The Era of Chinese Predominance, 1000–1500 27Year Tons(^806) 13,500
998 32,500
(^1064) 90,400
1078 125,000
Such statistics are of course derived from official tax records, and
may therefore systematically underestimate production, since small-
scale “backyard” smelting must sometimes have escaped official
notice. On the other hand, growth may be partly a statistical artifact, if
for some reason or other official concern with iron and steel produc
tion became more energetic in the eleventh century.^7 Yet even if this
apparent growth is partly a matter of more thorough reporting, Hart
well has shown that within a relatively small region of north China, on
or adjacent to bituminous coal fields (suitable for coking) in northern
Honan and southern Hopei, production went from nothing to 35,000
tons per annum by 1018. Large-scale enterprises arose in these loca
tions, employing hundreds of full-time industrial laborers, whereas
iron smelting in other parts of China seems usually to have remained a
part-time occupation for peasants who worked as ironmakers in the
agricultural off season.
The new scale of enterprise could flourish only when there was
a ready market for large amounts of iron and steel. That in turn de
pended on transportation, and on price relationships that made it
attractive for families (perhaps, as Hartwell suggests, originally land
owners) to build and manage the new metallurgical establishments.
For about a century, these conditions did coexist. Canals connected
the capital of the northern Sung dynasty, K’ai-feng, with the new iron
and steel producing centers in Honan and Hopei; and the capital
constituted a vast market for metal. Iron was used for coinage,^8 for
weapons, in construction, and for tools. Government officials super
vised minting and weapons manufacture closely and in 1083 saw fit
also to monopolize the sale of agricultural implements made of iron.
Chinese history offered ample precedent for this decision. Ever
since Han times (202 B.C.–A.D. 220) iron had rivaled salt as a com
modity attracting official attention. By monopolizing the distribution
of these two materials, and selling them at arbitrarily heightened
ferrous metallurgy, total iron output in England and Wales was only 76,000 tons, just 60
percent of China’s total seven hundred years earlier!
- Chinese population estimates encounter this same difficulty, as had long been
recognized. - Only in Szechuan; elsewhere coinage was copper.