Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276

According to the official censuses, the total population of China seems to have doubled between 106o and 1110, and had reached the figure of 1oo,ooo,ooo persons on the eve of the barbarian invasions of 1126. ## DAILY LIFE IN CHINA which derived the main part of its revenue from a system of State monopolies and indirect taxation. In the spheres of social life, art, amusements, institutions and technology, China was incontestably the most advanced country of the time. She had every right to consider the rest of the world as being peopled by mere barbarians. Let us now give the reasons for our choice of the time and the place of our description. The Mongol invasion put an end to a period of rapid progress which had already announced the beginning of modern times in China. This period was marked by an extraordinary development of urban centres and of commercial activity. In less than one century, the population of Hangchow had doubled, and it had gone beyond the million mark by 1275. But this increase is not peculiar to the capital. In directing attention to urban life, we are merely underlining a feature that was typical of the epoch. There were other considerations which motivated our choice of locality and of period. It is undeniable that archaeological documents of the Sung era are rare, and not particularly revealing. Apart from the ceramics, the production of which was of great importance during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and of which countless specimens survive, nothing remains but a few small objects such as women's ornaments, glass cups, lacquer boxes or vases, pillows in painted faience, copper coins ... Not a single architectural monument has survived, due to the fragile and perishable nature of the materials used in Chinese buildings. It is chiefly the paintings that might furnish us with details of daily life. The Sung painters did in fact like to portray intimate scenes in the life of the rich, or street scenes. We could refer, among other documents of this kind, to the long scroll representing the city of Kaifeng at the beginning of the twelfth century, a scroll attributed to an artist who specialized in the painting of town walls and carts. Unfortunately, the number of these paintings in lively, realistic style which has survived is limited to a very few specimens (or, to be exact, copies), owing to the exclusive preference of collectors of the Ming period (1368-1644) for paintings of flowers, bamboos and landscapes. However, the scarcity of archaeological documents is largely compensated for by the almost inexhaustible riches of the literary SUNG CHINA at the heginningof tile 12th. century 0 300 THE CHIN EMPIRE (JU-CHEN) ' ~Canal CHAPTER I THE CITY THE CHOICE OF HANGCHOW AS CAPITAL: A provincial town. Its ramparts and its lay-out. OVERPOPULATION AND SCARCITY OF ACCOMMODATION: Censuses. Degree of urban concentration about 1275• Crowding-together of buildings and multi-storeyed houses. Rents. OUTBREAKS OF FIRE AND FIRE-FIGHTING : Frequency and seriousness of outbreaks. Ware houses surrounded by water. Fear of ~re. COMMUNICATIONS AND SUPPLIES: Main thoroughfares and canals. The upkeep of roads. Cleanliness of the town. Provisioning by waterways. Main articles of consumption. Markets. AMENITIES OF TOWN LIFE: Luxury shops. Tea-houses, taverns and restaurants. Pleasure outings. The lake and the river. Amusements. ## THE CHOICE OF HANGCHOW AS CAPITAL T HERE ARE times when chance arranges things nicely. When, in 1126, the barbarian Ju-chen horsemen took the Sung capital (present-day Kaifeng, in the Yellow River valley) by storm and the exodus to the south began, there was nothing to indicate that Hangchow was destined to become the seat of the new dynasty. It was then no more than the capital of a distant province, situated at the head of the estuary of the Che river, well off the main commercial highways. The Emperor and his court, more than three thousand prisoners in all, were led into captivity, beyond Mukden, by the barbarians. A prince who escaped proclaimed himself Emperor at Nanking in 1127, and was to be seen fleeing before the nomad invasions, sometimes in the towns of the middle Yangtze, and sometimes, further east, at Yangchou, where the Grand Canal joins up with the river Huai, at Chen-chiang on the right bank of the Yangtze downstream from Nanking, at Suchow, further south, or at Hangchow. None of these walled towns was safe from invasion. But Hangchow, where the Emperor made several halts, was comparatively better protected than the Yangtze towns. To reach it, a region had to be traversed which was riddled by innumerable lakes and by muddy rice-fields: difficult terrain for the deployment of cavalry.