Three
The Rise and Fall of the Fu-Rong Salt-Yard Elite: Merchant Dominance in Late Qing China

Madeleine Zelin

Shortly after the 1911 Revolution a transplanted native of Chengdu prefecture undertook to write a book about his new-found home, the capital of Sichuan's well-salt industry, Ziliujing. From the preface by the author, Qiao Fu, we can see that the following work was meant to be a cross between a traditional gazetteer and the guidebooks written for the benefit of travelers and merchants in the long-distance trade. Between its covers one could find highlights of Ziliujing's geography, history, products, and customs, as well as details of the salt trade, a description of Ziliujing's banks and messenger services, and suggestions for the best places to stay in town. Most striking for its absence was any discussion of local self-governing institutions and other traditional "gentry" concerns. Most striking for their inclusion were the frontispieces of the book. Following maps of the east and west salt yards were two pages of photographs of Ziliujing's most venerated women of the evening. It is almost as an afterthought that we find on the next page a crowded array of the region's less scenic, nonhuman sites.

Ziliujing and adjacent Gongjing together comprised a one-industry metropolis whose population reached several hundred thousand by the end of the Qing.^[1] Although physically separated by only a few miles, administrative boundaries artificially limited the region's unity. The east yard, at Ziliujing, was under the jurisdiction of the Fushun magistrate and his superiors at Xuzhou prefecture, while the west yard, at Gongjing, was part of Rongxian and yet another prefecture, Jiading.^[2] This division extended to the administration of salt production and distribution, despite the frequency with which both residents and outsiders spoke of the entire region as the Fu-Rong salt yard. Moreover, although many salt merchants had investments in both yards, it is clear from post-Liberation works of oral history and earlier biographical materials that individual merchant families tended to identify

themselves with one or the other side of the river that ran through the two salt production areas.

Both Fushun and Rongxian lie in the hilly southwestern part of Sichuan province. Where the two counties meet, salt wells were arrayed in concentrated groupings; between them could still be found the agricultural fields upon which they increasingly impinged. Agriculture in Rongxian was generally poor, and the district could boast of few important products besides salt. Fushun, blessed by richer soil and superior water navigation, carried on a thriving trade in vegetables and fruit. Sugar, too, was manufactured in the vicinity of its own rich sugarcane fields along the Tuo and the Rongxi rivers. Nevertheless, by the time of the Qing, Fu-Rong's wealth, fame, and problems all emanated from the rich deposits of salt brine and natural gas below its surface. According to Qiao Fu, in its heyday, during the mid-nineteenth century:

From Badian street up, the salt firms, extravagantly decorated in colors and gold, were packed together like the teeth of a comb. From the moment the sun went down in the west, [the singing girls] put on their makeup and took out their instruments and sang. The sound of their music overflowed, filling everyone's ear. The activity of the money markets, the flow of currency, could come to several tens of millions. Itinerant traders and retail merchants were all in close contact with each other in a town which was equal to the greatest commercial ports.^[3]

This unembarrassed glorification of business and its by-products gives testimony to the spirit of the place. It was the third most important economic center of the Upper Yangzi region, following close behind Chongqing and Chengdu. But whereas Chongqing's prosperity rested on trade, and Chengdu's on farming, Fu-Rong was the archetypical early modern industrial town. Salt-well derricks dominated the skyline like the smokestacks of an English factory town. The vapors from the salt brine and gas wells were equally unhealthy and, according to Qiao Fu, were made worse by the unsanitary habits within Ziliujing's multistory urban dwellings.^[4] The tens of thousands of buffalo that pumped the brine from Fu-Rong's wells also polluted its water supply and contributed to frequent outbreaks of intestinal disease.^[5] It was a town where the elite—merchants and financiers—worked and laborers lived, where gambling openly flourished despite imperial prohibitions, and where a hierarchy of prostitutes served all levels of society, from the masses of unmarried male workers to the merchants who used the high-class bordellos as a place to make deals and grease the palms of local officials.^[6]

The state demonstrated its desire to control this sprawling industrial center by dividing the two counties. Each county was assigned an assistant magistrate to its half of the yard, further evidence of the place's economic and

political importance. But the heavy presence of government belied an independence of operations unknown to salt production areas outside Sichuan. By the early twentieth century Fu-Rong had a chamber of commerce manned entirely by prominent members of the salt-merchant community. However, this concentration of political and economic resources appears to have resulted in few manifestations of civic pride or local managerial effort. In Fu-Rong both the business of business and the business of society was salt.

Unlike the great Chinese merchant cities with which we are familiar, whose merchant communities made their fortunes in trade and finance, Fu-Rong society was centered on production. Brine was raised from deep wells and evaporated at furnaces fueled by coal or gas. During the last decades of the Qing, when the main gas-producing area was Ziliujing and the main brine production center was Gongjing, an elaborate network of bamboo pipes was laid to carry brine to the furnaces as far as twenty li away. Salt, supplies for the salt industry, and by-products of salt manufacture provided the main items of commerce and the main sources of wealth and employment in Fu-Rong. It comes as no surprise that the elite of Fu-Rong were merchants.^[7] Members of this elite might make forays into the world of gentry-official politics, and they might even acquire and manipulate traditional symbols of elite status. However, we do not see the same interpenetration of gentry and merchant occupations as appear in Bell's discussion of the Jiangnan elite in this volume, and the story of the elite's rise and fall is as much economic as social history.

The Nineteenth-Century Salt Magnates

The Business of Salt . Sichuan sits on salt. Salt deposits can be found throughout the rock layers deposited from about 900 to 65 million years ago. The most important are thought to have originated about 185 million years ago in an ancient epicontinental sea. Repeated inundation and evaporation in the basin produced thick accumulations of salt that are now preserved in rich subterranean deposits of rock salt and brine.^[8] Evidence exists of its exploitation in shallow salt pits as early as the second millennium B.C. However, large-scale exploitation of salt wells appears to have dated from the Song (960-1279), with the invention of new drilling and pumping techniques that combined to produce the "lofty-pipe" wells (zhuotong jing ), the basis for all well-salt production until the mid-Qing.^[9]

During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the center of Sichuan salt production was the Shehong and Pengxi region of Tongchuan prefecture and Sui department in the upper Sichuan basin.^[10] This lead was maintained during the early Qing until new deep drilling technology led to the rapid development of the richer salt resources in the Lower Basin counties of Jianwei, Leshan, Rongxian, and Fushun. Abundant coal deposits in Jianle gave it an

advantage over the Fu-Rong yard until the Qianlong reign (1736-1795), when improved exploitation of natural gas in Ziliujing led to the rapid expansion of both Fu-Rong well excavation and salt-evaporation facilities.^[11]

The physical destruction of Sichuan's economic substructure during the Ming-Qing transition, coupled with what one scholar has estimated to be as much as a three-fourths reduction in population,^[12] made Sichuan a poor target for taxation by the new Manchu government. Even more important, the actual production of salt was left entirely in private hands. Not until 1686 was the province enrolled in the official salt gabelle, and salt sold to the more accessible parts of the province by specialized merchants authorized to purchase salt certificates (yin ), entitling them to deal in a fixed portion of Sichuan's legal salt quota. By the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735), the expansion of Sichuan's salt market was deemed sufficient to warrant the institution of specified sales territories, encompassing Sichuan and parts of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hubei. However, a system of flexible quotas (jikou shouyan ) was installed to allow salt sales to grow with Sichuan's burgeoning population.^[13] Supervision of this system was never tight, and less accessible areas continued to be served by petty merchants dealing in quantities deemed too small to be subject to tax. By the early nineteenth century, difficulties in meeting the legal salt quota and in controlling salt smuggling had led parts of Sichuan to eliminate the system of sale by yin and to absorb the tax generated by yin sales into the land tax.^[14] At the same time, merchants in the more productive yards, like Fu-Rong and Jiart-Le, both legally and illegally took over the quotas of the less efficient salt-producing areas.^[15]

By the 1840s Sichuan's capacity to produce salt began to exceed the marketing limits permitted by the imperial salt administration. For the moment, those who suffered were the small producers outside the Lower Basin. However, with the advent of the Taiping Rebellion, salt producers throughout the province were faced with a vast new market, just waiting to be tamed.^[16] As rebel forces cut Hubei and Hunan (Huguang) off from their designated salt suppliers to the east, Sichuan merchants moved in swiftly to take up the slack. The opening of the "aid to Huguang" (ji-Chu ) salt territory marked a new stage in developing the Fu-Rong salt yard. To the exploitation of this market, the late Qing Fu-Rong elite, as both producers and wholesalers, traced their fortunes.

