China before the Mongol Takeover

In 1200 the Song dynasty (960–1279) ruled over large parts of an ancient Chinese civilization that could trace its origins back thousands of years (see Map 2.1). Since the late seventh century, China had experienced, with a few exceptions, a period of relatively stable political rule. Successive dynasties drew on much older cultural and political traditions that in turn outlasted even the Song, enduring into the twentieth century. Culturally, the Song dynasty was a “golden age” of arts and literature, setting standards of excellence in poetry, landscape painting, and ceramics, even as its scholars debated new forms of Confucian philosophy.Politically, the Song dynasty built on earlier precedents to create an elaborate bureaucratic state structure that endured into the twentieth century. Six major ministries were overseen by the Censorate, an agency that exercised surveillance over the rest of the government, checking on the character and competence of public officials. To staff this bureaucracy, an examination system first established by the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) was revived and made more elaborate, facilitated by the ability to print books for the first time in world history. Schools and colleges proliferated to prepare candidates for the rigorous exams, which became a central feature for men of the upper class. While candidates from privileged backgrounds were better able to access the education needed to pass exams, village communities or a local landowner sometimes sponsored the education of a bright young man from a commoner background, enabling him to enter the charmed circle of officialdom while also bringing prestige and perhaps more concrete benefits to those who sponsored him. Thus the examination system provided a modest measure of social mobility in an otherwise quite hierarchical society. Selecting officials on the basis of merit represented a challenge to established aristocratic families’ hold on public office. Still, a substantial percentage of official positions went to the sons of the privileged, even if they had not passed the exams. Moreover, because education and the examination system grew far more rapidly than the number of official positions, many who passed lower-level exams could not be accommodated with a bureaucratic appointment. Often, however, they were able to combine landowning and success in the examination system to maintain an immense cultural prestige and prominence in their local areas. Underlying these cultural and political achievements was China’s economic revolution, which made Song dynasty China “by far the richest, most skilled, and most populous country on earth.” The most obvious sign of China’s prosperity was its rapid growth in population, which jumped from about 50 million or 60 million in the ninth century to 120 million by 1200. Behind this doubling of the population were remarkable achievements in agricultural production, particularly the adoption from Vietnam of a fast-ripening and drought-resistant strain of rice, known as Champa rice. AP® EXAM TIP - Know that for much of history China has had the world’s highest population and the greatest number of urban areas with large populations. As many people found their way to the cities, China became the most urbanized country in the world. Dozens of Chinese cities numbered over 100,000, while the Song dynasty capital of Hangzhou was home to more than a million people. For the thirteenth-century Italian visitor Marco Polo, Hangzhou was “beyond dispute the finest and noblest [city] in the world.”AP® EXAM TIP - Understand the uses and spread of gunpowder after 1200. AP® EXAM TIP - China had the world’s leading economy around 1200, and you should know its features, such as paper money. Industrial production likewise soared. In both large-scale enterprises employing hundreds of workers and in smaller backyard furnaces, China’s metallurgy industry increased its output dramatically. By the eleventh century, it was providing the government with 32,000 suits of armor and 16 million iron arrowheads annually, in addition to supplying metal for coins, tools, construction, and bells in Buddhist monasteries. This industrial growth was fueled almost entirely by coal, which also came to provide most of the energy for heating homes and cooking and no doubt generated considerable air pollution. Technological innovation in other fields also flourished. Inventions in printing, both woodblock and movable type, led to the world’s first printed books, and by 1000 relatively cheap books had become widely available in China. Chinese navigational and shipbuilding technologies led the world, and the Chinese invention of gunpowder created within a few centuries a revolution in military affairs that had global dimensions. These innovations occurred within the world’s most highly commercialized society, in which producing for the market, rather than for local consumption, became a very widespread phenomenon. An immense network of internal waterways (canals, rivers, and lakes), described by one scholar as “an engineering feat without parallel in the world of its time,” stretched perhaps 30,000 miles, including a Grand Canal of over 1,000 miles linking the Yellow River in the north to the Yangzi River in the south. (See Map 2.1.) These waterways facilitated the cheap movement of goods, allowing peasants to grow specialized crops for sale while they purchased rice or other staples on the market. In addition, government demands for taxes paid in cash rather than in kind required peasants to sell something — their products or their labor — in order to meet their obligations. The growing use of paper money, which the Chinese pioneered, as well as financial instruments such as letters of credit and promissory notes, further contributed to the commercialization of society. Two prominent scholars have described the outcome: “Output increased, population grew, skills multiplied, and a burst of inventiveness made Song China far wealthier than ever before — or than any of its contemporaries.” However, the “golden age” of Song dynasty China was perhaps less than “golden” for many of its women. Confucian writers emphasized the subordination of women to men and the need to keep males and females separate in every domain of life. The Song dynasty historian and scholar Sima Guang (1019–1086) summed up the prevailing view: “The boy leads the girl, the girl follows the boy; the duty of husbands to be resolute and wives to be docile begins with this.” For elite men, masculinity came to be defined less in terms of horseback riding, athleticism, and warrior values and more in terms of the refined pursuits of calligraphy, scholarship, painting, and poetry. Corresponding views of feminine qualities emphasized women’s weakness, reticence, and delicacy. Furthermore, a rapidly commercializing economy undermined the position of women in the textile industry. Urban workshops and state factories, run by men, increasingly took over the skilled tasks of weaving textiles, especially silk, which had previously been the work of rural women in their homes. Although these women continued to tend silkworms and spin silk thread, they had lost the more lucrative income-generating work of weaving silk fabrics. The most compelling expression of a tightening patriarchy among elite women lay in foot binding. Apparently beginning among dancers and courtesans in the tenth or eleventh century C.E., this practice involved the tight wrapping of young girls’ feet, usually breaking the bones of the foot and causing intense pain. During and after the Song dynasty, foot binding found general acceptance among elite families and later became even more widespread in Chinese society. It was associated with new images of female beauty and eroticism that emphasized small size, frailty, and deference and served to keep women restricted to the “inner quarters,” where Confucian tradition asserted that they belonged. For many women, it became a rite of passage, and their tiny feet and the beautiful slippers that encased them became a source of some pride, even a topic of poetry for some literate women.