38 replies to this topic

[Forespidy]

Hi everyone,

This is my first post, so go easy on me.

There is a source floating around claiming that China (during the Han Dynasty) produced only 5,000 t of steel per year, compared to 82,500 t for the Roman Empire. I find this a little difficult to believe. Also, there are sources claiming China produced "negligible" amounts of gold, copper, and silver compared to one province of Rome.

Does anyone have additional references to back up or refute these claims? Thank you very much.

[TigerTally]

There wasn't any direct record on the metal productivity of China before the Tang dynasty. The earliest figure one can find is that of 806 in Jiù-Táng-Shū 舊唐書, which suggested the bureaucratically-owned industry had produced in that year 12000 liǎng兩 (~495kg) of silver, 262000 jīn斤 (~173t) of tin and 2070000 jīn斤 (~1368t) of iron. Despite the absence of private business and influence of officials' corruption, the inaccuracy of this set of figure was still limited, considering the high government monopoly in traditional Chinese economy.

Obviously, for the Han dynasty a millennium before, the situation could not be better, if not worse.

Edited by TigerTally, 02 September 2010 - 06:02 PM.

[Mei Houwang]

There is a source floating around claiming that China (during the Han Dynasty) produced only 5,000 t of steel per year, compared to 82,500 t for the Roman Empire. I find this a little difficult to believe. Also, there are sources claiming China produced "negligible" amounts of gold, copper, and silver compared to one province of Rome.

Does anyone have additional references to back up or refute these claims? Thank you very much.

The 5000 tons do seem pretty small, and probably wouldn't have been even near sufficient for the iron tools/weapons that needs to be replaced(given a population of around 60 million). The source you quoted probably comes from Needham. Here is his quote: "There appears to be no reliable way to estimate pig-iron production per day or(more relevant) per year. Perhaps we can assume that production per year was of the same order of magnitude as that of 19th-and 20th-century Chinese traditional blast furnaces of the same size, a few hundred tones per year. If we were to assume an average annual production of 100 tonnes per Iron Office, then total annual legal production in the Han empire as a whole would have been about 5000 tonnes, or about .1 kg per person. Obviously it would not be wise to lend much credence to this figure, but perhaps it gives a feel for the general scale of Han iron production." - pg 236

According to Yang Hong, the typical blast furnace would produce around .5 to 1 ton of iron per year, so Needham's conjecture of "several hundred tons" is correct. This means Needham's estimate is the absolute minimum, and then minus some. First off he gave his annual production per blast furnace variable as 100 tonnes, when he himself said it should be several hundred. And then he assumes there is only one blast furnace per Iron Office(the number of furnaces in an Iron Office is unknown, but by definition the minimum is 1). So 5,000 tons per year would naturally be the absolute minimum the Han would produce. Besides, he said the figure was unwise. Donald Wagner, who quoted almost verbatim from Needham, said it would be "foolish".

The statement that gold production was "negligible" is also probably untrue. The sheer amount Han emperors would reward their generals in gold is astronomical. In fact early China seemed to be rife with gold until they were all used up by the Song dynasty. Even during the Tang dynasty writers claimed that they could fill an entire jar with gold just by plowing.

The silver part is probably true, because only during Wudi and WangMang was silver used as currency. Except during the reign of these two rulers the demand for silver would not be high.

Edited by Mei Houwang, 03 September 2010 - 02:43 AM.

[Forespidy]

This is good insight. I read somewhere that China was able to produce near-industrial amounts of steel during Han times, but this could very well be a myth.

[Mei Houwang]

^That statement is true during Song times, but not during the Han. This is probably due to the fact that the Song switched to charcoal as the main heat source, thus they did not have to bother with the deforestation problem. In comparison, the Song(computed from tax records), would produce well over 100,000 tons annually. If a Han blast furnace produced .5-1 ton per day as according to my previous post, and assuming one blast furnace per iron office, then that would mean a total of 49(number of iron offices)*274(amount of iron per year per blast furnace) = 13,426 tons per year during Wudi's time. Of course, this is a minimum considering there may be more than one furnace per Iron Office. This was also during a time when the Han government placed an iron monopoly throughout the empire, so all private iron production would be halted.