The Rise of the Fu-Rong Salt Merchants: Making a Fortune in Salt . By the end of the Taiping Rebellion four families had emerged as the leaders of the Fu-Rong salt community. Following in their wake, and no doubt aspiring to the enormous wealth and influence that these families had accrued during the years of war, were several hundred other large salt developers.^[17] The strategies they pursued to build their fortunes were similar to those of the four great families, although in the case of the Lis, Wangs, Hus, and Yans, the results exceeded those of almost any merchant in the land.^[18]

Wang Langyun was the architect of the Wang Sanwei lineage trust (tang ) that would come to encompass much of the salt resources of nineteenth-century Fu-Rong. His ancestors are said to have emigrated to Sichuan during the early Ming from their ancestral home in Macheng county, Hubei.^[19] At least as early as the Zhengde reign (1506-1521), Wangs were involved in brine excavation. During the warfare accompanying the Ming-Qing transition, Wangs fled to nearby prefectures like Chengdu, Luzhou, and Jiading and as far afield as Guizhou province. In the process, lineage records were destroyed, and the genealogical records compiled by the Wangs in the late nineteenth century go back only to the early Qing.^[20] For most of the dynasty they remained a family of middling means set upon a conventional course of land management combined with attempts at official success. Wang Duanhu, the great grandfather of Wang Langyun, held a minor military rank. His grandfather, Wang Yuchuan, reached the position of expectant first class assistant department magistrate, while his father, Wang Kai, actually served in government as a legal secretary in a financial commissioner's yamen. During the first half of the dynasty, the Wangs accumulated a modest legacy in the form of agricultural and brine land, much of the latter apparently in the form of abandoned or relatively unproductive wells.

The Lis, whose fortune was incorporated during the nineteenth century as the Li Siyou lineage trust, had a similar history, although their ancestors were said to have come to the province during the late Yuan. Li Yuanqing, a native of Gushi county in Henan, first came to Sichuan in 1319. Residing in the capital of what was then Rongde county, his descendants took advantage of the depopulation of Sichuan during the Yuan-Ming transition by extending their holdings for a radius of several miles in what is now known as Jigong shan and Ziliujing.^[21] Their involvement in salt production is said to have begun in the early Ming, and it continued to the end of the dynasty. In his biography of his grandfather, Li Jiuxia writes that in 1628, at the age of ten, Li Guoyu was already climbing the derrick to change the cable that drew up brine.^[22] During the late seventeenth century, when Sichuan was under the oppressive rule of Wu Sangui, Li Guoyu is said to have often acted as a spokesman for salt industry interests—perhaps following a family tradition of local activism. The son of the founder of the Li lineage was a tithing head, and the family produced a number of lower-degree holders (shengyuan ). The height of its academic success appears to have occurred in the mid-Ming when Li Shao earned the metropolitan degree (jinshi ) and served as financial commissioner of Yunnan and later Fujian and Jiangxi. His son and grandson also achieved academic success, each earning the provincial degree (juren ). Much of the Li's property seems to have been lost during the warfare accompanying the fall of the Ming.^[23] However, with the restoration of peace, they quickly reestablished their stake in the salt industry. Until the early nineteenth century, the family pursued a mixed strategy, applying its energies

to both farming and well drilling, while assuring that the children of each generation received ample education to achieve modest academic success. One of Li Guoyu's brother's sons earned the academic rank of juren , serving in several magisterial level posts. The next generation produced a shengyuan , a juren , and an instructor in the plain white banner, who later served as a magistrate. One cousin even presaged a pattern that was to be common among salt industrialists in the late Qing: he purchased the rank of prefectural registrar but never actually held a substantive post.

While the Wangs, the Lis, and probably the Yans grounded their fortunes in possessing land and cultivating traditional gentry roles, the founder of the Hu dynasty of Gongjing represents that other breed of immigrant so important to Sichuan's early economic development, the merchant.^[24] Hu Liwei was born in Luling, Jiangxi, to a large but impoverished agricultural lineage. He and his kinsman, Hu Shiyun, came to Ziliujing in the mid-Jiaqing reign (1796-1820), lured by the already strong links between Jiangxi merchants and the salt-producing regions of this distant province. Liwei married in Sichuan but died soon after, leaving a wife and son, Hu Yuanhai, who were forced by poverty to return to Jiangxi. When Hu Yuanhai grew up, he borrowed some money from a relative and returned to the site of his father's dreams. Here he joined other members of the Jiangxi guild in selling cloth. Yuanhai made enough money to open a shop on Xinjie [New Street] in Ziliujing; soon after, the owner of the new Yuanhe shop married the daughter of a fellow provincial named Wang.

Together, Hu Yuanhai and his wife built a strong business, and with the money he made selling cloth he first entered a partnership to drill for brine. When this venture succeeded, he used the well's profits of more than eight thousand strings of cash to buy a piece of agricultural land yielding eighty piculs (about four thousand kilograms) of rice a year in rents. Far more important in the purchase was the apparently barren waste land and riverbank land that adjoined it. Here Hu Yuanhai opened his first gas and brine wells, and on the bank of the river, at the foot of Zhaizi hill, he moved his family and built his business offices.

In mid-century none of these families had sufficient resources to expand their operations on their own. With a prospering cloth business to fall back on, Hu Yuanhai was alone among the early salt giants to remain relatively independent in his business activities. After his first successful partnership, Hu tended to develop his wells on his own land. His method, using the profits from one well to build another well (yinjing banjing ),^[25] was a conservative business strategy ideally suited to an economy short of venture capital. Even if the new venture failed, the investor's original capital was safe. This same method protected another salt capitalist, Huang Zhiqing, from bankruptcy, despite an investment of almost seventy thousand taels in a well that was finally abandoned after drilling for eight years.^[26] For Hu Yuanhai the method

not only guaranteed profits but also promised to relieve him and his descendents of the complications that partnerships could bring. Nevertheless, it did limit the scope of his endeavors. Unlike his fellow magnates, most of Hu Yuanhai's wells produced low salinity yellow brine, albeit of good quality. The wells tended to be shallow and took relatively little time and money to drill. By the time of his death, Hu had accumulated an estate consisting of five brine wells and gas wells yielding enough fuel to evaporate thirty pans a day, agricultural land yielding two thousand piculs of rice in rents, and liquid assets amounting to several tens of thousands of taels.^[27]

For merchants intent on a less cautious business strategy, extraprovincial investment capital and sophisticated partnership formation were the keys to economic success.^[28] The most important sources of extraprovincial capital were merchants from Shaanxi. Shaanxi natives began exploiting Sichuan's economic opportunities during the late seventeenth century. Their earliest activities appear to have been in the wholesale marketing of Sichuan salt. When the salt gabelle was enforced during the early eighteenth century, licenses to sell salt were allocated to "honest" local merchants. However, few Sichuanese at this time had the requisite interest or experience in long-distance trade, and most salt distribution privileges were rented to Shaanxi merchants who took responsibility for paying the gabelle.^[29] The stele commemorating the completion of repairs to the Xiqin guild hall in Ziliujing states that this guild of Shaanxi merchants had long been involved in shipping salt to Yunnan and Guizhou. They, too, engineered the early nineteenth-century revision of salt quotas that allowed salt-supply centers to shift to the more efficient salt yards in the southwest.^[30]

