Song dynasty
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The Song dynasty ruled China from 960 to 1279, and although it never controlled the whole empire it was the most economically advanced society in the world. The northern Song kept the capital at Kaifeng until the Jurchen Jin took it in 1127, after which the southern Song held the rich south from Hangzhou. Chinese inventors moved from woodblock printing to movable type, from gunpowder used in fireworks to bombs and fire lances, and from the magnetic needle used for divination to the compass that let ships sail out of sight of land. Paper money, the jiaozi of Sichuan, circulated centuries before Europe had any, and coal and iron output in the eleventh century would not be matched in Europe until the nineteenth. The examination system was opened to more candidates, and a gentry of scholar-officials, not aristocrats, ran the counties. Painters worked in ink on silk, capturing mist and distance, and the great kilns at Jingdezhen began the porcelain trade. The economy was ruined by the wars against the Jin and the Mongols; Hangzhou fell in 1276, and the last emperor drowned with his regent in 1279. Its bureaucracy kept detailed records of population and tax, and its scholars catalogued the past.