Rural markets, as well as cities and towns, facilitated the exchange of goods and services. Some of the products on sale in this city depicted in the scroll would have come from nearby farms, but others came from far away.

Then, as still often now, donkeys did much of the work in the North. For heavy transport there were wagons and large wheelbarrows, while camels linked China to the world beyond the deserts.

Water transport, however, has always been far cheaper than going over land. The South, with its many rivers and waterways, had an advantage in this respect, but northern cities too were served by water transport. Here we see men unloading bales of grain.

International maritime trade also flourished during this time. Quanzhou in the Fujian region became a major center of trade with Southeast and South Asia, as well as with Korea and Japan.