Studies in Chinese Price History

Endymion Porter Wilkinson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429858253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

This book, first published in 1980, uses a body of original documentary sources (some 5000 district grain price reports) to quantify, in the form of exchange and price zones, the relationships between the exchange markets and the grain markets of ninety district towns in Shensi, a province in China. Through this study there emerges a detailed picture of a near subsistence agricultural economy.

CHAPTER 1

General Introduction

In this thesis I have attempted to use a body of original documentary sources (some 5000 district grain price reports) to quantify, in the form of exchange and price zones, the relationships between the exchange markets and the grain markets of ninety district towns in a province in north-west China, Shensi. The years covered by the reports were 1900-1910 but since no new forms of transport had come to the province at that time and since the monetary system was essentially as it had been for the previous one hundred years, I selected Shensi rather than Szechwan or Kiangsu (for both of which provinces we also have the same type of reports) in the belief that Shensi at that time might legitimately be regarded as a province at a pre-modern stage of development.

Before beginning the analysis of the exchange rates and the grain prices in the Shensi markets however certain preliminary questions with regard to the grain price reports and exchange reports had to be answered, for, so far as I know, this type of report has never been used in Chinese historical studies before.

The first Chinese historian to draw attention to the importance of grain price reports and exchange reports was Chang Hstieh-oh’eng in the 18th century. Chang commented that although the summaries of these reports which were sent to the emperor were probably not too reliable, the original documents upon which they based were much more so. He recommended that compilers of gazetteers record commodity and grain prices in each district every ten years. Unfortunately few if any followed his advice.¹ Of modem Chinese historians only Liu I-cheng drew attention to the grain price reports, in an article on rice prices in Kiangsu. As an appendix to the article he published selections from a series of price reports with the terse comment.

It was a Ch’ing institution that local officials report on grain prices to provincial governors. The governors memorialized on them to the central government. Usually every month. If we look at the Vermilion Endorsements and Edicts (of the Yung-cheng period) we can see that at that time (1723-1735) provincial officials had to send in reports (on grain prices) punctually, based on the investigations of the local officials.²

Since Liu wrote these words several historians have worked on the rice prices contained in the memorials of provincial governors in the Vermilion Endorsements and Edicts (of the Yung-cheng period), notably Abe Takeo and Ch’üan Han-sheng with the collaboration of Wang Yeh-chien.³ None of these scholars however related the price summaries in the memorials to the original district reports or discussed the purposes for reporting on prices and the methods used to collect them. As a consequence when I found several thousand original district price reports in a Tokyo collection there was no immediate way of knowing what type of prices they were, who had collected them and for what purposes they had been collected. Parts of chapter three and all of chapter four of this thesis are attempts to answer these questions. Why such a lengthy effort was required to evaluate what was after all a routine administrative activity, not only in imperial China, but also in many other pre-industrial societies, is a question whose answer leads us to a brief consideration of the nature of Chinese historical sources.

During the 19th century when historians in western countries were beginning to emphasize the importance of arohival sources as opposed to essentially literary sources, Chinese historians were still drawing on a long tradition of handling and quoting from archival sources. For historical reasons however that tradition never developed in this century into a full scale assault on national and local archives; there were many notable attempts to preserve the national archives, to edit and publish the materials in them, but these efforts were only able to skim the surface. At the local level the collecting and preservation, not only of the type of materials to be found in local yamen, guild head-quarters etc., but also such private documents as deeds of sale, contracts of all sorts, account books etc., never really even began. Local and private materials were almost totally neglected and vast quantities of them must have been lost or destroyed in the upheavals of these years.

Those who approach the study of Chinese history can therefore draw on a highly developed historiographical tradition but they are often not in a position to check or corroborate works produced in that tradition. Nor, frequently, if they decide to move outside the essential areas covered in that tradition, can they draw on the type of source often taken for granted in other countries. Thus China had a long and highly developed commercial history, for example, but few if any of the account books of even the most famous businesses have been brought to light by historians.⁴ Turning to a more familiar field for another example, that of administration, we have at least sixteen editions of the administrative regulations of the Board of Revenue (Hu-putse-li) in the Ch’ing period, but we do not have the accounts and receipts of the central government, nor do we have the accounts and receipts of the provincial and district governments which were kept in the archives of the Board. We have the five editions of the Collected Statutes of the Ch’ing Dynasty (which carry the administrative regulations of the entire central government) but we only have a few of the provincial equivalents of this work (the sheng-li) and practically none of the cases and investigatory reports which would allow us to gain some idea as to how these regulations worked in actual practice.

At the provincial and district levels there are, to be sure, the enormous resources of the provincial and local gazetteers. These works however were never intended as a substitute for the local archives nor were they intended as practical guidebooks to local administrative problems. Usually only edited two or three times in a hundred years their primary purpose was to enshrine the notable people, places and literary output of a given locality. They contain much else besides however, and their utilization can provide insights which the non-availability of local documentary sources makes particularly valuable.

