10.3: Song Economy, State, and Society (960-1276)

More Rice, More People, More Rice

The conquest of the area south of the Yangzi River by people who paid taxes to Chinese regimes was slow indeed. The southern regimes of the Period of Division presided over less than a quarter of the whole population of former Han territory. In Tang, officials posted to the south – like Hei’an officials sent away from the capital – considered it an exile, and one that might spell doom through malaria. But in Song times, sixty percent of the population resided in the south: rice country. The result was a revolution in production and in productivity, which led to dramatic changes in every area of life. The styles of cooking known today, for instance, stems from Song times, although American foods like hot peppers, corn (maize), potatoes, and sweet potatoes (and tobacco, not a food) were added in Ming times, after 1492. (What happened in 1492?)

The growth in population is both a measure of the changes and a contributing factor. In the middle of the Han, in the year 2, the population of China was about 60 million people, dropping to 49 million in the Latter Han. In the year 200, it was about 60 million people. In the year 755, the census counted about 52 million, so real population was probably still around 60 million people. In other words, population remained essentially stable for eight or nine centuries. By 980, however, Song presided over 100 million people, even though its territory did not reach the far west. The number of households registered by the state tripled from 980 to 1110, even as registered cultivated land only doubled.¹⁹

Map W. Rough borders of the Southern Song (dashed) and Jin (dotted) territories, after 1127; some of their neighbors; and cities mentioned in the text. Q = Quanzhou. G= Guangzhou (Canton).

How could two times the land support three times the population? The answer is that wet rice agriculture feeds more people than wheat or millet. In the South, during the centuries of division, people had built dikes and transformed the swamps of the south into fields that could be flooded and drained at the appropriate times for plowing, planting, transplanting, weeding, and harvesting. Rice produces more food per acre than any other grain: even today wheat yields only half as much per acre as rice, and the gap between medieval European wheat crops and Song rice crops was much more dramatic.²⁰ Unlike other plants, rice can breathe under water, and the water regulates temperature, controls weeds, dissolves nitrogen and inorganic salts so that they are easier for the rice to absorb. That means that the fields do not need to lie fallow for a season to rebuild nutrients; in fact, the longer rice is grown in one place the more nutritious the soil gets, because the water and roots pull minerals up from far below.²¹ Southern areas had more water. The growing season in southern areas in longer, and farmers in Southeast Asia had developed new strains of rice with a shorter time to harvest, so two crops per year could be grown. Song farmers also developed strains that were more resistant to disease, or had other strengths. New varieties of seed passed from farmer to farmer, and were distributed by the government. There were fewer years of dearth.

Scholar-official Zhu Xi (1130-1200), a key figure in Confucian thought, wrote in a letter about Xinchang county in Zhejiang:

This county, too, has had a severe drought. The early rice harvest was entirely lost. The fields of intermediate and late rice had already become cracked and parched when, in the middle of the 7th month, it rained for several days in a row. As a result, it has been possible to have water in all the fields; and there is hope that there will be a harvest of the intermediate and late rice.²²

Overall production and productivity per acre increased. But since rice required a lot of tending and winter was less harsh in the South, people also worked more. As a big landlord in the Yangzi delta wrote:

Before the new year, wheat is sown.

When the wheat has risen, we plant the sprouts of rice.

When the latest-ripening rice is done,

The winter vegetables are already green.

After the harvest, there are no idle hands,

No empty acres in the diked fields.

My family’s hundred tenants have learned

What it is to reap in every season.²³

But even with the year-round work, fewer people were engaged in producing basic necessities. At the end of the Tang period, most cultivators were still largely self-sufficient in food and clothing, buying only government salt and iron tools. By the middle of the Song period, although some farming households were still self-sufficient, many had become specialists, growing one main crop to sell on the free market – tea, sugar, indigo, and mulberry – and using the money to buy grain and cloth and pay their taxes.

The Cosmopolitan South

It is sometimes said that Tang was a cosmopolitan empire with connections far afield, while Song closed in on itself again. We have already seen Song engaging in fruitful diplomacy with the Liao regime under the century-long Chanyuan peace. When we look at the South, Song looks even more cosmopolitan. The Southern Song capital Hangzhou, Guangzhou (Canton), Hainan Island, and especially Quanzhou all hosted communities of foreign merchants who alongside Chinese merchants traded peacefully with ports in today’s Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and India.

