ChAPTER 17 Reunification and Renaissance in

The energy and prosperity that characterized Chinese urban life in the Tang-Song eras can be seen in this cityscape.

Bian Liang's bridges, bustling river markets, and spacious parks attracted many visitors, especially at times of festival celebrations like that depicted here.

Located between a large lake and a river in the Yangzi Delta, Hangzhou was criss crossed by canals and bridges.

The city's location near the coast of the east China Sea allowed its traders and artisans to prosper through the sale of goods and the manufacture of products from materials drawn from throughout China as well as overseas.
By the late Song times, Hangzhou had more than a million residents and was renowned for its wealth, clean streets, and variety of diversions.

There are ten great marketplaces in Hangzhou, each filled with products from much of the known world.

The city's many parks and delightful gardens could be enjoyed by the less consumption minded visitor.
One could visit the bath houses in the late afternoon.
One could also get a massage at these establishments.

There are many fine restaurants in the city that specialize in the different cuisines of the different regions of China.

There were many different entertainments to choose from after dinner.
The pleasure parks have acrobats, jugglers, and actors performing.
The city's ornate tea houses, an opera performance by the lake, and a viewing of paintings by artists from the city's famed academy were some of the other options.
The good life in cities like Hangzhou was made possible by the large, well-educated bureaucracy that had ruled China for centuries.
In this chapter, we will see how a strong military and centralized control brought long periods of peace, during which the ruling elites promoted technological innovation, agricultural expansion, and commercial enterprise.
From the 11th century onward, these trends persisted despite increased pressure from nomadic invaders from the west and north.
China produced some of the great art of humankind and was one of the most prosperous societies of the modern era.

The rise of the Sui dynasty in the early 580s appeared to be just another factional struggle of the Tang era that followed, a Confucian sort that had occurred repeatedly in the splinter states fighting for control of China in the centuries revival enhanced the position.

The return to highly centralized northern Zhou empire was the result of a marriage between a daughter and the ruler of the family that had been active in these contests.
The Zhou monarch ruled under an imperial dynasty.

The throne of his son-in-law was seized by the emperor.

The second Sui title shows little desire to favor the Confucian scholar-gentry class.

With their dynasty, murdered his father to support, and then taking the title Wendi (or Literary Emperor) and extending his rule across the north gain throne, Confucian China was restored.
The weak and divided Chen kingdom was conquered by Wendi's armies in 589.
For the first time in over three and a half centuries, the traditional core for construction of Chinese canal areas of Chinese civilization was returned to Wendi after his victory over the Chen.

Wendi was supported by lower taxes and the establishment of granaries.

L A Y A M T S.

After the collapse of the Han dynasty, China was divided into warring kingdoms for nearly 400 years.

Military commanders were the deep divisions of this period.

L A Y A M T S.

The Tang was built on the foundations of the Sui dynasty.

He was fond of extravagant construction projects.

He forcibly conscripted hundreds of thousands of peasants to build palaces, a new capital city, and a series of canals to link his empire.
His demands seemed to be endless.
There was an extensive game park in his new capital.
Tens of thousands of laborers were forced to dig up huge trees in the nearby hills and replant them in the artificial mounds built by other laborers because there wasn't enough forest on the site chosen.

Before work on his many construction projects was done, Yangdi led his tired and angry subjects into a series of unsuccessful wars to bring Korea back under Chinese rule.

His failures in the Korean campaigns, and the near-fatal reverse he suffered in central Asia, set in motion widespread revolts throughout the empire.
The governors of the provinces declared themselves independent rulers, bandit gangs raided at will, and nomadic peoples seized large sections of the north China plain.
Faced with a crumbling empire, the emperor retreated to his pleasure palaces in the city of Hangzhou on the Yangzi River to the south.
It looked as if China would return to the state of political division and social turmoil it had experienced in the preceding centuries when Yangdi was assassinated by his own ministers.

Li was a loyal supporter of the Sui ruler and was the duke of Tang.

The first emperor of the Tang dynasty, whose forces had been trapped by a large force of Turkic cavalry in a small fort, was saved from assassination by Li Yuan.
The unrest spread from of gaozu as Yangdi grew more irrational.

Li Yuan emerged the victor from the many-sided struggle for the throne that followed Yangdi's death.

