by Kevin Reilly
Iron and Coal . The Chinese use of iron dates from the beginning of the Iron Age in Asia, but production was relatively low before the Tang dynasty. By 1078 (toward the end of the Northern Song dynasty), China produced more iron than any country in the world before the industrial revolution. In fact, the entire iron production of western Europe did not surpass Chinese production until 1700.3
By the eleventh century, Chinese iron was also pure enough to be considered steel. The first ironworkers hammered soft iron into tools. Later, iron was extracted from rock and fired with wood or charcoal to remove impurities and strengthen it. But iron made this way still contained a high measure of carbon. Steel not only was much stronger but also did not rust. The making of steel, however, required much higher temperatures (about 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit). Those temperatures could be achieved only with coke, which was a concentrated block of coal (like charcoal was to wood), an intensified energy source.
The Chinese use of coal and coke for fuel may have been fortuitous. Northern China was not heavily forested, and much of the forest that did exist was cut to make charcoal during the early Song dynasty. Chinese iron production was concentrated near the northern capital of Kaifeng near abundant sources of coal. The market of metropolitan Kaifeng, a city of a million people, drove iron and steel production in the eleventh century. Iron and steel built a vibrant regional economy. The value of Kaifeng trade at the end of the eleventh century has been estimated at about 12.4 million British pounds; by comparison, the imports and exports of London in 1711 were worth no more than 8.4 million pounds.4
Industrial Revolution? Figures like these have led some modern historians to ask why China did not undergo an industrial revolution as Britain did 700 years later. If we restrict our inquiry to Kaifeng, the answer is fairly straightforward. Unfortunately for the people of Kaifeng, they entered a period after 1100 of a series of catastrophes that made iron production the least of their worries. In 1126, Kaifeng was conquered by the Jurchen people from the northern grasslands. In 1176 and again in 1194, the Yellow River changed its course, causing severe flooding and isolating Kaifeng from its traditional supply and trade routes. In 1233, Kaifeng fell to the Mongols after a brutal and punishing siege accompanied by plague and famine. A report of the time claimed that 900,000 coffins were carried out of the gates of the city over a five-day period. This may not be an exaggeration since the population of Kaifeng in 1330 had been reduced to only about 90,000—less than a tenth of its eleventh-century size.5
After the Mongol period, the Chinese economy revived, but the population shifted to the area south of the Yangtze River. While iron was no longer produced in the Kaifeng mines, it was produced in southern and central China. One problem, however, was that China’s coal fields were mainly in the north. The nine provinces of the south contain only 1.8 percent of China’s coal reserves.6 Consequently, most of the iron that was produced when China revived in the fifteenth century was probably fueled with wood or charcoal. Chinese metallurgists may have even lost the craft of making coke from coal, as this was normally passed on orally from master to apprentice. As a result, Chinese iron in the Ming and Manchu dynasties (1368-1911) was inferior to that of the eleventh-century steel.
A modern historian points to a further irony.7 The industrial revolution that transformed Britain and the world in the nineteenth century was driven by the symbiosis of heavy industries in iron, coal, and steam. Iron became steel in blast furnaces stoked by coke. Steam engines were developed to remove water from the coal mines, then they powered the removal of the coal in wagons run on iron rails, and finally steam engines were refined to drive steel railroad cars along the iron rails laid throughout the world. The irony is that Chinese coal mines did not flood but were kept dry, so they did not have to develop steam engines. Dry mines were more dangerous and difficult to mine because the dry air full of coal dust was highly combustible. Consequently, even if China had an abundance of coal easily at hand and even if the Chinese continued to produce coke and steel, the synergy of iron, coal, and steam that jump-started the industrial revolution in Britain would have been less likely to occur in China.
Could China have begun an industrial revolution hundreds of years before it occurred in Europe? Perhaps, if there had been no Jurchen and Mongol invasions. Perhaps, if China had the global market for textiles and iron that Britain enjoyed thanks to its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is important to realize that no one foresaw the industrial revolution; no one could have planned it. Such things are much easier to copy than create. China has been industrializing quite successfully in recent decades along models borrowed from nineteenth-century Europe and late twentieth-century Asia.
But what was the relationship between medieval Chinese technological inventiveness and the industrial revolution that eventually created the modern world? If the Mongol invasion ended Chinese steel production and dramatically curtailed Chinese iron production, there was no continuity between Chinese metallurgy and the growth of the British and European iron industry. In fact, between 1500 and 1700, Chinese, Muslim, and European iron industries were relatively equal. Therefore, the precocious inventiveness of the Chinese iron and steel industry during the Song dynasty had limited global consequences.
