The Song Dynasty
Explore the Song Dynasty — the era of Chinese history that invented movable type, gunpowder weapons, and the world's first paper money.
The Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE) may be the most underappreciated era in world history. While it lacked the territorial reach of the Tang or the political drama of the Three Kingdoms, the Song presided over an economic and technological revolution that made China the most advanced civilization on earth — by a significant margin.
The numbers are staggering. China's population doubled to over 100 million. Iron production in the Song exceeded the combined output of all of Europe. The Song invented movable type printing, gunpowder weapons, the magnetic compass for navigation, and the world's first paper money. Rice cultivation techniques supported massive urbanization — Kaifeng and later Hangzhou may have been the first cities in history to exceed one million inhabitants.
The Song also refined China's civil service examination system into a true meritocracy, creating a governing class selected by literary and philosophical skill rather than birth. Neo-Confucian philosophy, which synthesized classical Confucianism with Buddhist and Daoist ideas, emerged as the dominant intellectual framework. The Song world was, in many ways, recognizably modern: commercial, urban, bureaucratic, and technologically innovative. That these inventions took centuries to reach Europe — and transformed it when they did — is one of world history's most consequential stories.