During most of the Qing period, Sichuan's financial institutions were also dominated by merchants from the neighboring provinces to the north. According to Zhang Xiaomei, most pawnshops in early Qing Sichuan were owned by Shaanxi merchants who dominated the early development of native banking in the province. When the remittance business came to Sichuan, it too was controlled by outsiders, from Shanxi.^[31] The Xiqin guild hall in Ziliujing, built between 1735 and 1752, was repaired in 1827 at a cost of several hundred thousand taels, with over 150 business establishments contributing to the repair fund.^[32] The shops of the eight main Shaanxi merchant houses formed the backbone of the main street in Ziliujing, and the street itself was named after these establishments Eight Shops Road.^[33] Such a strong economic presence could not but have had an influence on Fu-Rong's social life. However, during the first half of the dynasty, much of the money made by these extraprovincial giants appears to have been repatriated or used for business undertakings elsewhere in the country.^[34] The sojourners were economically powerful at the salt yard but do not appear to have entered elite community activities. And neither the Fushun nor the Rongxian

gazetteers highlight investment by Shaanxi or Shanxi men in county-level public welfare activities.

In the 1830s this pattern began to change, and investment by sojourners began to play an important role in expanding local industry and developing a local industrial elite. The possibility of larger markets and higher profits through exploiting the newly developed black-brine and gas wells began to lure Shaanxi merchant profits into the exploration of wells. This combination of Shaanxi (and to a lesser extent Shanxi) capital and native-owned land was responsible for the first phase of the "take off" in the salt industry at Fu-Rong. The effect on the composition of capital in the industry was dramatic. In one estimate, the Shaanxi merchant share in the total capitalization of salt production in Sichuan rose from almost nothing in 1830, to as much as 70 or 80 percent by the 1870S.^[35] Although this may be an exaggeration, it is clear that an enormous increase in outsider investment did take place. The first major strike by salt evaporators was waged largely against the Shaanxi guild, which was said to own a dominant share in furnaces at the Fu-Rong yards.^[36] Although we do not know the provenance of most investors listed in salt contracts, we do know that many wells featured in recent studies of late Qing Fu-Rong were also opened largely with Shaanxi merchant funds.^[37] Indeed, at a well owned by Shaanxi guild members the first rock-salt well was dug.^[38] Shaanxi merchant funds also helped transform the meager land holdings of the Wang Sanwei and Li Siyou lineage trusts into salt empires.

In the 1830s the fortunes of the descendants of Wang Yuchuan were on the decline;^[39] they had few operating wells and only modest holdings in agricultural land. In 1838 one descendant, an enterprising and ambitious man named Wang Langyun, proposed that the property of the three existing branches of the lineage be divided and a small trust be maintained to support the triennial sacrifices to their common grandfather. Wang Langyun took over managing the trust and embarked on two projects that were to make his fortune and decide the destiny of his lineage.

With the meager resources of the lineage itself, Wang Langyun decided to redrill a well the family was already operating near Gaoshan jing. At the same time, Langyun signed a limited-tenure lease with a Shaanxi merchant to drill another black brine well on Wang land. The Wangs put up the land, and the lessee put up all the capital necessary to drill the well and build the pumping facilities. In return for their contributions, the Wangs received twelve shares in the well and the lessee-cum-investor received eighteen. All profits from the well were divided according to these respective shares. Thus, Wang Langyun and his relatives had nothing to lose if the well failed. If it struck brine the Wangs would enjoy two-fifths of the profits it produced. Even more important, after eighteen years the well and all nonmovable equipment would revert to their lineage trust.^[40] By means of leases such as

these the Wangs and other Fu-Rong landowners moved into the large-scale production of salt, and they may be considered a major strategy for the initial accumulation of resources by the Fu-Rong merchant elite. Many investors were outsiders looking for opportunities for the large profits from a successful black-brine or gas well. But at least a few partners in these new Wang ventures were local merchants, such as Yan Yongxing, who later became a salt magnate in his own right.

The early expansion of the Lis's salt holdings also depended on Shaanxi merchant wealth. As late as the 1820s the Lis had only four modestly productive brine wells.^[41] When the profits from these wells were divided among the four sons of Li Shijin, little was left for investment in expanding the family business. In 1827-28 Li Weiji went to Chengdu to take the provincial examinations. There he chanced to meet a Shaanxi merchant named Gao who was involved in both the salt and tea trade in Sichuan. Gao became interested in the Li family's holdings and decided to invest three thousand taels to allow them to expand. Over the years, the Li-Gao partnership developed seven brine wells with a combined production of more than ten metric tons a day. Three more wells turned out to produce gas, giving them sufficient gas to evaporate approximately six hundred pans of salt as well.^[42] With the addition of gas wells, the Li-Gao partnership was transformed from a net marketer of brine into a net purchaser, a factor that encouraged their further exploration of wells.

By the time of the Taiping Rebellion, families like the Lis, Wangs, Hus, and Yans were already becoming important producers of salt for domestic (ji'an ) and border trade (bian'an ). But the actual marketing of that salt still remained largely in the hands of the major Shaanxi salt firms (yanhao ). When the Huguang market opened after the Taiping capture of Nanjing, this monopoly broke down. The dangers involved in shipping salt downriver before the trade was legalized made for an unmet demand for salt in Hubei and Hunan. Those merchants with stocks on hand and a bit of nerve had an unparalleled opportunity to amass thousands of taels in a short time through speculation in and export of Sichuan salt. Salt that cost only a few copper cash per jin (halfa kilogram) at the Sichuan yards could be sold for ninety to two hundred cash per jin at the other end.^[43] It was said that a man could sell a jin of salt in Hubei and come back with a jin of cotton, and indeed numerous salt merchants thus first became involved in the cotton trade. Many heroic stories circulated at the time, inspiring those with a sense of adventure and taste for wealth. At first this smuggled salt was beyond the constraints of the salt gabelle. Once legalized, the Huguang market for Sichuan salt was the only free market in salt in China, providing an outlet for excess productivity beyond the yin quota (yuyin ), as well as yin quota salt that could not find a market in Sichuan (jiyin ).^[44] Anyone could get involved, and through this

pirate trade the Lis, Hus, Wangs, and other salt producers became actively engaged in marketing as well as production.

By the end of the Taiping war, the Shaanxi commercial monopoly was broken, in not only the new Huguang market but also the domestic and border markets.^[45] From then on, two marketing groups dominated the trade: the Chongqing group, largely extraprovincial and founded on control of financial resources in the economic capital of the province; and the Well group, whose ability to compete was based on their own enormous productive capacity at Gongjing and Ziliujing and their ability to buy up the product of many small Fu-Rong producers who could not market their salt themselves.^[46] The leading salt merchants had made great fortunes as entrepreneurial risk takers. They dominated the industry as a whole and safeguarded the wealth upon which their elite status depended by combining a strategy of business integration and the merger of lineage and business structures.

Adaptation of the Corporate Lineage . The leaders of the four great salt dynasties of Fu-Rong, as well as those of many of the more modestly wealthy merchants families at the yard, skillfully adapted the institutions of the traditional charitable estate to the needs of early modern industrial development. Although they have taken many forms since the prototype was first suggested by Fan Zhongyan in the eleventh century, in general charitable estates (yizhuang ) or lineage trusts (tang ) served as a mechanism to preserve family property, ensure the education of talented youths, and provide a small income from which to maintain an ancestral hall and perform certain ritual functions connected with the ancestor cult. The salt merchants of Fu-Rong flexibly adapted this old form to construct a new institutional resource for furthering their business and protecting the family interests that depended so heavily on business wealth. They, in effect, turned the lineage trust into an analogue of the business corporation that evolved in the West during its early modern period. Application for and receipt of an imperial "charter" for founding such a trust provided an inviolate sanction against dissolution or division of its property. Whereas traditional trusts were largely based on agricultural wealth, in Fu-Rong the lineage trust was the structure within which business property was built, diversified, and preserved against the ravages of the tax collector, the creditor, and individual family members. Equally important, the trusts provided lineage elites with all the resources necessary for local economic and political dominance.^[47] During the nineteenth century, it was within the lineage that the dramatic battles for power were fought and the managerial skills of the Fu-Rong elite were applied.

