Song Dynasty

The Song Dynasty (Template:Zh-c) was a ruling dynasty in China from 960-1279. Its founding marked the reunification of China for the first time since the fall of the Tang dynasty in 907. The intervening years, known as the Period of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, were a time of division between north and south and of rapidly changing administrations.

During the Sòng dynasty, there were many threats from the northern borders by the Khitans from the Liao dynasty, Tanguts from the Western Xia dynasty, and the Jurchens from the Jin dynasty. The Sòng dynasty itself can be divided into two distinct periods: the Northern Sòng and Southern Sòng. The Northern Sòng (960-1127) signifies the time when the Sòng capital was in the northern city of Kaifeng and the dynasty controlled all China. The Southern Sòng (1127-1279) refers to the time after the Song lost control of northern China to the Jurchen Jin dynasty. The Song court retreated south of the Yangtze River and made their capital at Hangzhou.

The Jin dynasty was soon conquered by the Mongols in 1234, who subsequently took control of northern China and maintained uneasy relations with the Southern Sòng court (A hasty peace treaty was settled, when Kublai Khan received the news of Möngee's death, the ruler of the Mongols. He went back in a bid to seize the throne from other competitors, leaving Sòng intact for a little longer). The Mongol Yuán dynasty, proclaimed in 1271, finally destroyed the Sòng dynasty in 1279 and once more unified China, this time as part of a vast Mongol empire.

Arts, culture and economy

The founders of the Sòng dynasty, Zhao Kuangyin also known as Taizu, built an effective centralized bureaucracy staffed with civilian scholar-officials. Regional military governors and their supporters were replaced by centrally appointed officials. This system of civilian rule led to a greater concentration of power in the emperor and his palace bureaucracy than had been achieved in the previous dynasties.

The Sòng dynasty is notable for the development of cities not only for administrative purposes but also as centers of trade, industry, and maritime commerce. The landed scholar-officials, sometimes collectively referred to as the gentry, lived in the provincial centers alongside the shopkeepers, artisans, and merchants. A new group of wealthy commoners - the mercantile class - arose as printing and education spread, private trade grew, and a market economy began to link the coastal provinces and the interior. Landholding and government employment were no longer the only means of gaining wealth and prestige. The development of paper money and a unified tax system meant the development of a true nationwide market system.

Accompanying this was the beginnings of what one might term the Chinese industrial revolution. For example the historian Robert Hartwell has estimated that per capita iron output rose sixfold between 806 and 1078 (AD), such that, by 1078 China was producing 125,000 tons of iron per year, a per capita consumption of roughly 1.5 kg of iron per year (compared to 0.5 kg in europe). This iron was used to mass produce ploughs, hammers, needles, pins, cymbals (etc. etc.) for an indigenous mass market and for trade with the outside world, which also expanded greatly at this point. Concurrently the Chinese invented or developed gunpowder, the cannon, the flamethrower (as did the Byzantines), and printing technology which increased literacy with the mass production of printed materials. This meant that parents could encourage sons to learn to read and write and therefore be able to take the civil service exams and become part of the learned growing bureaucracy. As a result of these innovations (and the concurrent agricultural revolution) China boasted some of the largest cities of the world at this time. For example it has been estimated that Hangzhou had roughly 500,000 inhabitants at this point: far larger than any European city - in western Europe by 1200, only Paris and Venice had a population of over 100,000, though Constantinople had 300,000.

Second to the most common estimates, the GDP (PPP) per capita income under the Sòng Dynasty was estimated to be over $600 in 1990 dollars. Western Europe had a per capita income of roughly $550 by 1000 AD, significantly smaller. Western Europe started to become slightly wealthier in per capita income than a slowly declining China after 1300 AD. By the 16th century, Europe's per capita income was vastly superior.

Culturally, the Sòng refined many of the developments of the previous centuries. Included in these refinements were not only the Tang ideal of the universal man, who combined the qualities of scholar, poet, painter, and statesman, but also historical writings, painting, calligraphy, and hard-glazed porcelain. Song intellectuals sought answers to all philosophical and political questions in the Confucian Classics. This renewed interest in the Confucian ideals and society of ancient times coincided with the decline of Buddhism, which the Chinese regarded as foreign and offering few practical guidelines for the solution of political and other mundane problems.

The Sòng Neo-Confucian philosophers, finding a certain purity in the originality of the ancient classical texts, wrote commentaries on them. The most influential of these philosophers was Zhu Xi (1130-1200), whose synthesis of Confucian thought and Buddhist, Taoist, and other ideas became the official imperial ideology from late Song times to the late 19th century. As incorporated into the examination system, Zhu Xi's philosophy evolved into a rigid official creed, which stressed the one-sided obligations of obedience and compliance of subject to ruler, child to father, wife to husband, and younger brother to elder brother. The effect was to inhibit the societal development of premodern China, resulting both in many generations of political, social, and spiritual stability and in a slowness of cultural and institutional change up to the 19th century. Neo-Confucian doctrines also came to play the dominant role in the intellectual life of Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.

Fall of the Southern Sòng

In 1276 the Southern Sòng court fled to Guangdong by boat, fleeing Mongol invaders, leaving Emperor Gong of Song China behind. Any hope of resistance was centred on two young princes, Emperor Gong's brothers. The older boy, Zhao Shi, who was nine years old, was declared emperor; and in 1277, the imperial court sought refuge in Silvermine Bay (Mui Wo) on Lantau Island and later in what is today Kowloon City, Hong Kong (see also Sung Wong Toi). The older brother became ill and died, and was succeeded by the younger, Zhao Bing, aged seven. On March 19, 1279 the Song army was defeated in its last battle, the Battle of Yamen, fought against the Mongols in the Pearl River Delta; subsequently a high official is said to have taken the boy emperor in his arms and jumped from a clifftop into the sea, drowning both of them (See: Sung Wong Toi). Hau Wong, an official from this court, is still revered as a god in Hong Kong.

Sòng dynasty emperors

Convention: "Sòng" + temple name or posthumous name except last emperor who was revered as Song Di Bing (Sòng Dì Bǐng 宋帝昺).

Bei (Northern) Sòng dynasty, 960- 1127

Nan (Southern) Song dynasty, 1127- 1279

See also

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• Chinese sovereign
• Wang Anshi
• Battle of Xiangyang
• Yue Fei
• Wen Tianxiang
• Treaty of Shaoxing
• Bao Qingtianca:Dinastia Song

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