Compare And Contrast Tang And Song Dynasties

The Tang Dynasty, which existed from 618 until 907 AD, is often considered to be the greatest dynasty in Chinese history. The Song Dynasty, which existed from 960 until 1279 AD, reunited China after the divided time of the Five Kingdoms and lead a time of great prosperity. Despite the years separating the two dynasties, the Tang and Song Dynasties are often treated as a single period because “the Tang forms the background for the existence of Song, while the Song is the historical extension of the Tang.” Their intrinsic connection fostered similar artistic and technological developments that would lead to and built upon other Chinese developments. The artistic and technological developments of the Tang and Song Dynasties are some of the most

Guifang was created so that merchants could deposit funds in order to protect them and then could draft checks to third parties, but proprietors began devising loan schemes in order to increase turnover and the guifang became more precarious by the 10th Century. Along with the appearance of guifang was the introduction of feiqian or “flying cash.” Flying cash involved a public-order mechanism in which merchants received paper certificates from the imperial treasury against liquid deposits which could be cashed in multiple provinces. Both of these forms of currency involved trust in institutions to maintain the worth of paper in the place of the palpable worth of coins and grains. Guifang and feiqian laid the earliest foundations for fiduciary currency and paper money during the Tang Dynasty, but the Song Dynasty marks the true foundation of the world’s first paper

First, the government produced coins at an extremely rapid rate, outputting five billion individual bronze coins annually. In order to standardize their currency, the Song instituted the gradual commutation of tax liabilities from iron coinage to bronze coinage; however, this caused strife and the Song then allowed the Sichuan region to remain a separate currency zone that used iron coins. Despite this allowance, the value of the iron coinage dropped dramatically. Therefore, the Song Dynasty introduced bills, jiaozi, to take the place of coins even though paper bills were more susceptible to foreign forgery. In order to increase the value of the jiaozi, only sixteen merchant houses were allowed to issue it, making it a private-order currency. This helped extend the use of the notes by increasing their worth, but eventually the jiaozi depreciated again, so Xue Tian, a Chengdu prefect, reinstated it as a public order currency. Yuan Xie, who lived during the second half of the Song era, noted that “paper notes are a matter that will be of lowly esteem when aplenty, and become prized when scarce; thus redeeming some of them out of circulation, will make them appreciate in value; for when it is lowly its circulation languishes; when it is prized, it will be widely used; thus redeeming some of it will boost its circulation.” Withstanding many centuries of the evolution of