319yrs
Duration of the two Songs
两宋国祚
960–1279. Northern Song 960–1127 (167 years); Southern Song 1127–1279 (152 years).
Data · ten figures
Song in Numbers
数字看宋
Ten figures for getting your bearings before you read the volumes — how long the dynasty lasted, how many people lived in its capital, when its money and its inventions arrived. Each one carries the limits of what it can actually support.
4 min read · Part 7 of 10 in this English section
18emperors
Emperors of the two Songs
两宋帝王
Nine in the Northern Song and nine in the Southern Song — the line ran unbroken across the loss of the north.
1million+
Population of Kaifeng
东京人口（估）
The Northern Song capital is generally put above a million residents, which would make it the largest city on earth in the eleventh century. Lin’an (Hangzhou) reached a comparable size after 1138.
Caveat. Estimate, not a census. Scholarly figures range from roughly 600,000 to well over a million; there is no surviving household count for the whole city.
1,023CE
The first state paper money
官办交子务
A government bureau for jiaozi notes opened in Yizhou (modern Chengdu). Paper money had circulated privately in Sichuan for around a decade before the state took it over — and this was the moment it became official.
3of four
Great inventions matured
四大发明成熟
Movable-type printing, the magnetic compass used for navigation, and gunpowder as a military explosive all reached working form under the Song. Only papermaking predates them.
39,000degrees
Jinshi graduates
两宋录取进士
Roughly thirty-nine thousand men passed the highest examination across the two Song, several times the Tang total. The examination system, not birth, became the main route into office.
Caveat. Depends on how the surviving lists are summed. Some counts of Northern Song degrees alone run to only a few thousand; the total is a reconstruction, not a register.
5kilns
The Great Kilns
宋瓷顶峰
Ru, Guan, Ge, Jun and Ding — the five traditions treated as the peak of Song ceramics, prized for glaze and proportion rather than decoration.
Caveat. The set of “five great kilns” is a later canon, fixed in the Ming and Qing, not a Song-period ranking. Treat it as a useful shortlist, not a contemporary league table.
1,330poets
Ci poets in the Complete Song Ci
《全宋词》词人
The twentieth-century compilation gathers over 1,330 named poets and about twenty thousand ci lyrics — the form the dynasty is remembered for.
294juan
Zizhi Tongjian
《资治通鉴》
Sima Guang’s annalistic history, completed in 1084 and covering 1,362 years of Chinese history in 294 chapters. It set the standard for how later historians wrote.
1,103CE
Yingzao Fashi promulgated
《营造法式》
Li Jie’s building manual was issued by the state in 1103: 34 chapters of specification, materials and labour rates. It is the most systematic surviving pre-modern Chinese treatise on construction.
How these were chosen. Every figure above is either a record — a year, a reign, a chapter count — or a widely used scholarly estimate, and the difference is stated rather than hidden. Where the estimate is soft, the note says so and the caveat gives the range. This is not a table of facts about the Song; it is a way of hearing how large the dynasty was.
Principal sources: the Song Shi and Song Huiyao Jigao for the institutional record; Dongjing Meng Hua Lu and Mengliang Lu for the two capitals; the Complete Song Ci for the literary count; and the standard demographic and economic scholarship on the period for the estimates.
Reading the Numbers
What the figures cannot tell you
Numbers give the scale, not the storyA number is a claim with the argument removed. Three things are worth holding on to before you treat any of the figures above as settled.
Every large figure here is a reconstruction
China had no continuous census of the kind a modern state keeps. Surviving Song household registers are partial, uneven in coverage, and measured for tax purposes — which is exactly the kind of count people try to avoid. Population and output figures are built by taking those registers apart and arguing about the multipliers. When this page says a million, it means scholarship is comfortable above a million, not that anyone counted.
Three hundred and nineteen years is the easy number
The duration and the emperor count are secure because the annalistic record is secure: we know who reigned, from when, and what year each died. Everything else on this page — the money, the kilns, the ships, the examinations — is better understood as a trend than as a value at a date. Song China did not become the most commercially developed society of its time in 1023; that is simply the year the state stopped pretending otherwise about paper money.
The counting was itself the achievement
Volume I of the Chinese site makes the point that the Song state was unusually addicted to record-keeping — registers, examinations, budget memorials, printed gazetteers. That is why so much of what we know about eleventh-century urban life comes from a single dynasty rather than a region or a period. The numbers survive because someone was paid to write them down.
Keep Reading
Beyond the numbers
Where the scale came from, and what it costHistory
宋朝史
The three hundred and nineteen years behind the first number: a mutiny at Chenqiao, two lost capitals, and a dynasty that survived its own worst defeat.
Economy & Technology
经济与科技
Paper money, movable type and ocean-going ships — the four figures here that describe things China did first.
Timeline
大事年表
Every date on this page in one place, from 960 to the fall of Yamen in 1279.