The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

by Michael Wood

The glory of the Song had ended in shattering defeat. Its achievements had been huge and its inventions had outstripped those of the West. Its artists and scientists were without rival in the world, while mass printing had spread its ethos and its ideas as never before in history. It had been poised, or so it appears today, to become the world’s first modern society. But, as so often in Chinese history, before and since, the world beyond China burst over her frontiers and disrupted the development of civilisation and society. Mongol dominion, the first completely foreign rule in Chinese history, was such a shock to the Chinese psyche that when it ended in the fourteenth century, as we shall see, it was followed by a native dynasty, the Ming, which retreated from the open society of the Song, turned its back on the commercialisation of China, and created a bureaucratic autocracy that looked back to older despotisms, setting China on a course that would cast its shadow until the present day.