7.9 — China, Japan and Korea in the Medieval Centuries

In 1078 the iron output of Song dynasty China has been estimated at over 100,000 tonnes a year. Britain reached comparable output around 1800, at the height of its industrial revolution.

Song China had paper money, movable type printing, a coal-fuelled iron industry, the magnetic compass in maritime use, gunpowder weapons, water-powered machinery, a national examination system, cities of over a million people, and an economy in which a large share of output was traded rather than consumed by its producers.

It did not industrialise. Why not is one of the great questions in economic history — usually called the Needham Question, after Joseph Needham, who spent his life documenting Chinese science and technology and asking it — and Chapter 9.5 takes it up properly. This chapter is about what was actually there.

Song China

The Song dynasty, 960–1279, is the high point of pre-modern Chinese economy and technology, and it was militarily weak throughout, which is why it is underrated.

The economic transformation.

Rice. The introduction of early-ripening Champa rice from Vietnam allowed two crops a year in the south. Population roughly doubled to over 100 million, and the centre of gravity of China shifted decisively from the northern millet plains to the southern rice regions.

Commercialisation. Peasants grew cash crops and bought food; a national market in grain, salt, tea, silk and iron developed; and a merchant class became genuinely wealthy despite Confucian disapproval.

Paper money. Merchants in Sichuan had been issuing deposit certificates; the government took over the issue in the eleventh century, producing the world's first government paper currency. It also produced the world's first inflation from over-issue, which is a lesson Chapter 9.7 uses.

Printing. Woodblock printing was already established; Bi Sheng invented movable type using fired clay around 1040, four centuries before Gutenberg. Metal movable type followed in Korea.

Why printing did not transform China as it transformed Europe is the interesting part. Chinese writing has thousands of characters, so a font is an enormous investment and typesetting is slow, whereas an alphabet needs a few dozen sorts. Woodblock printing, where a whole page is carved as one block, suited Chinese better and was extremely efficient for reprinting standard texts. So China printed enormously — the Buddhist canon, the Confucian classics, agricultural manuals, medical texts — and the specific explosive effect Chapter 8.2 describes in Europe did not occur.

Iron and coal. Northern China's iron industry used coal and coke, blast furnaces, and water-powered bellows. The output figures above are contested in their precision and the order of magnitude is accepted.

Gunpowder. Discovered by alchemists seeking an elixir of immortality, and in military use from the tenth century — fire arrows, bombs, and by the thirteenth century the fire lance, a bamboo or metal tube projecting flame and shot. The Song fought the Jin and the Mongols with gunpowder weapons.

The compass was in use for navigation by the eleventh century, described in a text of 1088 alongside the observation that the needle points slightly off true north — the discovery of magnetic declination, four centuries before it was noticed in Europe.

Ships. Chinese junks with watertight bulkheads, stern-post rudders and multiple masts were the largest and most seaworthy vessels in the world.

And the examination system reached its mature form here (Chapter 5.6), with printing making the classics affordable and expanding the pool of candidates enormously.

The Song's weakness was military. It paid tribute to northern neighbours, lost the north to the Jin in 1127, and was destroyed by the Mongols in 1279 after a long resistance.

Yuan and Ming

The Yuan — Mongol China (Chapter 7.6) — ruled for less than a century and was overthrown by a rebellion led by a former peasant and monk who became the Hongwu Emperor, founding the Ming in 1368.

The Ming rebuilt on Confucian lines, restored the examination system, and — the decision this chapter exists for — sent out and then cancelled the greatest maritime expeditions in the world.

Zheng He

Between 1405 and 1433 the eunuch admiral Zheng He commanded seven voyages to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and East Africa.

The scale. The fleets numbered in the hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men. The largest vessels — the treasure ships — are described in Chinese sources at dimensions that would make them several times the length of anything Europe had, and the figures are disputed by naval historians on structural grounds. What is not disputed is that these were by a wide margin the largest fleets anyone had put to sea.

The purpose was diplomatic and commercial rather than territorial — displaying Ming power, collecting tribute and exotic goods, and installing favourable rulers where convenient. Zheng He did use force, intervening in Ceylon and Sumatra, and the enterprise was not gentle.

And then it stopped. After 1433 the voyages ended. Shipbuilding of ocean-going vessels was restricted, records were neglected or destroyed, and by the end of the century it was illegal to build a ship with more than two masts.

The reasons, on the evidence, are fiscal and factional and strategic.

The voyages were enormously expensive and returned prestige rather than revenue. The Confucian bureaucracy regarded them as eunuch-run extravagance, and the court factions that opposed them won.

The Mongol threat returned. The Ming moved the capital to Beijing to face north, rebuilt the Great Wall in the form visitors see today, and spent its military budget there. A land threat and a naval programme were competing for the same money and the land threat was real.

And a devastating fire, floods and the cost of the capital move all fell in the same period.

The consequence, stated carefully. This is not a story about China being incurious or inward by nature — it had just sent fleets to Africa. It is a story about a centralised state making one decision that no one could appeal against. Chapter 8.4 contrasts it directly with Europe, where Columbus was rejected by Portugal and went to Spain, and where a fragmented continent meant no single refusal could stop a project. That contrast is the single most-cited illustration of why political fragmentation can be an advantage, and Chapter 16.3 takes it up.

The Ming also saw the last flowering of the traditional order — porcelain that became the world's most desired manufactured good, vast encyclopaedic compilations, and the novel as a form, including Journey to the West and Water Margin.

Japan

Japan's medieval history turns on an arrangement found almost nowhere else: an emperor who reigns and does not rule.

The Heian period (794–1185) produced a refined court culture at Kyoto in which political power drifted to the Fujiwara family, who governed as regents while the emperor performed ritual functions. The Tale of Genji, written around 1010 by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of the court, is arguably the world's first novel — long, psychologically detailed, and concerned with the interior lives of its characters.

