The Development of the South

In addition to the disappearance ofthese institutions and practices that had emerged in the Northern dynasties and had provided the basis of the Tang reunification— fiscality based on state-owned land and standardized taxes, an army based on hereditary soldiers, and a semi-hereditary elite based on the domination of high office and a cultivated aesthetic style—the second half of the Tang was also marked by the emergence of a new cultural geography.

Most important was the rise—made possible by the southward shift of the demographic, economic, and cultural center—of water-based, inter-regional trade and the consequent regional economic specialization. The Southern dynasties had opened and developed on a large scale the Yangzi River's drainage basin, as well as certain regions further south. Once marshy lowlands were drained, this emerging region achieved higher agricultural productivity than the old northern heartland. In addition to greater productivity of grain due to more frequent harvests, the southward shift in the Tang also entailed the rise of a whole new range of crops. Rice, which had been secondary to millet and subsequently wheat in the north, became the single most important food crop. New technologies for water drainage and the controlled plowing of smaller plots that were to be immersed in water emerged, and ultimately early- ripening rice introduced from Southeast Asia made possible ever more frequent cropping. The opening of the south also made possible the introduction or commercial exploitation of crops such as tea, sugarcane, orchard fruits, timber, and medicinal plants. Tang farmers also pioneered the late imperial pattern of dividing landholdings into multiple smaller plots, often spatially far apart, to allow the cultivation of a variety of crops and the regular adjustment of crop selection to market demands.^[1108]

The Tang south also boasted better water transport for shipping bulk commodities, which facilitated inter-regional trade and consequently regional specialization.

The Grand Canal, constructed in the Sui dynasty, served to transport southern grain to the capital Chang’an in the northwest, and later was extended to Beijing when that city was built as the capital of the last imperial dynasties. Regional or local specialization in the production of crops for sale in the market allowed greater efficiencies of scale, so that relatively poor farmers might grow higher quality grains to be sold, and then purchase cheaper grains from their even poorer neighbors. While the southern population was still slightly lower than that of the north in the late Tang, the government’s lack of control in the northeast resulted in the Yangzi Valley becoming both the economic and fiscal center of the empire, and the greater productivity of the south made it the center for production as well. This pattern of an economically, dem- ographically, and culturally dominant south, controlled for strategic reasons from a northern capital, endured for the rest of imperial Chinese history.

The rise of large-scale, inter-regional commerce also led to the emergence of new urban forms. This development comprised several major aspects. First, urban trade in the first half of the Tang had been formally restricted to official markets which were open only in the day, and where the range and price of goods were regulated. After the An Lushan rebellion, these market either collapsed or significantly declined. Second, cities throughout the south increased considerably in size and complexity on the basis of the large-scale, water-based trade. Third, new market towns emerged throughout the countryside, evolving from temporary markets that had been set up on specific days.

The earlier restriction of trade to the official markets—apart from the sale of lodging, food, drink, and entertainment—was based on the larger system of closing up walled wards after a curfew, and controlling night-time movements on the main urban streets. In the capital only high officials and monasteries had gates that opened directly onto the streets outside the wards.

Consequently, one of the first signs of the decay of this system were complaints beginning in the mid-eighth century that people were breaking gates through the outer walls of their wards to gain direct access to the major thoroughfares. By 831 the police commissioners noted that everybody was now breaking the rules on curfew, and requested that the old system be restored. There were also complaints that many people, notably soldiers, were setting up shops and stalls on the main streets, although this seems to have been merely a widening of the early Tang practice of allowing food vendors on the street. Regular night markets were also being held in the streets of the capital, as well as in Yangzhou, Canton, and other major provincial cities.^[1109] This culminated in the emergence of specialized commercial districts scattered throughout cities.