The golden age of the Tang was laid down by Li Yuan and his second son, Tang Taizong.

The Tang armies conquered central Asia and Afghanistan.

Many of the nomadic peoples who dominated China in the Six Dynasties era had to submit to Tang rule because of these victories.
The Tang emperors created frontier armies after completing repairs to the northern walls.
The frontier forces were partly recruited from Turkic nomadic peoples.
The sons of Turkic tribal leaders were sent to the capital as hostages to ensure good behavior in the tribe.
They were educated in Chinese ways at the Tang capital in the hopes of becoming Chinese.

The empire was extended to parts of Tibet in the west, the Red River valley homeland of the Vietnamese in the south, and Manchuria in the north.

For the first time since the Han, north and south China were integrated in the Tang period.
Korea was overrun by Chinese armies in 668 and a vassal kingdom called Silla was established that was loyal to the Tang.
The Tang empire was much larger than that of the early Han empire, which stretched beyond the borders of present-day China.

central roles in the process were played by a revived scholar-gentry elite and reworked Confucian ideol ogy.

The fortunes of the scholar-gentry began to improve after the second Sui emperor, Yangdi.
The early Tang emperors desperately needed loyal and well-educated officials to govern the vast empire they had put together in a matter of decades.
The scholar-gentry bureaucrats were used by the Tang rulers to counterbalance the power of the aristocracy.
The role of the aristocratic families in Chinese history was reduced as their control over court life and administration declined.
Political power in China was shared by the imperial families and bureaucrats of the civil service.

The bureaucracy went from the imperial palace down to the district level, which was roughly equivalent to an American county.

One secretariat drafted imperial decrees and the other monitored the reports of regional and provincial officials.

The empire was run by the executive department on a day-to-day basis.

The Tang emperors used academies to train state officials and educate them in the Confucian classics, which were thought to teach moral and organizational principles essential to effective administrators.

The educated scholar-gentry rose far above those in the Han era in the Tang and Song dynasties.
The pattern of advancement in the civil service was regularized in the Tang and Song periods.
The Chinese connected merit as measured by tests to students from skills with authority and status.

Only those who passed exams on legal classics at the highest imperial or metropolitan level could gain the highest offices.

Their names were announced throughout the empire, and their families' to students who passed the most positions were secured because of their success.
Even their former friends and fellow students all of Chinese literature became addressed formally and treated with deference after they were transformed into dignitaries over difficult Chinese examination on night.
Success in exams at all levels made candidates eligible for social status.
They were given the right to wear certain types of clothing because they were for high office.

Birth and family connections were still important in securing high office despite a higher proportion of Tang bureaucrats winning their positions through success in civil service exams.

The document feature shows some of the relationships illustrated by the petition.
Even failed candidates from their families were able to get into the imperial academies because of the established bureaucrats.
Staffing bureaucratic departments was influenced by ethnic and regional ties.
Although bright commoners could rise to upper-level positions in the bureaucracy, the central administration was overwhelmingly domi nated by a small number of established families.
A disproportionate share of the places available in the imperial academies were bought by prominent households and sons followed fathers in positions of power and influence.
The old aristocracy and the low ranking sons and grandsons of lesser wives and concubines of the imperial household were given many positions.

Birth and family influence are often more important than Merit and ambition.

Board games and musical recitals were highly esteemed leisure activities for the scholar-gentry class, as shown in this ink drawing of Chinese philosophers of the Song dynasty.

Members of the scholar-gentry elite can go to mountains to meditate, attend poetry reading or writing parties, or paint the plum trees in their gardens.
The highly educated elite admired those who pursued a variety of activities at leisure.

There is a longstanding problem of defining the boundaries between established religions and the state of Chinese society.

Zen Buddhists are strong patrons of the Buddhist establishment.

Buddhism flourished in China after the fall of the Han in Japan.
Chinese monks were the most popular because of their appreciation of natural and artistic part.

Zen had great appeal for the educated classes of China because of its stress on meditation and appreciation of natural and artistic beauty.

The goal of those who followed Chan was to come to know the ultimate wisdom, and thus find release from the cycle of rebirth.

The nature of this level of con sciousness was often expressed in poetic metaphors and riddles.

There is no limit to the power of wisdom.

It can see, hear, understand, and know.

It can do all of these, but is always empty and tranquil.