The coast of Fujian, where Quanzhou is, was the last part of the coast to fall under the control of Chinese regimes, because of the mountains that surround it. The Tang writer Han Yu described it this way:

Typhoons for winds, crocodiles for fish –

Afflictions and misfortunes not to be understood!

South of the country, as you approach its boundary,

There are swollen seas linked to the sky.

Poisonous fogs and malarial miasmas

Day and evening flare and foam.²⁴

Traders went to Guangzhou or further north to Yangzhou instead. But in the Period of Division an autonomous regime developed Quanzhou as a port. Under Song control, it continued to grow. By about 1000 it housed communities of Muslims (the first mosque was built in Quanzhou in 1009) and Hindus. A Shiva lingam existed in Quanzhou by about 1000, there are inscriptions written in Tamil, and Hindu gods including Shiva and Vishnu appear in a Buddhist temple there. Most intriguingly, the two pagodas of that temple include the Monkey King Sun Wukung (hero of Journey to the West) looking exactly like the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman. The foreigners who settled in Quanzhou, bringing their languages and religions, also brought those new strains of rice mentioned above – drought-tolerant and disease-resistant – which spread the habit of eating rice.²⁵

Along with the extraordinary productivity of rice and the widespread use of iron, the many waterways of the south contributed to the commercial revolution. Water made transport cheaper than in the North, where goods had to be carted or carried by road, so prices could be lower, and there was profit to be made even in cheap bulk goods like grain, vegetable oil, and ordinary cloth. Since most farms were large enough to support the family, they were also consumers, purchasing the “seven indispensable items:” tea, rice, salt, soy sauce, cooking oil, vinegar, and charcoal or firewood. One observer saw farmers carrying rice into Southern Song Hangzhou and going home with the seven goods and with incense, candles, noodles, spiritmoney, flour, pepper, ginger, and medicine.²⁶ Fujian, on the southeastern coast, transformed from a subsistence hemp and rice economy to one that specialized in fruits like oranges and lichees; sugarcane; manufactured goods including pottery and metalware; and cotton, introduced through Southeast Asia from the Middle East.²⁷ In Tang long-distance trade focused on luxury items; now the mass market in staples and moderately-priced consumer goods drove longdistance commerce. Boats of every size and description plied the rivers, streams, lakes, and coastline of the south, carrying goods to be sold as far away as the Middle East or as close as the next town.

In some areas, transport meant employment: whole families lived on boats and made their livings by moving consumer goods from one Yangtze city to another. As a national market developed, farmers learned to calculate possible profit based on complex factors, and were affected by changes in markets far away. But in addition, a whole human infrastructure of trade arose: from peddlers whose capital was a couple of baskets full of shoes carried on a ten-day circuit of villages up to merchants whose capital amounted to several large seagoing boats, and who invited investors to partner in one voyage or many. From village shopkeepers selling a few needles and pots from the front of a house up to town shop-owners specializing in gold-speckled folding fans from Japan. From brokers who managed relations between porcelain wholesalers and retailers to salt merchants who held licenses from the state and lived in unimaginable wealth. Innkeepers, porters, muleteers, boatmen of all kinds – thieves and rascals – goldsmiths, pawnbrokers, moneychangers, moneylenders – smugglers and officials on the take: every kind of living that could be made from commerce appeared in Song times. In thirteenth-century Hangzhou, artisans and merchants were organized into 414 different guilds (hang 行).²⁸

The infrastructure of trade included many more towns and cities. Tang towns had been administrative centers, and the only cities that counted, socially, were the capitals. By late in Song times, about 12% of the population may have lived in cities. As the population grew and more shops and markets were needed to handle trade, the once-every-ten-days market serving nearby villages became a town ,and towns became cities with markets open every day, as well as permanent shops.