More important than changes in the pattern of trade in the capitals was the emergence of urban centers that thrived on the new bulk trade in commodities carried out on the canal system. The most significant trade-based city was Yangzhou, which was located at the intersection of the Yangzi River and the Grand Canal and thus served as the key trans-shipment point for goods moving northward from the lower Yangzi. As the court came to depend entirely on the southeast, Yangzhou became the economic linchpin of the empire. The city soon became celebrated as the great trade emporium of the empire, dealing in salt, tea, wood, gems, medicinal herbs, and manufactured products such as copper wares, silks and brocades, and, above all, ships. It grew even wealthier after the An Lushan rebellion, when the salt monopoly was based there. In the Yangzi drainage basin many cities—e.g., Jingkou, Hangzhou, Chengdu—also grew large and wealthy on trade.

In addition to transforming life in the cities and the countryside, this expansion of trade facilitated the development of an internal customs network which the state relied on to tax commerce.

By the later eighth century there were officers in the major cities in the provinces to inspect the goods of merchants and to levy taxes. In the ninth century the military men who held power at the provincial level turned the control stations set up by the government along roads and waterways into de facto customs houses levying a tax on merchants' goods. These taxes provided the fiscal foundations of the military men whose states emerged through the breakup of the Tang Empire in the tenth century.^[1110]

This inter-regional trade's ultimate foundation lay in the development of new networks of local market towns. Under early Tang regulations, markets were banned outside administrative centers, the lowest level of which was the district town. However, districts were widely spaced, so it was impossible for most peasants to meet their regular needs by traveling to the nearest official market. Consequently, from early in the Tang, there were periodic rural markets. These were transient assemblies for the purpose of trade, arising out of the needs of rural society and independent of government control. People gathered at convenient sites, engaged in trade, and then dispersed. Naturally such markets also offered opportunities for recreation and entertainment that would have enlivened the otherwise dreary lives of the peasants.

These temporary markets served as the seeds for the emergence of permanent settlements. Many of them took place at nexuses of communication: road junctions, bridges, fords, and so on. Others grew up around temples or shrines, sometimes in association with periodic fairs. Still others emerged around inns or roadside stores that provided services to traveling merchants. Serving as hostels, eating houses, shops, and warehouses, such establishments were found along all major transportation routes. Any of these sites served to regularly attract both traveling merchants and nearby peasants, who could exchange their respective goods. In all likelihood, merchants began to travel according to a fixed schedule, so that they could move with their goods from one local market to the next.

By the end of the Tang dynasty, many of these sites had turned into permanent, trade-based settlements, which in turn represented the embryonic form of the great, nested, hierarchical network of settlements that structured the geography of late imperial China.

The development of these markets played an important role in the rise of local powers in the late Tang dynasty. In many provinces, military governors encouraged the growth of such new centers that lay outside the administrative network of the imperial court and hence could be easily co-opted. The new towns that emerged around the periodic markets were thus often labeled “garrisons.” These towns consequently not only contributed to an increase in commercial activity in rural society, but also to the diffusion of taxes on trade, which contributed to the gradual shifting of the fiscal center of gravity away from farming and toward commerce.³⁰

The final great change, closely linked to the southward shift of the Tang economy and the rise of long-distance trade, was the transformation of Tang relations to the outside world. Several contrasts with earlier Han dynasty in international relations were carried forward from the Northern and Southern dynasties. First, while the Tang also fought a great nomadic empire to their north and west, in this case the Turks, like the armies of the Northern dynasties the Tang military was steeped in the traditions of the steppes. From the beginning of the dynasty, whose ruling house was at least in part ethnically Turk, the Tang used mass cavalry charges much like the Turks, and manipulated successions to produce repeated splits at the time of generational shifts. The second Tang emperor, Taizong (r. 626-649 ce), even declared himself “Heavenly Qaghan,” as well as “Son of Heaven,” and briefly created a grand Sino-Turkic federation.³¹

A second inheritance from the previous centuries was the existence of extensive cultural, economic, and political exchanges with Central and South Asia.