The nephew of the Prime Minister has made use of share in his own way.

Even though your high ability has been rewarded with a commission, less favor I could take part in this triumphal progress.
General member of the rear most company, the day would live engraved Li is highly qualified both as a civil and a military official, and on my memory.

I have held office only as an officer of the guard, but I do not compare with other men in talent.

Having no appearance means being empty.

Being tranquil is not having been created.

One will not be mourned by birth or death.

Buddhism had a strong social, economic, and political force due to the combination of royal patronage and widespread conversion at both the elite and mass levels.

The Tang rulers were trying to promote educa tion in the Confucian classics.
They commissioned Buddhist paintings and statuary and sent emissaries to India.
She tried to make Buddhism a state religion.

Many Buddhist paint ings and sculptures were commissioned by the emperor.

The sculptures are large.
The steeply cast bronze of the two and three stories high is carved from stone, which is one of the most characteristic features of this style of construction.

The Tang ruler was 690-705 years old.

Huge statues of the Buddha were carved out of rocky cliffs in the 6th century c.e.

at sites such as Longmen near the Tang capital of Luoyang on the Yellow river and Yunkang far to the north.
The art at these centers was strongly influenced by that of central and west Asia, and before the age of Buddhist predominance, sculpture had not been highly developed in China.
The huge Buddhas of sites such as Longmen attest to the high level of skill the Chinese had attained in stone- and metalworking.

There were hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns in China by the mid-9th century.

The envy of Confucian and Daoist rivals was aroused by the Anti-Buddhist Backlash Buddhist successes.

Even though the faith followed by most of the Chinese was very different from that originally preached by the Buddha or that practiced in India and southeast Asia, some notables attacked the religion as alien.
The monks tried to counter Buddhism's appeal to the mass by emphasizing their own magic.
The growing campaign of Confucian scholar administrators to convince the Tang rulers that the large Buddhist monastic establishment posed a fundamental economic challenge to the imperial order was the most damaging to the fortunes of Buddhism.
The Tang regime lost a lot of revenue because they didn't tax monastic lands and resources.
The state did not have the power to tax or conscript peasants who worked on monastic estates.

State fears of Buddhist wealth and power led to measures to limit the flow of land and resources to the monastic orders.

The Chinese emperor of Tang tions began an open persecution of Buddhism.
Thousands of monasteries and Buddhist shrines were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns were forced to abandon their monastic lives because of the persecution.
They and the slaves and peasants who worked their lands were subject to taxation in the 800s, and the monastery lands were parceled out to taxpaying landlords and peasant Buddhism.

Chinese Buddhism was weakened by this and other bouts of oppression.

The political influence and wealth that the Buddhist monastic orders had in the first centuries of Tang rule would never happen again.
The great age of Buddhist painting and cave sculptures gave way to art dominated by Confucian subjects and styles in the late Tang and the Song Dynastic era.
The Zen and pure land sects of Buddhism have millions of followers.
Confucianism was the central ideology of Chinese civilization from the 9th to the early 20th century.
Buddhism left a mark on the arts, the Chinese language, and Chinese thinking about things such as heaven, charity, and law, but it ceased to be a dominant influence.
The impact of Buddhism on the civilizations of mainland southeast Asia, Tibet, and parts of central Asia continued even after Tang-Song rule ended.

The Tang assault on the Buddhist monastic order was smaller than the general weakening of imperial control that had begun almost a century earlier.

After the Tang, the Confucian revival was controversial, but strong rule between 690 and 705 by the empress, who tried to establish a flourished under the new dynasty, and a second attempt to control the throne was made by a highborn woman who had a mar dynasty.

Backed by her powerful relatives and a group of prominent courtiers, she poisoned her husband and placed her own child on the throne.

The very capable officials he appointed to high positions pushed for political and economic reforms.

His interest in running the empire waned.
He devoted himself to patronizing the arts and enjoying the pleasures within the confines of the imperial city.
An Arab merchant visits the imperial apartments for the attention of the monarch.

They were one of the most famous and illstarred romances in Chinese history.

Powerful women at the courts of emperors and kings throughout Afro-Euroasia made a lot of interven tions.
The imperial gardens were where Xuanzong gave flute lessons.

She used her new power to pack the upper levels of the government with her greedy relatives after being raised to the status of royal concubine.

