Liturgical Services and Business Fortunes 301
able to provide the urban community with indispensable leadership.
In practice, they took over the traditional role of the scholar-gentry in
providing social amenities and community services and performed these
more effectively. All this benevolence helped to blur the cultural stigma
attached to trade and gained merchants social and ofβicial acceptance,
and merchants who wished to obtain gentry (shen) status through the
purchase of ofβicial titles encountered remarkably few obstacles. They
bought land and adopted the same lifestyle as the scholar-gentry.^36 Not
surprisingly, merchants and gentry (shenshang) were often mentioned
together in social activities during Qing times and the line between the
two groups became blurred.^37
“Merchants”, in Susan Mann’s words, “thus became key members
of what Max Weber termed the informal ‘liturgical’ structures of local
governance”, that meant local elites were called upon by the authorities to
perform important “liturgical” (or “public”) services on the state’s behalf
at their own expense.^38 Guilds or merchant associations formed part of
the liturgical constituency, “drawing strength from the government’s
sanction of their liturgical functions”.^39 The hang merchants in Amoy,
the jiao merchants in Taiwan and the Cohong merchants in Guangzhou
provide good examples of the liturgical services that were performed.
Hang Merchants in Amoy
The late βifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries witnessed the rise of
such South Fujian seaports as Anping, Yuegang (Haicheng) and Amoy.
This period was characterized by social upheavals and political turmoil.
Signiβicantly, maritime bans, the invasion of Japanese pirates and the
struggle led by the Zheng family against the incoming Manchu regime had
not prevented the entrepreneurial Fujianese merchants from responding
to new opportunities with marked consequences for the development
of maritime trade. When peace was restored after the Qing conquest of
- Wang Gung wu, China and the Chinese Overseas, p. 183.
- Yü Ying-s hih. Chung-kuo ching-shih tsung-jiao lun-li, p, 161; and Susan Mann,
Local Merchants, pp. 22‒3. - Susan Mann, Local Merchants, pp. 12‒3. The author provides a most illuminating
discussion on the subject of liturgical governance and the merchant class. See
Chapter 2. The area of urban services as well as of social welfare is termed
“an extra bureaucratic ‘civic’ or ‘public’ sphere” by William Rowe. See Rowe,
Hankow: Conϔlict and Community, p. 183. In the same work, Rowe has also
contributed an excellent description of merchant roles in providing “popular
welfare”, “public goods” and “public services”. See Part II. - Susan Mann, Local Merchants, pp. 13, 24.