Southern Song dynasty: A Visual History

The Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) was the continuation of the Song after the Jurchen captured Kaifeng, with its capital at Lin'an (Hangzhou). It fought the Jin to a standstill (Yue Fei's victories, then the peace of 1141) and enjoyed a century of prosperity based on rice, tea, porcelain, overseas trade and paper money, with a population of perhaps 60 million and Hangzhou the largest city in the world. Neo-Confucianism was formulated by Zhu Xi. The Mongols conquered it in a 45-year war ending with the sea battle of Yamen in 1279.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Southern Song dynasty. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Southern Song population

Timeline of the Southern Song dynasty

1. 1127
   Gaozong proclaimed emperor
2. 1138
   Capital fixed at Hangzhou
3. 1142
   Yue Fei executed; peace with the Jin
4. 1161
   Battle of CaishiJin invasion repelled.
5. 1234
   Jin destroyedSong-Mongol alliance.
6. 1259
   Mongke dies at Diaoyu Fortress
7. 1273
   Xiangyang falls
8. 1276
   Hangzhou surrenders
9. 1279
   Battle of Yamen

Survival

Zhao Gou, a son of Emperor Huizong, escaped the Jin and was proclaimed Emperor Gaozong. Generals like Yue Fei drove the Jurchen back towards the Yellow River, but Gaozong and his minister Qin Hui preferred peace: Yue Fei was recalled and executed in 1142, and the Treaty of Shaoxing accepted the Huai River border and annual tribute. Later attempts to retake the north in 1161 and 1206 failed.

A commercial civilisation

Cut off from the northern land routes, the Song built a navy and merchant fleet; junks with compasses sailed to India and Arabia and Quanzhou became a great port. Paper money, credit, printed books, tea houses and restaurants flourished; Marco Polo later called Hangzhou 'the finest and noblest city in the world'. Zhu Xi's synthesis of Confucianism became state orthodoxy for the next 700 years.

The Mongol conquest

The Song allied with the Mongols to destroy the Jin in 1234, then tried to reoccupy the north and provoked war. Mongke Khan died besieging Sichuan in 1259. Kublai's forces spent five years taking the fortress of Xiangyang (1268-1273) with Persian counterweight trebuchets, then sailed down the Yangtze; Hangzhou surrendered in 1276. Loyalists fled with two child emperors down the coast; at Yamen the last, aged seven, drowned in his minister's arms as the fleet was destroyed.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Northern Song dynasty (960 to 1127)
• Jin dynasty (1115-1234) (1115 to 1234)
• Mongol Empire (1206 to 1368)
• Yuan dynasty (1271 to 1368)
• Western Xia (1038 to 1227)
• Liao dynasty (916 to 1125)

Wars of the same era and region

• Mongol invasions and conquests (1206 to 1368)
• Fang La rebellion (1120 to 1121)
• Song-Dai Viet War (1075 to 1077)

8 surprising things about the Southern Song dynasty

1. Yue Fei, executed on a false charge, became China's archetypal loyal general; statues of Qin Hui kneel in shame outside his tomb in Hangzhou to this day.
2. The Song navy used paddle-wheel ships and gunpowder bombs against the Jin on the Yangtze in 1161.
3. Hangzhou's population may have exceeded one million, with a large restaurant and entertainment industry.
4. The siege of Xiangyang lasted five years and was decided by trebuchets designed by two engineers from Mosul.
5. The Song's paper money issues eventually inflated to worthlessness in the final decades.
6. The Song loyalist minister Lu Xiufu jumped into the sea holding the boy emperor rather than surrender.
7. About 100,000 corpses were said to have floated on the sea after Yamen.
8. The Song dynasty as a whole lasted 319 years, longer than the Tang or Ming.

Sources

• Song dynasty Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Southern Song dynasty Wikipedia
• Song Dynasty World History Encyclopedia
• Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion (1962) Stanford University Press

Back to all empires and wars