They played a bigger role in court politics.
The arrogance and excessive ambition of Yang Guifei and her family angered members of the rival cliques at court, who took every opportunity to turn her excesses into a cause for popular unrest.
The economic distress was caused by Xuanzong's neglect of state affairs.
The government was unable to deal with the dis orders effectively because of chronic military weaknesses.
The depiction of the opulence and a general of nomadic origins named An Lushan gives a vivid impression of Chinese court life in the late Tang era.
Here, a well-dressed woman who supported revolt with the aim of founding a new is aided by some of her servants on a well-fed horse.

Although the revolt was crushed and the Tang concubine on her ride was preserved, victory was won at a very high cost.

During his time as emperor, he was unable to continue because of his grief and disillusionment.

The introduction of the Tang monarchs who followed him could not compare to the ability of the dynasty to have her royal relatives into administration in the first century and a half of its rule.

To defeat the rebels, the Tang sought out nomadic peoples living on the northern borders of the empire.

They gave resources and political power to regional commanders who were loyal to the dynasty.
In the late 8th and 9th centuries, the nomads used political divisions within China to gain entry into and eventually assert control over large areas of the north China plain.
Many of the provincial governors became independent rulers.
They didn't pass any of their taxes on to the treasury.
The regional lords gave their titles to their sons without asking for permission from the Tang court.
Some revolts in the 9th century were popular uprisings led by peasants.

By the end of the 9th century, little remained of the Tang Empire.

When the last emperor of the Tang dynasty was forced to resign, China appeared to be entering another phase of nomadic dominance, political division, and social unrest.
Zhao was a scholarly man who collected books rather than campaigning after the fall of Tang.

The Liao dynasty wanted him to proclaim himself emperor.

Emperor Taizu will be independent in the next few years.

The failure set a precedent for weakness in dealing with the nomadic people of the north by the Song rulers.

The dynasty was plagued by this shortcoming from the beginning and eventually was destroyed by the Mongols in the late 13th century.
The Song were forced to sign in China by military defeats.

A comparison of the boundaries of the early Song Empire with that of the Tang domain shows that the Song never matched its predecessor in political or military strength.

The weakness of the Song resulted in part from imperial policies that were designed to stop the con ditions that had destroyed the Tang dynasty.
The military was subservient to the civilian administrators from the beginning.
Civil officials were allowed to be governors in order to prevent military commanders from seizing power.
Military commanders were not allowed to build a power base in the areas where they were stationed.

The interests of the Confucian scholar gentry were promoted by the early Song rulers.

Additional servants and payments of luxury goods such as silk and wine made government posts more lucrative as officials' salaries were increased.
The civil service exams were easy to take.
They were given three years each at the district, provincial and imperial levels.
Song examiners passed a far higher percentage of those taking the exams than the Tang examiners had, and these successful candidates were more likely to receive an official post than their counterparts in the Tang era.
The bureaucracy became bloated with well-paid officials who had little to do.
The ascendancy of the scholar-gentry class over its rivals was secured in this way.

A comparison of the territory controlled during the two phases of the Song dynasty clearly shows the growing power and pressure of nomadic peoples from the north and the weakened state of the Song rulers of China.

The revival of Confucian ideas and values that dominated intellectual life was mirrored by the influence of the scholar-gentry in the Song era.

Many scholars tried to recover long-neglected texts.
Impressive libraries were established and new academies devoted to the study of the classical texts were founded.
Rival interpretations of the teachings of the ancient philosophers were propounded by the new schools of philosophy.
They wanted to prove the superiority of indigenous thought systems over imported ones.

They argued that virtue could be attained through knowledge gained through everyday book learning and personal observation as well as through contact with men of wisdom and high life and action.

During the eras of all the dynasties that followed the Song, there was an intellectual life.

Chinese rulers and bureaucrats became less receptive to outside ideas and influences because of the impact of China's foreign philosophy systems.

Chinese rulers and bureaucrats were less receptive to outside and critical thinking due to the neo-Confucian emphasis on tradition tradition and hostility to foreign influences.

Class, age, and gender distinctions were reinforced by the neo-Confucian emphasis on rank, obligation, deference, and traditional rituals.

