32 Chapter Twogeneral interest. Confiscatory taxation of ill-gotten gains always
smacked of justice and retribution. The all too obvious suffering of
the poor reinforced the case against the rich merchants and ruthless
engrossers of the market. Yet Sung officials recognized that indiscrim
inate resort to such a policy might cost the state dearly by diminish
ing tax revenue in future years. Officials therefore struggled to recon
cile justice with fiscal expediency, and long-range with short-range
advantage. For a while, in the eleventh century, their policies allowed
rapid technological development and expansion of iron and steel pro
duction in geographically favored regions accessible to the capital.
Hartwell has explored the truly spectacular result for us.
But large-scale commercial and industrial enterprises were vulnera
ble to decay for the same reasons that had caused them to burgeon.
Interruption of communications with the capital or collapse of official
demand for iron and steel products would be sure to disrupt the
industry. Changes of tax rates or of prices paid by the government
could choke off production—perhaps more slowly, but no less surely.
Assuredly, conditions did alter so that the growth of iron and steel
production in the K’ai-feng economic region decayed in the twelfth
century, but statistics disappear after 1078 because of gaps in surviv
ing records. Forty-eight years later, in 1126, regular administration
was disrupted when tribesmen from Manchuria, known as Jürchen,
conquered K’ai-feng and set up a new regime in north China (the Chin
dynasty). The defeated Sung withdrew to the south, making the Huai
River the northern frontier of their shrunken domain. A century af
terward Genghis Khan’s armies defeated the Jürchen (by 1226), and
the victor assigned the area in which the ironworks lay to one of the
Mongol princes as an appanage. Later when Genghis’ grandson, the
founder of the Yüan dynasty, Kublai Khan, ascended the throne
(1260) and undertook the conquest of southern China, direct imperial
administration was again imposed on the iron-producing region of
Hopei and Honan. Accordingly, it once more becomes possible to
estimate output for the 1260s. By that time, iron production of this
region had shrunk from a recorded peak of 35,000 tons per annum in
1078 to about 8,000 tons annually, and was exclusively consigned, as
one might expect, to equip the Mongol armies with armor and
weapons.^22
The Yüan dynasty’s military demand for iron and steel did not, in
and of itself, suffice to restore production to anything like the former
level. One reason was the disruption of canal transportation in north
- Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change,” p. 147.