I'm assuming that under normal circumstances the Han dynasty would average around 20,000 tons per year. This is based off of authors who claimed that the Song dynasty iron production is six-fold that of the Tang (although I have yet to find a primary source for that). 125,000 divided by 6 is around 20,000. Because the Tang and Han had similar population levels and the Tang made no significant improvement on the blast furnace, one could very well say that the Han dynasty would produce around 20,000 tons per year.

Edit: The Song switched from charcoal to coke, not from wood to charcoal as I stated in this post.

Edited by Mei Houwang, 16 September 2010 - 01:20 PM.

[Borjigin Ayurbarwada]

The "source" you are talking about came from the member Tibet Libre, who cited unreliable figures from two separate sources and incoherently threw them together for a half baked comparison. We've already pointed out the weakness in his arguments in the very same thread he made his post, you can look there for a start.

The Roman figure came from Sim and Ridge, whose estimations are based off of British iron production, mostly from Weald, and projected it onto the rest of the Roman Empire. The margin of error for projected calculations are always high and the whole estimation is quite unreliable, since scholars gave different estimates of iron production in Weald alone, ranging from 250 tons to over 800 tons a year, meaning the estimation for the rest of Britain, and the even larger Roman Empire is even more unreliable. But historians love to make these estimations for the sake of estimation anyways. But at least they are aware that these figures have little credibility, a fact which Tibet Libre apparently failed to catch. The figure for the Han iron came from Donald Wagner, who drew his source from Joseph Needham, but Tibet Libre completely ignored that Needham was completely guessing the figure of Han production, a fact which he made clear himself. Furthermore, it was the absolute low end estimation as Needham himself noted, and even here Needham was only estimating iron production during Han Wudi's reign where there were only 49 iron producing foundaries recorded in a Han text known as Tong Kao. Yet this ignores that the Eastern Han's iron foundaries increased to over 100 or more than twice the amount of foundaries during Wudi's time. And even though the government outlawed private production, such a policy probably became looser during the Eastern Han as well.
We must not forget that there was around 137 iron foundaries during the Qing a figure not much higher than the Eastern Han, yet it was estimated that Qing iron production reached over 130,000 tons by 1800 while the productivity of the furnace has not increased much. The only difference been that the Qing also had private iron industries. However, as Wagner noted, these private iron industries are small in scale as well as quality.

But its fortunate that we do not need to rely ourselves on these disproportionate data, for we have qualitative comparisons from simply comparing the methods of iron production in both the Han empire and the Roman empire; the Han method of production is based on large government enterprises while the Roman iron production is based on small household bloomery furnaces. As Donald Wagner noted:

While there did exist large state ironworks run by the Roman army, most iron production occurred in thousands of tiny units scattered in villages throughout the Empire. There would have been no way at all of enforcing a monopoly, and it is also difficult to imagine what advantage the Roman state might have derived from such a monopoly.

The difference lay in the technology of iron production. Bloomery smelting, the only iron-smelting process known in Europe until Medieval times, lends itself well to small-scale production. It was used in early China to some (unknown) extent, but by the 3rd century B.C. it appears that most iron was being produced in blast furnaces, which provide very large economies of scale.
...In the Roman Empire, though iron production was rarely concentrated, there were other industries whose technology did encourage large-scale production. Rostovtzeff (1957, pp. 349­352) notices a trend in the Imperial period away from 'house-economy' toward large-scale 'capitalist' industry and then back toward a smaller scale of industrial production. This course of development is loosely analogous to that seen in Han China, with the rise of blast furnace iron production, the establishment of large ironworks under the monopoly, and the later rise of illegal iron production, very likely on a smaller scale than the monopoly ironworks. Any detailed comparison is of course rendered pointless by two important differences in Han China: a technology which provides extremely large economies of scale and a powerful interventionist government.

Rostovtzeff, writing in the 1920's, discusses several possible explanations for the 'failure' of large-scale industry to develop further in Roman Europe. He concludes that a major factor was a failure of demand...The quotations above from the debate in Han China include arguments which are common today. Small-scale production can have important political, social, and ecological advantages; large-scale production can be technically superior, producing a better product, and can be more efficient in its consumption of scarce resources.

In another words, the Han production is much more professional and "capitalistic", enabling a much greater scale of production as well as producing better quality irons and this is the consensus among virtually all historians of Chinese iron production（including Needham, Wagner and Hartwell).

^That statement is true during Song times, but not during the Han. This is probably due to the fact that the Song switched to charcoal as the main heat source, thus they did not have to bother with the deforestation problem. In comparison, the Song(computed from tax records), would produce well over 100,000 tons annually.

The textual record did not even give the figure of 100,000. That was a number first estimated by Robert Hartwell. The Song Shi records a figure of roughly the equivalent of near 4,000 tons of iron. However, this figure was incomplete and left out many productions outside of government registration. The amount of iron coins circulating during the Song alone outnumbered the figure that was cited in the Song Shi. From these coins the Japanese historian Yoshida Mitsukuni gave a figure of 35,000-50,000 tons of iron for the Song. While the Chinese historian Qi Xia estimated 150,000 tons a year through examining consumption data(See Qi Xia, Song Dai Jin Ji Shi, volume 2, p.185-188). Neither consumption data or coinage volume data are present during the han, meaning we are even more in the dark in regard to its actual iron production.

The statement that gold production was "negligible" is also probably untrue. The sheer amount Han emperors would reward their generals in gold is astronomical. In fact early China seemed to be rife with gold until they were all used up by the Song dynasty. Even during the Tang dynasty writers claimed that they could fill an entire jar with gold just by plowing.

We must also note that possessing a great quantity of Gold does not necessarily mean that there are lots of Gold mines during the Han. A large quantity of these Gold might well have came from importation, and some perhaps from the Roman Empire itself. So the lack of Gold mines during Han times does not need to come as a surprise, for the Han perhaps didn't produce them, but received them from abroad in the same manner that the Ming dynasty received large quantities of Silver from abroad. Even during the first century AD, the Roman Empire was at a trade deficit in its commerce with China, by purchasing Chinese silk with Roman Gold, therefore the net flow of Gold should be outward from the Roman Empire and into China in similar manner as Spanish silver was flowing into the Ming market through purchasing Chinese porcelain. Precious metals is just one form of commodity and does not directly measures the wealth or industrial capability of a state.

According to Yang Hong, the typical blast furnace would produce around .5 to 1 ton of iron per year, so Needham's conjecture of "several hundred tons" is correct. This means Needham's estimate is the absolute minimum, and then minus some. First off he gave his annual production per blast furnace variable as 100 tonnes, when he himself said it should be several hundred. And then he assumes there is only one blast furnace per Iron Office(the number of furnaces in an Iron Office is unknown, but by definition the minimum is 1). So 5,000 tons per year would naturally be the absolute minimum the Han would produce. Besides, he said the figure was unwise. Donald Wagner, who quoted almost verbatim from Needham, said it would be "foolish".

If a Han blast furnace produced .5-1 ton per day as according to my previous post, and assuming one blast furnace per iron office, then that would mean a total of 49(number of iron offices)*274(amount of iron per year per blast furnace) = 13,426 tons per year during Wudi's time. Of course, this is a minimum considering there may be more than one furnace per Iron Office. This was also during a time when the Han government placed an iron monopoly throughout the empire, so all private iron production would be halted.

I'm assuming that under normal circumstances the Han dynasty would average around 20,000 tons per year. This is based off of authors who claimed that the Song dynasty iron production is six-fold that of the Tang (although I have yet to find a primary source for that). 125,000 divided by 6 is around 20,000. Because the Tang and Han had similar population levels and the Tang made no significant improvement on the blast furnace, one could very well say that the Han dynasty would produce around 20,000 tons per year.

A few things to consider. First, Hanshu was very clear that these offices did not only have one furnace. According to the text, in some places, there were over 100,000 people on a single foundary in a year "一岁功十万人以上". This means that there were at least dozens of furnaces in the larger foundaries.
Secondly, as stated before, the amount of foundaries during Eastern Han more than doubled when compared to the time of Wudi. So the comparative figures that are carelessly thrown around by Tibet Libre was not only unreliable, they are outright misleading.

Edited by Borjigin Ayurbarwada, 06 January 2011 - 11:16 PM.

[Tibet Libre]

There is a source floating around claiming that China (during the Han Dynasty) produced only 5,000 t of steel per year, compared to 82,500 t for the Roman Empire. I find this a little difficult to believe. Also, there are sources claiming China produced "negligible" amounts of gold, copper, and silver compared to one province of Rome.

For those who are not familiar with the topic, Forespidy refers to these two threads here and also here.

Does anyone have additional references to back up or refute these claims?

Craddock's 2008 number of around 80,00 t annual iron production of the Roman Empire is also supported by the following two references:
- Sim, David; Ridge, Isabel (2002): Iron for the Eagles. The Iron Industry of Roman Britain, Tempus, Stroud, Gloucestershire, ISBN 0-7524-1900-5, p. 23
- Healy, John F. (1978): Mining and Metallurgy in the Greek and Roman World, Thames and Hudson, London, ISBN 0-500-40035-0, p. 196

In fact, this is pretty much a very low estimation since it rests on the assumption that Roman per capita production was no more than one third of 17th century Great Britain's.

[sindeee]

In fact, this is pretty much a very low estimation since it rests on the assumption that Roman per capita production was no more than one third of 17th century Great Britain's.

Considering that Britain had large scale blast furnace productions which allowed its production of iron to increase by 10 times, I think 3 times is a very much high end estimate.

Edited by sindeee, 22 September 2010 - 11:32 AM.

[Borjigin Ayurbarwada]

Craddock's 2008 number of around 80,00 t annual iron production of the Roman Empire is also supported by the following two references:
- Sim, David; Ridge, Isabel (2002): Iron for the Eagles. The Iron Industry of Roman Britain, Tempus, Stroud, Gloucestershire, ISBN 0-7524-1900-5, p. 23
- Healy, John F. (1978): Mining and Metallurgy in the Greek and Roman World, Thames and Hudson, London, ISBN 0-500-40035-0, p. 196

Tibet Libre, stop citing multiple sources as if all of these scholars derived the same sets of data through separate estimation when in fact Craddock never made any estimations at all and merely based his figures on previous scholars like Sim and Ridge who merely revised their data from Healey and Clere's.
Its very academically dishonest of you to do that as it gives a false impression that this estimation is based on concrete evidence made by multiple scholars when it isn't. If you have bothered to take the time and take Sim and Ridge's book from the counter as I have done, you'll realize that their estimation is a complete assumption based on projections from estimations of several locations in Britain and they are far from certain about their own estimates.

Your mistreatment of sources doesn't come as a surprise since this isn't the first time you've done this; you've committed similar irresponsible citations with your quotation of Wagner's figure for the Han estimations as if it was some authoratative figure when in fact the writers which you've quoted stated the utter unreliability of their own guestimates themselves, all of this is because you never actually scrutinized the sources you've quoted; a trademark characteristic of yours since you've posted in this forum and its apparent that it hasn't changed. But I must congratulate you for at least quoting from sources instead of pulling intuitive statements from thin air, thats a great improvement from your behavior in the past.

Edited by Borjigin Ayurbarwada, 22 September 2010 - 02:28 PM.

[Tibet Libre]

Considering that Britain had large scale blast furnace productions which allowed its production of iron to increase by 10 times, I think 3 times is a very much high end estimate.

I don't think so. To reach this per capita production it would have needed not more than five hundred furnaces of the Ashwicken type in the whole of Roman Britain. The estimate is thus very much on the downside.

[Borjigin Ayurbarwada]

I don't think so. To reach this per capita production it would have needed not more than five hundred furnaces of the Ashwicken type in the whole of Roman Britain. The estimate is thus very much on the downside.

Its a high end estimate not only because the estimation of iron ranged from 250-800 tons in Weald alone, whereas the 82,500 tons is taking the high end of that estimate, but also because the figure of over 80000 tons of iron rests on the assumption that the per capita iron production in the rest of the Roman Empire is the same as it was in Britain, hence the projected figure for 82,500 tons from Britain's 2250 tons in proportion to the population of Britain in the Roman Empire. But that was clearly not the case when one examine Roman records since we know from Strabo that Britain is one of the area which exported iron to the other parts of the empire; "Britain bears grain, cattle, gold, silver and iron, these things accordingly, are exported from the island." Regions which export iron reflects a high level of iron productivity vis a vis the region which it exports iron to, having iron as one of its major export products, British iron productivity per capita wise is most likely higher than the rest of the empire. Really, estimations like this are fun for historians, but there is a major problem when a person takes it seriously.

Edited by Borjigin Ayurbarwada, 23 September 2010 - 02:24 AM.

[Tibet Libre]

Its a high end estimate ... because the figure of over 80000 tons of iron rests on the assumption that the per capita iron production in the rest of the Roman Empire is the same as it was in Britain,.. But that was clearly not the case ...

Yes, certainly, I've said a thousand times that the figure of 82,500 t is an extrapolation of the estimated output of Roman Britain. But unlike Strabo, modern authors do not assume that the productivity of Roman Britain was significantly above average:

Although Britain did export some iron, most was mined of manufacture of artefacts to be used in Britain. Davies notes that there was a very good supply of iron ore in Gaul, that would have been much easier to export to the rest of continental Europe should it be required. If we accept this fact, it is a great help in sizing the British iron industry as a whole.

[Sims then goes on to state the 2,250 t for Britain and the 82,500 t for the entire Roman empire.]

Source: Sim, David; Ridge, Isabel (2002): Iron for the Eagles. The Iron Industry of Roman Britain, Tempus, Stroud, Gloucestershire, ISBN 0-7524-1900-5, p. 22

There is also another reason why this figure is very much a low estimate: it rests on the largely superseded traditional notion that the population of the Roman Empire peaked at 55 m people. However, if we follow modern conservative estimates of 60-70 m, then the Roman total iron output would be somewhere between 90,000 and 105,000 t (for the estimated 1.5 kg per capita). The modern high count of 100 m Romans would even yield an output of 150,000 t.

[Borjigin Ayurbarwada]

Yes, certainly, I've said a thousand times that the figure of 82,500 t is an extrapolation of the estimated output of Roman Britain. But unlike Strabo, modern authors do not assume that the productivity of Roman Britain was significantly above average:

All it means is that we have absolutely no evidence to make a case for any reliable estimates. How much British iron productivity is above the average productivity in Rome is not known, nor has modern historians inquired the matter, but the fact that Strabo mentioned that Britain exported iron to the rest of the empire and that Gaul and Britain, two regions which had less than 1/6 of Rome's population were the major exporters to the rest of the empire, very well demonstrates that British iron productivity was higher than the average per capita productivity in the Empire and would place the stated total iron figure of the entire empire as an absolute high end estimate. The rest is a simple matter of guesswork as neither textual evidence survived, nor has significant archeological studies been done by these authors in question to regions outside of Britain.

Edited by Borjigin Ayurbarwada, 23 September 2010 - 11:27 AM.

[Tibet Libre]

Don't know how you can read into the references that Britain and Gaul were the largest iron producers in the Imperium Romanum, but we can certainly agree that the iron figures, in fact all figures on ancient economies including those on Han China, are rough estimations at best. This is what I have said all along, and this is why I don't understand why so many users feel threatened by the Roman output dwarfing that of the Han in all respects.

[Mei Houwang]

^Oh, don't pretend as to the real reason you're here. It's too late to cover up that fact now.

Edited by Mei Houwang, 23 September 2010 - 01:57 PM.