During China's Song dynasty (960-1276 CE), scholar-official bureaucracy superceded an earlier aristocracy. Population doubled (and in some regions tripled) as wetland drainage and new crops allowed agriculture to flourish in new locations.  The Song empire had the most urbanized and  commercialized economy that would exist anywhere in the world prior to the  eighteenth century.  Song settlers and armies colonized small-scale  societies that still persisted in the far south.  At the same time, the  regime struggled to resist incursions by the newly powerful and centralized  regimes of the northern steppes. The northern half of Song territory fell  to the Jurchen Jin in the early twelfth century, and the whole empire was  conquered by the Mongols a century and a half later.

During this extraordinary period of history, the imperial court maintained a precise inventory of counties, prefectures, and provinces:  a territorial  landscape which organized tax collection, census taking, military campaigns, and which determined the density of the state presence in  different regions of the realm.  During the three centuries of the Song,  there were over a thousand occasions when these jurisdictions were founded,  abolished, merged, split, and organized into new hierarchies.  My recently  completed Digital Gazetteer of Song Dynasty China is a spatially and  temporally referenced reconstruction of the Song spatial landscape and its  frequent changes.  This presentation introduces the Gazetteer, explains its  development and structure, and demonstrates how this work can be used for  an innovative approach to spatial history.