The lineage trusts of the great Fu-Rong salt merchants were established during the nineteenth century. In the case of the Lis, corporate identity pre-

ceded the establishment of a corporate trust. Genealogical records were maintained by the Lis at least as far back as the Qianlong reign (1736-95), and the Qianlong edition revised an earlier version of unknown date. A stone inscription marking the site of the family's ancestral hall was recut as early as 1694, further strengthening Li claims to earlier corporate identity.^[48] However, it was the expansion of the family's salt holdings that led to the establishment of a lineage trust, named after the generational character, You, of the four (si ) founders. Although we do not have a precise date for the founding of the Li Siyou tang , we do know that members of the Siyou generation reached adulthood during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Member Li Weiji first expanded the family's salt-related holdings in conjunction with the Shaanxi merchant Gao. During the first three generations of the trust's incorporation, all lineage resources were reinvested to build up its collective property. Even the potential for disputes among family members, which would soon plague the Wangs, was initially avoided by granting each branch of the lineage a fixed allowance of four metric tons of rice from agricultural rents and a cash allowance of no more than twelve hundred taels a year from the profits of the salt business. All other income from lineage enterprises was plowed back into production and sales.^[49]

The Hu Yuanhe lineage trust also appears to date from the early nineteenth century. As the holdings of the family grew, its structure underwent a change specifically designed to meet the needs of a large salt conglomerate. In the early years of the Hu Yuanhe lineage trust, all positions of responsibility remained entirely in family hands. We know nothing of the family rules associated with the trust, but its structure was simple: a main office oversaw salt property, a separate department managed agricultural property, and another controlled all lineage business with the world outside. This latter office had the onerous task of cultivating useful connections for the lineage, as well as maintaining relations with businesses and officials associated with the salt industry. Each department was run by the husband of each of founder Hu Yuanhai's three daughters; therefore, control of the most important resources remained in the hands of the family of the trust's founder. Both the structure and the men who manned it remained largely unchanged until the 1890s, when Hu Yuanhai's son, Mianzhai, died and was succeeded by his second son, Ruxiu. Under Hu Ruxiu, the lineage rules were redrafted to include provisions that the family never live apart and that their property remain forever a corporate whole. However, in the event that a division should become necessary, a clause was added to allow equal distribution of wealth according to the number of lines in the present generation, not the three branches that had formed the original Hu Yuanhe lineage trust.^[50] This would save the family from much of the bitterness and infighting that plagued the Wan Sanwei and Li Siyou lineage trusts when they finally dissolved.

At the same time, a set of management rules was incorporated into the regulations of the trust, establishing the complex corporate structure that would continue to run the personal affairs of the trust along with its many businesses. Besides a general manager in charge of the main counting house (zhangfang guanshi ), there were managers (guanshi ) with special responsibility for agricultural land, the family school, sacrifices to the ancestors, the family accounts, repairs to lineage property, feed for the lineage's buffalo, warehouses, and so on—twenty managers in all. This hierarchy continued downward for several levels and was devoted entirely to the private needs of the lineage members. A separate hierarchy was devoted to business affairs. Morever, in a radical departure from the usual practice, by the Guangxu period (1875-1908), most offices were manned by professional managers, not relatives.^[51]

The lineage trust known as the Wang Sanwei tang was also formed specifically to meet the needs of a family in possession of a growing salt empire.^[52] According to family tradition, Wang Langyun feared that his family would dissipate the property he had worked so hard to build up. Therefore, he incorporated the well and agricultural property that had grown out of an earlier sacrificial trust and set it aside as temple land to be maintained in perpetuity. The center of the new lineage organization was a recently built ancestral temple called the Yuchuan Ci. There the three branches with the hall name Wei pledged to follow the example set by Fan Zhongyan and establish a charitable estate. In 1877, presumably through the offices of the provincial governor, Wang Langyun requested and received the emperor's permission to have a stele carved and installed in the Yuchuan temple en-joining future generations to obey the regulations governing lineage property and its distribution.

In all, the Wangs put aside twenty operating wells and six hundred mu (one hundred acres) of agricultural land as a lineage trust.^[53] This property was to pay for sacrifices, upkeep of ancestral graves, support of elderly lineage members, expenses of lineage members taking the examinations, and aid to relatives and neighbors in time of famine. To achieve the lineage's goals of wealth and influence, special provisions were made to support the examination success that would both extend the local status derived from the Wangs' great wealth to wider arenas and broaden political connections with officials and degree holders higher in the urban hierarchy. A school was established for all male progeny of the lineage; it was open to promising nonrelatives as well.^[54] Each Wang son and grandson would be given twenty taels to help defray the costs of taking the provincial examinations and two strings of copper cash if he took the district or prefectural exams. Those who passed would be rewarded with one hundred taels; anyone fortunate enough to qualify for the metropolitan examinations would be given four hundred taels toward the trip to Beijing. And if someone was selected to enter the

Hanlin Academy or the Imperial University established during the last years of the Qing, the lineage would provide him with a stipend of four hundred taels a year.

The Wang Sanwei lineage trust also provided a pension of fifty kilograms of rice a year for any tenant on trust land who lived to the age of sixty, and put aside 240 strings of cash a year as payment for the man chosen by each branch to oversee ancestral sacrifices. The trust promised to request that a memorial archway be erected in honor of chaste widows and virtuous women among its female members, contributing fifty taels to the construction of every one for which permission was given. However, the most important passage, and that which set its governing rules apart from those of the traditional lineage trust, referred to the disposal of the huge surplus profits that the Wang Sanwei trust would undoubtedly produce. It was arranged that the entire lineage would meet annually to settle the trust's accounts. At this time, half the money remaining after the designated expenditures and upkeep of lineage property would be reinvested to add to the lineage's holdings. The other half would be used to buy more property for each branch, in accordance with its share of the lineage's corporate possessions.^[55]

Corporate entities borrowing the structure of the lineage trust account for approximately 20 percent of all investors in the salt industry contracts collected by the Zigong Municipal Archives.^[56] In other salt yards as well, the lineage trust became a crucial tool for managing industrial resources and insuring the integrity and continuity of business holdings. The lineage trust established by the Wu Jingrang tang of Jianwei developed into a major industrial empire in the twentieth century, controlling many modern industries as well as its holdings in salt.^[57] Moreover, in Jian-Le as in Fu-Rong, although lineage trusts combined traditional gentry mobility strategies and business pursuits, increasingly the latter provided the resources necessary for the elite status of their members. We will, therefore, look further at how these families organized their businesses before considering the strategies they employed to cultivate symbolic status and social capital beyond the power and influence that flowed from great wealth.

The Organization of Business Resources

The key to the extraordinary business success of the Wang, Li, Yan, and Hu lineage trusts was the development of efficient management organizations that promoted expertise, centralized control of a large business empire, and allowed the expansion of the initial well business into a vertically integrated salt conglomerate. Although these practices were carried out to their fullest extent among the largest salt lineages, centralized hierarchical organization of diversified business interests was common to many families involved in the salt industry at this time.

The economic interests of all three lineage trusts about which we have information were based on a two-tiered management system. At the apex was a main office with supervisory control over the operation of each subsidiary business. At the Hu Yuanhe lineage trust this function was performed at the elaborate lineage hall known as the Shenyi tang , completed in 1867. The main office (zong guifang ) was usually headed by a family member whose title was general director (zong zhanggui ). Under him were five departments: (1) a counting house (guifang ) run by a chief accountant (zongzhang ) and two assistants (bangzhang ) in charge of the overall productivity of the lineage's wells and furnaces; (2) a procurement department (huowu gu ) in charge of purchasing all supplies needed for the daily operation of the wells and furnaces; (3) an external affairs department (jiaoji gu ) in charge of buying brine for the lineage's furnaces and selling salt at lineage-owned retail shops; (4) a department of agricultural estates (nongzhuang gu ) in charge of collecting rents and selling grain; and (5) a cash department (xianjin gu ) in charge of daily cash expenditures and silver-copper exchange transactions.^[58]

After a long period of unified management under the leadership of its founder, Wang Langyun, the Wang Sanwei lineage trust was almost destroyed by a period of fragmentation in the late nineteenth century. Individual family members, distrusting each other's intentions, took over operating groups of wells, furnaces, and other family businesses. Without violating the trust regulation that lineage holdings be maintained as an undivided estate, poor business practices, waste, embezzlement, and loss of the advantages of coordinating wells, furnaces, and wholesale enterprises left the family in debt for almost seven hundred thousand taels. The lessons learned in the 1880s and 1890s led to a renewed attention to centralized management, and during the height of its prosperity the counting house of the Jingfeng well regulated all income and expenditure, planning, and allocation of materials for the Wang Sanwei lineage trust's agricultural lands, wells, furnaces, wholesale firms, and brine pipes.^[59]

Below the main supervisory bodies at each lineage trust was a separate management structure for each furnace, well, wholesale firm, and pipe. The literature on the Li Siyou lineage trust gives the fullest picture of how these management hierarchies worked.^[60] Taking as an example the organization of furnaces, we find two layers of authority. Each furnace was under the overall charge of a counting house whose manager (zhanggui ) received orders directly from the trust's main office. In reality, he had considerable freedom in running the furnace, with the aid of a head (guanzhang ) and assistant accountant (banggui ). Besides handling the furnace's books, the head accountant was the manager's assistant, in complete charge of the business when the manager was away. Together, these three men were the main decision-making group at the furnace, in charge of all purchases, sales, and planning.

Beneath the managers were supervisors in charge of specific operations at

the furnace. In addition, most furnaces also employed a "master" or shiye ; this man of education and some political sophistication was designated to handle the social obligations of the management. Social relationships played an important part in the highly competitive world of salt, and many of these men were probably chosen for the connections they would bring to the business. However, they also performed another function. Most masters were also high-level advisers to the lineage headquarters, not under the jurisdiction of the management of the enterprise itself. Probably they were also family spies, keeping an eye on operations and making suggestions when problems arose. At the same time, they undertook the task of training a number of apprentices who performed servile chores for the master while learning the ways of business, the use of the abacus, and the techniques for keeping accounts.

The elaborate centralized bureaucracies created under the auspices of the lineage trusts enabled strategically placed family members or their representatives to control large business empires; through them they could influence the fate of a large laboring population and the smaller businessmen with whom they competed and whose products they used at their wells. They also provided a route for upwardly mobile new elites. Like the hired managers of old-style banks, the managers of salt firm departments were well placed to make money for themselves and to acquire the knowledge and connections necessary to found their own companies.

Vertical Integration, the Key to Economic Success . The key to the economic and political power exercised by the large, lineage-based salt firms was vertical integration of salt industry holdings. By combining under a single management pumping brine, evaporating salt, wholesale marketing, and operating brine pipes, firms were able to guarantee dominance of a relatively unstable salt market.^[61] By combining ownership of wells and furnaces, they could almost invariably guarantee their supplies of the key ingredients in salt manufacture: brine and gas. By controlling the main wholesale salt-distribution firms in the province, they insured that their salt was first to be sold in the major Sichuan salt markets. With the wealth accumulated in salt production they expanded into developing brine pipes, which gave them control over marketing a large portion of Gongjing brine and enabled them to hold the nonaffiliated furnaces of Ziliujing ransom to their needs. Their control of large capital reserves allowed them to buy up stocks of seasonal goods or items like coal, the price of which was lower in the winter, when the pits were operating at full productivity. Finally, they went on to diversify their holdings into almost every industry that served the producers of salt. At the same time, wealth and the ability to guarantee product delivery when others could not, gave them an advantage in dealing with the main buyer of salt, which, in the last four decades of the dynasty, was the state.

During the 1870s and 1880s, the Li Siyou lineage trust is said to have drilled hundreds of wells, although the names of only seventeen survive. While most of these were brine wells, the few gas wells in their possession were also highly productive, allowing the Li Siyou lineage trust at its height to evaporate more than eight hundred pans.^[62] The holdings of the Hu Yuanhe lineage trust were far less extensive, reaching a maximum of twenty-six yellow- and black-brine wells. However, all but five of these were independent of outside investment, and at least ten produced gas as well as brine.^[63]

At Shanzi ha, site of their first explorations, the Wang Sanwei lineage trust operated twenty-one brine wells, producing only about fifty metric tons. of brine a year. However, early exploitation of the rock-salt layer kept profits from brine wells high. Far more important were the lineage's gas wells, producing sufficient gas to evaporate at least twelve hundred pans. Some of these were rented out, and some gas was rented from outside wells. In all, the Wang Sanwei lineage trust evaporated an average of seven hundred pans during the last years of the Qing. With this capacity, they and the Li Siyou lineage trust were responsible for approximately 23 percent of the licensed salt produced in Fu-Rong each year.^[64]

The brine and gas holdings of the four great lineages would have been sufficient to guarantee them an important place in the economy of the salt yard, but they also controlled the pipes that transported Gongjing brine to the gas furnaces at Ziliujing. Each of the ten main brine pipes carried between 50 and 150 metric tons a day, compared to the total 150 tons a day carried at far greater expense by brine porters before the construction of the pipes. Well owners had to sell their brine to the pipe companies, which in turn sold all Gongjing brine to the gas furnaces. Pipe owners made large profits in these transactions and, moreover, enjoyed privileged access to the limited number of pipes in the yard. Their brine was the first to be sold in times of surplus, and their furnaces were the first to receive brine in times of shortage. According to one estimate, during the 1890s, 70 percent of existing pipes were owned outright or in partnership by Wangs and Lis.^[65] A main pipe could cost as much as one hundred thousand taels to build, limiting their ownership to only the wealthiest merchants in the yard. More important to the large local lineages' dominance in pipe construction was the need to negotiate leases with the hundreds of individual landlords over whose property the pipes passed. Only large local landowners, with strong community influence, could put together such a deal—as many outside investors soon discovered.^[66]

As important to the success of the large salt lineages was their operation of wholesale firms. The Wangs, Hus, and Lis each marketed their own and others' salt in the lucrative extraprovincial markets. The Wang Sanwei lineage trust's Guangshengtong company was the largest agent for the sale of

Sichuan's "aid to Huguang" salt; the Li Siyou lineage trust and the Wang Baoxinglong trust ranked second and third.^[67] The Wang Sanwei lineage trust's Zhongxingxiang company and the Xiexinglong company (a joint Li, Tian, and Liu lineage operation) were the two main wholesalers of salt in the portion of the Guizhou market centered at Renhuai prefecture. More than seventy branches served the departments and districts between the company headquarters at Renhuai and the provincial capital at Guiyang. Each branch had a business office, salt warehouse, and living quarters for staff. Large agricultural holdings in the region yielded sufficient rents to pay for all operating expenses of the branch units. In addition, the firm trained and staffed its own antismuggling police (yanjing ), who served as both escorts for their merchant shipments and personal guards for the firm's bosses.

The wealthy lineages also dealt in commodities other than salt. The Wang Sanwei lineage trust's Fuchangsheng company was a major purveyor of rice, broad beans, soy, rapeseed oil, and other basic provisions purchased in Luzhou and Jiangjing. They operated their own money shop in the center of Ziliujing and were among the first to use salt profits from Huguang to import machine-made cotton yarn. To guarantee their own stores of coal, the Wangs set up the Bianli Coal Yard at Gaotong, the main coal distribution point in Fu-Rong. At the same time, they established the Tianxintang Medicine Shop to purchase and retail herbal medicines, particularly those used in the treatment of water buffalo. The Hu Yuanhe lineage trust also dealt in white wax from Jiading and ran a pawnshop in Chengdu. The Lis were engaged in a number of retail businesses, including ownership of two medicine shops and their own lumberyard to supply materials for constructing wells, derricks, wheels, and salt-yard buildings.^[68]

Finally, the main salt lineages were among the largest landowners in Sichuan. By his death in 1884, Wang Langyun had accumulated for his lineage agricultural lands spread over four counties and producing over 450 metric tons of rice in rents. By the turn of the century, Wang, Li, and Hu trusts produced rental incomes of 850, more than 250, and 380 metric tons, respectively. However, it would be incorrect to think of the accumulation of land as evidence that traditional investment strategies played a major part in developing the Fu-Rong elite. Land may also be seen as a liquid asset in an economic environment in which banking played a minor part. When the Wang Sanwei lineage trust ran into debt in the 1880s it sold off agricultural assets to shore up its industrial holdings. The same was true of many salt lineages in the early twentieth century.^[69]

Business capital invested in land yielded comfortable returns in the form of rents, which could rapidly be converted into cash in the highly fluid land market of the late Qing. Land also played a part in the integrated salt business. We have already seen that the Li Siyou lineage trust used the income from its land holdings in those provinces to operate its wholesale salt firms in

Guizhou and Yunnan. The need to feed thousands of employees and buffalo at the wells was also a powerful motivation to invest in land. At its height the Wang Sanwei lineage trust kept a herd of between twelve and thirteen hundred buffalo. Even during the period of decline, their wells required maintaining at least six to seven hundred head.^[70] Large well owners rented part of their landed holdings in nearby villages to tenants contracted to grow grass. Under one system of tenancy, the peasant had to agree to supply a certain well with an agreed quota of grass every day: periodic payment would be made to the tenant after deducting his rent. The landlord received his feed and a guaranteed rent. The tenant, tied to one buyer for his crop, was forced to sell at a low price.^[71] Similar practices may have been imposed on peasants growing broad beans, another important component of the buffalos' diet and a major item of expenditure at the wells. In this way, business organization provided the structure through which these lineages dominated villagers throughout southern Sichuan, in addition to the more direct economic power they exercised over Fu-Rong's large industrial labor market.

The Cultivation of Soclal Capital

To what extent did the Lis, Wangs, Hus, and Yans, whose local prominence in industrial Fu-Rong arose from their great wealth, also seek to enhance their status through the examinations or to enlarge their reputations through local community activity? Sichuan's Lower Basin produced more than one-third of the province's upper-degree holders during the Ming and early Qing. Families with a long history in the region, like the Lis, followed a mixed strategy, pursuing both academic honors and commercial or agricultural wealth. However, the depopulation and material destruction of the Ming-Qing transition created in Fu-Rong, as in much of early-Qing Sichuan, a frontier atmosphere that was reinforced by high levels of in-migration and sudden economic boom. Here bravado, conspicuous displays of wealth, and physical strength appear to have been more important than refined gentry politics.

Although the "wild west" character of Fu-Rong society receded by the mid-eighteenth century, the expansion of the Fu-Rong salt industry continued to steer local elites into nongentry strategies to acquire or preserve local dominance. As economic opportunities increased, both newcomers and established families concentrated on maintaining their burgeoning salt empires. Contrary to our expectations, they did not achieve great examination success soon after becoming rich. Perhaps the more tangible and accessible rewards of industrial development discouraged the pursuit of elusive examination degrees. In their formative years, when government involvement in salt distribution was limited, the Fu-Rong elite may not have valued the usefulness of degrees in forging contacts with the government bureaucracy. Moreover,

until the mid-nineteenth century most often the large Shaanxi merchant firms controlled the salt distribution networks and dealt with Qing officialdom. This changed in the 1850s, when expanding economic opportunity, the threat of rebel military attack, and increasing government demands for revenue joined to forge a new outward-looking orientation among Fu-Rong's salt-yard elite.^[72]

The Impact of the Taiping Rebellion . The event that so altered the political and economic fortunes of the Fu-Rong elite was the Taiping Rebellion. Sichuan's salt-producing regions were struck several times by rebels associated with the Taiping, the worst of the fighting occurring during the uprising of Li Yonghe and Lan Dashun. Soon after the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion, merchants in Fu-Rong began to construct fortifications in the hilly suburbs surrounding the yard.^[73] Construction of Sanduo fort began in 1853 under the leadership of Li Ji'an, Yan Changying, Wang Kejia, and several members of the elite of neighboring Neijiang county. According to the obituary of a descendant of the Li Siyou lineage trust, Li Tonggai, the merchant community raised over seventy thousand taels to build Sanduo fort. In 1860, Wang Langyun took the lead in constructing a stockade and hiring a force of mercenaries to defend the neighborhood of Da'an fort. An attack by one of the Li-Lan rebels' lieutenants, Mao Dexing, was launched before the fortification was completed, but the merchant militia managed to survive. A second attack the following year resulted in a protracted siege during which many members of the salt lineages died, including Wang's own nephew, Wang Zhujun.^[74] As a reward for his leadership in local defense the Sichuan governor general memorialized the court to award Wang Langyun the low rank of senior imperial bodyguard.

The need to defend their businesses and homes also drew the salt-yard elite into the local political arena. Acquiring honorary official titles placed the Wangs among the ranks of the new post-Taiping "irregular" bureaucratic elite.^[75] However, minor honors did not always help their changing relations with the state. The opening of the "aid to Huguang" market, which accompanied the Taiping Rebellion, not only created the opportunity for the meteoric economic rise of the Fu-Rong elite, but it also drew them into the legal trade in salt and left them increasingly vulnerable to government taxation and regulation.

The first signs of government encroachment upon the profits of the newly developed free market in Sichuan salt came soon after the outbreak of war. The opening of the "aid to Huguang" market heralded the elimination of specified sales territories for yin salt as well as the "surplus salt" that had previously been sold freely within Sichuan. Officials in Huguang were simply instructed to set up tax collection stations at which merchants from Sichuan paid a single fee, set at between 10 and 20 percent of the market value of the

salt, and received a certificate entitling them to sell their salt anywhere in the "aid to Huguang" region. Beginning in 1854 the lijin transit tax was also levied on salt shipments to Huguang. At first these imposts were collected at two key ports along the salt transport routes.^[76] In 1855, checkpoints were established within Sichuan as well. At the same time, lijin bureaus were situated at the main salt yards for taxing both yin and surplus salt at the point of production. The most important bureaus were those at Wutong qiao in Jianwei, at Ziliujing and Douya wan in Fushun, and at Kangjia du in Pengxi.^[77]

Unlike the lijin collected in the economic centers of eastern China, which became an important source of revenue for both government and elite activities, salt lijin was placed under strict bureaucratic controls from its inception. Moreover, much of the money raised in this way was exported to support the more intense fighting in other provinces and, later, to help pay China's growing foreign debt. For the large merchant conglomerates with interests in production and marketing, this new levy meant a double burden of taxation and they appear to have reacted swiftly, in swashbuckling frontier fashion.

Local legend holds that on an evening in 1863, the heads of the Yan Guixing and the Wang Sanwei lineage trusts led their workers to the local lijin bureau and razed it to the ground. There is no evidence of literati-style negotiation with the state prior to their act of protest, nor were past relations with the magistrate, who eventually arrested Wang Langyun, apparently cordial.^[78] Indeed, it was from jail that Wang Langyun took his first real steps toward gentry politics. After several days incarceration he made an enormous donation to famine relief—some say seventy thousand taels—in exchange for which he received the rank of judicial commissioner, a second-class official button for his hat, posthumous honors for his ancestors extending back three generations, and his freedom.