Trees fell across the south: to build boats and houses, make lacquerware and paper, and fuel the specialized pottery kilns of cities like Jingdezhen. True porcelain, with its lustrous sheen and unmatched smoothness and hardness, was invented in Song times, and outpaced silk as an export product. Tea was grown on family farms and on plantations owned privately or by the state, picking tea came to be women’s work. Sugar mills employed a dozen workers and ran on ox-power, selling the jugs of cane juice to candy-makers.²⁹

Iron production rose dramatically: Agricultural productivity reinforced the production of other necessities and luxuries. In 1078, the Song national output of iron was about 125,000 tons per year, six times what was produced in 806 under the Tang. That’s about 3 pounds of iron per person: a rate of produced Europe achieved only in 1700. Much of the iron went to the capital, Kaifeng, with a population of nearly one million. Thousands of iron workers turned it into weapons, tools, nails, locks, and musical instruments. Huge smelters used up the available wood by 1100, so the industry turned to burning coke (made by anaerobically heating coal). The iron industry was widespread enough that it hired farmers in the agricultural slack season, and poets pitied families in areas where such employment was not available.³⁰ The ideal that most taxpaying commoners were smallholding farmers feeding and clothing their families themselves had never been further from the truth. Other aspects of the state changed as well.

Recruitment for Office

The Song founder, Zhao Kuangyin, is said to have invited all his senior generals to a banquet in the palace the year of a major victory. They reminisced about their shared glories in battle. Then Zhao congratulated the generals on their having honorably come to the end of their fighting days. They could retire now, he told them, to comfortable mansions in the capital. They did so, removing the immediate threat that one of them would replace the fledgling Song.

Zhao followed up by choosing young generals who were reliably subordinate to him. He conducted the rest of the conquest patiently, giving regional leaders plenty of time to surrender peacefully. As he set up the state structure, he carefully subordinated military power to civil power. Han and Tang consort families had frequently intervened in government, and in later periods eunuchs and favorites sometimes even ran the whole country. But in the Song the bureaucrats and emperors, really did wield power. Their reform programs were not just futile cries like those of the Han Confucians. And they took full account of the commercial economy.

The history of Song government is a history less of emperors than of advisors – advisors who were self-consciously Confucian, even though they did not agree on what that meant. However they came to office, they came to high office because they were unusually articulate or savvy. These men had multiple talents. Most of them led troops in battle against foes or rebels, as well as taking on all the practical matters of government: building infrastructure, settling lawsuits, dealing with poor harvests or famine, collecting taxes, and solving murder cases – from 1247 with the aid of the world’s first manual of forensic medicine, The Washing Away of Wrongs. They wrote memorials to the emperor on policy, reams of poetry, epitaphs for friends, and ruminations on the places they travelled through. They painted and did calligraphy and played music, and managed large estates and affairs in their own communities. (When they were away their wives managed the estates and educated the children.) They wondered about and investigated natural phenomena and studied history from primary and secondary sources. Multitaskers extraordinaire, these men.

Song officials were recruited from a larger number of families than in Tang. The Tang aristocracy who had monopolized office had been slaughtered and scattered by Huang Chao. Moreover, a key technological advance made it possible to educate and recruit from a wider swath of the male population. That was printing. Tang aristocratic families who owned manuscript libraries had had an enormous advantage in studying for the examinations. Printing had been invented about the year 700, but was used initially only for Buddhist materials and images of gods. The Song printing industry made widely available the classics and other Confucian texts (as well as Buddhist and Daoist scriptures, posters, political pamphlets, newspapers, and every other kind of book imaginable), and the commercial economy made teachers widely available for hire.³¹

The dominant stream of recruitment into government was through examinations. Government schools recruited from among the common people, and unlike in Tang times the examinations were graded anonymously. There were three levels of exam, held on a three-year cycle that was observed, with some breaks, until 1905. Examinations allowed for specialization in Confucian classics, or historical texts, or ritual texts or the law. Entering office through examination was the most prestigious route, but there were other routes. Each high official could put forward one son (the “shadow” privilege); government clerks could be promoted to officials; provincial officials could recommend men for office; graduates of the National University were eligible; military men could be transferred to the civil side; lower-level degrees could be purchased; and there were special “facilitated” exams for those who had repeatedly failed. Once gentry families were in place, of course, they took steps to assure their own continued status: even as more and more men took examinations, the percentage of officials who held regular examination degrees dropped, from 89% in 1046 to 54% in 1213.³² Studying for and taking exams, however, became the defining characteristic of the new elite, the gentry.

