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  • ED GLAESER: What are the other cities that come to rival in China?

  • PETER BOL: Well, I think the big change--

  • and we have wonderful illustrations of this,

  • because if we look at a map of Chang'an, we can see that grid layout.

  • 10th century Tang Empire falls apart.

  • The south breaks into multiple states.

  • The north is this succession of short-lived dynasties.

  • And then when it's reunified under the Song dynasty at the end of the 10th

  • century, the Song chooses as its capital not Chang'an.

  • It chooses a commercial city called Kaifeng on a canal close

  • to the Yellow River.

  • And it makes its capital there.

  • And now we're east of the passes.

  • We're on the Western part of the North China plane.

  • And it's a commercial center.

  • And all the illustrations we have of it, and all the discussion and the accounts

  • of the city that we have from the time describe it as a commercial center,

  • as a place that's not only an administrative center, but also

  • a center of commerce.

  • And it's at that moment that we start to see the development of let's say

  • hierarchies of cities taking place where we have a number of cities--

  • Suzhou, Yangzhou, Hangzhou-- cities in the South

  • that have become major cities as well.

  • ED GLAESER: Now there's one piece of infrastructure

  • that many of these cities have in common,

  • which is the Grand Canal, which seems to play a role in many of their histories.

  • PETER BOL: So that Grand Canal that links

  • the prosperous and fertile southeast with the northern capital

  • is done under the Sui Dynasty, so back in the end of the sixth century.

  • It continues on through the Song.

  • Then after a conquest, it's dilapidated, and it has to be restored again.

  • But it's a very important route.

  • The Grand Canal, the Yangtze River, the shift

  • of the center of population to the south,

  • gradually the shift of the center of commercial wealth to the south

  • is absolutely essential to this story.

  • ED GLAESER: One thing that is somewhat unusual about the Kaifeng story is

  • that it's quite often in the West that great political cities will

  • become commercial cities.

  • Think about London, for example.

  • It's less common that you have a city that rises first as a commercial hub,

  • and then becomes a political city on top of it.

  • PETER BOL: And remains a commercial city at the same time.

  • ED GLAESER: So what's different in the way that we look at Kaifeng?

  • How does it feel different?

  • And how do you see the fact that it's originally a commercial city instead

  • of a political city from the top down?

  • PETER BOL: They can't restore the Tang system of wards, or fang,

  • with walls around them.

  • They no longer, I think, have the same commitment

  • to the notion of a unified hierarchy of status, power, wealth, culture,

  • religion.

  • There is-- it's still--

  • Kaifeng is still a case where you tend to see elites congregate--

  • the political leaders, cultural leaders--

  • ED GLAESER: In particular neighborhoods, in particular areas?

  • PETER BOL: No, no. It just congregated there.

  • But in fact, it's now spread out to other cities as well.

  • One of the phenomena we see is that when people

  • retire, when leading officials-- leading cultural figures--

  • retire, where do they move?

  • In the Tang, they moved to the capital, the capital corridor in the Song.

  • All over the place.

  • They're no longer-- there's no longer the same commitment to the capital

  • as the center of culture.

  • And there's something else that happens.

  • And we actually have really good evidence from 1077.

  • What that map shows is that the economic hierarchy

  • and the administrative hierarchy from the capital

  • all the way down to the county is starting to diverge.

  • And you have market towns that have more commercial tax coming in

  • than the county seat.

  • You have county seats that have more commercial tax coming in

  • than the prefectural seat.

  • So there's no longer this neat Tang hierarchy,

  • or the imagined hierarchy of Tang where economy

  • is subordinate to the administration.

  • Now we have a world in which commerce is independent of politics,

  • and where, in fact, the great thing about the Song dynasty is they

  • learned how to tax the economy.

  • So more of its wealth is now coming in, more of its revenue

  • is now coming in from commerce than from agricultural tax.

ED GLAESER: What are the other cities that come to rival in China?

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