Society & Daily Life

If you want to understand what changed in the Song, imagine a city where the government no longer decides when the day ends. Under the Tang, the residential wards of a capital were walled compounds with gates, marketplaces were separately enclosed and supervised, and the streets emptied at night by law. The Song capital abolished all of that — not by decree, but gradually, as the walls stopped being maintained and the administration gave up trying to enforce them.

The Ward Walls Come Down

The result was a city organised by commerce rather than by administration. Streets became shopping streets, with different trades clustering in different quarters. Houses were built out over the pavement. Entertainment districts grew up around the temple squares. Nothing in the physical city told you where you were supposed to be.

Kaifeng: the Northern Capital

Kaifeng — called Dongjing, “the eastern capital” — sat on the Bian River, the canal that connected the Yellow River plain to the grain surplus of the south. That single fact made it a supply city before it was anything else: a million people cannot eat from their own hinterland, and the canal brought in the rice.

The city was also extraordinarily mixed. Muslim merchants from Central Asia, Korean and Japanese envoys, Jewish families whose descendants are documented in Kaifeng for centuries, and soldiers from every frontier garrison all appear in the records. The commercial economy described in Volume IV was not an abstraction; it was this street.

The Qingming Scroll as Evidence

The most vivid source for Song city life is not a text but a painting. Along the River During the Qingming Festival, attributed to the court painter Zhang Zeduan in the early twelfth century, shows Kaifeng over the course of one spring day — from quiet countryside, down the canal, across the great timber arch of the Rainbow Bridge, and into the walled city.

It is a documentary painting as much as an artistic one. In it you can count the shops and read their signs, watch a restaurant serve customers upstairs, see a boat being poled under a bridge with its mast being lowered at the last moment, and follow camels entering through the city gate. For the study of Song daily life it is roughly what a photograph would be for a later century.

Lin’an: the Southern Capital

After 1127 the court rebuilt itself at Hangzhou, renamed Lin’an — literally “temporary peace,” a name that quietly admitted the government did not consider itself home. It never built a proper imperial palace, and the imperial tombs were built above ground for the same reason: the plan was always to go back north. It never did.

What it built instead was, by most accounts, the most prosperous city in the world. It sat between a lake famous for its scenery and a river mouth that connected it to the maritime trade of the whole southeast coast. A century later Marco Polo would describe it in terms that read as extravagant — and modern estimates of its population and its trade volume suggest he was not exaggerating much.

Eating, Drinking, Living

• Restaurants. The sources list hundreds of named establishments, distinguished by region, price and function — banquet houses, noodle shops, wine houses with singing girls, food stalls that opened before dawn. Regional cuisine as a commercial category appears in the Song.
• Tea. Tea houses functioned as something between a café and a public living room, and tea itself moved from a luxury to a mass commodity.
• Housing. City houses were usually timber-framed and densely packed, with shops at street level. Fire was the great hazard, and the Song ran professional fire brigades in the capital.
• Getting around. Sedan chairs, pack animals, carts; by the Southern Song, an extensive network of canals and ferries. Horses were scarce and expensive — the Song had lost the horse country in 1127.
• Dress. Sumptuary laws tried to reserve certain fabrics and colours for rank, and were widely ignored once ordinary households could afford silk.

The Festival Year

The Song calendar was dense with public festivals, most of which survive in recognisable form today. What is distinctive about the Song versions is that they were increasingly commercial events — sponsored by shops, marked by retail promotions, and staged in the streets rather than in temples.

Faith in the Street

Religion in the Song city was plural and largely unregulated at street level. Buddhist monasteries were major landlords and lenders. Daoist temples received imperial patronage. Alongside them stood a dense world of local cults — city gods, mountain gods, deified officials, and Mazu, the patron goddess of seafarers whose cult spread along exactly the trade routes described in Volume IV.

Temple courtyards doubled as marketplaces and theatre venues. This overlap — sacred space as public space — is one of the reasons the Chinese city had no need for a separate civic square.