A New Elite: The Gentry Class

Participation in the civil service examinations defined the gentry class. It was truly a class, for its power rested on wealth, not inherited rank or bloodline. But wealth had to be funneled into education sufficient for a son to pass an examination every generation or two, or the family would lose its legal privileges and becomes commoners again. The gentry class, though composed of different families over time, dominated mainland society until the dynastic system fell in 1911. In the Tang, there had been an infinite grading of social statuses from the purest blood families with their family traditions down to lower aristocrats, to commoners and mean people and slaves. From Song through Qing, setting aside the imperial family, the major social distinction was between the gentry (or literati), and everyone else. Although individual gentrymen held different ranks and amounts of wealth, and might never serve in office, and although gentry families ranged from rich to poor, gentry status was not much more hereditary than wealth is in the US today.

A gentry family was one in which people had enough land and money to support highstatus activities. They owned, borrowed, read and wrote books, performed classical family rituals, took the examinations and aspired to hold office, married other gentry families, and visited high officials and other powerful people. Along with religious beliefs in Buddhism and organized Daoism, they identified with the Confucian tradition of scholarship and public service, and that meant study, which required a certain amount of land or other capital. Once a family had the cash, earned through participation in the commercial economy, gentry attributes could be acquired over a couple of generations, as Tang aristocratic rank could not. So in the Song, and even more in the Ming and Qing, gentry families were involved in trade and money-lending and even production, as well as agriculture, and mercantile families or well-to-to farmers could buy books, hire teachers, educate their sons to pass the exams and take office, and slowly acquire the cultural polish necessary to be “gentry.” It is because the gentry status required some money, and did not require a long pedigree, that they are a “class.”

This was not an egalitarian society. Office-holding was still the most prestigious occupation, and educated men even remade the ideal of filial piety: they argued that earning state honors and privileges was the most filial of acts, more important than the daily, personal service to parents they could not do while travelling and serving far from home.³³ Officials could earn personal as well as office rank, and gentry might believe themselves composed of finer qi than others. A large permanent underclass of convicts and soldiers were marked by tattoos. The military-penal complex, as historian Elad Alyagon has dubbed it, included at its height 1.4 million men, as well as their families. Some soldiers were so poor that their wives and daughters collected firewood to sell, wove sandals, collected night soil (excrement), brewed moonshine, or turned to prostitution. Officials illegally exploited the labor of both soldiers and these armycamp courtesans.³⁴ The dynasty displayed more compassion for these people once they had died in battle than while they lived, paying monks to hold Buddhist masses for their souls, lest they become vengeful ghosts.³⁵

Figure 10.4. Jin Chushi, detail from “Ten Kings of Hell,” before 1195. Source: Metropolitan Museum. Public domain. See the whole hanging scroll at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/44510

Nevertheless, social mobility upwards was a theoretical possibility that was sometimes realized. A family could, by hard work and good luck and study, move up into the gentry elite. Conversely, a gentry family whose sons refused to study or work, but preferred to gamble and whore around, selling off the family library to buy wine and hire actors, could sink back into the working class in generation or two. As Song gentryman Yuan Cai warned: “Gentlemen and officials should try to count the number of their hometown’s official families of thirty years ago who still survive today. They will find only a handful.”³⁶ Both the opportunity and the danger were ever-present in people’s thinking. Yuan Cai advised that the smartest gentry sons study for the exams, the next smartest become teachers, and others work as clerks, doctors, Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, diviners, astrologers, and physiognomists, or manage farming, gardening, and trade. “All provide income for your family without bringing shame to your ancestors,” he wrote. “All are acceptable.”³⁷ Tang aristocrats would not have agreed.

