commerce and assign its practitioners to the lowest rung on a four-tier status
scale below that of government officials, peasants, and craftsmen. Confucianism
is above all a moral doctrine and, from a moral perspective, a merchant’s
business was seen as being based on greed and selfishness. Long-distance
trade was believed unnecessary since the empire was large and varied enough
to provide everything that could be needed to carry on a respectable econ-
omy. Furthermore, there was nothing positive to be gained from contact
with foreigners.
In practice, the government was more ambivalent toward trade and mer-
chants than the prevailing ideology, although such widely held attitudes in
high places made it easy to justify heavy commercial taxes or to assume
control over trade whenever it appeared advantageous. In theory, the gov-
ernment was supposed to ensure that goods were distributed fairly, and
many believed that if a profit was to be made it should go into the public
treasury rather than the greedy hands of private merchants. This led the late
second century BCEemperor Han Wudi, whose military adventures and
expensive foreign policy were“too high for calculation,”according to Sima
Qian’s successor, Ban Gu, to establish monopolies over the production and
sale of salt, iron, and alcoholic beverages, industries that had brought vast
fortunes to a few well-placed dealers. Subsequently, large-scale grain traffic
was also taken over to eliminate speculation in times of need. Monopolies
did, however, bring stability to the economy by regulating the prices of
basic commodities, and by the waning years of thefirst millenniumBCE, the
Chinese economy was highly commercialized. As an occupational group,
merchants ranged from the wealthiest of big-time entrepreneurs, who pos-
sessed not only vast riches but often political influence despite their social
standing, to the most wretched of village peddlers. In a queer twist, the
Chinese merchant, so distrusted in his own society, developed a reputation
on the international scene for his scrupulous honesty.
The idea that trade with the outside world could be taken or left, that it
didn’t really matter, did not match reality. The Chinese had a surplus of
some goods like silk and lacquerware, and the elite classes had been absorb-
ing imported luxury goods since thefirst jade arrived. Under the Han, the
official attitude toward long-distance trade was more positive than under
some other dynasties, not in the least because the state was one of the great
beneficiaries reaping substantial income from the various tariffs, taxes, and
fees it levied. Sima Qian saw merchants as providers of things people
wanted. If they became rich in the process, so much the better; acquisitive-
ness, so he thought, was natural to humans. In one of his biographical sket-
ches, he details the activities of a chieftain from a friendly nomadic tribe
living on the western border of China. This trader–chief swapped horses for
silk, which he exchanged with other chieftains for more horses, which he
then traded back to the Chinese. Soon his profits were ten times the value of
his investment, and he counted his herds by the valleyful.
124 From the Jade Road to the Silk Road