THE MERCHANT NETWORK

IN I6th CENTURY CHINA

A DISCUSSION AND TRANSLATION OF ZHANG 'S "ON MERCHANTS"

BY

TIMOTHY BROOK (Tokyo)

1. Introduction : The Place of Commerce in Ming Society

The latter half of the Ming dynasty is generally recognized as a period of active commercialization at local, regional, and national levels. The pioneering work of Chinese and Japanese historians begin- ning with the 193 os debate on the "sprouts of capitalism" brought Ming commercial activity out of its former obscurity and has made it a basic fact in our knowledge of Chinese history 1). What this work revealed about the growing wealth and power of merchants and the spread of a commodity economy can be supported by an abundant base of contemporary documents which these historians have assembled. Among Chinese historians, Fu Yiling has furnished the most compre- hensive sources on Ming commerce, most notably in his first book, Ming Qing Shidai Shangren ji ShangJe Ziben (Merchants and commercial capital in the Ming-Qing period). One of the sources which he cites in that book, and which continues to receive mention in discussions of the Ming economy, is the essay entitled "Shanggu Ji" (On merchants) by Zhang Han (15 I I - I 93) 2). This essay has not been translated, nor have the full implications of Zhang's suggestions for altering state policy toward merchants been examined. Both are attempted here as a contribution toward the problem which historians of the Ming and

1) Nishijima and Suzuki presents an intelligent summary of Chinese and Japanese contributions, as well as bibliographies of books and articles in both languages from 1950 to 2) Fu pp. 20-23, 161; also Fu pp. 40, 44, 46-47. For a more recent citation in the Chinese literature see Liu Yongcheng (1979), p. 34. I66

Qing have set for themselves since the i ? 5 os : why did the Chinese socioeconomy not respond with more significant qualitative change to the potentially transformative developments occurring in the Chinese economy since the 1 6th century? More specifically, why did commercial capital not shift from pure circulation to become the foundation of production? A counterfactual question is obliged to take this negative form, yet considering such a question may lead us forward to a more positively stated understanding of the dynamic elements of Chinese social and economic history.

(i) Ming merchants and regional economies Merchants have played many roles of varying importance in the economy of China. Since the second millennium B.C. they have served to create economic links within Han and Inner Asian worlds, and this economic role has been of critical importance in forming a long history of specialization and exchange in the Chinese economy. During the Warring States period, the wealth of some merchants brought them social and political roles as well, as records in the chapter on commodities (1 29) in the Shi Ji (pp. 325 5 ff) 3). The power that the merchants gained because of the needs of warring states was per- ceived as a threat to the stability of the unified state, and the Han dynasty began a series of anti-commercial laws and practices which, as Zhang Han demonstrates, were continued in different forms through to his own day (see the translation, section 3). The functions and distribu- tion of private merchants in the Ming should be dated to somewhat later origins in the mid to late Tang when state control of commercial

3) References to the Shi Ji are to the Beijing Zhonghua Shuju edition of 1972 (a reprint of the 1959 edition). Pre- writings also bear testimony to the political success available to merchants. A nice example is found toward the end of the first chapter of Zhuang Zi, in which a man buys the prescription for a salve which prevents chapped hands from a dyer in Song (traditional home of fools) for what seems an enormous price to the dyer, and presents it to the king of Wu for his sailors to use in their victorious battle against Yue. His reward is lordship of part of the conquered territory. This tale may be found in Watson (1968), pp. An oversight in the translation is rendering ke simply as "traveler" rather than in the sense of keshang or "itinerant merchant".