Figure 10.5. Li Gonglin, illustration for the Classic of Filial Piety (c. 1085). You can see the whole thing at the collection website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Debates over the Role of the State in Northern Song

The Tang government had controlled markets and prices, and tried to rely on selfsufficient households paying taxes in grain and cloth. After Tang fell, in the “Five Dynasties” period (907- 960), the North was divided among dozens of local warlords. Seven relatively stable regimes held the South, each eagerly promoting the production of local products like salt, lumber, paper, cloth, and ceramics. These states relied on taxing the private merchants who traded along the coast and to Liao, Koryŏ, Japan, and Southeast Asia, importing other necessities like iron as well as luxury goods like incense and gold jewelry. The direct trade with Japan, reestablished in the 900s, was particularly valuable, since the Hei’an elite paid for books, ceramics, and textiles mainly with gold.³⁸ The Song state, too, relied on commercial taxes for about a fifth or a quarter of its cash income. The state also engaged in commerce directly, brewing ale and licensing others to do so, for instance; making cash loans to sericultural families who repaid them in finished cloth; and maintaining a monopolies on tea (for a while) and salt production.³⁹ Money – iron coins, then bronze coins and paper money – became ever more central to the economy, and silk was no longer used as currency.

Money came to seem to some officials an answer to the fiscal problems the Song government faced -- problems that stemmed in part from pay-offs they had continually to make to the northern nomads on their borders. The Tang court had loved foreign goods but held itself above taxing them. Song was perfectly happy to do so. Whereas Tang had collected taxes in grain and cloth from each farming family, and distained commercial taxes, the Song fisc relied mainly on commercial taxes and on monopolies on necessities such as salt, tea, iron and wine.⁴⁰

But since the Song desperately needed money to fend off the northern regimes, some officials proposed involving the state in the economy much more deeply. In a great debate about state ideology and organization, Song officials framed a moral and pragmatic choice between an ideal of a small, lightly-funded government and an ideal that government must be effective and powerful in creating a better society, caring for the people, and defending the realm. Of the many participants in the debate, I will focus on two main figures, each of whom had supporters and opponents: historian Sima Guang, who believed in small government, and classicist Wang Anshi, who attempted major reforms so that government could tackle big problems.

Sima Guang (1019-1086) argued that government should be small and cheap. Low taxes would free people to grow and make, buy and sell, and profit. That meant Song could not support the huge army needed to retake the Sixteen Prefectures. But Sima was satisfied with a balance of power between Song and Liao. More generally, Sima was conservative: he thought that the emperor should work with the inherited structure of government and society, only improving it here and there. It was not flawless, but radical attempts at change in themselves would destabilize society and endanger everyone.

As a historian, Sima Guang regarded the state not as a natural or cosmic product, but as a building constructed by the dynastic founder at the start of each dynasty. The founder earned the Mandate of Heaven by having outsmarted and outlasted all his rivals. The founder put together the building of the state with the people as its foundation, rules and rituals its supporting columns, the high ministers its roof beams, the rest of officialdom its roof, the generals its walls, and the soldiers its gate. Later rulers inherited this building. They did not own it, but were supposed to be caretakers, and maintenance on the building meant preparing against foreign invasions and natural disasters by training soldiers, storing grain, selecting honest officials, and keeping administration going. Just like a building, the state could only stand if every part of it carried out its function faithfully, while the caretaker watched out for rotten beams or loose bricks.

Wang Anshi (1021-1086), thought that the metaphorical building of the Song state was already rotting. Big parts of it should be torn down and built anew, even if that meant sleeping outside while the reconstruction was going on. In the dynamiting and rebuilding, different parts of the state might not work for a while, and the architect – Wang himself, of course – had to be able to call the shots. The self-interested elite who staffed the bureaucracy would object, but Wang knew he was right: the classics, he said, backed him up. The short-sighted common people might balk, but they would eventually see that the changes were good for them.

When Emperor Shenzong (r. 1068-86) took the throne, he was only 20: a fiery young nationalist determined to re-take the Sixteen Prefectures from Liao. He appointed Wang Anshi Prime Minister, and supported a series of reforms called the New Policies, from 1069-1076. Shenzong chose Wang because Wang talked about enriching the state and strengthening the army, and argued that government revenue could be raised without increasing the burden on working people, if there were structural changes and if the government got into the business of actively promoting production. In fact, Wang was not particularly interested in military strength beyond defense. Rather, he was worried about how the laissez-faire economy had resulted in serious class inequities, so that the poor could not meet their basic needs. He believed that to take care of the people’s livelihood, the state had to radically restructure itself and take charge of society in a much more aggressive way. Like Wang Mang of Han times, he turned to the classics to envision fundamental changes.

