Technology of the Song Dynasty

The Song Dynasty was the ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279 CE. Notable advances in civil engineering, nautics, and metallurgy were made in Song China. These advances, along with the introduction of paper-printed money, helped revolutionize and sustain the economy of the Song Dynasty.

Intellectuals such as Shen Kuo (1031–1095) and Su Song (1020–1101) are responsible for many of the advances during this time. Kuo is credited for discovering the concept of true north and magnetic declination towards the North Pole by calculating a more accurate measurement of the astronomical meridian, and fixed the calculated position of the pole star that had shifted over the centuries. This allowed sailors to navigate the seas more accurately with the magnetic needle compass, also first described by Kuo. Using knowledge of solar and lunar eclipses, he theorized that the sun and moon were spherical in shape, not flat.

Su Song wrote a famous treatise in 1070 known as the Bencao Tujing, which included information on the subjects of pharmacy, botany, zoology, metallurgy, and mineralogy. This treatise included many medical breakthroughs, including the use of ephedrin as a pharmaceutical drug which is still in use today. He was most famous for his hydraulic-powered astronomical clock tower which was built in the capital city of Kaifeng in the year 1088. Su's clock tower employed an escapement mechanism (which maintains the swing of a pendulum and advances the clock’s wheel with each swing) two centuries before it was applied in clocks of Europe.

These two men exemplified the type of person the Song Dynasty looked for in drafting highly skilled officials who were knowledgeable in the various sciences that could ultimately benefit the dynasty as a whole. The advances of the Song Dynasty can’t be attributed to just a few individuals however, but by the contributions of many great thinkers.

Printing technology in the form of movable type was invented by Bi Sheng (990–1051) in the 11th century. Movable type, along with woodblock printing, increased literacy with the mass production of printed materials. This meant that parents could encourage sons to learn to read and write and therefore be able to take the imperial examination and become part of the growing learned bureaucracy. For printing, the mass production of paper for writing was already well established in China. The papermaking process had been perfected and standardized by the Han Dynasty and was in widespread use for writing even by the 3rd century. The Song Dynasty was the world's first government in history to issue paper-printed money. For the printing of paper money alone, the Song court established several government-run mints and factories. The size of the workforce employed in these paper money factories was quite large, as it was recorded in 1175 that the one factory alone employed more than a thousand workers. Additionally, toilet paper had been in general use in China since the 6th century, and paper bags for preserving the flavor of tealeaves by the 7th century.

Advances in military technology aided the Song Dynasty in its defense against hostile neighbors to the north. The flamethrower found its origins in Byzantine-era Greece in a device with a siphon hose by the 7th century. In 919, the siphon projector-pump was used to spread the 'fierce fire oil' that could not be doused with water, as recorded by Lin Yu. The Chinese applied the use of double-piston bellows to pump petrol out of a single cylinder (with an up stroke and down stroke), lit at the end by a slow-burning gunpowder match to fire a continuous stream of flame.

Although an alchemist described the destructive effects of gunpowder in the earlier Tang Dynasty, the earliest-known existent written formulas for gunpowder come from the Wujing Zongyao text of 1044, which described explosive bombs hurled from catapults. The earliest developments of the gun barrel and the projectile-fire cannon were found in late Song China. The first art depiction of the Chinese 'fire lance' (a combination of a temporary-fire flamethrower and gun) was from a Buddhist mural painting of Dunhuang, dated circa 950. These 'fire-lances' were widespread in use by the early 12th century, featuring hollowed bamboo poles as tubes to fire sand particles (to blind and choke), lead pellets, bits of sharp metal and pottery shards, and finally large gunpowder-propelled arrows. Eventually, perishable bamboo was replaced with hollow tubes of cast iron. This ancestor to the gun was complemented by the ancestor to the cannon, what the Chinese referred to as the 'multiple bullets magazine erupter', a tube of bronze or cast iron that was filled with about 100 lead balls. However, the oldest existent archaeological discovery of a metal barrel handgun is from the Chinese Heilongjiang excavation, dated to 1288. The Chinese also discovered the explosive potential of packing hollowed cannonball shells with gunpowder.

The Chinese of the Song Dynasty were experience sailors who traveled to ports of call as far away as Fatimid Egypt. They were well equipped for their journeys abroad, in large seagoing vessels steered by stern-post rudders and guided by the directional compass. Even before Shen Kuo had described the mariner's magnetic needle compass, the earlier military treatise of the Wujing Zongyao in 1044 had also described a thermoremanence compass. This was a simple iron or steel needle that was heated, cooled, and placed in a bowl of water, producing the effect of weak magnetization, although its use was described only for navigation on land and not at sea. In 1117, the author Zhu Yu wrote not only of the magnetic compass for navigation, but also a hundred foot line with a hook that was cast over the deck of the ship, used to collect mud samples at the bottom of the sea in order for the crew to determine their whereabouts by the smell and appearance of the mud. In addition, Zhu Yu wrote of watertight bulkhead compartments in the hulls of ships to prevent sinking if damaged.

The art of metallurgy during the Song Dynasty built upon the efforts of earlier Chinese dynasties, while new methods were incorporated. The Chinese of the ancient Han Dynasty figured out how to create steel by smelting together the carbon intermediary of wrought iron and cast iron by the 1st century BCE. However, there were two new Chinese innovations of the Song Dynasty to create steel during the 11th century. They were the "berganesque" method that produced inferior, inhomogeneous steel, while the other was a precursor to the modern Bessemer process that utilized partial decarbonization via repeated forging under a cold blast.

These technological advances are only some of the many advances by the Song Dynasty, which reigned until the Mongol invasion in 1279. Although the dynasty had some of the biggest military technological advances to date, it was not enough to fend of the invasion.

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