Song Dynasty Commercial Revolution

7 Key excerpts on "Song Dynasty Commercial Revolution"

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  Voyages in World History, Volume 1

  • Valerie Hansen, Ken Curtis(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  360 Chapter 12 China’s Commercial Revolution, ca. 900–1276 religions, like Daoism and Buddhism, while others, like the spirit mediums, tended to work on their own. Believing that evil spirits caused illness, many people con-sulted religious specialists, such as exorcists, in the hope of curing sick family members. Buddhist monasteries offered many women a place where they could go unac-companied by men and listen to Buddhist texts recited aloud (see Chapter 8). Thousands forswore marriage and became monks and nuns living in monasteries and nunneries. Male clerics outnumbered women six to one during the Song dynasty. Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and the World Beyond D uring the Song dynasty, as the commercial revolution led to technological breakthroughs, particularly in ocean exploration, the vastness of the larger world became apparent to educated Chinese. Chinese navigators continued to modify their designs for ships, whose large wooden construction profoundly impressed Ibn Battuta (see Chapter 11), and mapmaking also improved. Foreign trade with surrounding powers played an important role in China’s commercial revolution. Anyone traveling to Vietnam, Korea, or Japan in the thir-teenth century would have seen signs of Chinese influence everywhere: people using chopsticks, Buddhist monasteries and Confucian schools, books printed in Chinese, and Chinese characters on all signposts and government documents. Chinese bronze coins, or local copies, circulated throughout the region, forming a Song dynasty currency sphere. But Vietnam, Korea, and Japan also had their own distinctive political structures and their own ways of modifying the collection of institutions, laws, education systems, and religions they had adopted from the Tang (see Chapter 8). Although Chinese ships traveled to Southeast Asia and India as early as the fifth century, they stayed close to the coastline because they did not have compasses.

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  Chinese City And Urbanism: Evolution And Development

  Evolution and Development

  • Victor F S Sit(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • World Scientific

    (Publisher)

  Figure 9.2 reflects the spread of the mercantile economy by means of the hierarchy of cities in terms of the amount of commercial tax they collected and the main locations of monopolies and commercial farming (the latter indicated only by tea growing) in North Song. It demonstrates to some extent the growth of cities, hence commerce, in South China, including Sichuan. This is, however, not the entire picture, because in the 11th century, private trade was larger than trade in goods subjected to tax. Song Renaissance and the New Urbanity 169 Source : Adopted from Balezs (1969). Fig. 9.2. Song China: Political and Commercial Situation. sectors and urbanization. Meanwhile, a major change in the traded items had also taken place, i.e. necessity or consumption items now predominated over luxury goods, hence trade became less depen-dent on the Court and administration. The completion of an inte-grated internal waterways system of 50,000 km, improvement of ship design and navigation means, i.e. the introduction of the stern-port rudder, compass and new sails, had led to a revolution in ocean ship-ping and facilitated domestic (coastal) and international trade. The 170 Chinese City and Urbanism: Evolution and Development use of money and availability of credit equally smoothened trade and enhanced its volume. These factors, together with changes in society as previously mentioned, were behind a new urban revolution. In sum, in the Song, the two dimensions of technology and culture had exhibited a level of development comparable to the beginning of capitalism in some European states at about the 18th century. Thus, despite the growth of population, i.e. from 21 million in 970 AD to 85.6 million in 1110 AD (Table 9.2), more people had been released from the soil. The annual harvest of grains reached 300 million stones (1

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  The Chinese Market Economy, 1000–1500

  • William Guanglin Liu(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Part II

  The Song Era

  Passage contains an image Chapter 3

  How Large Was the Money Economy?

  The first major characteristic observed from long-term economic changes in China is the existence of two contrasting economic cycles during the six intervening centuries between 900 and 1500. During the Song era from 960 to 1120, population growth and market development engineered economic expansion to an unprecedented level. This expansive cycle, however, halted after 1200. The Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century caused a radical decline in the Chinese aggregate population and devastated the economy in North and Central China. The retreating cycle worsened during the succeeding two centuries by the establishment of a command economy and by all kinds of anti-market policies that the early Ming court implemented.

  The fourteenth-century turning point thesis held by Elvin, Skinner, and Hartwell explicitly takes demographic change as the major cause for the making of these two cycles and assumes the economy would have recovered to the same level when the population reached the same size.1 This assumption is highly problematic and rather misleading when applied to the performance of the early Ming economy. Despite the close connection between population decline and the major trend in price movements, a shrinking in the size of the market economy was even more dramatic than the decline in the population. The following three chapters are aimed to provide a comprehensive survey of the two cycles based upon quantitative evidence. Chapter 4 focuses on the expansion of the Kaifeng-centered waterway transportation network in the eleventh century, and this investigation strongly supports the Song commercial revolution thesis. Chapter 5

