Song Dynasty

The Song Dynasty was one of the most economically, technologically, and culturally advanced periods in Chinese and indeed world history, an era often described as a Chinese 'renaissance' or commercial and intellectual revolution.

It was founded in 960 CE by the general Zhao Kuangyin, who became Emperor Taizu, reunifying most of China after the fragmentation of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period and deliberately curbing the power of regional military governors in favour of a civilian-dominated government. The Song perfected the imperial civil service examination system, which became the principal route to power and produced a scholar-official elite (the literati) steeped in a revived and reinterpreted Confucianism known as Neo-Confucianism, which would dominate Chinese thought for centuries. The dynasty presided over remarkable economic growth, with surging population, urbanisation, sophisticated markets, the world's first government-issued paper money, and booming maritime and overland trade. Song China was a hotbed of innovation, producing or perfecting gunpowder weapons, the magnetic compass for navigation, movable-type printing, and major advances in shipbuilding, metallurgy, agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, alongside a flourishing of landscape painting, ceramics, and poetry. Yet for all its internal brilliance, the Song was militarily on the defensive against powerful steppe and northern neighbours. The dynasty is divided into two periods. During the Northern Song, ruling from the great commercial capital of Kaifeng, the empire controlled the Chinese heartland but paid tribute to the Khitan Liao and later faced the Jurchen Jin. In 1127 the Jurchen Jin captured Kaifeng and overran the north in a catastrophe known as the Jingkang Incident, forcing the court to flee south. The reconstituted Southern Song established its capital at Hangzhou and held the prosperous lands south of the Huai River for another century and a half, a period of even greater commercial and cultural sophistication. The dynasty's end came at the hands of the Mongols, who after a long and grinding war conquered the south; the Southern Song was finally destroyed in 1279 at the naval Battle of Yamen, completing the Mongol conquest of China under the Yuan dynasty.

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