Counterfactual

宋商

Song Merchant

Head a trading house in Northern Song China, from 1080 to the fall of Kaifeng in 1127.

In development · for PC on Steam

Background

The realm in 1080

It is the third year of Yuanfeng (元豐), 1080. The Song realm runs from the Liao border south of Yanjing to the island of Hainan, and from the Sichuan basin to the Fujian coast: 298 prefectures, each with its own market.

China has never been so commercial. Grain from the lower Yangzi comes up the Grand Canal to feed the capital at Kaifeng. Sichuan trades in paper money, the jiaozi (交子). Tea goes west to buy horses on the Tibetan frontier. Silk, porcelain and copper cash sail from Guangzhou and Mingzhou for the Southern Seas, Korea and Japan. Every market town has its brokers, its guilds and its pawnshops.

The state stands in the middle of this trade. Under Emperor Shenzong's New Policies (新法), drafted by Wang Anshi from 1069, the government lends seed money to farmers, buys and sells through its own trade bureau, and runs granaries to steady the price of grain. A merchant meets the state as customer, creditor, tax collector and competitor.

Your house starts in one prefecture with three of its people, one boat and 500 strings of cash (貫).

Boats unloading sacks of grain at a snowy canal wharf
Yangzhou (揚州) on the Grand Canal, where a new house starts by default. Town view from the game.
A canal and arched bridge in Kaifeng under a grey sky
Kaifeng (開封府) in the game's last years.

The story

Forty-seven years

The game follows the period's political history as the sources date it. Policies are repealed and restored, wars start and end, the coinage changes, and the house has to live with each of these turns.

  1. 1080Your house opens for business. The New Policies are in force.
  2. 1085–86Shenzong dies. The Yuanyou (元祐) regency repeals most of the New Policies.
  3. 1087–88Quanzhou and Mizhou open maritime trade offices (市舶司).
  4. 1094The Shaosheng (紹聖) restoration brings the reforms back.
  5. 1096–99War with Xia on the north-west frontier.
  6. 1100–02Huizong takes the throne. Cai Jing (蔡京) takes charge of the court.
  7. 1103–06The state casts ten-cash coins (當十錢), then devalues them.
  8. 1115The Jurchen proclaim the Jin (金) in the north-east of Liao.
  9. 1120The Song make an alliance with the Jin against Liao. Fang La rises in Zhejiang.
  10. 1122–23The Song attack on Yanjing fails. The Jin take the city and sell it back to the Song.
  11. 1125Liao falls. The Jin turn south, and Huizong abdicates.
  12. 1126–27Kaifeng is besieged twice and falls, and both emperors are carried north. The game ends here and scores your house.

Free play runs the same world with no history and no end.

Intention

Rebuild the society, then let it run

Song Merchant simulates how the Northern Song economy and society worked, and puts a household inside it. The game's numbers come from the period: harvests and yields, prices, freight, taxes, the coin in circulation and the size of the great merchant houses. A number we had to estimate is marked as an estimate, and no number is tuned to make the game play better.

Built from the record

Prefectures, routes, goods, farmland and the state's institutions come from the period's sources and from modern economic history. The world is built from a research library that grows with the game.

One set of rules

About 800 great merchant houses, the smaller traders and four rival households all trade under the rules and costs that bind you. A rival gets rich the way you could, and goes under the same way.

You know what the news tells you

Prices from elsewhere arrive as they did then, carried by travellers and letters and days or weeks old. The map shows what your house has heard and fades what has gone stale.

By hand or handed over

You can run any part of the house yourself, including trade, convoys, lending and the family, or leave it to its stewards, and switch back at any time. The rival houses are played by the same decision code.

The game map of the Song realm coloured by the price of rice, with the side panel open on Yangzhou
The realm in the first days of 1080, in the price map mode, with the side panel open on Yangzhou.
The market screen at Yangzhou listing goods, prices, stock and the best known place to sell
The market at Yangzhou: price, stock, and the best known place to sell after freight and tax.
An event card in which the county magistrate presses Green Sprouts loans on the house
A county lends Green Sprouts money (青苗錢) by household grade, and your house is named head guarantor.

Where it stands

What is built

The game can be played from 1080 to the end, in Chinese and English, in a browser or as a desktop app.

298prefectures, as of 1080
~80goods with their own markets
~800great merchant houses, placed from the record
212events
156dated turning points
  • Markets, harvests, people and migration across the realm, simulated day by day.
  • Travel by river, canal, road and sea, at the period's speeds and freight costs.
  • The state: taxes in coin and in kind, granaries and relief, the mint, the Green Sprouts loans and the other New Policies.
  • Border markets with Liao and Xia, the tea-and-horse trade, and voyages to the Southern Seas, Korea and Japan.
  • The house: warehouses, boats, carts, ships, workshops and pawnshops; loans and deposits; marriages, children, the examinations and office.
  • Illustrated town views, portraits and event scenes, in the woodblock style shown on this page.
  • Ten-year test runs that check the economy against the historical record.
  • A play server where AI agents can run rival houses under the same rules and through the same orders as a human player.

The plan

What we are building next

  1. The period's economy, completed from the sources In progress

    We are settling the design point by point against the research. Next come the commercial tax as it was collected, at the 1,985 tax offices of 1077 along the trade routes; the toll of famine, using the period's own figures; and how households of each class spent and saved.

  2. Situations: the crises your house lives through Designed

    The period's great crises become situations that play out over a region and over years. The first is the northern affair of 1120–27 (北事): the alliance with the Jin, the war for Yanjing and the fall of Kaifeng. The powers press the house for grain, coin and loyalty, putting its property, its family and the life of its head at risk. The same years also open chances that peacetime never offers.

    At each turning point, three members of the house argue for three courses of action. Each argues from what the house knows that day, without hindsight, and none of them is simply right. History bends only at the few points that historians read as genuinely open, and at those points it can turn out otherwise. Our company is named for that possibility.

  3. The world beyond the realm Research

    Liao and Xia become economies in their own right, with their own markets and prices, and the Jin rise inside Liao's territory from 1115. A house that trades across the border has to deal with three states and with prices, risks and loyalties in each of them. In time the game will cover the whole of China in this period.

  4. Release on Steam Planned

    Song Merchant will be released for PC on Steam, on Windows, Mac, Linux and Steam Deck, in Chinese and English.