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  The Sinister Way

  The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture

  • Richard von Glahn(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 5 The Song Transformation of Chinese Religious Culture The rise of the Song dynasty (960–1276) was accompanied by epochal changes in all aspects of Chinese society and culture, changes sufficiently great to mark the transition from Tang to Song as the turning point be-tween China’s early imperial and late imperial eras. The growing power of the imperial state eroded the aristocratic order of the early imperial era, giving rise to a more fluid hierarchy within the elite. Economic ex-pansion generated abundant wealth, and possession of wealth endowed greater social distinction. Confucianism recaptured the intellectual alle-giance of the ruling class, yet at the same time Buddhism became fully domesticated within Chinese society and culture. New social and cul-tural opportunities afforded by the growth of cities, burgeoning merchant and artisan classes, and the dissemination of printing gave birth to an intensely vital “commoner culture.” All of these developments reshaped religious life. Most profound of all of these changes was the shift in the center of gravity of Chinese civilization from the Yellow River valley in the north to the Yangzi valley in the south. Civil war and invasions of steppe no-mads wracked north China from the onset of the An Lushan rebellion (755–63) to the turn of the eleventh century, provoking massive migra-tions to the Yangzi River basin and the southern coast. In 750, two-thirds of the population of the Chinese empire lived in the north, and only one-third in the south; by 1100, that ratio had reversed, and the south has remained more populous than the north to the present day. The primacy 130 of the south reached its apogee following the conquest of north China, including the whole of the Yellow River valley, by Jurchen invaders in 1127. Remnants of the imperial family continued the Song dynasty after reestablishing their court at Hangzhou, at the southern terminus of the Grand Canal.

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  The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China through the First Millennium CE

  • Hugh R. Clark(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  Especially as the economy of the re-united empire of the eleventh century surged, the reach of com-merce and the spread of cash into the world of the common people expanded greatly—again a development led by the South. Com-mercialization had penetrated more deeply into the everyday econ-omy than ever before, and the degree of involvement of southern peasants in the world of commercial exchange had reached levels not yet seen in world history. Consequently, more people than ever before found themselves enmeshed in a commercial nexus that at least occasionally required the use of money. Quanzhou, by the Song the undisputed commercial center of southern Fujian Province, is a case in point. As I have illus-trated elsewhere, the expansion of long-range trading networks through the port, coupled with the importation of rice from sur-plus regions such as southern Guangdong Province, presented the agrarian producers an opportunity to diversify their production toward nonsubsistence, cash-oriented crops such as luxury fruits and cotton. 13 When peasants opted to devote a portion of their land to a nonconsumable crop such as cotton or to the cultivation Social Innovation in the 11 th Century and the Debates on Civilization 73 74 Chapter 4 of orchard crops such as lychee, they were opting to some degree to depend on the market to supply their subsistence needs. Al-though it no doubt remained an option to exchange their cotton or fruit directly for grain, Cai Xiang (1012–1067) noted that merchants made monetized contracts with the producers of ly-chee based on harvest projections, clear evidence of a monetary exchange. 14 It was not simply commerce, moreover, that enmeshed the population in a monetized economy. Through the centuries of the transition the Chinese state increasingly sought to convert taxa-tion from kind to cash.

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  The Age of Confucian Rule

  The Song Transformation of China

  • Dieter Kuhn, Timothy Brook(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  10 a changing world of production The Song dynasty, like the dynasties that preceded it, depended on a sys-tem of efficient household registration in order to be able to control agri-cultural production and tax income. The imperial economy prospered only when self-managing farming households were able to harvest high yields per acre and move food and other raw materials to market ef-ficiently. The mechanization of agricultural work, along with the de-velopment of sophisticated textile machinery, increased production and raised the standard of living, while a well-developed transportation sys-tem provisioned the capitals and the court with food and other items that were part of the new urban lifestyle. Farm Production The Northern Song state covered 2.6 million square kilometers, and this entire territory—“all under Heaven”—was the property of the emperor. In this ideological construct, the emperor owned the ground and acted on behalf of the Chinese people, who regarded him as the guardian of their interests and welfare. In theory, the emperor could give away, sell, expro-priate, and confiscate land at will. In actuality, apart from distributing large estates among members of the imperial family, he rarely made use of this unique privilege. Landowners in China were people whose tracts of land were registered in the Residence Registration Files. They tilled the ground and paid taxes on its production. They were allowed to bequeath, sell, and lease the property they held to family members and others. Prior to the twentieth century, the percentage of Chinese who did not make a living from agri-culture, the marketing of agricultural products, or the making of farm tools was negligible. During the Song dynasty, as military expenses rose continuously, state revenues depended more than ever before on a reli-able system of tax income from rural households.

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  The Story of China

  A portrait of a civilisation and its people

  • Michael Wood(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster UK

    (Publisher)

  Many of the features of the Song Renaissance will seem familiar. Just as in Europe, there was a rediscovery of the ‘classical past’ and the spread of printing, enabling mass production of books, encyclopaedias, works of science and medicine; epigraphical and philological studies began to analyse the remains of the ancient past in inscriptions on bronze and stone and in manuscript evidence. Catalogues were produced of ancient bronzes and there were even archaeological excavations at famous historic sites like Anyang. In the writing of history, too, great achievements were made in codifying the tradition and critically examining the sources for the past. In the Song, China’s commercial economy and technological achievements far outstripped the medieval West. Song advances in science in particular were unrivalled between the Hellenistic Age and the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment.

  But, as we have already seen, the Song was created by warfare, and the cultural achievements of the eleventh century rested on the battles of the tenth. It was a time when China might have broken apart for good, leaving a patchwork of states akin to medieval and modern Europe. The big question, then, is why, unlike the Roman Empire and every other empire of the ancient world or the Middle Ages, did China stay together in the tenth century and not break up? 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. In the northwest, too, the Song state never reached out along the Silk Road into Central Asia, and left powerful neighbours like the Tanguts over the Amur River. Necessarily the Chinese had to cultivate close diplomatic relations with these border states, and regular exchanges took place with ambassadors bringing gifts, celebrating birthdays and giving condolences at the time of deaths. Relations with the Liao, it was said, were warm, ‘like one family’.

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