

Not hard though

How are we to explain the revolutionary changes that happened under the Song, in economy, science, society and culture? Part of the answer lies in the strategic decisions made in 955, to concentrate efforts on the conquest of the south, so large parts of northern China were left under the rule of the neighbouring Liao kingdom, whose territory extended right into the heart of China.

This brought a change in the world view of the Chinese: ‘All Under Heaven’ now shared a landmass with other states, and interaction was not limited to diplomacy; in this period there was a fertile exchange of people, goods and ideas.

Knowledge was also shared at this time through the widespread availability of print – it was even the first real age of travel literature. This encouraged a very different view of Chinese identity.

There was even a book printed in 1085 entitled How to Make Sure that the Elderly Have Happy, Healthy Retirements – perhaps the first of its kind in history and, astonishingly, still in print.

In all respects the Song was an era of groundbreaking innovation: the world’s first national library, the first national university, the first print culture. Many of the Song achievements would not occur again anywhere until the early modern age in Europe.

None of the alleys is earlier than the late Qing dynasty, but Song paintings show this part of the old city is what it looked like 1,000 years ago, with shops, shrines and the courtyard compounds of the leading families.

The site of the old synagogue, which survived until 1855, is in ‘Teaching the Torah Lane’, where the Jewish community have lived in the past few centuries.

They may have first come in the Song, bringing with them the customs of circumcision, abjuring pork and praying to Jerusalem, which were still followed in the nineteenth century, by which time no one was left who could read their Hebrew Torah scrolls and manuscripts. Their last teacher of Hebrew died in the late eighteenth century.

Part of a regular correspondence with the wider clan, the Hotan letters include references to ‘my dear brother Shavapardar’ and name eight family members including Isaac, ‘my little sister Khudenak’, and his brother, whom he calls rabbi.

Until the 1980s they were reluctant to advertise themselves, but now links with American Jewry and Israel are growing, their inscriptions have been published, and with international interest in their culture, they themselves are re-engaging with their rituals.

Tang Chang’an (Xi’an) had been a place of palaces and government offices, a highly regulated conurbation, with the people confined by walled wards and curfews and restrictions of class and rank. Kaifeng was a different thing altogether, a new kind of Chinese city.

the essential survival of a great historic city is not so much in buildings, in bricks and stone, but in prose, poetry and paint.

Nearly 20 feet long, it was painted only ten years or so before the fall of Kaifeng to northern barbarians in 1127, a date as etched in Chinese history as the Sack of Rome is in the West.

The people of Song-dynasty Kaifeng were probably the best-fed citizens on earth, and perhaps the best-fed people who had lived so far in history.

Meng’s book, Dreams of Splendour of the Eastern Capital, is that rare thing among historical sources – recalling street-corner conversations, feelings and even tastes.

He himself was a military man, who had come to power in a coup, and knew that as long as the generals remained powerful, his new regime would be insecure. So he retired the old army leadership on comfortable pensions, and then restructured the government so that the armed forces were subordinated to a well-trained civilian bureaucracy.

To recruit an adequate number of such civilian officials, and ensure they were the best candidates, the Song emperors radically expanded China’s civil service examination system.

Unlike the Tang, then, the elite of Song China were not hereditary nobles, or warlords, or bankers or merchants (although of course only better-off families could afford to have their young men dedicate themselves to long years of study). They were the Confucian ‘scholar-officials’, a governing elite that was unique in world history and would be for centuries.

the invention of woodblock printing had made the production of books cheaper and faster than ever before. A family in Song China could now more easily purchase copies of the Confucian classics for their sons who were studying for the exams, as well as dictionaries and reference works, books on history and ritual.

Third was a crucial technological change: the transition from manuscript culture to the age of print – a change that only began in the West with Gutenberg, Aldus Manutius and Caxton in the fifteenth century.

Now, as Song rule expanded into the Yangtze valley in the 960s, though by no means a learned man himself, in the wake of his armies Taizong sent commissioners to towns and noble houses to save manuscripts, expanding the collection by four times.

Taizong’s aim, too, was to show that the Song was not just another short-lived regime founded by warlords, but one whose rulers had inherited the responsibility for the sacred cultural tradition of the Han and the Tang.

Moreover, the Song rulers were able do something that previous dynasties could not: they could use the new technology of printing to spread learning far and wide.

as well as the complete Buddhist canon, for which it took twelve years to prepare the wooden blocks (a complete set of which still survives in Korea, engraved on 81,000 woodblocks).

The Extensive Records for the Time of Supreme Peace collected all known texts on more mysterious matters, such as ghosts, spirits and immortals, as well as the ideas of monks, priests and doctors.

The Song, for example, pioneered water-driven spinning machines, coke-fired blast furnaces and the steel smelting process.

The most famous scientist, Su Song (1020–1101), was a polymath typical of his time; in addition to his classical learning, Su wrote on metallurgy, pharmacology, botany and zoology, and compiled a celestial atlas with star maps – the first ever to be printed.

More than 40 feet high, this was a water clock driven by an endless chain drive with an escapement mechanism.

The Song government also wanted to spread practical know-how, such as information about the latest technology and tools. The Directorate of Education printed and circulated practical, illustrated handbooks on topics such as mathematics, medicine, agriculture, warfare and architecture.

As a renaissance of learning and culture through the means of print and education, it was an age without parallel so far in human history.

Not just the administrators, the Confucian elite, but the traders, craftsmen and even well-to-do farmers in the Song empire could use manuals and almanacs to help them in business.

And so, over 400 years before Gutenberg and Caxton began a similar process in Europe, printing revolutionised the spread of ideas in China.

Moveable type was also invented first in China under the Song, but while that would be transformational in the West, with its small alphabet, in China, moveable type never took off to any great extent, its use limited by the nature of Chinese script, which required thousands of individual pieces of type.

by 1103 the number of students at university in Kaifeng had grown to 4,000, and there were around 200,000 students at schools empire-wide.

By 1100, China had developed many of the characteristics that would later constitute early modern society as we in the West define it. It had reunited and achieved revolutionary changes in technology, education and the arts. But why, then, did it not become the first modern society?

Throughout its history China has had to cope with problems of governance on a scale beyond any other state. There were the perennial pressures of population, challenges from neighbouring powers with whom it shared the East Asian landmass; its geography, too, made it particularly prone to floods and natural disasters, and the attendant famines and social dislocation.

While China can be seen as the most successful political entity in human history, its failures – if we may call them that – were often the product of these factors, compounded by its rulers’ inability to shake off deep-rooted tendencies towards a centralised despotism.

The Song dynasty had been created by war, and for all its societal and cultural ambitions it was maintained by military power.

From the mid-eleventh century the economic revolution that underpinned the Song state allowed it to maintain a huge army – perhaps the biggest the world had yet seen.

By 1040, the regular army comprised 1.4 million men – over three times the size of the Roman army at its peak in the third century CE. The central army in the plains numbered 300,000, whi...

Mass production of weaponry now involved separate departments responsible for millions of weapons and suits of armour; more than 16 million arrowheads a year were produced by government foundries.