What This Is
The site is organised as six volumes — History, Society, Arts, Economy, Thought and Gallery — plus a page of figures that gives the dynasty a sense of scale, a timeline, and a guided reading of a single painting. Each volume is an essay that stands on its own; read in order, they add up to a compact history of the dynasty from its founding in 960 to its destruction at Yamen in 1279.
The Chinese site is considerably larger. Under the same six volumes it carries some thirty-four further pages on individual subjects — institutions, military history, individual cities, the great kilns, maritime trade, historiography. The English section does not attempt to reproduce that depth. It aims instead to give an English reader one continuous, accurate, well-illustrated account without gaps.
Two parallel sites, one editorial standard
The English pages are written for English readers, not translated from the Chinese. Where the two differ it is usually because the English version explains something a Chinese reader would already know, or leaves out detail that only makes sense with the Chinese background. Both versions are checked against the same sources.
How the Content Is Written
The site is written from published scholarship and from primary sources in translation, and it follows three rules that matter to us:
- No invented numbers. Where a figure is an estimate or a scholarly range, it is labelled as one. Population figures for Kaifeng and Lin’an, in particular, are reconstructions rather than census counts, and are described that way.
- Contested points are presented as contested. Whether the Song was “weak,” whether Wang Anshi’s reforms helped or harmed, whether Yue Fei’s execution reflected cowardice or calculation — these are disagreements among historians, and the site says so rather than picking a side and presenting it as fact.
- Attribution is flagged. Many famous Song paintings survive only in later copies, and “by” versus “attributed to” is often genuinely unclear. Labels follow the holding institution and note uncertainty where the institution does.
The site is not peer-reviewed and does not claim to be a source of original research. It is a serious popular account. If you are citing something, go to the underlying scholarship listed at the foot of each page.
Images and Rights
Every image on this site comes from a public collection and is either in the public domain or released under CC0. Nothing here is reproduced under a claim of fair use, and no image is taken from a commercial source. Each item is credited individually, with its licence and a link to the source file.
The paintings, calligraphy and ceramics in the Gallery come from Wikimedia Commons, ultimately from institutions including the Palace Museum in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and several provincial museums. Photographs of out-of-copyright two-dimensional works are themselves treated as public domain in most jurisdictions, which is what makes this possible.
If you hold rights in something here
We have tried to use only material free of known copyright restrictions, but mistakes happen and we would rather fix them than argue. Write to us and we will remove or correct the item promptly.
Sources
Each page ends with a short list of further reading chosen for availability in English as well as authority. For the dynasty as a whole, the standard reference is The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 5, Part 1; for a single-volume narrative, Dieter Kuhn’s The Age of Confucian Rule. For social history, Jacques Gernet’s Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion remains the best introduction in any language.
Primary sources used most heavily are the Song-period memoirs of the two capitals — Dongjing Meng Hua Lu for Kaifeng and Mengliang Lu for Hangzhou — which are the basis for most of Volume II, and Shen Kuo’s Dream Pool Essays for the history of science.
About the Site Itself
The site is a static publication: there is no database, no tracking, no accounts and no advertising. Pages are built ahead of time and served as plain files, which is why it loads quickly and has nothing to break.
- Built with Astro; no client-side framework and no third-party analytics.
- No cookies and no external requests — fonts and images are served from this domain.
- Accessible by design: reduced-motion preferences are respected throughout, and every image carries alternative text.
Corrections
Corrections are genuinely welcome, especially from people who know the period better than we do. Write to 6686112@qq.com with the page and the problem. We would rather be told.
The Song is the dynasty that keeps overturning its own reputation. It lost its northern half, and it produced the printing, the money, the ships and the philosophy that carried East Asia into the modern period.— Editorial note
Further reading
- Twitchett & Smith (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 5: The Sung Dynasty and Its Precursors, Cambridge University Press.
- Dieter Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China, Harvard University Press.
- Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276, Stanford University Press.