In the case of a system such as price reporting, which was based upon a local administrative activity (the gathering and summarizing of district market prices) the gazetteers, as Chang Hsüeh-ch’eng deplored, have nothing to offer. Nor do the great central government compendia of administrative regulations, by their very nature, present the type of material required for the evaluation of this kind of local activity. In evaluating the price reporting system therefore I turned to the type of informal source so brilliantly used by Ch’ü T’ung-tsu in Local Government in China Under the Ch’ing. By good fortune I found about half a dozen handwritten copies of handbooks written by secretarial assistants in charge of financial matters (ch’ien-ku lao-yeh

as they were familiarly referred to) active in Shantung and Fukien in the first part of the 19th century.⁵ On the basis of these works and various compendia of provincial administrative and legal regulations I was able to attempt a reconstruction of the price reporting system with the object of establishing the nature of the price quotations in the reports. I have also made the suggestion, in the course of this reconstruction, that such a system was a Ch’ing innovation at least insofar as the entire process of reporting and summarizing was regularly carried out at every level of the bureaucracy. The implications of this tentative finding however are not fully explored for my original purpose in reconstructing the price reporting system was not to make a comment upon the historical evolution of a key area of Chinese administrative concern. It was, rather, to provide some grounds for deciding whether to put aside or use that highly unusual type of Chinese historical source which chance had placed in my hands; a body of basic documentary materials, a series of some 5,000 district price reports.

In the event I reached the conclusion that the price quotations in the district reports were market prices and that they were not customary assessments for tax commutation or means of assessing additional fees as part of that system. The positive part of this conclusion was based upon the reconstruction of the entire price reporting system as it had developed in the Ch’ing period. The negative part was rapidly arrived at simply by checking on the tax systems of one of the provinces (Shensi) from which several thousand of the reports had been submitted.⁶

That so much work had to be spent upon the evaluation of the basic documents used in this thesis and that the evaluation had often to be done using rare or informal (i.e. not printed) sources arose from the fact that the type of work on basic documents which can be taken for granted in other areas of historical writing has simply not been done, as I have suggested above, in many fields of Chinese history.

The evaluation of the documents and their contents occupies portions of Chapter 2 (2.4 Recording and Reporting Cash/Silver Exchange Rates) and all of Chapter 4 (Grain Price Reporting and Grain Price Quotations during the the Ch’ing). Both reporting on cash/silver exchange rates (C/S rates) and reporting on grain prices are found to have been conducted for the first time on a regular basis in the 18th century. Decisions on the allocation of grain were now being taken on a much higher level than before. Although all the elements of the 18th century system had existed for many centuries the achievement of the 18th century was the regularization on a national scale of the system of reporting and scrutiny implied in the development of the practice of monthly grain price reports. The emergence of this system at this time was presumably connected with the increasing awareness that population was running ahead of resources and that grain prices were rising more rapidly than ever before. The mid-Ch’ing government, no doubt spurred by this realization, was the first to conceive the entire system of public granaries as being controlled and operated on the basis of the monthly district price reports. It is a selection from these reports which forms the basis of the analysis of the Shensi grain market in Chapter 5.

Before turning to the Shensi grain price quotations however a number of monetary problems are considered. In Chapter 2 (Money), I have given the basic monetary terminology necessary for an understanding of prices and price quotations. Short sections on the two sectors of the Chinese monetary system i.e. the cash (copper) sector and the silver sector (2.2 and 2.3) core followed by an examination of long-term and short-term factors affecting changes between the two sectors as reflected in the C/S rates. These rates were quotations of the amount of a given type of cash which exchanged for a given type of tael (silver unit of account). They had not survived in sufficient numbers to trace differences between many different markets within a single region or province until the discovery of the grain price reports from Shensi which I have already referred to. Since these reports also include C/S rates I have been able to present (in Chapter 3, Cash/Silver Exchange Rates in Shensi. 1900-1910) a preliminary study of differences of C/S rates in 90 district towns over a period of ten years. This chapter shows the extremely dislocated nature of the money or exchange markets within a province which was one of the richer of China’s poor provinces. After testing integration between exchange markets in a number of different ways, I divide up the province into about fifteen groups of towns having similar levels of C/S rates. That there was no national exchange market (as pointed out in Chapter 2) covering the whole of a country the size of Europe should not surprise us, but that C/S rates even within the boundaries of only one province were not integrated is surprising. The fact that they were not is taken as a reflection of the monetary chaos into which China had fallen from the end of the 19th century on the one hand, and on the other, as a reflection of the slow communications and high transport costs in this part of China.

In order that others may use the data in the reports I have appended all the C/S rates from the Shensi district towns at the end of this chapter as well as the statistical analysis.

Chapter 5 (Shensi Grain Markets, 1900-1910) opens with a brief account of the agricultural sector of the Shensi economy at this time. Since the total product of the province was almost entirely derived from this sector no attempt was made to allow for other sectors. I have attempted to calculate production per capita expressing output in terms of a single unit, namely kilograms of wheat equivalent per person per year (kw/p/y). The basis for calculating these equivalents are the typical province wide prices of the different grains which were derived from the Shensi grain price reports (the data and statistical analysis are contained in Chapter 5, appendix 1 and 2). All steps leading to the calculation of the wheat equivalents are given and various alternative ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1. General Introduction
• 2. Money
• 3. Exchange Rates in Shensi, 1900-1910
• 4. Grain Price Reporting and Grain Price Quotations During the Ch’ing
• 5. Shensi Grain Markets, 1900-1910
• 6. References Cited