76 China in World History
This detail from QingmingFestival Along the River, an eighteenth-century, thirty-
holiday in the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng shortly before it was conquered
is fi lled with shops and stalls selling goods and services, and a plethora of vendors,
Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of ChinaIn 1120, just before the loss of the north to the Jurchen, the Song gov-
ernment collected eighteen million ounces of silver in taxes.
In the early Song period, advances occurred in iron smelting tech-
nology, including the use of explosives to mine iron ore and the use
of hydraulic machinery to power bellows that could generate higher
temperatures for smelting iron and steel. The Song government spon-
sored the largest iron-smelting industry in the world, which produced
125,000 tons of iron in 1078 (quantities not reached in Europe for
about another eight hundred years). Iron was important for making
plows, other farm implements, locks, nails, musical instruments, and