The authority of the patriarch of the Chinese household was compared to that of the male emperor of the Chinese people.
The neo-Confucians argued that if men and women kept to their places, there would be social harmony and prosperity.
They believed that historical experience was the best way to navigate the future.

The weakness they showed in the face of the Khitan challenge encouraged other nomadic peoples to carve out kingdoms on the northern borders of the Song domain.

The resources of the empire and Song were drained by the tribute that the Song had to pay to the southern kingdoms to protect their northern borders.
The cost of the army was burdensome.

The size of the army was a good indicator of the productivity of the Tangut people.

In the 11th century, it was larger than other civilizations from kingdom to western Europe.

The Song elite for the military took a toll due to the emphasis on civil administration and the growing disdain for resources.

The command peasantry of the Song armies was large.

Funds needed to upgrade weapons or repair fortifications were often diverted to the court and gentry.

Horseback riding and hunting that had preoccupied earlier rulers and their courtiers went out of fashion while painting and poetry were cultivated at the court and among the ruling classes.

Wang ran the government on the basis of the Legalist assumption that an energetic based on Legalists could greatly increase the resources and strength of the dynasty.

cheap loans and government-assisted irrigation projects were introduced to encourage agricultural expansion.

The landlord and scholarly classes were taxed because they had excused themselves from military service.
The Postclassical Period, 600-1450: New Faith and New Commerce increased revenue to establish well-trained mercenary forces to replace armies that had been conscripted from the untrained and unwilling peasantry.
Wang tried to reorganize university education.
The reformers stressed analytical thinking over the memorization of the classics that had been the key to success.

The emperor died in 1085 and his successor favored the conservative groups in northern China.

Song was forced to flee to the south after the neo-Confucians reversed most of the Yellow river basin.

As a result, peasant unrest grew throughout the empire.

The threat from beyond the northern borders of the empire was too much for the Kingdom north of the Song tary.

The Jin kingdom annexed most of the Yellow River basin after successful invasions of Song territory.

The Song dynasty was able to survive for another century and a half because of the anchor of the Yangzi River basin.
It was one of the most glorious reigns in Chinese history, and perhaps in the history of humankind.

A major shift in the population balance within Chinese civilization led to the renewed urban attention given to canal building by the Sui emperors and the Tang rulers.

The great river systems were essential to China's agricultural base innovations.

overland travel was slow and difficult when it was built in the 7th century.

The transport of bulk dynasty was expensive because it was designed to link the original goods.
The increase of the popula centers of Chinese civilization in the southern regions of the Han and Six Dynasties period made it necessary to improve north China plain with the Yangtze communications between north and south.

More and more of the emperor's subjects lived in the southern regions.

The south had surpassed the north in both crop production and population by late Tang and early Song times.

The southern regions were intended to be controlled by courts, bureaucrats, and armies from ancient imperial centers in the north.

The canal made it possible to move grain from the south to the capital and food from the south to the north in times of famine.
The canal construction was something that Yangdi was obsessed with.
More than a million forced laborers had worked on the Grand Canal by the time it was finished.
The canal system was an engineering achievement that was as impressive as the northern wall.
Most stretches of the canal were 40 paces wide and lined with willow trees.

The building of the canal system in central Asia helped to promote commercial expansion in the Tang and Song eras.

The overland silk routes between China and Persia were reopened after Tang control was extended into central Asia.
Tang control promoted exchanges between China and Buddhist centers in the nomadic lands of central Asia as well as with the Islamic world farther west.
Fine silk textiles, porcelain, and paper were exported to the centers of Islamic civilization while horses, Persian rugs, and tapestries passed to China along these routes.
In the Han era, China exported mostly manufactured goods to overseas areas, such as southeast Asia, and imported mainly luxury products.

Chinese merchants and sailors carried Chinese trade overseas in the late Tang and Song times.

They had gunpowder-propelled rudders, compasses, and bamboo rockets for self-defense.
Chinese sailors and merchants became the dominant force in the Asian seas east of the Malayan peninsula.

The market quarters found in all cities and major towns show the increased role of commerce and money in Chinese life.

These were filled with shops that sold products from far away, such as regional centers of artisan production, and trade centers as distant as the Mediterranean.
Merchants specializing in products of the same kind banded together in guilds to promote their interests with local officials and to regulate competition, as the Tang and Song governments supervised the hours and marketing methods in these centers.

This expansion in scale was accompanied by a growing sophistication in commercial credit available in China.

Domestic marketing and international commerce were transformed by the innovations in instruments for economic exchange in the following millennium.
Deposit shops, an early form of the bank, were found in many parts of the empire as the proportion of exchanges involved in the money economy expanded.
Paper money was used for the first time in the Tang era.
Merchants deposited their profits in their hometowns.

Merchants made perilous journeys from one market center to another because of the danger of robbery on vouchers.

The government began to issue paper money in the early 11th century after an economic crisis made it clear that the private could not handle the demand for the new currency.

The Tang and Song eras saw a surge in urban growth as a result of the expansion of commerce and artisan production.

The population of the Tang capital and its suburbs at Chang'an was larger than any other city in the world at the time.
The imperial city, an inner citadel within the walls of Chang'an, was divided into a domi nated by the palace and audience halls and a section crowded with the offices of the ministries and secretariats of the imperial government.
Outside of Chang'an's walls, there were gardens and a hunting park for the emperors and courtiers.

The urban growth in the rest of China was fed by the spread of commerce.

In the north and south, old cities grew as suburbs spread from the original city walls.

The proportion of the empire's population living in urban centers grew steadily.
After the Industrial Revolution, the number of people living in large cities in China may have been as high as 10 percent.

In the Tang and Song period, the population moved southward to the fertile valleys of the Yangzi and other river systems.

The rulers of both dynasties promoted the expansion of Chinese settlement and agricultural production.

Their officials encouraged peasant groups to migrate to uncultivated areas or those occupied by non- Chinese people.

The Postclassical Period, 600-1450: New Faith and New Commerce to protect the new settlements and complete the task of subduing non- Chinese peoples.
Irrigation and embankment systems were regulated by the state.
The canals made it possible for peasants to grow specialized crops, such as tea or silkworms, and sell them over the empire.

The introduction of new seeds, such as the famed Champa rice from Vietnam, better use of human, animal, and silt manures, and more thorough soil preparation and weeding, increased the yields of peasant holdings.

Much of the time of most Chinese people, tasks such as plowing, planting, and weeding were taken care of by inventions such as the wheelbarrow.

The rulers of the Sui and Tang dynasties decided to break up the great estates of the old aris tocracy and distribute land more evenly among the free peasant households of the empire.

The threat that the aris tocracy posed for the new dynasties was designed into these policies.
They were intended to bolster the position of the ordinary peasants, whose labors and well-being had long been viewed by Confucian scholars as essential to a prosperous and stable social order.
These measures succeeded.
The average holding size in many areas rose as the number of free peasantry increased.
Many of the old aristocratic families were stripped of their inde pendent centers of power because of the decline in their fortunes.
The nation that dominated the imperial bureaucracy illustrated the farming methods developed in the Song era.

The overseer is protected by an umbrella.

The extended- family households of the gentry that were rice meant that China's long-held advantages over other civilizations in terms of found in rural settlements in the Han era increased in size the population it could support increased in this era.

The Chinese empire may have had widespread use of a quarter of humanity.

Curved roofs were reserved for people of high rank.

The great dwellings of the gentry were adorned with intricately carved and painted roof timbers and glazed tiles of yellow or green, which left no doubt about the status and power of the families who lived in them.
Their simple lines, wood and bamboo construction, and muted colors blend beautifully with nearby gardens and groves of trees.

In the Tang and Song centuries, Chinese family organization was very similar to what it was in earlier periods.

Under the Tang and early Song eras, the position of women showed signs of improvement, but then deteriorated in the late Song.
Normally, extended- family households were only available to the upper classes.
The male-dominated hierarchy held sway at all levels.
In the Tang period, the authority of elders and males within the family was but tressed by laws that prescribed beheading as a punishment for children who struck their parents or grandparents in anger, and two and one-half years of hard labor for younger brothers or sisters who hit their older

Forging marriage alliances developed over the centuries.

Both families were helped by professional go-betweens to negotiate prickly issues such as matching young men and women and the amount of dowry to be paid to the husband's family.
In contrast to India, brides and grooms in China were generally the same age.

Both within the family and in society at large, women were clearly subservient to men.

