READ: East Asia 1200-1450

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Ever wonder why China has been the dominant power in East Asia for the last two thousand years? Sure, military conquests mattered, but China’s power came more often through its cultural influence. Politically, China went back and forth between periods of unity and disunity in the centuries around 1200, but the population, economy, and cities continued to grow. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan were all shaped by China, though they also developed their own traditions.

China first became a unified state during the third century BCE, with an emperor at the top of a ruling dynasty. There were periods of strong centralized government, some lasting centuries, but these alternated with periods of conflict when China’s border states invaded, or when groups within China fought each other for power.

The Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) expanded Chinese borders outward and created a cosmopolitan culture with elements from many different places. In the tenth century, Tang China broke into separate competing states. One of the largest and most enduring was ruled by the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), centered in southern China. It is with the Song that our look at China in this period really begins.

Song territories were not as extensive as the Tang’s had been, and they shrank further during the twelfth century when the non-Chinese Jurchens conquered most of north China. Song China had a large and increasing population, however, and a broad and well-educated ruling class. Aristocratic lineage was still the easiest path to power, but not the only path. Hundreds of thousands of young men took civil service examinations—a Chinese educational innovation—after a long period of rigorous study. This provided a way for many able men to gain influence, an opportunity not open to women.

The life of scholar-officials in Song China involved more than study and official duties. They were expected to appreciate and even produce literature, music, and art. Some scholars promoted Confucianism, the philosophical system based on the ideas of the fifth century BCE thinker Confucius. One outstanding scholar, Zhu Xi (1130–1200 CE), brought together Confucian writings into what became the official version and the basis of examinations from then on. Confucian writings emphasized the importance of social hierarchies, including ruler/subject, husband/wife, and father/son, all of which reflected the cosmic relationship between Heaven and Earth. Women’s proper realm was believed to be the household, not the world beyond. Still some girls learned to read beside their brothers, and domestic tasks could include producing things such as silk that supported the family, not simply housework.

In the 1270s, the Mongols conquered southern China, ending the Song dynasty and establishing their own dynasty, known as the Yuan (1279–1368 CE). They maintained a separation between Mongols and Chinese, though Chinese men did serve in the Mongol army and government. In the fourteenth century, drought, disease, rebellions, and ineffective leadership led to disorder. Taizu, a brilliant Chinese general who had begun life as a penniless orphan, defeated many rivals for power. He led armies against the Mongols, and founded a new dynasty, the Ming, which would last for three hundred years (1368–1644 CE).

Rulers depend on taxes and required labor for their power, so the emperors of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties were always interested in economic expansion. But many ordinary people also led important innovations, including the expansion of wet-field rice culture in central and southern China. In this system, villagers leveled forests, swamps, and coastal plains, transforming them into irrigated rice paddies that were less dependent on irregular rainfall. To reap two harvests a year, they grew rice seedlings in a seed bed and then transplanted the seedlings into a flooded field, an extremely labor-intensive process involving every family member. This system helped expand the food supply, which allowed the Chinese population to grow from about 50 million in the eighth century to about 100 million in the twelfth.

Villagers also grew cash crops such as sugar, tea, mulberry leaves (for silkworms to eat), and cotton. Women in village households raised silkworms, spun silk thread, and wove textiles. Profits from these household enterprises paid their rents and taxes, and bought charcoal, tea, oil, pottery, and other consumer goods. Trade was carried out in coins, or in paper money, invented by Chinese merchants. In the 1120s the Song government itself began issuing money, producing the world’s first government issued paper money. In addition to printing paper money, block and movable printing technology allowed for the production of texts, such as Confucian manuals for aspiring bureaucrats to study for their government exams. Manufacturing and trade also flourished during the Song, in particular with the production of porcelain, including vessels to drink one of China’s most important trade goods—tea!

Industry expanded as well, especially the production of iron, which grew six-fold in the ninth to twelfth centuries. Most iron was used for military purposes, including for armor and high-quality steel for swords and spears. Gunpowder had been invented in China in the ninth century, and it was used in the following centuries for weapons. These first included bombs and land mines, then exploding-tip arrows shot by giant cross-bows, and then cannons that shot projectiles.

Meanwhile, economic expansion was fueling the growth of cities. By 1200 the most urbanized part of the world was eastern China, with at least six cities that had more than 100,000 residents each. Hangzhou, for example, began as a rice-growing village in the fertile Yangzi River Delta, and grew steadily to become the largest city in China—and perhaps the world. During the Tang dynasty the city became one of many cosmopolitan centers of learning, where Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam brought by foreign merchants joined various branches of Buddhism and Confucianism. After 1132, Hangzhou had become the capital of the Song state. Immigrants poured into the city from the surrounding countryside and the conquered north, and a century later its population may have reached one million. The city was not only a center of trade and production, but also culture, entertainment, and education. Visitors reported on the city’s many markets, bathhouses, silk shops, and painted ships. After their conquest of China, the Mongol Yuan dynasty moved the capital north to Dadu—now Beijing—but Hangzhou remained an important port and a giant city.

From its earliest centuries, China exerted strong influence on its smaller neighbors, including Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, especially among the elites. Confucian political ideas, Buddhist religious teachings, and Chinese writing were adapted for local use. They were brought in through written texts, imported material objects, visiting ambassadors, marriage across societies, and traveling scholars, students, merchants, musicians, and monks. Chinese influence was especially pronounced during the Tang dynasty, when Vietnam was ruled directly by China and Korea was a vassal state that paid tribute to China. In the eleventh century, powerful regional overlords in Vietnam threw out most Chinese people, but Chinese cultural influence remained.

In the early years of this period, Korea was ruled by a dynasty known as the Koryŏ (935–1392 CE), the origin of the name “Korea.” A powerful, wealthy aristocracy controlled a poor peasantry. The Koryŏ modeled their government and capital city on China. When the Mongol Yuan dynasty conquered China, the Koryŏ hoped to buy them off, but instead the Mongols conquered Korea in the 1250s. The Koryŏ technically remained in charge, but they had to obey the orders of the Mongols, including the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of people to other places under Mongol rule. When Mongol rule fell apart in China, it did so in Korea as well, and a new indigenous dynasty, the Chosŏn, took power in 1392.

Japan, by contrast, managed to avoid conquest by the Mongols. During the Heian period (794–1185 CE), Japan had been dominated by the Fujiwara family. The Fujiwaras developed a brilliant court, where aristocrats learned Chinese literature and philosophy, wrote poetry, and surrounded themselves with beautiful paintings and objects. Although Chinese continued to be used for scholarly writings and official documents, a new script for writing Japanese phonetically was increasingly used for poetry and memoirs, some of these by female authors. Japanese monks who had traveled to China introduced new strains of Buddhism. One was Chan, known as Zen in Japan, which emphasized rigorous discipline and obedience to a master. Another was Pure Land Buddhism, which venerated the Buddha Amitabha and offered the possibility of reaching paradise through simple devotional practices. Pure Land was popular among ordinary people, who blended this with traditional Japanese religion, termed Shinto.

In the late twelfth century, however, civil war brought an end to the dominance of the Fujiwaras. For the next several centuries, other powerful families established military governments headed by a shogun, meaning top general. Shoguns advised emperors on major decisions, appointed officials to all the important government positions, directed the military, and became the center of courtly life. Skillful shoguns were occasionally able to assert authority, but in general power became increasingly decentralized. Landowning aristocrats and their bands of warriors, called samurai, often fought each other. The shogunate was able to repel massive invasions by the Mongols in 1274 and 1281, but disputes continued and violence was widespread.

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently the president of the World History Association. She is the author or editor of 30 books that have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean.