Song dynasty

The Tang dynasty fell in 907. For a little over half a century, until 960, no single power ruled all of China: historians call this interlude the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (五代十国).

In the north, the old imperial heartland, five short-lived regimes followed one another: the Later Liang (907), Later Tang (923), Later Jin (936), Later Han (947) and Later Zhou (951). Four of them already had their capital at Kaifeng (开封). The south and west were shared among ten relatively stable kingdoms, among them the Southern Tang, the Southern Han and Wu-Yue.

In 960 Zhao Kuangyin (赵匡胤), military inspector general of the Later Zhou, seized the throne in a coup and founded the Song dynasty (宋朝), with Kaifeng as its capital. As Emperor Taizu (r. 960–976) he set about absorbing the other states; the last two of the ten kingdoms, Wu-Yue and the Northern Han, came to an end in 978 and 979.

Historians divide the dynasty in two: the Northern Song (北宋, 960–1127), ruling from Kaifeng, and the Southern Song (南宋, 1127–1279), ruling from Hangzhou after the north was lost.

The Song were not alone: states founded by peoples of the north shared the map with them, and the dynasty alternated war and diplomacy with its neighbours.

• The Liao (辽, 907 or 916 to 1125, depending on the source), founded by the Khitan, covered much of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. It ruled its Chinese subjects through a Tang-style administration and the steppe peoples through a tribal one. The Treaty of Shanyuan (1005) committed the Song to yearly payments of silk and silver and opened about a century of relative peace.

• The Western Xia (西夏), a kingdom proclaimed by the Tangut in 1038, lasted nearly two centuries in the north-west, until the Mongols destroyed it.

• The Jin (金, 1115–1234) was founded by the Jurchen of Manchuria, former subjects of the Liao, who overthrew their overlords with Song help.

The Jin then turned on the Song. They besieged Kaifeng, which fell in January 1127, and carried off Emperor Qinzong and his father, the retired emperor Huizong. Qinzong's brother Zhao Gou escaped south and re-founded the dynasty as Emperor Gaozong, with his capital at Lin'an (临安), today's Hangzhou (杭州). The Treaty of Shaoxing, signed in 1141 and ratified in 1142, set the border with the Jin on the Huai River, leaving the north to the Jin.

Britannica describes the Song period as a whole as one of flourishing commerce: paper money came into growing use and several cities passed one million inhabitants.

The Song period saw the full flowering of one of the most distinctive features of imperial China: scholar-officials recruited through highly competitive civil-service examinations. Columbia University's Asia for Educators gives the early Song emperors' motive: to bring men with a literary education into government as a counterweight to the military. The highest degree, the jinshi (进士), rewarded knowledge of the Confucian classics and opened the way to high office.

This world of scholars produced the thinker who shaped Confucianism for the following centuries, Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200), born in Fujian. He took four texts, the Great Learning (大学), the Analects of Confucius (论语), the Mencius (孟子) and the Doctrine of the Mean (中庸), put them in that order, wrote commentaries on them and called them the Four Books (四书). His system, often called the "Learning of the Principle" and central to Neo-Confucianism, explains the world through two notions: li (理), the principle or pattern that gives each thing its nature, and qi (气), the vital force or matter that gives it form.

His influence lasted: according to Britannica, the Four Books were the core of elementary schooling and of the examinations from the 14th century on. His thought also reached Korea and Japan.

Several techniques with a great future appear in Song-period texts. Here is what those texts say, no more and no less.

Movable type. In the Qingli era (1041–1048), a commoner named Bi Sheng (毕昇) carved characters in clay, one type per character, each as thin as the edge of a coin, and fired them hard. He set them on an iron plate coated with pine resin, wax and paper ash, heated it, pressed the surface level and printed as from a woodblock; two plates were used in turn. He is known from a single text: the Mengxi bitan (梦溪笔谈, "Brush Talks from Dream Brook"), dated 1088, by the high official Shen Kuo (沈括, 1031–1095), in its 18th scroll, on arts and crafts. Shen Kuo adds that after Bi Sheng's death his types passed to members of Shen's own family.

Paper money. In Sichuan, where people paid in iron coins, deposit certificates issued by private shops gave rise in the early 11th century to notes called jiaozi (交子). First issued by merchants, they came under state control in the 1020s.

The compass. In 1044 the Wujing zongyao (武经总要), a military compendium, describes a magnetized fish-shaped object floating in a bowl of water to show direction. The Mengxi bitan contains the first known description of a magnetized needle, and Zhu Yu's Pingzhou Table Talks (1119) is the first text to mention sailors using one.

Gunpowder. The Wujing zongyao, compiled between 1040 and 1044 by Zeng Gongliang and others, contains the oldest known written formulas for gunpowder, based on saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal. The original edition is lost; the surviving copy dates from 1510.

To see a Song city, look at the handscroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival (清明上河图), painted in the 12th century by Zhang Zeduan (张择端). Done in ink and light colour on silk, it measures 24.8 cm high by 528 cm long and belongs to the Palace Museum in Beijing. Unrolled from right to left, it shows the Northern Song capital, Bianjing (Kaifeng), and the banks of the Bian river at the Qingming festival: first the countryside on the outskirts, then the river with its boats and bridge, then city streets lined with shops. The museum counts more than 500 figures in it. Britannica notes that the city it shows was burned by the Jurchen in 1127, shortly after the work was finished.

A towering figure of Chinese literature, Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101), also known as Su Dongpo (苏东坡), was a scholar-official, poet, prose writer, calligrapher and painter. An opponent of the minister Wang Anshi's reforms, he was caught up in the court's factional struggles. In 1079 he was arrested over writings accused of mocking the government: the "Crow Terrace poetry case" (乌台诗案). After about 130 days in prison he was exiled in 1080 to Huangzhou (黄州), in today's Hubei. There, in 1082, he wrote his pieces on the Red Cliff, among them the Former Ode on the Red Cliff (前赤壁赋). Pardoned in 1100, he died in 1101 at Changzhou, on his way to a new post.

Among the generals who fought the Jin was Yue Fei (岳飞, 1103–1142), whose life later inspired many popular stories. He led Southern Song armies against the Jin, but Emperor Gaozong and his chancellor Qin Hui (秦桧) chose to negotiate. In 1141 Qin Hui had him imprisoned for insubordination and charged with treason; Yue Fei was put to death in prison early in 1142, once peace with the Jin had been agreed.

The History of Song (宋史), in its biography of Yue Fei, says that under interrogation he bared his back, where four characters were tattooed deep in the skin: 尽忠报国, "serve the country with utmost loyalty". The text does not say who tattooed them. The popular scene in which his mother does it is a late legend: it first appears in a Qing-era novel, the Shuo Yue quanzhuan (说岳全传), and modern historians doubt it; earlier novels, under the Ming, had someone else do the tattooing.

The end came from the Mongols. Their armies reached Lin'an in January 1276 and took it the following month; Emperor Gong was captured. Loyalists enthroned two of his younger brothers in turn as they fled south. On 19 March 1279, at the naval battle of Yamen in southern China, the Song made their last stand; the loyalist Lu Xiufu leapt into the sea with the last emperor, seven-year-old Zhao Bing. All of China now belonged to the Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan (忽必烈).