Song and Tang China — a non-European society & economy

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Educated, landowning officials who passed the civil service examinations and staffed the imperial bureaucracy.

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Candidates were tested on the Confucian classics, at local, provincial and imperial levels; only a small fraction passed.

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Nomadic Jin armies conquered northern China, so the Song court fled south to Hangzhou, where fast-ripening rice could feed far more people.

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A vast network of waterways over 1,000 miles long linking northern and southern China, moving grain, goods and troops between the two regions.

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In the 1120s, building on merchant promissory notes that had already been used for large transactions.

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The painful binding of young girls' feet, mainly among elite Song families, to keep them small as a mark of status and beauty.

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Elite women were more likely to have bound feet and stay secluded at home; peasant women usually went unbound and kept working the fields and looms.

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Bi Sheng, in the 1040s during the Song dynasty, using individual reusable characters made of baked clay.

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Carving a whole page of text into a wooden block to print copies, widely used to spread Buddhist texts and calendars.

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First made by Chinese alchemists seeking immortality potions; by the Song period it was used in bombs, fire-lances and early rockets against northern invaders.

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It became one of China's most valuable exports along the Silk Road and maritime trade routes, spreading Chinese craftsmanship and wealth abroad.

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Song China: partly merit-based, through civil service exams open in theory to able men. Feudal Europe: power passed mainly through birth and land grants within a fixed nobility.