ABSTRACT
The mood of the moment in Hangchow was hardly conducive to valor. Farther to the west, this was an uneasy epoch of war and conquest in which the Christians launched their often bloody crusades, Saladin was to take Jerusalem, and the merciless hordes of Genghis Khan were to ravage Asia from the Mediterranean to the China Seas. Cash and food were distributed to the needy, and the state ran hospitals, orphanages, and almshouses. But poverty still dogged the peasant, who might drown an unwanted baby at birth in a lean year, and many unfortunates slept in the streets of the capital. Even before the loss of the north, Wang An-shih, the great "socialist" reformer of the dynasty who had tried to narrow the gap between rich and ragged, had been unable to prevail for long against China's grasping and corrupt conservatives. Li decreed that China should be a centralized state administered by scholar-officials versed in the Classics.