According to some evidence, the opportunities for personal expression increased in the Tang and early Song for women of the upper classes in urban areas.
Tang women could wield considerable power at the highest levels of Chinese society.
A pottery figure from the early Tang period of a young woman playing polo shows that they enjoyed access to a broad range of activities.

Both husband and wife consented to the divorce.

It was against the law for a husband to set aside his wife if her parents were dead or poor when they were married.
The Chinese wives had more defenses against their husbands' behavior than they did in India.
The practice of wealthy women in large cities taking lovers with the knowledge of their husbands was reported in late Song times.

Evidence of the independence and legal rights enjoyed by a small minority of women in the Tang and Song eras is overwhelmed by the worsening condition of Chinese women in general.

The neo-Confucian phi losophers, who became a major force in the later Song period, believed in the assertion of male dominance.
The woman's role as homemaker and mother was emphasized by the neo-Confucians.
The importance of virginity for young brides, fidelity for wives, and chastity for widows was emphasized by them.
In India, widows were discouraged from remarrying.

Men were allowed to have premarital sex without scandal, to take concubines if they could afford them, and to remarry if one or more of their wives died.

The Buddhists promoted career alternatives for women at the expense of marriage and raising a family, which was attacked by the neo-Confucians.
They drafted laws that favored men.
The kind of education that would allow women to enter the civil service and rise to positions of political power was not included.
The later Song period limited the possibilities of self-fulfillment for elite women.

The Tang and Song eras are remembered for their achievements in science, technology, literature, and the fine arts.

Major technological discoveries were made under each dynasty.
The course of human development was changed by the invention of new tools, production techniques, and weapons.
The arts and literature of China were not well known outside of its borders.
Their impact was limited to areas such as central Asia, Japan, and Vietnam, where Chinese imports had long been a major catalyst for cultural change.
The poetry and short stories of the Tang and the landscape paintings of the Song are some of the best artistic creations of all time.

The Tang and Song eras saw a lot of economic growth and social prosperity thanks to new agricultural tools and innovations.

The engineering feats of the period are noteworthy.

The practice may have begun with the delight one of the Tang emperors took in the tiny feet of his favorite dancing girls.

By the Song era, upper-class men preferred small feet for women.
The well-to-do peasantry was the first group to spread this preference further down on the social scale.

As early as five or six years old, fathers began to bind the feet of their daughters in response to male demands that the successful nego tiation of a young woman's marriage contract might hinge.

The young girl's toes were bound with silk, which was wound more tightly as she grew, as shown in the accompanying photo.
By the time she reached marriageable age, a young woman's feet had become the "golden lily" shapes that were preferred by husbands.

Bound feet made it very difficult for a woman to walk short distances, and they were a constant source of pain for the rest of her life.

It's easier for husbands to confine their wives to the family com if they have bound feet, since they depended heavily on the pound.

It also meant that women couldn't engage in occupations that resulted from footbinding for support when standing, except those that could be pursued within the extended family and walking.
The sole of the foot did not touch the ground or toes household.
The lower were fused together to make a pointed foot.

Footbinding became more difficult for the laboring classes when it was in fashion.

In Chinese Canal, Tang and Song engineers made great advances in building dikes and dams and regulating the society of women's feet flow of water in complex irrigation systems.

They devised ingenious new ways to build bridges, in order to make them smaller, which is a major focus of engineering efforts in a land dominated by mountains and waterways.
Most of the basic bridge types known to humans movement were pioneered in China.

One of the most important technological advances made in the Tang era was the inven tion of explosives.

The Chinese used these potent chemical combinations for fireworks for hundreds of years.
By the late Song, the imperial armies used a variety of grenades and bombs that were thrown at the enemy by catapults.
Song armies and warships were also equipped with weapons.
The dynasty used projectiles to check nomadic incursions.

The habit of drinking tea swept the empire, coal was used for the first time, and the first kite soared into the sky.

The number of major inventions in the Song era was lower than in the Tang, but they were important for the future of all civilizations.

Since the last centuries b.c.e., compasses have been used.
Merchants and tax collectors use the abacus to count their profits and keep track of their revenues.
The technique of printing with moving type was invented by Bi Sheng in the 11th century.
The production of written records and scholarly books was greatly improved by the use of movable type.
Printing and paper made it possible for the Chinese to attain a level of literacy that was unparalleled by any preindustrial civilization.