Other Chinese inventions did begin a global history, however. While Chinese iron production was not copied by Muslims or Europeans, Chinese ceramics and silk were. Chinese ships were not copied, but the compass was. In these and many other technologies, China participated in a shared universe of technological invention and development. In an age with porous borders but no patent offices, it would be a fool’s errand to trace the history of most inventions. Many transfers are as hidden from the historian as they were hidden from authorities at the time. Often technologies were stolen or captured in war. When Muslim armies defeated Chinese troops in 751, among the Chinese prisoners brought to Samarkand were Chinese papermakers. Paper appeared in Baghdad by the early ninth century and in the rest of the Muslim world by 1000. Later, paper filtered into Europe through Spain and Italy. The compass also sailed on Muslim ships before European ones, but some Chinese inventions jumped straight to Europe. Gunpowder, cannon, and block printing went directly from China to Italy in the fourteenth century, possibly brought by Mongolian or Tibetan slaves purchased by Italian merchants on the Black Sea.8 Thus, in China, we see many roots of modern technology. And while some of these turned out to be only temporarily productive, others turned into permanent routes to the modern world.
Commerce and Capitalism
Increasing trade is a long-term trend in world history. However, since rulers and religious institutions managed much of the trade in the ancient world, private, capitalist, market-driven trade has had a shorter history. China clearly played an important role in advancing private markets. Markets, merchants, private investors, and manufacturers were more important in Song dynasty China than ever before. But if capitalism means a society in which commercial decisions trump most others, China was not capitalist. The government directed much of the economy, and merchants were neither independent actors nor members of a self-conscious class. Rather, they operated in great family, clan, and lineage organizations that mediated individual action and restricted the role of the market.
Money and Markets . Song dynasty China created many of the elements of modern commercial society that we take for granted. Paper money is perhaps the most notable. Marco Polo was astounded to see paper money in China when he visited in the thirteenth century, but since appearing in 1024, paper money had already been in use for hundreds of years. Between 1265 and 1279, the government backed its paper notes with gold and silver. The Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) made paper money legal tender, the only money that one could legally use. Foreign visitors like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta wrote of having to surrender their foreign money on arrival and convert whatever they wanted to spend into Chinese paper.
During the period of the Song dynasty, government returns from commercial activi
ty surpassed those of agriculture.9 This income included both taxes from private commerce and the revenues derived from government owned industries.
Public versus Private Enterprise . How much of this commercial activity was private, and how much government owned? Salt production was a government monopoly, as was tea, alcohol, and incense. The huge Chinese military (about a million strong) played an important role in directing the economy. In Hangzhou, the army owned 13 large and six small stores that sold alcoholic beverages. From these, it also ran taverns with state prostitutes.10
A class of private merchants and producers grew with the expanding Chinese economy during the Song dynasty, but it is likely that the state increased rather than decreased its control of the economy over time. There were a large number of private iron producers in Kaifeng during the eleventh century, for example. But by the thirteenth century, independent entrepreneurs had been replaced by government contractors. Then, during the reign of Kublai Khan (1260-1290) and the Mongol Yuan dynasty, these contractors were replaced by government-salaried officials. Increasingly, free laborers were replaced by slave and dependent workers.11 Salt mines near Hangzhou employed hundreds of thousands of semislave workers at starvation wages. Those who were not homeless were kept in substandard public housing, six to eight in a room.
Markets also became less free during the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Merchants complained that government manufactures undersold private producers and that government purchasers paid less than full value. The government was a major buyer of armaments, clothing, and military equipment, some of which was made by government factories and some privately.
Hangzhou . Great cities crystallize the values of the civilization from which they spring. Hangzhou was one of the greatest. Marco Polo, who visited the former capital of the Southern Song dynasty shortly after the Mongol conquest in 1275, thought it was “the greatest city which may be found in the world, where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies himself to be in Paradise.” Hangzhou offered lowly officials, foreign merchants, and native working people a variety of recreational facilities and amusements. There were many specialized restaurants: some served everything ice cold, including fish and soups; some specialized in silkworm or shrimp pies and plum wine; and even teahouses offered sumptuous decor, dancing girls, and musical lessons of all kinds. On the lake, there were hundreds of boats, many of which could be rented, according to Marco Polo, “for parties of pleasure”:
Anyone who desires to go a-pleasuring with the women or with a party of his own sex hires one of these barges, which are always to be found completely furnished with tables and chairs and all other apparatus for a feast. . . . And truly a trip on this Lake is a much more charming recreation than can be enjoyed on land. For on the one side lies the city in its entire length, so that the spectators in the barges, from the distance at which they stand, take in the whole prospect in its full beauty and grandeur, with its numberless palaces, temples, monasteries, and gardens, full of lofty trees, sloping to the shore.