The Move Toward Gentry Politics . The basic outlines of this story of prominent elites' violent resistance to government policies were resurrected frequently during the ensuing decades as government pressure on the salt industry increased. The most striking example of this phenomenon is offered by Manyin (pseudonym of a descendant of the Wang lineage) whose novel Ziliujing purports to tell the story of his illustrious family's declining years. In his version the entire episode took place in the 1870s; it was not an attack on the newly established lijin bureau but on the "official transport and merchant sale" bureau established in 1877.^[79]

In fact, Wang and undoubtedly other members of the salt industry elite do appear to have opposed the system of official transport and merchant sale as soon as it was in place. However, protest against salt administration reform in the 1870s reveals the rise of a different leadership style among the Fu-Rong elite. Here, Wang Langyun and others voiced their dissent by establishing connections among officials in the capital in Beijing. The petitions their con-

tacts sent to the Board of Revenue and the Censorate may have been instrumental in sparking a debate that came close to successfully curtailing official transport and merchant sale in Sichuan.^[80]

The change in the strategy employed by the Fu-Rong merchant community in pressing their economic interests against those of the state reflects a maturation of the salt-yard elite. The lijin protests demonstrated the ineffectiveness of mere bravado in advocating merchant goals. In addition, the peculiar position of the Fu-Rong yard encouraged attempts to cultivate connections at the centers of power, rather than nearer to home. The central government's control of salt administration and the Fu-Rong yard's division between two counties, themselves belonging to two separate prefectures, made a concentration on metropolitan ties the most economical use of political capital. At the same time, governmental hunger for funds in the post-Taiping period opened the door for men of wealth and local influence to purchase the titles that gave them access to the regular elite beyond their home communities. Li Shaotang's sons, Bichun and Yuru, each bought circuit intendant ranks at a cost of around ten thousand taels apiece. With these passports into gentry society, both men spent most of their time in Chongqing, entertaining officials and degree holders and building connections for the family among the province's nonbusiness elite. Li Xingqiao, who ran the lineage firms between 1899 and 1911, also purchased the office of circuit intendant and spent much of his time cultivating officials and degree holders, both to protect the family against official pressures and to safeguard his own position in the lineage. Only one member of the Li Siyou lineage trust appears to have acquired a regular degree, giving that lineage one more member of the examination elite than their fellow salt dynasties.^[81]

Following his confrontation with the bureaucracy over lijin , Wang Langyun authorized the expenditure of lineage funds to purchase degrees for the next generation of branch heads. Langyun's sons, Wang Dazhi and Wang Huitang, each bought himself an expectant circuit intendant rank; the rank of military defense circuit was purchased for a grandson, Wang Xingyuan, whose father had died young leaving him in charge of his branch. Several years later Wang Zuogan and Wang Yucai of the third generation also purchased the rank of county magistrate.^[82] Official connections served the family well, when, in 1880, Sichuan Governor General Ding Baozhen decided to vent his anger on the most militant opponents of salt administration reform. Having convinced the emperor that Wang Langyun was illegally collecting salt fees and corrupting young girls, Ding issued an order to arrest the head of the Wang Sanwei trust and bring him to Beijing. Connections in the capital warned the Wangs, enabling Langyun to flee to Yunnan; he remained there for four years, returning to Fu-Rong only three years before his death.

The Hu Yuanhe lineage trust appears to have been the most vigorous in

establishing its members' credentials through purchased rank. Hu Ruxiu bought the rank of a board department director; Hu Shuliang, salt inspector; Hu Shizhong and Hu Tiehua each, second-class ministerial secretary; and Hu Xingsheng, Hu Jiyun, and Hu Zhongwen, ranks at level 9, the lowest bureaucratic grade. Like the Wang Sanwei lineage trust, the Hu Yuanhe tang established a lineage school at which numerous local degree holders were invited to teach.^[83] Although there is no evidence that any member of the Hu lineage achieved success in the imperial examinations as a result of the investment placed in this school, it did develop links between the family and members of the local examination elite. Most important among them was Zhao Xi, who was to become the most prominent literati advocate of salt yard goals during the early Republican period.

The acquisition of official ranks continued to play an important part in the consolidation of elite standing within the salt yard community. In his survey of the Fu-Rong gentry during the late 1910s, Qiao Fu notes twenty title holders, all of whom were salt merchants. This resonates well with my findings for Chongqing, where at least 30 percent of merchants involved in lawsuits in the post-Taiping period appear to have previously purchased minor degrees.^[84] A purchased degree or title was viewed as facilitating contacts with government in a period of considerable competition for economic dominance.

The decades following the Taiping Rebellion saw the consolidation of the business fortunes established during the heady years of the early nineteenth century. At the same time, the expansion of Fu-Rong's markets in Huguang and Sichuan, gains in output through deep-drilling technology, and renewed governmental interest in the revenue potential of Sichuan salt created new uncertainties and opportunities for new entrepreneurs. In such conditions the Fu-Rong elite began to jockey with each other for position in the social sphere as well as in the world of manufacturing and commerce.

Much nonbusiness activity of the salt-yard elite can be viewed in the context of image making and symbolic display. Wealth was demonstrated in both ostentatious marriage, funeral, and birthday rituals, and construction of sumptuous family mansions and gardens. All the leading salt lineages maintained large fleets of sedan chairs and corps of personal attendants.^[85] To these rather crude expressions of economic power were now added various status-related behaviors designed to establish elite credentials within the larger local gentry community. As we have seen, at least one lineage mandated erection of memorial arches to chaste widows in its lineage rules. There is some evidence of intermarriage between salt-merchant progeny and prominent scholarly families,^[86] and ties with the county-level elites of both Fushun and Rongxian were deepened when local scholars were employed as teachers at the schools salt merchants established for the children of their lineages.

A small portion of the great wealth accumulated by the Fu-Rong salt

lineages was also contributed to the public welfare. Hu Mianzhai and his son, Hu Ruxiu, were major contributors to a late-nineteenth-century project to repave the imperial road between Weiyuan county and the outskirts of Chengdu. The Lis, Yans, and Wangs all contributed to the repair of bridges and roads in Fushun and in neighboring Rongxian.^[87] During the early twentieth century the Hus, without charge, treated children in the yard for smallpox and established one of the first health clinics for the poor. The Lis, Hus, and Wangs founded schools, and Li Ji'an is praised in the gazetteer of Fushun for his sponsorship of scholars traveling to take the provincial exams.^[88] These activities, too, should be viewed within the context of symbolic display. Focused on the local community, most fall within the kind of largess expected of local leading figures in late imperial China.

Two further examples of salt merchant activity in the public sphere deserve special attention. The most important outlet for extralineage philanthropy among the wealthiest families of Fu-Rong was famine relief. We have already noted Wang Langyun's not entirely disinterested activities in this field. During the catastrophic drought of 1884-85, the court rewarded Hu Mianzhai for providing low-cost sorghum cakes to the poor, a practice that later became an annual lineage event. And Li Ji'an was a major sponsor of relief programs in Sichuan and neighboring Hubei and Shaanxi.^[89] Although a traditional expression of gentry largess, participation in famine relief also served the business interests of the large salt industry lineages. Achievement in famine relief and the contribution of money and rice to granary stores won predictable rewards in the form of official ranks and helped each lineage establish its credentials with the scholar elite and gain access to officials in Beijing.