Closely linked with the Buddhist religion, which had become central to the East Asian world in the Northern and Southern dynasties, exchanges with India and Central Asia were major elements of the Tang world. As Buddhism began to decline in India, the Tang even emerged as the center of a greater Buddhist world. The one major novelty in Tang relations with this part of the world was the rise in the mid-seventh century of the Tibetan Empire. This state became the greatest military power in Central Asia, repeatedly defeated Tang forces, occupied what is now Xinjiang, and engaged in a triangular policy of war and alliance with the Tang and the Nanzhao kingdom (in modern Yunnan and Sichuan). Only its collapse in the mid-ninth century ended the threat from Central Asia, although even then the greatly weakened Tang could not reassert influence in the region.³²

Even as Tang China was becoming the center of the Buddhist world, it also gradually came to be ringed on the east, south, and southwest by sedentary states that copied the Tang writing system and many of its governmental institutions. These states included what is now Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, as well as the state of Nanzhao in what later became Yunnan province in China. These states formed for the first time what could be described as an “East Asian world.”³³

³⁰ Twitchett 1966, 233-241.

³¹ Pan 1997; Skaff 2012; Graff 2002, 185-188, 195-201; Wechsler 1979, 189-200, 231-235; Barfield 1989, ch. 3-4.

³² Sen 2003, ch. 1-3; Beckwith 1987; Backus 1981, ch. 3.

³³ Holcombe 2001, ch. 5-8; Wang 2005, 2013.

However, the greatest shift in the Tang Empire's relations with the outer world was the turn away from Central Asia and the “Silk Roads,” which were often blocked by Tibet and the rising power of Islam, and the shift to a greater reliance on oceanic trade. This shift was also an extension of the southward shift of Tang civilization, for the southeast coast of East Asia, in contrast to its northeast, is highly irregular and marked by hundreds of harbors. Consequently, its peoples often turned toward the sea to make a living in fishing, trade, and piracy. From the establishment of the Sassanid state in 225 ce, Persian traders had begun to dominate maritime trade between China, India, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. When Arab forces conquered Persia in the seventh century, many of the Persian traders converted to Islam and were joined by Arab merchants, although it was only in the Song dynasty (960-1276) that Arabs became the leading non-Chinese merchants. Chinese merchants themselves relied on foreign vessels; the great oceangoing vessels of China do not appear until the Song. By the late tenth century, Muslim merchants were transporting Chinese silk and porcelain through southern India to the Persian Gulf, and shipping aromatics and spices back in the other direction.^[1111]

From the middle of the eighth century, these maritime routes across the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea became more popular than the increasingly dangerous overland routes. This oceangoing trade was governed by the periodic shifts of the monsoon. Ships outbound from Canton sailed before the northeast monsoon, setting out in late autumn or winter. The same wind also signaled the departure of the fleets from the Persian Gulf, thousands of miles to the west, who relied on the monsoon of winter to carry them across the Indian Ocean. They then caught the stormy southwest monsoon in June to carry them northward from Malaya across the South China Sea to their destinations in south China. The rule, both east and west, was southward in winter, northward in summer.

The rise of maritime trade also changed the nature of the commodities exchanged, because ships can carry bulk cargos of less-precious goods across great distances at reasonable expense. Along the land routes, China had primarily exported silk to India, often in exchange for precious goods used in Buddhist rituals, or for Buddhist ritual paraphernalia. While Chinese silk declined as an export commodity after the tenth century, due to the fact that Muslim Turks had introduced sericulture and silk production to India and the Middle East, in the same period porcelain began to replace silk as the major Chinese commodity that was trans-shipped through India. The production and sale of porcelain became a major world industry under subsequent Chinese dynasties.

