The Song Dynasty Expansion

About 1,000 years ago, during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), China saw a remarkable period of expansion and prosperity. Among the reasons for this was Chinese society's increasing acceptance of a market economy. Buying and selling became more commonplace when Chinese coinage (soon supplemented by skillfully managed paper currency) began to facilitate commerce, and merchants were allowed greater scope than before. As a result, the Chinese economy became increasingly commercialized. Imperial administrators found it convenient to collect taxes in cash rather than in goods, and by the late eleventh century, more than half of the government's income took monetary form. This, of course, required ordinary people to sell something (part or all of the harvest, for the majority of people) in order to pay their taxes. The government used its cash income to purchase goods and services, often in large quantities, thus sustaining and intensifying market relationships. Cities burgeoned, artisan skills improved, and wealthy landlords and merchants lived elegant lifestyles that dazzled outsiders for centuries to come.

Intensified agriculture supported this expansion of urban life. Early-ripening rice, introduced from Southeast Asia and first mentioned in Chinese records in 1012, allowed farmers in well-watered parts of southern China to produce two crops a year, nearly doubling their harvest at the cost of prolonging hard work in the fields. A single crop of early-ripening rice could also mature on hill slopes where water was only available for a couple of months in the year. Chinese peasants therefore began to construct fields on hilly landscapes of southern China, vastly expanding the total area of cultivation.

New crops, notably tea and cotton, also spread widely in China. The practice of drinking tea, steeped in boiling water, undoubtedly reduced intestinal infections by killing off most of the microorganisms that lurk in drinking water. This helped Chinese populations in Tang (618-907) and Song times to flourish in the warmer and wetter south, an area notoriously unhealthful and only thinly populated in Han times (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.). Washable cotton clothing may also have had positive implications for health. It certainly improved comfort for ordinary people, who could not afford silk and had previously worn coarse hempen clothes. All in all, intensified agriculture appears to have kept pace with China's intensified urban manufacturing.

Cheap and safe transport along China's rivers and canals was what made the market so effective in concentrating material resources wherever government officials and wealthy private persons wanted them. Canal boats carried thousands of kilograms at a time, and since they relied on wind and current, and used towropes (ropes used to pull boats through the canal or river) only when necessary, they permitted far lower transport costs than overland carriage. Consequently, even small differences of price made it worthwhile to carry local products long distances up and down the waterways. The Grand Canal-connecting, at great labor, the fertile plains of the Yangzi and Huang He valleys after 611-became the main artery of Chinese commerce to such an extent that the daily efforts of some 100 million persons came to be linked, far more closely than ever before, by buying and selling in a vast, reliable, and well-articulated market.

Cheap transportation allowed goods of common consumption to circulate widely. In favorable locations, a peasant family could concentrate on raising silk worms, or some other commercial crop, and rely on the market for food and other necessities. All the benefits of specialization thus emerged in Song China. Output increased, population grew, skills multiplied, and a burst of inventiveness made Song China far wealthier than ever before.

It was not a completely free market, however. Government officials considered wealthy merchants and military commanders threats to social justice and good government. Yet in a dangerous, commercialized world, prudent officials could not do without their services. The officials attempted to restrain the power of merchants by fixing prices, taxing excessive gains, and occasionally resorting to outright confiscation of their wealth. They sought to weaken generals by subdividing their commands and keeping the delivery of necessary supplies under civilian control. Such policies limited the mobilization of China's resources and eventually curtailed large-scale industrial enterprise, despite a cluster of high-tech furnaces in North China that, according to surviving tax records, produced no less than 125,000 tons of iron in the year 1078.