Song Dynasty China | Asia for Educators

China was the most advanced place in the world. recognized this when he got to China in the late 13th century after traveling through much of Asia. In what is now Europe, this was the period now referred to as the “high” Middle Ages, which fostered the Crusades and witnessed the rise of Venice, the mercantile center that was Marco Polo’s home.

A  painted by a Chinese artist in the 12th century provides us with a look at society and urban life in China during this time.

• During the Song (Sung) Dynasty (960-1276), technology was highly advanced in fields as diverse as agriculture, iron-working, and printing. Indeed, scholars today talk of a Song economic revolution.
• The population grew rapidly during this time, and more and more people lived in cities.
• The Song system of government was also advanced for its time. The upper-levels of the government were staffed by highly educated scholar-officials selected through competitive written examinations.

Many ways of living and acting that are now seen as most “Chinese,” or even characteristically East Asian, did not appear before the Song.

• and are historically important crops/staple foods in China; but most Chinese during the previous Tang dynasty and before ate wheat and millet and drank wine. Rice and tea became dominant food and drink in the Song.
• China’s is large, and tends to “explode” in certain periods; its first explosion occurred in the Song.
• Many Chinese are “Confucians”; but the kind of that served as government orthodoxy throughout late-imperial times was a Song reinvention.
• Chinese are known to have bound their feet; but they did not bind them until the Song.
• Even the with its turned-up corners is by origin a Song Chinese roof. (2)

Yet, despite its political and economic strengths, Central to its engagement with the outside world were efforts to maintain peace with its powerful northern neighbors and extend its trading networks.

(1)See Philip D. Curtin in Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 109; as quoted in David Northrup, “Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term,” Journal of World History 16, no. 3 (2005): 258.

(2) See Robert Hymes, “Song China, 960-1279,” in Asia in Western and World History, edited by Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 337.