With Shenzong’s backing, Wang and his group implemented the “New Policies,” which put the state more firmly in control of the economy and related aspects of society than at any time since Qin. They implemented old Legalist measures like remeasuring land to make taxes fair, and organizing households into be organized into groups – of tens and hundreds – to police each other and form local militias for defense. But the New Policies also included pro-trade rationalizing measures like legalizing the trade through Quanzhou.⁴¹ They included new measures like organizing special zones in the northern frontier areas to raise horses, new ways to manufacture weapons efficiently, and to train militia members.

As an example, one of the New Policies, the “Green Sprouts” program, was meant to assure the long-term fiscal strength of the state by helping farmers stay secure.⁴² Farmers had been borrowing seed grain for planting in spring, at exorbitant rates of interest from wealthy landlords, merchants, or Buddhist temples. That led to a spiraling cycle of debt, so that small farmers lost land to their wealthier neighbors, who were better able to evade taxes because of their wealth, connections, and influence. The fiscal base of the state eroded as fewer taxes were paid. (Does that sound familiar?) To prevent small farmers from falling into debt and losing their land, the state would lend farmers the seed they needed for the next crop, allowing them to pay it back to state granaries when the harvest came. The state would charge a below-market interest rate: only 20% plus fees over 6 months.

This was not intrinsically a bad idea. In fact, even Sima Guang wrote after Wang’s death that ‘the great idea of this measure was in the interests of the people.’⁴³ And poet and scholarofficial Su Shi, although at first he strongly opposed the project, after thirteen years of seeing it in action wrote that “the idea of Wang Anshi’s measure could not be improved upon, even by a Sage.”⁴⁴ Even Wang’s opponents thought “Green Sprouts” was a good idea. The problem was that local officials abused the policy. To fulfill required quotas of loans, or just from greed, they forced unnecessary loans on farmers and even urbanites, to collect the interest. This aroused great resentment, of course. The anti-Wang party thought that empowering government would always lead to such corruption; even the best idea, if imposed by the center, would have bad results. They preferred to let the market work according to laws of supply and demand.

Political debate was rational. But the New Policies were also unfairly blamed for the fact that in 1074 a terrible drought in North China forced many poor farmers to abandon their land. The situation appeared to have been worsened by the loans they had been forced to take out by local officials, who pressed for repayment even when the crop failed in a large area. Someone wrote a very moving memorial describing the suffering of these families to the emperor, and the Empress Dowager and some eunuchs who opposed Wang Anshi took advantage of the famine to criticize him. Shenzong felt torn. He still supported Wang, but Wang felt he had lost face, and insisted on retiring, with honors, to Nanjing.⁴⁵ The two sided cycled in and out of power like Democrats and Republicans, until 1127, when Kaifeng fell and Song abandoned the north.

When in power, Wang did not hesitate to demote and exile those who disagreed with him, and promote youngsters who did support him. He also imposed his interpretation of the classics on the curriculum for all. He believed he knew best, and that others, if forced to work within the new system, they would eventually change their minds. A period of enforcement was necessary for real change. This kind of argument is normal for revolutionaries.

Like other revolutionaries, Wang also believed that there should be one integrated system that incorporated everyone and linked everything to the state. And that everyone should believe basically the same thing; he did not like variation and dissent in thought. Sima, on the other hand, held that as long as man did not abuse public office for private gain, but worked as honestly and thoroughly as he could, what he thought was none of the state’s business. He believed a clear line demarcated a private sphere in which the state had no business. People are still arguing today about just these kinds of issues.

In the Southern Song, a different set of solutions arose. The gentry took the lead in organizing their communities, substituting for the central state. They replaced the Green Sprouts program with locally-managed community or charity granaries that could lend out grain to locals if they needed it, and collect moderate interest. They substituted local academies for Wang’s centralized educational system. Socially, too, they married close to home, building dense local marriage networks instead of focusing on the capital area. And in many other ways, they shifted activism down to the local level.⁴⁶ This became the long story of the late imperial period.

