Culture and Society

During the Song era, cultural traditions originated that remained important until modern times including living in large urban environments, eating rice and foot binding.
 

The Song Empire experienced economic growth and industrial advance that was absent in other eras. The Song built some of the biggest cities in the world and had relative stability and peace among the people. Commercialization, urbanization and industrialization advanced a lot as well crop cultivation techniques. The rice cultivation technique advanced the most and thus, rice became the empire’s major food crop. For the urban elite, rice wasn’t the only food they had. They also had large amounts of fresh meat and fish according to Marco Polo. Also, Marco Polo thought the cities in the Song Empire were much richer than European cities.
 

During the Tang era and before, the empires mainly cultivated wheat and millet. Earlier empires developed around the Yellow River in the north but they expanded southwards to the Yangtze River, a cleaner and better river. Therefore, during the Song era, most people lived in the south where they used improving techniques of rice cultivation, which in turn enabled the population to multiply many times. Based on census counts during the Western Han and Tang Dynasties, it was thought that the population of both empires was 50 to 60 million. That means that after 800 years, the population grew very little. During the Song era, scholars think that population exceeded 100 million in a very short amount of time. Also, during the Song era, people learned how to live in some of the world’s largest urban centers like Kaifeng and Hangzhou that were more like our modern cities because they had now walls for protection.
 

Another cultural tradition was binding the feet of girls, which essentially crippled the girls for life. This tradition was usually reserved for higher class and richer people but it spread lower classes and peasants quickly. By the Qing era, the majority of women except those of ethnic minorities had given in to the tradition of binding feet. For the richer families, it was thought that binding the feet of girls made them more submissive and signified their family’s status. Another reason for binding the feet of girls was because it was thought that small feet were more beautiful. In the lower classes, even though foot binding rendered the girls less able to do farm labor, the fathers wanted to have beautiful daughters who might marry richer men.