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The Song Empire (960-1279 CE) had a larger population, a higher agricultural output, a more efficient infrastructure, and a more extensive monetary system than any previous empire in Chinese history. As local jurisdictions during the eleventh century became entangled in empire-wide economic relations and trans-regional commercial litigation, imperial officials sought to reduce the bewildering movement of people, goods, and money to an immanent cosmic pattern. They reasoned that because money and commerce brought to imperial subjects the goods they required to survive, money and commerce must be beneficent, and because they were beneficent, they must conform to the immanent pattern of the moral cosmos, as did everything else that was enduringly sustaining of life and wellbeing. And because money and commerce conformed to the moral cosmos, officials attempted to understand their workings by analogy with other phenomena that sustained human life, such as the flow of water and the circulation of vital essences through the human body. During the 1030s and 1040s, officials and scholars believed that knowledge of the cosmic pattern lay within their grasp, and that this knowledge would allow them to align culture with nature, and the present with hallowed antiquity. By the 1080s, however, this intellectual optimism had been defeated by irreconcilable disagreements about financial and economic policy. The failure of the attempt to understand finance by natural analogy draws attention to the underlying ideological insistence on moral learning as the basis for political power, and to the very limited range of economic discourse that has been preserved in eleventh-century texts.

In Song-dynasty Kaifeng, empire and emporia existed in a relationship of mutual dependence and mutual competition. Th e imperial government depended on merchants for the shipment of grain and goods to supply its massive armies and to pay the salaries of its officials; the merchants derived their income directly or indirectly from these government expenditures. Th e concentration of wealth and goods in the capital generated in turn a culture of sumptuary competition. Th e contests over space in the streets of the capital, and the competition for the goods that circulated through them, reveal confi gurations of power that rarely fi nd direct expression in writing. À Kaifeng, capitale des Song du Nord, l'empire et les emporia se trouvaient dans une relation de dépendance mais aussi de compétition. En eff et, le gouvernement impérial dépen-dait des marchands pour le transport des grains et des marchandises avec lesquels il approvisionnait ses armées et payait les traitements de ses fonctionnaires. Réciproquement les marchands tiraient la plupart de leurs revenus des dépenses gouvernementales. La concentration des richesses et des biens dans la capitale entraîna en retour une compétition somptuaire. La concurrence pour l'espace dans les rues métropolitaines et les rivalités pour * ) Christian de Pee, Department of History, University of Michigan, USA, cdepee@ umich.edu.I wish to express my gratitude to Jos Gommans for inviting me to participate in the conference on "Empires and Emporia," and to publish the resulting paper. A semester of nurturance leave during the winter of 2008, kindly granted by the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, aff orded me the time to write the essay. In addition to the participants in the JESHO conference, audience members at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and participants in a lively session of the Premodern Colloquium at the University of Michigan off ered valuable insights and criticisms. I am grateful to Linda Cooke Johnson, Lara Kusnetzky, Rachel Neis, Michael Nylan, Helmut Puff , Ivo Smits, Angela Zito, and an anonymous reader for JESHO for their comments on the manuscript, and for their encouragement.

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