Song Dynasty Innovations
Song China produced movable type, the magnetic compass, paper money, gunpowder weapons and a cast-iron industry, and did not have an industrial revolution. The dynasty was founded in 960 by a general who took the throne and then spent his reign making sure no general could do it again, retiring his commanders on generous pensions and subordinating the army to civil officials permanently. That decision shaped everything. The examination system was expanded until the bureaucracy was genuinely meritocratic by the standards of any pre-modern state, printing made the classics cheap enough for a provincial family to own, and the class that ran China became scholars rather than aristocrats. The economic figures are the striking part. Iron output reached perhaps 125,000 tonnes a year by 1078, comparable to the whole of Europe seven centuries later. The population passed a hundred million. Champa rice from Vietnam allowed two harvests a year in the south. The Grand Canal and the coastal trade moved grain in quantities that supported cities of a million people, and Kaifeng and later Hangzhou were the largest cities on earth. Paper money began as merchants' deposit receipts in Sichuan and became state currency, with the state inflation that follows. Bi Sheng made movable type of fired clay around 1040, four centuries before Gutenberg, and it never displaced woodblock because Chinese needs thousands of characters. The Song lost the north to the Jurchen in 1127 and the rest to the Mongols by 1279. What the Song did not do is the question everyone asks. The inventions were real and the scale was real, and there was no self-sustaining mechanical industry: coal and iron were far from each other and from the markets, labour was abundant and cheap, and the state's ablest men went into the bureaucracy rather than into trade.
- Year: 960 CE
- Category: Technology
