Tang and Song China: An Age of Invention, Cities and Commerce

Between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, China ran an examination-based civil service, printed books in bulk, issued government paper currency, and supported cities larger than anything in contemporary Europe. That is the short answer to what the Tang and Song are known for. The longer answer is more useful, because the two dynasties are usually compressed into one "golden age" paragraph, and they were doing quite different things.

Columbia University's Asia for Educators timeline gives the Tang as 618–906 CE, with capitals at Chang'an — present-day Xi'an — and Luoyang, and the Song as 960–1279, after an intervening Five Dynasties period. The Song then splits: a Northern Song ruling from Bianjing, present-day Kaifeng, until 1127, and a Southern Song ruling from present-day Hangzhou thereafter.

Tang: reach, and what it cost

The Tang is the outward-facing dynasty. Its capital sat at the eastern end of the overland routes described in the Silk Road for beginners, and the resulting traffic in goods, people, religions and techniques is visible in the art.

UNESCO describes the Longmen Grottoes as holding the largest and most impressive collection of Chinese art of the late Northern Wei and Tang dynasties, entirely devoted to Buddhism, and the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang — sited at a strategic point on the Silk Route — as 492 cells and cave sanctuaries whose statues and wall paintings span a thousand years of Buddhist art. These are not incidental monuments. They are the record of a religion arriving from outside, being funded by Chinese patrons, and becoming a Chinese art tradition.

The Tang is also a caution against reading dynasties as smooth arcs. The eighth-century rebellion that broke the dynasty's military and fiscal control marks a rupture as sharp as anything in the argument over why Rome fell, and the post-rebellion Tang was a materially different state from the one that preceded it.

Song: the economic transformation

The Song is the dynasty that changed how an economy worked, and the specifics are more concrete than the phrase "commercial revolution" suggests.

Columbia's Song module traces the currency story in stages. For centuries the basic unit was the bronze or copper coin strung through a central hole, which made large transactions physically heavy. As trade grew, minting grew with it: the module records that by 1085 coin output had increased tenfold since Tang times, to more than six billion coins a year. Merchants in late Tang times, around 900 CE, began trading receipts from deposit shops rather than moving the coins themselves. Early Song authorities granted a small set of shops a monopoly on issuing those certificates, and in the 1020s the government took the system over and issued paper money itself.

Note how the innovation actually happened: a private workaround for a logistical problem, licensed, then nationalised. That is a far better model of how monetary change usually occurs than "someone invented paper money".

Printing follows a similar shape. By the ninth century, craftsmen were mass-producing books by carving a whole page of text and illustration into a wooden block. Movable type — one piece per character — was invented in the eleventh century by Bi Sheng, using fragile baked clay, with wooden movable type credited to Wang Zhen around 1297. But movable type did not take over, because whole-block printing was cheaper. The reason is structural rather than cultural: with thousands of characters to cut, cast and sort, the carved page remains the efficient unit, while an alphabet of a few dozen letters flips the calculation.

The examination system, in its actual sequence

Competitive written examinations are the feature most often attached to the Song, and the attachment is half right.

Columbia's module states that it had been possible to become a government official by passing a series of written examinations since the Sui dynasty, 581–617, and that the Song period saw the full flowering of the scholar-official class certified through those examinations. So the mechanism is older than the Song; what the Song did was make it the dominant route and build a whole social class around it.

The module is also careful about what that class was. Most scholars came from landholding families, so the examinations did not dissolve wealth as a precondition. What they did was give a group whose standing rested on learning both prestige and a licence to criticise policy — the module describes officials whose Confucian education encouraged them to speak up when they thought power was going wrong.