While anything could be purchased in Hangzhou, many things were free. Workers, soldiers, and the poor frequented almost two dozen “pleasure grounds.” Each was a large fairground with markets, plays, musical groups, instrumental and dance lessons, ballet performances, jugglers, acrobats, storytellers, performing fish, archery displays and lessons, snake charmers, boxing matches, conjurers, chess players, magicians, imitators of street cries, imitators of village talk, and specialists in painting chrysanthemums, telling obscene stories, posing riddles, and flying kites. Gambling, drinking, and prostitution were also part of the scene here as elsewhere in the city.
Market areas were equally a source of entertainment and business. Marco Polo saw so much fish in a single market that he could not imagine it would ever be eaten, but all of it was sold in a couple of hours. There were markets devoted to specialized goods and crafts that could hardly be found in the rest of China. One “guidebook” gave directions for the best rhinoceros skins, ivory combs, turbans, wicker cages, painted fans, philosophy books, and lotus-pink rice. In addition, the resident of Hangzhou could find books (hand or mechanically printed) on a fantastic variety of subjects: curious rocks, jades, coins, bamboo, plum trees, special aspects of printing and painting, foreign lands, poetry, philosophy, Confucius, mushrooms, and encyclopedias on everything.
Marco Polo’s description of Hangzhou reveals a metropolis of unbridled commerce, but in praise of its architecture, Marco Polo added a note that shows the enormous power the emperor exerted over individuals, families, and private owners of property:
And again this king did another thing; that when he rides by any road in the city . . . and it happened that he found two beautiful great houses and between them might be a small one . . . then the king asks why that house is so small. . . . And one told him that that small house belongs to a poor man who has not the power to make it larger like the others. Then the king commands that the little house may be made as beautiful and as high as were those two others which were beside it, and he paid the cost. And if it happened that the little house belonged to a rich man, then he commanded him immediately to cause it to be taken away. And by his command there was not in his capital in the realms of Hangzhou any house which was not both beautiful and great, besides the great palaces and the great mansions of which there were great plenty about the city.
Hangzhou was still the emperor’s city, and China was the emperor’s country. The emperor could encourage trade, support private businesses, and reward economic development, but the emperor could never be a businessperson. He could never think or behave like a capitalist. Rather, he was like a father to all the people of the Celestial Kingdom, rich and poor, powerful and weak.
Technologically, administratively, and economically, China cleared routes to modern society that others followed only recently. But China was not a modern society. Nor was China alone, large as it was, pervasive enough to change the world. The world we know evolved from the spread of these Chinese innovations and the contributions of other societies in a vast global network of trade, migration, and influences that many contemporary scholars call a “world system.”
State and Bureaucracy
The modern state was also a Chinese invention. The Chinese state is, in fact, the longest-continuing state in world history, whether we date its origins back to the Bronze Age or the formation of the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty in the second century BCE. But by the modern state, we mean something a bit different.
The Modern State . Our world consists almost entirely of nation-states (and the international organizations that represent these states). We take them for granted because there are no parts of the world that do not belong to a particular state. No island is too small or too far away to avoid the jurisdiction of a state. Even ships on the ocean fly the flag of a particular nation-state (though often one chosen for tax or legal purposes). But this was not always the case. A thousand years ago, there was no “France” or “Egypt” or “India.” There were empires and caliphates, “no-man’s-lands,” stateless peoples, and frontiers beyond the control of governments. Many parts of the world were run by religious organizations, local lords, tribal leaders, or marauding armies rather than territorial sovereigns. The transformation of a stateless or tribal society into a territorial state involved a number of important steps. We have discussed some of these in our study of the ancient and classical world. Tribal, clan, or family organization and identity had to be subordinated to state or national organization and identity, and there had to be an authority (a sovereign) able to administer the territory in some more regular and stable form than periodic plunder.
One reason why the Chinese state proved so long lasting was its development of state bureaucracy. As early as the Han dynasty, but especially during the Tang and Song dynasties, China developed a system of state administration second to none. One of the distinctive features of this centralized state administration was the Chinese civil service and examination system. We referred in a p
revious chapter to the origins of this system in the Han dynasty. It became especially important in the Tang and Song dynasties and had much to do with the revival of the Chinese Empire after the sixth century.
In the beginning, the old aristocracy rejected a system based on exams rather than birth, but eventually they too recognized that the system had changed. As early as the seventh century, one Tang emperor was said to remark, on seeing young aristocrats line up for the exams, “The heroes of the empire are all in my pocket.” In fact, the battle between the palace and the old families continued throughout the Tang dynasty, and it was not until the Song dynasty that the old aristocracy was replaced by a new elite class of graduates of the highest state exams. Eventually, the sons of the old families were replaced by new names. The exam lists of 1148 and 1256 (which are unusually complete) show that less than half of the winning doctoral candidates had fathers, paternal grandfathers, or paternal great-grandfathers in the bureaucracy.