The shift of Chinese trade toward the southern seas also changed the pattern of imports. In place of earlier trade dominated by precious metals, semi-precious stones, coral, and similar luxury goods, the new maritime trade allowed for the import of greater quantities of spices or medicines, and more importantly of a wide range of timber types grown in Southeast Asia. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, the imported “staples” itemized by Robert Hartwell included horses, sulphur, ivory, and cinnabar. Such goods were not only expensive in comparison to the cost of shipping, but also were assured of a large and inelastic demand made possible by integrated interregional trading networks which could deliver the commodities to any city in China.^[1112]

The rise of maritime trade and the large-scale exchange of bulk commodities that it permitted also provided the first step toward the emergence of a genuine economic “world system” or “world economy.” Janet Abu-Lughod argues that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the major markets of Europe, Africa, and Asia were integrated into a single, well-structured trading network that consisted of eight overlapping “subsystems.” These eight subsystems could in turn, as pointed out by Tansen Sen, be grouped into three larger trading circuits: Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. In each of these areas the scale of foreign trade was sufficiently large to alter the social and economic order, so there was some degree of a common division of labor binding all the areas together. While this structure did not yet exist in the Tang, it is significant that the Far Eastern maritime trade circuit through which China was linked to the world economy at this time was largely identical with the trade patterns sketched earlier for the Tang.^[1113]

In conclusion, the Tang dynasty witnessed the end of the patterns that had marked post-Han empires, and the emergence of the major characteristics of late imperial China. This included a fiscal system based on the actual assessment of wealth and the taxing of trade, a new pattern of state service based on technical or military expertise, large-scale inter-regional trade through purely commercial entrepots, the incorporation of China into a greater East Asian world—on the basis of a shared religion, writing system, and government institutions, and the first steps toward the linking of continental East Asia into a world economy on the basis of the oceanic trans-shipment of commodities, above all porcelain. These developments provided the foundation for the emergence of what is now described as the “early modern” Chinese world.

Bibliography

Abramson, M. S. 2008. Ethnic Identity in Tang China. Philadelphia.

Abu-Lughod, J. L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Oxford. Backus, C. 1981. The Nan-chao Kingdom and T’ang Chinas Southwestern Frontier. Cambridge. Barfield, T. J. 1989. The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China. Cambridge.

Beckwith, C. I. 1987. The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ.

Clark, H. R. 1991. Community, Trade, and Networks: Southern Fujinan from the Third to the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge.

Crowell, W G. 1979. Government Land Policies and Systems in Early Imperial China. Ph.D. diss., University of Washington.

Ebrey, P. B. 1978. The Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China: A Case Study ofthe Po-ling Tsui Family. Cambridge.

Elvin, M. 1973. The Pattern ofthe Chinese Past. Stanford, CA.

Graff, D. A. 2002. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900. London.

Guisso, R. W L. 1979. “The Reigns of the Empress Wu, Chung-tsung and Jui-tsung (684-712).” In D. Twitchett, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 3: Sui and Tang China, 589-906, Part I, 290-332. Cambridge.

Hartwell, R. M. 1971. “Financial Expertise, Examinations, and the Formulation of Economic Policy in Northern Sung China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42, no. 2: 281-314.

Hartwell, R. M. 1989. “Foreign Trade, Monetary Policy and Chinese ‘Mercantilism.’ ” In Kinugawa Tsuyoshi, ed., Collected Studies on Sung History Dedicated to James T C. Liu in Celebration of his Seventieth Birthday, 453-488. Kyoto.

Holcombe. C. 2001. The Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.-A. D. 907. Honolulu.

Johnson, D. G. 1977a. The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy. Boulder, CO.

Johnson, D. G. 1977b. “The Last Years of a Great Clan: The Li Family of Chao Chun in Late T’ang and Early Sung.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37, no. 1: 5-102.

Kiang, H. 1999. Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats. Honolulu.

Kieschnick, J. 2003. The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. Princeton, NJ.

Lewis, M. E. 2009a. China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. Cambridge, MA.

Lewis, M. E. 2009b. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, MA.

Liu, X. 1988. Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, A.D. 1-600. Delhi. Lorge, P. 2005. War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900-1795. London.

