A Song dynasty ceramic vase
Vase, 12th–13th century
Marked Kaifeng

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Song China

Under the Song dynasty, Chinese inventors used the compass at sea, wrote down formulas for gunpowder, printed with movable type and paid with paper money. Hangzhou may have been the largest city in the world.

Place
Kaifeng · Hangzhou · QuanzhouAsia
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforeBooks copied by hand or printed from whole carved blocks; trade paid in coin.

  1. IPaper money
  2. IIMovable type
  3. IIIThe compass at sea
  4. IVGunpowder
  5. VSu Song’s clock tower
  6. VIHangzhou

AfterMovable type, paper money and the compass changed work and trade.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Su Song
  • Shen Kuo
  • Bi Sheng
  • Li Qingzhao

Objects

  • Jiaozi banknotes
  • Celadon ware
  • Along the River During the Qingming Festival

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

AD 960 to 1279. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?