arrow, it was projected into the enemy camp to start a fire. It became widely employed in warfare in early Song. Further advances were made in its weaponization in the Song and Yuan Dynasties. A sophisticated formula for manufacturing gunpowder was recorded in an encyclopedic military book, Wujing Zongyao, in 1044. A tubular “fire cannon” was invented in 1259: It had a length of bamboo as the gun barrel, which was filled with gunpowder and projectiles. When lit, the gunpowder would explode, hurtling the projectiles at the enemy. Iron and copper tubes replaced the fragile bamboo barrels in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (thirteenth to fourteenth centuries). It became the main weapon of the army in the Qing Dynasty.
3 3–4. Paper‐making technology and movable‐type printing. China had a long tradition of inscribing characters on flat bones, bronzeware, woodblocks, and stone slabs and pillars. Later, characters were written on strips of wood, bamboo, or silk. Cai Lun (61–121), a eunuch in the Han Dynasty, invented the technology of making paper from plant fiber (105). Henceforth, Chinese would write on paper with a writing brush and ink. In Tang, people began woodblock printing: cutting the characters of texts into woodblocks and printing them off on paper. Commoner Bi Sheng (?–1051) is credited with the invention of movable‐type printing in the Song Dynasty (1041). In this new method, one single character is cut into one single clay cube, and the clay cube is then hardened through baking. Since each tiny cube bears only one single character, the printer can use the same piece of type in different arrangements to print different texts. Going from woodblock printing to movable‐type printing was a big step forward. To print texts with movable types on paper greatly facilitated the dissemination of knowledge. Government documents, agricultural manuals, religious texts, and financial records could now be kept and transmitted with much greater ease, precision, and reliability. Unfortunately, Bi Sheng’s movable‐type printing was not widely adopted in China. (Metal movable‐type printing was invented in Korea in the early thirteenth century. Mechanical movable‐type printing was introduced to Europe in 1439 by German blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher Johannes Gutenberg [1398–1468].)
The Mongol Empire began with Genghis Khan (1162–1227), who united the various nomadic tribes on the Mongol steppes in 1206 and then launched out on his wars of global conquest. At its height, his empire straddled Eurasia, including today’s Mongolia, Iran, Russia, Poland, and Hungary. His grandson Kublai Khan (1216–1294) conquered China and Korea, and founded the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. He located his capital at Dadu (modern Beijing), close to his grassland home base in Mongolia. Yuan rule had some brilliant successes. The mere fact that it was part of a vast empire sprawling across the entirety of the Eurasian landmass enabled it to accomplish much that was unthinkable in other times.
Kublai Khan’s first challenge was how his tiny minority of Mongols would rule over a huge multiethnic population across such a large territory. His answer was a strategy of “divide and rule.” He divided the populations in China into four classes according to their ethnicity, and plugged them into an ethnically defined hierarchic structure. They were unequal as defined by law. The Mongols were perched at the top of the totem pole; the Muslims in the Mongol Empire ranked second to the top; the Han Chinese of North China made up the third class, which also included Khitans, Jurchens, and Koreans; and the Han Chinese of South China were assigned to the bottom of the pyramid as punishment for their long and stubborn resistance to Mongol conquest. The first two categories made up only 3% of the households in the empire, and the remaining two made up 97%.
Map of the four Mongol khanates.
Traditionally, the Mongols were organized into tribal units that included the military command, the civil government, and the civilian population. When they won a war, the commander would divide up the spoils of war among the tribal leaders, and reward them with grants of land; and the tribal leaders would then distribute the war booty among their followers. The nomadic victors naturally used the seized land as grazing land for raising their livestock. Since the early wars were generally fought between nomadic peoples, the change of hands of the land had no significant economic impact; the grazing land remained grazing land. But when the Mongols conquered China, the tradition had devastating consequences, for the land the Mongols seized was farmland, and the new masters readily converted it into pastureland. This had a twofold consequence. The Han Chinese farmers who lost their land lost their livelihood, and became a roaming population; the settled population of North China dropped by two‐thirds. This also hurt the Mongol government: It lost its potential agricultural tax revenues, and the roaming landless Han Chinese peasants were a tinderbox ready to explode anytime into peasant rebellion.
Yelu Chucai (1190–1244) was an advisor and prime minister to Genghis Khan. He came from an aristocratic ethnic Khitan family, but also had a thorough knowledge of Han Chinese practices. And he pointed out to the Khan that the Mongols’ long‐term interests depended on modifying their traditional nomadic ways and adopting the Chinese agricultural way of life. He urged the Khan to establish a civil government, make laws to ensure the civil government’s control over the land, keep Han farmers on the land, and collect agricultural taxes. The Khan was persuaded, but old habits were hard to break. The nomadic tradition of making land grants and then turning farmland into grazing land was never entirely abandoned. However, the government did make laws to encourage farming, and to protect farmland and farmers, and it issued detailed and informative agricultural manuals.
Wang Zhen (1271–1368), a Yuan government official, published his Book on Farming, which consists of 22 volumes and contains 306 illustrations (1313). It is an encyclopedic work that describes China’s agricultural practices and equipment up to his day. Its sections on new techniques and mechanical devices for growing cotton and making cotton cloth are the most fascinating.
The Mongols had always taken a keen interest in artisans and manufacture. Whenever they captured a city, they would round up the artisans and carry them off as prisoners. Artisans enjoyed certain privileges: They were given stipends and issued rations, and they were exempt from taxes and labor service. But they were also deprived of personal freedom: The law required their sons to carry on their trade and their daughters to do embroidery. Government‐run artisan industries became highly developed under centralized government control and support. Their war artisans produced excellent tubular copper cannon, and their civil artisans produced exquisite carpets.
The Mongol government played an active role in economic activities. It freely used its coercive powers to achieve economic benefits for itself at the expense of the normal functioning of economic forces. It directly managed monopolies of gold, silver, copper, iron, and salt. It sold monopoly rights and licenses to merchants to trade in everything from tea, liquor, farm tools, bamboo, and timber to aluminum and zinc. It also sold licenses to Muslims to act as government agents −tax farming− to collect taxes. This system had a serious built‐in flaw: Since the agents paid a fixed fee for the privilege of being tax collectors, they would stop at nothing to extract the last drop of blood from the peasants. The increased tax burden on the peasants would eventually force them into rebellion.
Mongols in high places often had the dual role of high government official and big merchant. They hired Muslim financial agents to manage their trading and money‐lending businesses. And the Muslim agents often used their privileged position to violate normal business practices, and cause serious disruptions to the normal operation of the economy.
The cotton revolution that took place in the Yuan Dynasty brought about profound changes in China’s economy. The cotton plant is native to India; it was first introduced into China in its southern frontier regions, then gradually spread across the country. It found the two essential elements it needed to thrive along the Lower Yangtze River: a favorable natural environment and an abundance of manpower. The Lower Yangtze had been a rice‐growing region, but since cotton yielded better returns, it soon overtook rice to become the main crop. The growing of cotton, along with the manufacture and trading of cotton textiles, became the major source of income for many farming families there. This changed the nature of agriculture in the Yangtze Delta: Commercial agriculture was replacing subsistence agriculture, and thriving.