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The Advantages And Disadvantages Of The Song Dynasty

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As just stated so did the Northern Song clan members set up a capital in Hangzhou. Instead of Northern Song so would they now be called Southern Song. Hangzhou back then was a wealthy trading city and the Song rulers retained their domain south of the Huai River along with most of the population at that time. They also managed to retain big southern merchant cities and therefore a new period of prosperity began. A priority in Southern Song was foreign trade, and the government constructed merchant ships and improved harbor facilities. Xiamen, Quanzhou and Guangzhou were big seaports. The Southern Song merchant ships sailed as far as India and Arabia. The trade allowed the Southern Song empire to continue to be prosperous although they had lost a lot of their land. The government ended up building a navy to protect the merchant shipping. Passle-wheel ships were built that were faster than regular boats …show more content…

The thing which made the cultural propagation fluid from dynasty to dynasty was that the Chinese mpires had a common written language for 2000 years. no matter what they spoke so would they be able to read texts. Therefore by requiring candidates for official positions to pass exams by testing their knowledge of the Neo-Confucian texts, the court would be ensured that their officials were exceptionally intelligent and could communicate in this very difficult literary language. The government system had of course its advantages and disadvantages. The bureaucrats for an example studied the same works on social behavior and philosophy. That promoted unity and the normalization of behavior through the empire and during the times of dynastic change. The scholar-bureaucrats had a common base of understanding after all and they passed on these political and philological ideals to the people underneath them so that the whole empire could have a common philosophy of

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