Before the Streets Turned Gold: Setting the Scene

The year was 907, and with it, an empire died. Not in a single dramatic moment of collapse—there would be no dramatic last battle, no desperate final stand in some far-flung garrison—but through a slow strangulation that had been playing out for decades. When Zhu Wen, a former rebel who had once fought against the Tang government, declared himself emperor of the Later Liang and claimed the Mandate of Heaven for himself, he was not so much conquering as inheriting. The great Tang Empire had already hollowed itself out from within, and what remained was a carcass that different regional warlords would fight over for the next half-century. The five dynasties that followed—the Later Liang, Later Tang, Later Jin, Later Han, and Later Zhou—each held the imperial title for a few decades at most before being overthrown by the next ambitious general. China, that ancient and supposedly unified civilization, had fragmented into something resembling a feudal patchwork, with powerful military governors controlling vast territories, distant from but nominally loyal to whoever sat on the throne in Kaifeng or Luoyang.

This period, known to historians as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, lasted from 907 to 960, and it stands as one of the most turbulent and overlooked eras in Chinese history. To casual observers familiar with the grand narratives of Chinese civilization—the glorious Han, the cosmopolitan Tang, the expansive Ming, the isolationist Qing—the Five Dynasties might seem like an embarrassing interlude, a period of chaos best glossed over. Yet to understand the rise of the Song Dynasty and the extraordinary urban revolution it catalyzed, one must understand what the Chinese world looked like before Song Taizu unified it under his rule. The streets that would eventually turn to gold in Kaifeng, Hangzhou, and a hundred other bustling cities did not emerge from a vacuum. They emerged from the ashes of the Tang, shaped by the choices made during those fragmented decades, and ultimately transformed by the deliberate policies of a dynasty that learned from the failures of everyone who came before it.

The Tang Dynasty's collapse was not a sudden catastrophe but rather the culmination of centuries of internal strain. The empire had reached its zenith in the early eighth century under Emperor Xuanzong, when Chang'an was arguably the greatest city in the world—a metropolis of over a million inhabitants where Buddhist monasteries stood alongside Persian wine shops, where Confucian scholars debated with Nestorian Christians, and where the Silk Road brought exotic goods and foreign ideas from distant lands. But this cosmopolitan grandeur masked structural weaknesses that would eventually prove fatal. The most significant of these was the jiedushi system—the appointment of military governors, or jiedushi, to oversee the empire's frontier regions. What began as a pragmatic measure to defend against Tibetan, Turkic, and Uighur threats gradually transformed into a system that concentrated enormous military and fiscal power in the hands of regional warlords. By the mid-ninth century, these military governors had become effectively independent rulers, paying lip service to the emperor while actually controlling their own armies, collecting their own taxes, and appointing their own officials.

The An Lushan Rebellion of 755 to 763 brought these latent tensions to a head in spectacular fashion. An Lushan himself was a general of Sogdian and Turkic origin who had been entrusted with military command in the northeast. His rebellion, which saw him declare himself emperor and seize both Chang'an and Luoyang, nearly destroyed the Tang state entirely. Although the rebellion was eventually suppressed, the empire that emerged from it was fundamentally different from the one that had existed before. The central government, weakened and traumatized, was forced to rely ever more heavily on the very military governors whose autonomy had made the rebellion possible in the first place. The emperor's power became increasingly symbolic, while real authority devolved to the jiedushi who controlled the provinces. The Tang limped on for another 150 years after An Lushan's defeat, but it was a diminished and divided empire, its glory days behind it.

As the Tang Dynasty approached its final decades, China began to fracture along the lines of regional power. The Huang Chao Rebellion of the 870s and 880s, which saw the rebel leader actually capture and sack Chang'an, dealt the final blow to imperial prestige. When the dynasty finally collapsed in 907, it left behind not one China but many. The Five Dynasties that followed represented attempts by various military powers to claim the imperial title and reunify the realm, but none possessed the strength or legitimacy to accomplish this task. Each dynasty ruled primarily from the North China Plain, controlling roughly the same core territory, but none could extend its authority over the entire former empire. Meanwhile, in the south and southwest, no fewer than ten independent kingdoms emerged, each ruled by its own dynasty of local origin. These southern kingdoms—the Former Shu and Later Shu in Sichuan, the Chu in Hunan, the Min in Fujian, the Southern Han in Guangdong and Guangxi, the Wuyue in Zhejiang, the Southern Tang in Jiangsu and Anhui, and others—maintained their independence throughout the Five Dynasties period, developing their own distinctive cultures and economies.

What followed was half a century of political instability and military competition that, paradoxically, created conditions favorable to commercial development. The fragmentation of political authority meant the end of the Tang-era monopoly that the central government had exercised over long-distance trade. With no single empire to regulate commerce, merchants found themselves operating in a landscape of multiple competing states, each eager to attract trade and tax it for their own purposes. The natural barriers that had once divided the Chinese world—the mountains, rivers, and vast distances that made centralized control difficult—now worked to the advantage of merchants who could move goods between different political jurisdictions, playing one ruler against another in pursuit of favorable terms. The southern kingdoms, in particular, invested heavily in maritime and riverine trade, establishing commercial networks that would later form the foundation for Song Dynasty economic expansion.

The most successful of the southern kingdoms was the Wuyue, centered on the region around modern Hangzhou. Under the rule of the Qian family, Wuyue developed into a commercial powerhouse, with Hangzhou emerging as the largest city in the Chinese world outside the northern capitals. The Qian rulers, though technically subjects of whatever dynasty held the imperial title in the north, pursued policies that emphasized commercial development and urban growth. They built canals and improved infrastructure, welcomed merchants from across the Chinese world and beyond, and invested in the agricultural productivity of their domain. When the Later Zhou—the last of the Five Dynasties—began to reunify northern China in the 950s, the Wuyue kingdom under its last king, Qian Chu, chose to submit rather than resist. Qian Chu famously surrendered to the Song forces in 978, bringing his kingdom's considerable wealth and commercial infrastructure into the new empire. Hangzhou, with its population of over a million and its sophisticated commercial institutions, would later become the Southern Song capital, a testament to the pre-Song development of southern urban centers.

The Later Zhou, which ruled northern China from 951 to 960, represented the first serious attempt at reunification since the fall of the Tang. Under Emperor Guo Wei and his successors, the Later Zhou launched military campaigns that reconquered much of the North China Plain and pushed back against the Khitan Liao in the northeast. M