The Era of Chinese Predominance. 1000–1500 33China. This, in turn, was part of an enormous disaster that occurred in
1194, when the Yellow River broke through its restraining dikes and,
after flooding vast areas of the most fertile land in north China, even
tually found a new path to the sea. The work necessary to restore the
canal system was never undertaken. Hence iron production in Honan
and Hopei remained at relatively modest levels thereafter. By 1736
the once busy blast furnaces, coke ovens, and steel manufactories
were abandoned entirely, even though plenty of coking coal remained
at hand and beds of iron ore were not far distant. Production was not
resumed until the twentieth century.
Clearly, information is too fragmentary to permit anyone to figure
out exactly what happened, either in the period of expansion and
technical breakthrough or in the period of constriction and decay. But
it is clear that governmental policy was always critically important. The
distrust and suspicion with which officials habitually viewed successful
entrepreneurs meant that any undertaking risked being taken over as
a state monopoly. Alternatively, it could be subjected to taxes and of
ficially imposed prices which made the maintenance of existing levels
of operation impossible. This is what seems to have happened to the
technologically innovative ironworks in the north which, if they had
continued to expand, would have been capable of supplying China
with cheaper and far more abundant iron and steel than any other
people of the world had hitherto enjoyed.
The abortion of coke-fired ferrous technology was the more re
markable considering that the army maintained by the northern Sung
dynasty grew to be over a million men, and its appetite for iron and
steel was enormous. Nevertheless, military demand was blunted by
the fact that it could become effective only with the consent of gov
ernmental officials; and the civil officials who disdained captains of
industry actively distrusted and feared captains of men, since orga
nized military force constituted a well-recognized potential challenge
to their control of Chinese society.
After the first years of reunification (in the 960s), which involved
offensive campaigning, Sung military policy became strictly defensive.
The main problem, as always, was how to keep the nomads across the
northwestern frontier from raiding settled Chinese landscapes.
Nomad cavalry could outstrip Chinese footsoldiers; but footsoldiers,
armed with crossbows and stationed in fortified garrison posts thickly
scattered throughout the frontier zone, could hold off cavalry attacks
quite effectually. If a raiding party chose to bypass such defended
places in order to penetrate deeper into China, the Sung government’s