The Tang and Song eras had a lot of artistic and literary creativity thanks to the scholar-gentry elite.

The court, prosperous merchants, and wealthy monasteries used Buddhist art and architecture.
The Tang is best remembered for the literature written by Confucian and scholar-administrators.
The landscapes that were painted were some of the most beautiful in the Song era.
People who were educated were expected to practice painting and writing.
The Chinese educational establishment wanted to turn out generalists rather than specialists.
A well-educated man is successful in many fields.
After a hard day at the Ministry of Public Works, a truly accomplished official was expected to spend the evening making music on his lute, admiring a new painting, or sipping rice wine while writing a poem to the harvest moon.
The Tang and Song eras were renowned for their poetry, music, and landscape painting.

As the Confucian scholar-gentry replaced the Buddhists as the major producers of art and literature, devotional objects and religious homilies gave way to a growing fixation on everyday life.

The lives of the common people were the focus of a lot of the short story literature.
His poems were similar to those of the great Persian authors in that they blend images of the everyday world with musings on philosophy.

The land was green after the rain.

There was one last cloudlet in the sky.

There are blossoms on the branches.

Time will end as flowers are fading.

The sighs of all mortal men are deep.

I will learn how to fly from magic and from the sacred hills.

The political elite produced more than the religious sculptures or mosaics of other civilizations.

The sculptures and mosaics were created to show a religious history of civilization.

The sculptures that adorned the temples of message were created to remind the viewers of a key event in the life of Christ India and the statues, paintings, and stained glass that graced the Buddha, or to impress upon them the horrors of hell or the cathedrals of medieval Europe.

The Song artists bridged the gulf between the elites and the people who painted in their leisure time.

Confucian scholars and often administrators, imported Buddhists who won enough patronage to devote themselves to painting full art forms performed this function in some periods in Chinese time.

It is not just the amateur and "master of all fields" ideals that are tivity, best exemplified by landscape painting, but the fact that so much art was produced by differences that separated the educated scholar.

The use of empty space, simplicity of composition, and emphasis on nature are all characteristics of Chinese landscape painting in the Song era.

The colors were usually brown or black.
Most artists stamped their work with signature seals, like the red ones in this image, and poems describing scenes related to those in the painting floated in the empty space at the top or sides.

The Chinese language was considered to be a high art form and the Special Chinese and Japanese Fund was created to honor those who wrote it.

The paintings were symbolic and intended to teach moral lessons.
A crane, a pine tree, bamboo shoots, and a dragon were some of the objects depicted that were larger than themselves.

The paintings have a special appeal in the present day because of their abstract quality.

The artists wanted to create a personal vision of natural beauty rather than depicting nature accurately.

There was a premium placed on suggestion.
The winner of an imperial contest painted a lone monk drawing water from an icy stream to depict a monastery hidden deep in the mountains during the winter.

As the viewer unfolded the scrolls, they could read the paintings on them.

Most were accompanied by a poem, sometimes composed by the painter, which complemented the subject matter and was aimed at explaining the artist's ideas.

Paper, printing, and gunpowder were important parts of Chinese civilization during the postclassical period.

The course of development in China was fundamentally changed by fewer fundamental changes than those experienced in eastern and Western Europe.
Chinese civilization had political power and economic resources that were important new ways until the 18th century.
Some of the innovations are unique to any other civilization.

The Song rulers were able to survive the assaults of the nomads from the north because they retreated to the south.

As the dynasty weak exchanges with central Asia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere in ened, enduring patterns of nomadic incursions resurfaced and built southeast Asia.
China contributed vital to other regions as it flours, even though it is more isolated than the Islamic empire and the top of pastoral military and political expansion under India.
Under two vigorous dynasties, the Tang and the Song, the Song emperors could not retreat far enough.

The Song rulers paid tribute to the Mongol Khan and made alliances in order to buy volume of overseas trade, productivity per land area, and the sophis time.

A later leader of luxury goods, from silks to fine ceramics, attracted traders from Kubilai Khan and launched a sustained effort to conquer the southern abroad and delighted upper-class consumers in distant lands.
The refuge was completed by 1279.

The general histories of China were suggested in Chapter 4.

The Tang and Song eras are covered in several important works.

What were the major ways in which the Chinese and 3 had relations?