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The Song Dynasty: China's Age of Invention and the World It Almost Created
Paperback
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Publisher: Expedition Publishers
Pages: 270
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In 1078, Chinese foundries produced more iron than all of Europe would manage six centuries later. Chinese merchants carried the world's first paper money in their sleeves three hundred years before Sweden printed a single banknote. A Chinese engineer built a water powered clock tower with a working escapement centuries before anything comparable appeared in the West. And Chinese printers were setting movable type while Johannes Gutenberg's great grandparents were still unborn.
This was the Song Dynasty. And it came closer to launching an industrial revolution than any civilization in recorded history before eighteenth century Britain.
THE SONG DYNASTY tells the story of the three centuries when China quietly assembled nearly every piece of the machine that would eventually remake the modern world: gunpowder weapons produced at industrial scale, a genuine standing navy powered by paddle wheels, oceangoing ships with watertight hulls, a meritocratic civil service recruited by competitive exam, and a scientific culture capable of producing polymaths who studied fossils, optics, and even ancient climate change centuries ahead of their time.
Then the Mongols came.
Drawing on primary source treatises, archaeological excavation, and current historical scholarship, this book reconstructs a civilization standing at the very edge of modernity, and asks the question historians have circled for decades: why didn't it cross the finish line first?
You will meet Bi Sheng, the obscure craftsman who invented movable type using nothing but clay and fire. You will follow the engineer Su Song's race to build a clock tower that could track the heavens on its own, and watch it torn apart by invading soldiers who could never put it back together. You will walk the night markets of Kaifeng, a city of one million people, larger than any city in Europe for the next seven hundred years. You will stand on the deck of a Song warship as it burns an invading fleet with gunpowder bombs launched from vessels driven by nothing but human legs on a treadwheel. And in the book's final chapters, you will watch the most technologically advanced civilization on Earth undone by conquest, ending with a nine year old emperor drowned in the sea rather than taken alive.
This is narrative history written to be finished in a single sitting, not shelved after one chapter. Each chapter stands as a self contained investigation into one pillar of Song genius: currency, printing, weapons, industry, medicine, law, philosophy, art, agriculture, and the sea, and every one of them is built on verifiable sources rather than invention. No fictional dialogue. No invented statistics. Just the astonishing, underappreciated true story of the empire that very nearly got there first.
Why did history's closest brush with an early industrial revolution happen in eleventh century China, and why did it stall? The answer is not simple, and it is not what most readers expect. Part economic history, part military history, part sweeping narrative nonfiction, THE SONG DYNASTY argues that the industrial world was never destined to be uniquely European. For three remarkable centuries, it was Chinese, until an empire arrived on horseback with nothing to lose and everything to take.
Read the book they left out of your world history class.
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