Now his nephew Zhenzong ruled from Bianjing (Kaifeng), the biggest city in the world with a million people, on the banks of the Bian River. It was filled with shops, restaurants, tea houses, taverns, palaces, teeming with merchants, shopkeepers, palm readers, hustlers, hucksters, psychics and designers. As Michael Wood writes, this was the ‘first great restaurant culture of the world complete with cookbooks and dining etiquette guides’ – which recommended a variety of meats from quail and venison to badgers and pangolins – for ‘the best-fed people who had lived so far in history’.
Fielding an army of over a million, Taizu and his successors deliberately encouraged technical learning and rewarded inventors, measures that ‘brought about a great number of cases of people presenting technology and techniques’. Taizu’s fire arrows were shot out of the tubes propelled by the Chinese invention, gunpowder, an accidental by-product of the Organic Fire Medicines, immortality elixirs, that had poisoned so many emperors. Now his engineers added extra saltpetre to produce a more powerful gunpowder, and later Song engineers created Thundercrash Bombs fired by trebuchets, and shoulder-fired Sky Erupters, an early firearm.*
The Song’s standing navy, China’s first, perhaps the world’s first, would be equipped with these weapons while navigating with magnetized compasses, their battleships and paddleboats made safe by watertight compartments not used in the west until the nineteenth century. Their goods were moved along the Grand Canal network improved by the Song, who used pound locks so that boats could travel from Kaifeng all the way to their southern port, Hangzhou; meanwhile a postal service improved communication. Rich aristocrats and merchants lived in exquisite palaces, using paper money to buy books written by male scholars and female poets, whose works were printed on paper using movable type. These works were read by a huge literate fanbase. The dynasty’s silk and porcelain were manufactured in state factories; its foundries produced so much iron – 100,000 tons annually, increasingly using coal in its furnaces – that Britain did not equal that output until the eighteenth century. Its scientists dissected cadavers for cause of death; astronomers mapped the heavens; its ministers created public clinics, welfare systems, paupers’ graveyards and aid for peasantry. The Song illustrate how rulers could deliver economic prosperity and technological advances by centralizing the rule of their vast market and encouraging ingenuity, both of which boosted foreign trade. Wealth and freedom were encouraged, providing they never challenged Song power. But the hierarchy was strict: men wore ornate robes according to their court ranks. The risk was that ultimately political control would crush the ingenuity that had created the Song miracle in the first place.
It was made possible by a succession of capable rulers who appointed some of the most refined statesmen to rule any country. At the time of al-Hakim and Canute, the real ruler of China was Empress Liu. She had started as an orphaned dancing girl married off to an impoverished silversmith who actually sold her to the future emperor. She and her new husband were childless, but she adopted the son of a concubine who was brought up as her own. After Zhenzong’s death in 1022 when she was fifty-two, she effectively made herself emperor, ruling for her supposed son Renzong. Coarse and fierce, she was a competent decision maker while the long-reigning Renzong was cultivated and self-deprecating: ‘I’ve never used the word “death” to threaten others, how dare I abuse the death penalty?’ But he made a fatal decision. The Song ruled only a quarter of today’s China; the north was dominated by a nomadic kingdom, the Khitan, which ruled Manchuria and Mongolia. To avoid constant war, he negotiated a truce by which he conceded vast tribute payments that ultimately destroyed Song from within while empowering deadly nomadic enemies without.
