30 Chapter Tivo
imperial carriage. Everyone sees them and the people pity them
and lament.^16
Under the remorseless pressure of circumstance, therefore, even
the humblest members of Chinese society were compelled to enter
the market whenever they could, seeking always to increase their
overall material well-being. As a writer of the early fourteenth century
put it:
These days, wherever there is a settlement of ten households,
there is always a market for rice and salt. ... At the appropriate
season, people exchange what they have for what they have not,
raising or lowering the prices in accordance with their estimate of
the eagerness or diffidence shown by others, so as to obtain the
last small measure of profit. This is of course the usual way of the
world. Although Ting-ch’iao is no great city, its river will still
accommodate boats and its land routes carts. Thus it, too, serves
as a town for peasants who trade and artisans who engage in
commerce.^17
Or again:
All the men of An-chi county can graft mulberry trees. Some of
them take their living solely by sericulture. For subsistence it is
necessary that a family of ten persons rear ten frames of silk
worms. ... Supplying one’s food and clothing by these means
insures a high degree of stability. One month’s toil is better than a
whole year’s exertion at farming.^18
On top of such local exchanges, an urban hierarchy arose, starting
with rural towns, then provincial cities, and rising to a few truly met
ropolitan centers located along the Grand Canal that connected the
Yangtse valley with that of the Yellow River. At the apex, and
dominating the whole exchange system, was K’ai-feng, the capital of
- Quoted in Hugh Scogin, “Poor Relief in Northern Sung China,” Oriens extremus
25 (1978): 41.
- Ting-ch’iao was located in the lower Yangtse region. This passage comes from a
local gazetteer, written between 1330 and 1332, quoted from Yoshinobu Shiba, “Ur
banization and the Development of Markets on the Lower Yangtse Valley,” in Haeger,
Crisis and Prosperity, p. 28. Shiba’s essay admirably connects the commercialization of
specific localities with landscape variations (hill vs. flood plain), transport networks, and
population growth. Obviously, not all of China was as highly developed as the region of
the lower Yangtse valley. But it was what happened in that region and in the lower
reaches of the Yellow River plain that set the pace for the new social and economic
developments of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.
- Ibid., p. 36, translating Ch’en Fu, Treatise on Agriculture, first printed in 1154.