Then the warriors took over. The Kamakura shogunate from 1185, established by Minamoto no Yoritomo after a civil war, created the office of shogun — the emperor's military deputy, who governed in fact while the emperor remained in Kyoto as the source of legitimacy. Japan was governed this way, under successive shogunates, until 1868.

Why this matters comparatively. The separation of legitimacy from power meant no ruler could ever claim absolute authority in his own right, and it meant Japan could change its government repeatedly without ever changing its legitimating principle. In 1868 the shogunate was abolished by restoring the emperor — a revolution conducted as a restoration, which is exactly what Chapter 9.13 needs to explain the Meiji transformation.

The samurai were a hereditary warrior class holding land in exchange for service — structurally similar to European feudal knights, which is why the comparison is so often made, and different in the ethical code that developed around it. Bushido as a codified doctrine is largely a later, Edo-period and even nineteenth-century construction, systematised when the samurai had become administrators with no wars to fight.

The Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281 (Chapter 7.6) were repelled with the help of storms, and the effect on Japan was paradoxical: a defensive victory produced no conquered land to distribute, so the shogunate could not reward the warriors who had fought, and the resulting resentment contributed to the Kamakura regime's fall.

The Sengoku period, roughly 1467–1600, was a century and a half of civil war among competing lords. It ended with unification under Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and finally Tokugawa Ieyasu, who established the shogunate that ruled until 1868.

Firearms arrived with Portuguese traders in 1543 and were adopted with extraordinary speed. Within decades Japan was manufacturing matchlocks in quantity and using them in massed volley formations — at Nagashino in 1575, Nobunaga's arquebusiers behind palisades destroyed a cavalry charge, and Japanese armies of the 1590s may have fielded more firearms than any European army of the time.

And then Japan gave them up. Under the Tokugawa peace, firearm production was progressively restricted and the samurai sword was elevated. This is one of the very few documented cases of a society deliberately abandoning a superior military technology, and it was possible because Japan was an island with no external threat and a government able to enforce the decision.

The Tokugawa also closed the country — the sakoku policy from the 1630s, restricting foreign contact to a Dutch trading post at Nagasaki and limited Chinese and Korean trade, and banning Christianity after a rebellion. It lasted until American warships arrived in 1853 (Chapter 9.13).

Korea

Korea's medieval states — Goryeo, from which the name Korea comes, and then Joseon from 1392 — sat between China and Japan and developed distinctively.

Metal movable type. Korean printers were producing books with cast metal type from the thirteenth century. The Jikji, printed in 1377, is the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type, seventy-eight years before the Gutenberg Bible. It is held in the French National Library.

Hangul. In 1443 King Sejong commissioned, and by tradition personally directed, the creation of an alphabet for Korean, promulgated in 1446.

Its design is the remarkable part. The consonant letters are shaped to depict the position of the tongue, teeth and lips when making the sound. Related sounds have related shapes, with strokes added for aspiration. Vowels are built from three elements. Letters are grouped into square syllable blocks so the text sits comfortably alongside Chinese characters.

The promulgation document says the king created it because Korean speech differs from Chinese, so ordinary people who wish to express themselves cannot do so, and that he pities them. He also says it can be learned in a morning by a wise man and in ten days by a fool, which is close to true.

The scholarly elite opposed it, since literacy in Chinese characters was the basis of their status, and it was suppressed at times. It is now universal in both Koreas, and Korean literacy rates are among the highest in the world. Linguists routinely describe it as the most scientifically designed writing system in existence.

Korea also produced the turtle ship — an armoured warship used by Admiral Yi Sun-sin against the Japanese invasions of the 1590s, in a campaign in which Yi won a series of naval victories including one where he engaged a much larger fleet in a narrow strait and destroyed it.

Where this shows up in your life

Porcelain is called "china" in English because Chinese porcelain was the world's most desired manufactured good for centuries, and European attempts to reverse-engineer it drove the development of European ceramics and, incidentally, some early chemistry.

Gunpowder, printing, paper money and the compass all came from here, and Chapter 8.3 and Chapter 8.2 show what happened when they reached Europe.

And the comparison this Part has been building toward is now complete. In 1400, China was the most technologically advanced society on Earth, the Islamic world had the best science, and Europe was a fragmented, poorer periphery. By 1800 the position had reversed entirely. Chapter 8.8 and Chapter 9.5 are where this volume tries to explain that, and the explanation involves the printing press, political fragmentation, corporate institutions, the Atlantic, and coal — not any difference between the people.

What Part 7 established

Islam expanded across two exhausted empires within a century and built a civilisation that preserved, corrected and extended Greek and Indian learning and produced algebra, optics, the hospital and the first sociology. Byzantium held the eastern half of Rome for another thousand years, preserved Roman law and Greek literature, and was destroyed by a crusade. Europe was poor and fragmented and invented the self-governing corporation, the university and the town charter. The Mongols connected Eurasia and killed on a scale nothing had matched, and the connection brought the plague, which killed a third of Europe and broke serfdom in its western half. Africa had states running the gold that Europe's coinage was struck from. And China had, by any measure available in 1400, the most advanced economy in the world.

What the next Part covers

Part 8 is the two centuries in which the balance shifted. The Renaissance and what it actually was; the printing press and why it changed everything; gunpowder and the military revolution that made European states expensive and effective; why Europe sailed and what it found; the conquest of the Americas and the exchange of crops, animals and diseases that followed; the Atlantic slave trade fully accounted; the Reformation and the wars of religion; the invention of a method for checking whether a belief is true; the Enlightenment; and the honest question of why the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires — which in 1600 looked stronger than anything in Europe — fell behind.