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. As the Jesuit Matteo Ricci observed in the early seventeenth century, echoing Plato, ‘it is the best system of governance in the world, for here they really do have the rule of the philosophers’.