The Money Mentality and Song Neo-Confucianism

The money mentality entered every part of life in Song. In popular religion, people came to believe that they were born with a deposit of credit in a spiritual account, which they had to pay back either by doing good or by burning “spirit money” – paper in the shape of silver ingots or imitating bank notes. Song poets, painters, monks, doctors, and all occupations saw themselves as competing in a marketplace, catering to consumers who had plenty of choice. Awareness of money crept into every kind of writing and every area of life. Song opera tunes, for instance, borrowed from the jingles that street peddlers sang to advertise their wares. Porcelain developed new and beautiful forms as the rich invested their silver and gold instead of eating off of it. When copper was cheap people melted down coins to make Buddha images; when copper was expensive, they melted the Buddhas to make coins.⁴⁷

Figure 10.5. Song copper coin dating to 1102-1106. Why is this a good, practical shape for a coin? Source: Metropolitan Museum. Public domain.

The money economy and mentality generated reactions. A concrete example was the development of an amateur ideal in art, the development of black and white ink paintings that were less realistic, colorful and detailed than court and commercial painting. They frequently incorporated ordinary people going about their business, and carrying things for the elite men they accompanied.

Figure 10.6. Guo Xi, “Old Trees, Middle Distance,” c. 1080. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. View the scroll at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39668.

Gender roles also reacted against the money mentality. Wealthy women gained some autonomy from the family because of increasing education, expanding commercial opportunities, and high dowries (which legally belonged to the wife, not the husband or family). Poor women could also earn a living independent of the family, but were increasingly in danger of being bought and sold on the market. Men responded by portraying women as dangerous, weak, and vulnerable, regardless of their individual status or accomplishments.⁴⁸ As elite men tried to control women, elite women responded, in turn, by adopting high-prestige behavior like not remarrying, avoiding contact with unrelated men, and practicing ostentatious frugality. Gender became a more apparently natural differentiation among people than rank.

Likewise, the uncomfortable facts that gentry status relied on cash and an anonymous examination competition may have given impetus to the revival of a strand of Confucianism that emphasized that a person’s worth lay in his or her personal moral understanding and effort, even without public recognition. For it was in Song times that Zhang Zai, the Cheng brothers, and Zhu Xi developed “Neo-Confucianism,” which they called “the Learning of the Way” (Daoxue 道學). This new Confucianism began as a minority movement; its interpretation of the Classics was accepted as state orthodoxy only in 1313, under the Mongols who headed the Yuan dynasty.

In Tang thinking, learned culture – the family inheritance of aristocrats – had been in itself the Way. The An Lushan rebellion, and their own frustrations at being unable to hold office even when they passed examinations, led some Tang men from lesser clans to challenge this. The foremost of these was Han Yu (768-824), who asked how writing – the key skill tested in exams and valued in aristocratic society – could itself improve the world. Han Yu advocated a return to what he saw as the old, pre-Buddhist, Confucian ethical message for individuals. He thought that writing should straightforwardly explain the way; literature could not be the Way. Han Yu emphasized personal moral responsibility and saw Confucius as primarily teaching about right and wrong.

This made sense to Song gentry, for their families did not reach all the way back to Han as the Tang elite had, or even back to Tang. For the growing number of educated people who were first-generation students, literacy something hard-won, with a purpose and a message.⁴⁹

Song Neo-Confucians thought that after Mencius the understanding of the Way transmitted from the sage-kings and Confucius was broken off. The Way was lost; and the confusions of Buddhism and Daoism made things worse. The truth, the Way, was no-one’s birthright; it could be learned from the Classics, the only thing that did reach back to the sagekings Yao and Shun. Neo-Confucianism opened a path to ethical social mobility that competed with Buddhism and that broadened over the remainder of the late imperial period, just as commercialization had opened a path to wealth and status.

Commercialization had changed everything about the Song world. But people still understood and managed that world not by entirely rejecting, but by remaking and continuing the great tradition.

Figure 10.7. Attributed to Liu Songnian, “Streams and Mountains Under Fresh Snow,” late 12th century. Detail, a gentleman being served wine or tea. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. For the whole scroll and a short recording about it, see https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40987.