McMullen, D. 1989. “The Cult of Ch’i T’ai-kung and T’ang Attitudes to the Military.” Tang Studies 7:59-103.

Pan, Y. 1997. Son of Heaven and Heavenly Qaghan. Bellingham, WA.

Peterson, C. A. 1979. “Court and Province in Mid- and Late T’ang.” In D. Twitchett, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 3: Sui and T’ang China, 589-906, Part I. 464-560. Cambridge.

Pulleyblank, E. G. 1955. The Background ofthe Rebellion of An Lu-shan. London.

Pulleyblank, E. G. 1976. “The An Lu-shan Rebellion and the Origins of Chronic Militarism in Late T’ang China.” In J. C. Perry and B. L. Smith, eds., Essays on T’ang Society: The Interplay of Social and Political and Economic Forces, 32-60. Leiden.

Sen, T. 2003. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400. Honolulu.

Skaff, J. K. 2012. Sui- Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580- 800. Oxford.

Somers, R. M. 1979. “The End of the T’ang.” In D. Twitchett, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 3: Sui and Tang China, 589-906, Part I, 682-789. Cambridge.

Tackett, N. 2014. The Destruction ofthe Medieval Chinese Aristocracy. Cambridge, MA.

Twitchett, D. 1954. “The Salt Commissioners after the Rebellion of An Lu-shan.” Asia Major, n.s., 4: 60-89.

Twitchett, D. 1959. “Lands under State Cultivation during the T’ang Dynasty.” Journal of the Economic and Social History ofthe Orient 2, no. 2: 162-203; 2, no. 3: 335-336.

Twitchett, D. 1965. “Provincial Autonomy and Central Finance in Late T’ang.” Asia Major, n.s., 11, no. 2:211-232.

Twitchett, D. 1966. “The T’ang Market System.” Asia Major, n.s., 12, no. 2: 202-248.

Twitchett, D. 1968. “Merchant, Trade and Government in Late T’ang.” Asia Major, n.s., 14, no. 1: 63-95.

Twitchett, D. 1973. “The Composition of the T’ang Ruling Class: New Evidence from Tunhuang.” In A. F. Wright and D. Twitchett, eds., Perspectives on the Tang, 47-85. New Haven, CT.

Twitchett, D. 1975. Fiscal Administration under the T’ang Dynasty. Cambridge.

Twitchett, D. 1976. “Varied Patterns of Provincial Autonomy in the T’ang Dynasty.” In J. C. Perry and B. L. Smith, eds., Essays on Tang Society: The Interplay of Social and Political and Economic Forces, 90-109. Leiden.

Twitchett, D. 1979. “Hsüan-tsung (reign 712-756).” In Denis Twitchett, ed., The Cambridge

History of China, Vol. 3: Sui and Tang China, 589-906, Part I, 333-463. Cambridge.

Wang, G. 1963. The Structure of Power in North China during the Five Dynasties. Stanford, CA.

Wang, G. 1973. “The Middle Yangtze in T'ang Politics.” In A. F. Wright and D. Twitchett, eds., Perspectives on the Tang, 193-235. New Haven, CT.

Wang, Z. 2005. Ambassadors from the Islands ofthe Immortals: China-Japan Relations in the HanTang Period. Honolulu.

Wang, Z. 2013. Tang China in Multi-Polar Asia: A History of Diplomacy and War. Honolulu.

Wechsler, H. J. 1979. “T'ai-tsung (reign 626-49) the Consolidator.” In D. Twitchett, ed., The

Cambridge History of China, Vol. 3: Sui and T’ang China, 589-906, Part I, 188-241. Cambridge. Worthy, E. H. 1976. “The Founding of Sung Chin, 950-1000: Integrative Changes in Military and

Political Institutions.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University.

Xiong, V 2000. Sui-Tang Changan. Ann Arbor, MI.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

The Development of the South

More on the topic The Development of the South: