Brook details the rise of commerce in China over the course of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). He shows how the increasing wealth of the merchant class disrupted previously established social hierarchies and norms. This wealth redistribution affected areas as diverse as rice production and subsistence farming, methods of communication, trade, and travel, textile manufacturing, and the enjoyment of the arts. In doing so, Brook develops an overall history of Ming China from the ground up- its rise and its eventual collapse.
Brook begins with the ideal model of how the first Ming emperor, Hongwu, envisioned Chinese society. “The emperor’s vision of an agrarian order was the Daoist model of a little elite of virtuous elders supervising self-sufficient villages and forwarding modest taxes to a minimalist state. Cultivators were tied to their villages, artisans bound to state service, merchants charged with moving only such necessities as were lacking, and soldiers posted to the frontier.” The Ming Code, the core laws of the dynasty, prohibited family lineages from switching occupations, just as it proscribed physical migration within the counties of China.
Ming China had a population of over 75 million subjects. It relied on a partially integrated system of courier, postal, and transport networks to move grain, officials, soldiers, and ambassadors across the realm by water and by road. The Grand Canal, which ended in Beijing, officially started south in Hangzhou, but a series of smaller canals made Ningbo its real southern terminus. 47,000 full-time workers were needed to maintain, dredge, and operate the canal. The journey from Hangzhou to Beijing took about forty days. This official waterway was also used by merchants, who tagged along on grain barges and other ships running imperial business. Private boats were also allowed to use the canal, as long as preference was given to vessels conducting state business.
In the early Ming, particularly, there was a great wealth disparity between China’s north and south. One Korean visitor sailing up the Grand Canal observed, “spacious tile-roofed houses south of the Yangzi, thatch-roofed hovels north; sedan chairs south, horses and donkeys north; gold and silver in the market south, copper cash north; diligence in farming, manufacturing, and commerce south, indolence north; pleasant dispositions south, quarrelsome tempers north; education south, illiteracy north.” Confucian philosophy tended to demean the merchant class. “To be a merchant was to be in the bottommost and least respected of the ancient “four categories of the people” (simin), which descended from gentry (shi) to peasant (nong) to artisan (gong) to merchant (shang).” However, as land became scarcer and droughts and floods perennially created bad harvests, enterprising people were forced off their lands to try to peddle goods and act as commercial middlemen. Farm land was consolidated and surplus crops were sold in urban markets.
Over the years, this merchant class gradually grew in wealth, if not prestige, and social mechanisms sprung up to deal with this burgeoning trade. “While the government relied on registers to keep track of land ownership, the people kept their own records by writing contracts—as they had been doing for centuries—the size and location of the land under transaction, its price, and the conditions, consequences, and legal responsibilities attached to the sale.” While most contracts were written by scribes by hand, the use of contracts was also facilitated by printing. “Xylography (the technology of printing from wooden blocks) was developed well before the Ming. What the Ming period marks in the history of printing is a notable expansion in the volume and variety of texts…. Paper and ink were manufactured in greater volume, woodblock carvers more widely available and working at lower wages, new fonts designed to speed up the rate of carving, new ways of compacting knowledge onto pages devised, and wider distribution systems set up. The state did its part at the very start of the dynasty by canceling the tax on books in 1368.” Hongwu also prescribed certain books as mandatory reading. Ancient Confucian classics, modern law handbooks, moral primers, and, especially, his own Grand Pronouncements (Dagao) and his Proclamation to the People (Jiaomin bangwen) were published, distributed, and required to be read by all amongst the literate class.
Within China, local brokers acted to connect merchants transacting goods from region to region. They were the grease which allowed the machine of commerce to flow smoothly throughout the realm. Brokers drew up the contracts, acted as middlemen, and guaranteed against fraud. Silver was the medium of exchange for major transactions, copper coins for smaller ones. “The wholesale trade even before the Ming thus involved three distinct parties: the merchant who owned the goods but did not personally ship them, the shipper who arranged for their transportation by hiring boats and engaging boatmen on the wholesaler’s behalf, and the broker who did neither but used his knowledge of local market conditions to arrange commercial agreements beneficial to both parties.”
Besides salt, tea, and alum the Ming state did not control any monopolies. It charged a 3.3 percent commercial tax on transactions, a “shop and stall” tax on retailers, and modest transit taxes for using state waterways and roads. In 1436, taxes were replaced from grain duties and corvee labor to simply being paid in silver. The 15th century scholar, Qiu Jun, comments on the relatively free markets at this time, “When the people operate their own markets, they can readily negotiate quality and price to determine whether or not to buy something. When officials operate markets for people, quality and prices are invariably fixed, yet self-interest and hidden dealings crop up all over the place. To operate [a state market] that produces profit and avoids corruption is difficult. The better course is for state administration not to get involved.”
The construction and upkeep of infrastructure, such as floating bridges and commercial roads, was organized by the local magistrate, but contributions came from “charitable commoners,” usually wealthy merchants and gentry. The central state played no role beyond major arteries like the Grand Canal and the highways needed to transport its soldiers. The Hongwu emperor did mandate the construction of one school per county, but again, the actual construction was handled at the local magistrate level, who sometimes also built a library with his own private collection. The gentry administrator, Zhang Tao, had a nuanced Confucian view of the rise of the merchant class. “Those who went out as merchants became numerous, and the ownership of land was no longer esteemed. As men matched wits using their assets, fortunes rose and fell unpredictably. The capable succeeded, the dull-witted were destroyed.”
Commerce in the Ming truly blossomed when the people moved from subsistence growing, beyond surplus growing, to commodity agriculture. “The growth of the cotton and silk trades induced Jiangnan people to plant cotton and tend mulberry trees on a scale beyond personal consumption. The northern Zhejiang silk market, for instance, was sufficiently developed that people could sell not only silk thread, which they produced by feeding silkworms on mulberry leaves they grew themselves, but the leaves as well. In Chongde county, for example, by the sixteenth century some peasants did not plant just a few mulberry trees in order to raise silkworms to “survive through lean harvests” but were growing fields of them so as to be able to sell the leaves commercially to mulberry leaf traders who in turn sold to other silk-producers. Merchants and producers both calculated to take advantage of fluctuations in the price of mulberry leaves as supply and demand shifted.”
Silk production was not the only area of specialization. A mid-Ming gazatteer mentions “Raozhou merchants, who distributed the porcelains produced in the kilns of Jungdezhen in Jiangxi. He mentions Huizhou merchants, who became the most prominent and prosperous commercial dealers in the dynasty…. He also mentions that Nanjing, Suzhou, and Linqing merchants dominated the silk trade, as also did Hangzhou merchants.” Brook continues, “Regions such as Jiangnan and the southeast coast produced the fabrics that “clothed the realm,” as the saying went, regions such as Shandong and Henan produced the raw materials for the weavers, while yet other regions such as Huguang and Guangxi grew the grain the weavers ate. An interregional—and maybe even a “national” economy—was emerging.”
Besides such essentials as horses, weapons, ironware, copper, and silk, Chinese merchants were also free to trade with foreign markets. “Zhangzhou’s port of Yuegang (Moon Harbor) was the center of the licensed (and unlicensed) maritime trade on the southern coast of Fujian.” Expat communities of Chinese traders established themselves throughout southeast Asia, while commercial trade with Japan, the Portugese in Macau, and the Spanish in the Philippines steadily grew. Chinese merchants mainly took back in silver with all of this outflow of goods. “Raw Chinese silk could be sold in Japan for about double its Chinese price; cotton thread and ceramics fetched between two and three times their price; high-quality silk fabrics sold for almost three times; licorice more than tripled its price…. [On the other hand,] silver traded at a much higher value in China than it did in either Europe or Japan.” Chinese merchants were also rising in prestige, as well as in wealth. “In 1504, Shanghai men regarded commercial travel as shameful; twenty years later, Shanghai merchants were traveling as far as Beijing, Shandong, and Huguang.”
With the merchant class’s rise came a dislodging of the stable social hierarchy. This change in status was most felt by the gentry class, who for centuries had been firmly planted at the top. “Being a sociocultural rather than economic category, gentry defies precise definition. At its core were those who held titles granted by the state principally through the examination system. But the status that degree-holders enjoyed extended to various educated relatives and to those whose cultural attainments and social networks gave them entree into the world of scholarship and connoisseurship that marked off the elite.” Being recognized as gentry also held prestige that could be passed down to one’s descendants. “The lineage—the collectivity of families acknowledging group cohesion through their male members—was the kinship unit above the family with which most people identified, and to which they became increasingly bound by ties of moral and financial obligation in the mid-Ming as the lineage acquired shared assets and a corporate identity.”
As the Ming dynasty progressed, wealth was replacing scholarship as the mark of status. Rich merchants took to wearing silk robes and concave hats, holding multi-course banquets, eating exotic fruits, planting rare trees in their homes, and collecting expensive porcelains and calligraphy. The luxury of reading also spread with the development of newspapers, books for amusement rather than moral education, and the private post to disseminate letters. Personal travel to see exotic sites and pilgrimages to monasteries became in vogue. Writing in the 1570’s, the scholar Chen Yao comments, “Now the young dandies in the villages say that even silk gauze isn’t good enough and lust for Suzhou embroideries, Song-style brocades, cloudlike gauzes, and camel serge…. It’s what they call fashion (shiyang), the look of the moment.”
Brook ends his book with the invasion of China by the Manchu in 1644 and the establishment of their own Qing dynasty. He questions whether moral decay and the breaking of social bonds, led by the rise of commercial culture, really did hasten the end of the Ming dynasty, as contemporary scholars were apt to complain. “The class system of overlordship and deference that held the Chinese world together at the beginning of the Ming was still there at the end. It had been much transformed by commerce, as merchants found their way into the elite and gentry turned to business to augment their income. But it had not dismantled it. For all the busy mobility that communication and commerce induced within Ming society, the structural distinction between those who ruled and those who were ruled was not weakened.”
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