The Song Dynasty Chinese encyclopedia Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau (which had been compiled since 1005), is completed in one thousand volumes of none million four hundred thousand written Chinese characters.

The largest of the Four Great Books of Song, it is an encyclopedia of political essays, autobiographies, memorials and decrees.

Kaifeng, the capital of the Chinese Empire, becomes the largest city of the world around this time (1013), taking the lead from Córdoba in Al-Andalus.

The city has some half a million residents by 1020; the population is over a million people including all those present in the nine designated suburbs.

The Song military has one million registered soldiers by 1021, a ten percent increase over the twenty years since the turn of the eleventh century, when the Song military only had nine hundred thousand soldiers.