Diminished Empire and Nomadic Challengers 77
eight-foot-long copy of a twelfth-century handscroll, depicts a Spring Festival
by the Jin invaders in 1127. The famous Rainbow Bridge spanning the Bian River
shoppers, and people transporting goods across the bridge. National Palace
pans for making salt. Chinese peasants probably used as many iron
tools in Song times as in the early twentieth century.
Much of the iron industry produced weapons for defense and coins
for the thriving money economy. Chinese coins were round with a
square hole in the middle, so 1,000 coins could be strung on one string.
In 1041, the Song court ordered one army in Shaanxi Province, facing
the Xi Xia on the northwest frontier, to be supplied with three mil-
lion strings of cash (requiring 29,000 tons of iron). The government
mint produced eight hundred million coins a year by the year 1000 and
six billion coins a year by 1085. The government also sponsored the