Dieter Kuhn

Dieter Kuhn is a German sinologist who taught at Würzburg and worked mainly on Song China and on the history of technology, textiles and silk among it. The Age of Confucian Rule, published by Harvard in 2009, is his volume in the six-part History of Imperial China that Timothy Brook edited. He argues that the Song is where the recognisable shape of later China was set: an examined bureaucracy instead of an aristocracy, a money economy, printing at scale, cities that were commercial rather than administrative, and a reworked Confucianism that supplied the framework for the next eight hundred years. He treats the loss of the north as a political fact rather than as a decline.