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How important to people are wealth and profit!
Human disposition is such that people pursue what is profitable to them, and with profit in mind they will go up against disaster. They gallop in pursuit of it day and night, never satisfied. Since profit is what all people covet, they rush after it like torrents pouring into a valley, coming and going without resting… never reaching the point at which the raging floods within them subside.-
Zhang Han (1511-93).​


Once in a while I like to review a book which I think other AHers might find interesting. I’ve plugged Timothy Brook’s The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China before, but I bought a copy for myself (I like it that much) that I thought I’d give a quick discussion of it.

Confusions of Pleasure is not an economic history of Ming China, although you get a good overview of changes to the economy. Instead it’s how the Ming state and Ming society shifted during the commercial boom of the dynasty, dividing the empire by Winter, Spring, and Summer periods.

1) The Song state, while advanced for its day, was probably further from an industrial revolution than we’d like to think. The main problem: Literacy.

It’s hard to get a rough estimate of literacy in Ming China, but some signs: barely a dozen Song and Yuan land contracts survive from Huizhou; from the Ming era, we’ve found about a thousand. Even accounting for the loss of some due to age, that suggests a bit of a difference.

And while the early Ming (and Song) had printing, it did not take off until the mid and late Ming. In the early Ming you had students mentioning that they had to copy books by hand, because they ewre too poor, and limited works were being printed.

This chaned during the latter half of the 15th century, as one scholar noted. “In the Xuande and Zhengtong eras [1426-40], printed books were still not widely available, whereas the printed editions we have today increase by the day and the month.”

By the Mid Ming, people are publishing travel guides, describing the best routes and inns to stop at. I’m going to propose this is a sign of a literate society using printing at least as fully as Europe. Plus, porn! And fashion guides. By the late Ming, people are printing joke books, moral tracts, etc. Matteo Ricci would comment that he was amazed by the “exceedingly large umber of books in circulation and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold.”

Late Ming also saw a proliferation of newspapers. Amusingly, some of these guys sound very modern. In 1591, the retired Grand Secretary Yu Shenxing complained about “news bureau entrepreneurs who are out for the most miniscule profits and give no consideration to matters of national emergency. Why aren’t they strenuously prohibited? “ Yu was writing about the panic caused by false reports about the military situation on the northern border, so this gives you an idea of what they were published. By the 17th century, private newspapers carried local gossip, providing a counterpoint to official announcements and news.


2) Every once in a while, some poster will mention how Confucianism hates merchants, and I fantasize about applying the “Death by a Thousand Cuts” as punishment. As the author points out, while early Ming gazetteers tried to divide China into the fourfold occupations, with merchants at the bottom , this changed over the course of the dynasty. Early gazetteers praised communities where “people are frugal and simple and devote themselves single-mindedly to plowing.”

The change starts in the Mid-Ming, as Merchants begin to usurp traditional “gentry tasks.” They build schools and bridges. They write, and more importantly, publish, poetry. They build enormous libraries. They become, as the 16th century scholar Gui Youguang would state, “gentry yet merchants.” To put it another way, “The ancients did not differentiate fourtcategories of the people, so why should merchants be treated as inferior to gentry?”

Scholars begin to argue that society benefits from the circulation of commodity, and that high taxes puts the state in competition with the people for the advantages of commerce. As one mid-Ming magistrate put it, “forcing peasants to become merchants is acceptable; forcing peasants to become merchants is not.”

And of course, by the end of the dynasty some merchants were powerful enough to wage war against the Qing and seize Taiwan. But y’all know about those guys.

3) Really, fashion deserves its own point. By the mid Ming people are writing books like “Essential criteria of Antiquities,” describing how to find the best lychee fruit (Huian products none of the exotic lychees. You want to buy the dragon eyes from Fengtiang.) People write books about the cherry trees of Huian; and how to make sure the chair you’re getting built has real mother of pearl (have it built in your house).

Not everyone was happy about this. Some scholars ranted about the craze for “lavishness and fine style,” the people who “drag their white silken garments as they roam about such that you can’t tell who is honored and who is based.”

As the scholar Chen Yao, writing in the 1570s, complains, “Long skirts and wide collars, broad belts and narrow pleats – they change without warning. It’s what they call the look of the moment.” Or, well, fashion. Chen goes on to complain: “Take simple clothes to a country fair, and not even country people will buy them – they’ll just laugh.”

Fashion seems to have stagnated under the Qing, because they reasserted "traditional" Chinese mores, reestablished the value of being a member of the civil service, and imposed harsher sumptuary laws, but how much the latter played a role is unclear.

4) This touches on the other points, but women’s role during the Ming underwent a subtle change In the early Ming female literacy is very rare, but more daming that women don’t’ show up in government census. The 1502 census for the Daming prefecture in Zhili indicates there were 3278,167 males but only 226,982 females: a 5-3 ratio. The county with the least imbalance, Neihuang, reported seven men for every five women. Census results for the Haiking prefecture in 1614 showed a ratio of 4:1!

This indicates both infanticide, or that women were evading registration on a large scale in census records. The later makes some sense, because reporting a wife or new daughter could result in a higher tax, but it indicates that women were being suppressed. Heavily.

Yet by the late Ming, the increased commercial sophistication was affecting women as well. Women begin travelling more often and become more visible in Ming accounts as petty merchants and shop owners. In the late Ming, you see women remarkably like geisha, courtesans who know poetry and calligraphy, becoming attractive in society (at the same time there was a surge in romantic literature).

Such women did not, in OTL, survive as a feature of Qing society. But still interesting. And such women had an odd statute in Ming society; you had gentry wives and courtesans exchanging poetry. Damn odd.

I have some thoughts on what this means for alternate dynasties, but I thought people would find this interesting.
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