The final arena for elite activism at the Furong salt yard, and the only one in which we can see sustained cooperation among members of more than one lineage, was local defense. The vulnerability of the salt yard to bandit attacks and, after the close of the dynasty, warlord attack resulted in the continued maintenance of merchant-financed armed forces. The fortresses or zhai constructed during the 1860s were kept up well into the Republic. A resident militia, commanded by Wang Hefu and Hu Tiehua, was an important feature of early Republican Ziliujing society.^[90] Descendants of Li Ji'an are said to have maintained such a force at Sanduo fort until 1926, when a united militia joining forces from Weiyuan, Neijiang, and Fushun was formed. This was later expanded into a larger army, combining militias from forty-three counties. Li Tonggai, grandson of Li Ji'an, commanded one unit, and his son, Li Jingcai, commanded another. Individuals and lineages also maintained smaller military guards.^[91]

In devoting their energies to communal defense, the elite of Fu-Rong were following a pattern common to the region. Defense-related activities formed the largest category of public service activities attributed to named indi-

viduals in the Fushun and Rongxian gazetteers. Almost all were carried out during or after the rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century.^[92] However, the formation of higher-level militia during the early Republic was not matched by similar cooperative activity during the Qing. Between the independent exercise of local influence and the cultivation of Sichuanese officials in the imperial capital was a void that went unfilled until after the dynasty's fall. Besides joint efforts to establish academies and fight intruders, the only examples of collective mobilization we have for the Fu-Rong yard involve underground organizations. Both the Elder Brother Society and the Roman Catholic church provided alternative access to power, but their patrons were usually landlords and merchants who did not belong to the most powerful lineages.^[93]

In summary, members of the Fu-Rong salt merchant community strove to enhance their status in two ways. First, and most important, they demonstrated wealth, military power, and to a lesser extent, ties to county-level literati through patronage, marriage, and purchased degrees. Displays in this sphere, while drawing money away from business, were aimed at establishing one's position in a local pecking order that included both native merchants and wealthy long-distance merchants from Shaanxi and Shanxi. Second, superficially related were activities like famine relief and the purchase of higher degrees, which also brought local prestige; but, more important, they linked Fu-Rong's elite and officials in Beijing and earned the salt merchants political capital that could be used in their never ending struggle to lessen the impact of government salt monopoly regulations on lineage profits.

The absence of intermediate-level political or community activity among the salt-yard elite prior to the twentieth century is striking. The activities described above could by no means be characterized by the term "elite activism" that is often applied to the expansion of the public sphere by both merchants and literati in regions like Jiangnan in the post-Taiping years. One obvious reason for this difference was that, unlike many areas of eastern and central China, Sichuan suffered little material damage during the period of the Taiping Rebellion, and military preparations in the late 1890s and 1911 were not matched by large-scale military activity. The massive work of reconstruction, which provided the basis for elite mobilization elsewhere during the late Qing, simply did not exist in Fu-Rong.^[94] Equally important, the size and organizational complexity of the lineage-based salt firms to a large extent made cooperation unnecessary. Controlling both manufacture and marketing, the salt merchants did not need the complex brokerage, transportation, and banking relationships established among the commercial community of the Lower Yangzi and east coast. Their physical control of large parts of the yard, their ability to mobilize many workers and retainers, and their instant access to large reserve funds made independent action the

most efficient and effective way to deal with the problems faced by Fu-Rong's salt merchant elite in the late nineteenth century. The most threatening of these was the salt administration. The fact that a central government institution decided their fate only reinforced the salt merchants' reliance on native officials and scholars in the country's capital.

Status Maintenance in the Early Republic

The fall of the Qing marked the end of the self-contained merchant elite. On the one hand, the end of the dynasty brought an end to an easily defined and manipulated structure of authority governing salt and the salt yard. At the same time, changes in the technology of salt production, access to markets, and intralineage competition for lineage resources led to the economic decline of the old salt families.

By the late nineteenth century individual lineage members were already using corporate resources to build their own fortunes, often to the detriment of lineage-based business. However, the fall of the Qing was almost universally viewed as removing the authority that had sanctioned the formation of a lineage trust, and demands that the lineage trust be divided were frequently heard. Although the salt holdings of the Li Siyou lineage trust were not divided until 1948, those of the Hu Yuanhe lineage trust were divided as early as 1913.^[95] An attempt to dissolve the Wang Sanwei lineage trust in 1911 was only thwarted by disagreement over distributing the spoils;^[96] however, for many years it ceased to function as an integrated economic unit.

As lineage fortunes declined, only those members of the four lineage trusts who became involved in politics survived as important members of the Fu-Rong elite. Moreover, the outlets for political maneuvering increased as competition for control of the yard became more intense. Whereas the great salt merchants sometimes had to turn to politics to protect their business interests during the Qing, in the unstable political environment of the warlord period a focus on politics was critical to economic survival. Salt merchants dominated both the Zigong Provisional Assembly (Zigong linshi yishihui ) and the chamber of commerce, founded shortly before the fall of the Qing.^[97] Both organizations were lively advocates of free market policies in the administration of salt and during their short tenures proposed many economic reforms at the yard. But, if Qiao Fu is correct, they did little that could be labeled public service. Several members of prominent salt families left the salt yard to concentrate on political careers unconnected with salt. Hu Tiehua, guided by his mentor, Zhao Xi, became a leader in the Chongqing branch of the short-lived Progressive party. Several members of the Wang lineage moved to higher-level central places to seek their fortunes, and Wang Xinjiu was active in provincial politics as a director of the Sichuan-Hankou Railway Bureau.^[98]

However, the most successful scions of the old salt lineages placed their futures in the hands of warlord patrons and tried to continue to exercise their power in the salt yard in which they were born. For example, Wang Zuogan served as an adviser to the Yunnan army brigade commander Liu Fakun, and his nephew, Wang Yuping, worked for division commander Gu Pinzhen. Li Jingcai developed close ties with the leading Sichuan warlord, Liu Xiang. The instability of the warlord regimes made such ties unreliable at best. Mere survival of a business was sufficient grounds for a new military ruler to suspect the owner of collusion with his enemies. During the first decade of the Republic, the Wangs, the Lis, and other lesser salt families suffered heavy losses in the form of fines, levies, and outright confiscations as their warlord governors changed from year to year. After an initial period of free market distribution of Sichuan salt, the new foreign-run Salt Inspectorate began to increase the gabelle and associated charges at rates several times those of the late Qing. Sichuan salt once and for all lost its competitive edge in the Huguang market. At the same time, banditry and warlord competition cut off Fu-Rong's markets at home and in the older Yunnan and Guizhou sales zones.^[99]

The end of the free market system in the 1870s and the gradual erosion of Sichuan's designated market in Huguang had already meant diminished profits for the large salt wholesale firms. The Li Siyou lineage trust was the first to close its wholesale firm trading with Huguang.^[100] With the introduction of "official transport and merchant sales," the lineage-based firms lost the advantage gained by preferential marketing of their own salt. With prices also fixed by the state, the profits that had helped finance conspicuous consumption, influence peddling, and other lineage businesses began to decline.

In the mid-1890s, the discovery of a layer of rock salt above the level of the black brine dramatically changed the structure of the industry at Fu-Rong. Rock-salt wells (yanyan jing ) had to be irrigated by fresh water brought in from the outside. However, once water was introduced, salinity at these wells was far greater than that at either yellow- or black-brine wells. The volume of brine brought up each day was limited only by the capacity of the pumps with which a well was equipped. This inspired the introduction of steam-driven pumps, wide-mouthed wells, and metal tubes and cable, which increased the output from a single well as much as ten times.^[101]

The advent of the rock-salt well was a boon to the salt yard as a whole, but apparently it contributed to the decline of the large lineage-based firms. First, the large lineage trusts in the nineteenth century dug mostly black-brine wells. Deeper than the new rock-salt wells, they had been opened at far greater expense, and represented a major commitment of lineage funds. By the turn of the century, many of these wells were drying up, and lineage finances were increasingly tight. Moreover, as brine supplies increased, they could not compete with the more productive rock-salt wells. Of the eighty-

seven deep wells opened in Gongjing at the turn of the century, at least forty-six closed between 1910 and 1930.^[102] Far more important for the lineage-based fortunes was the location of the rock-salt wells. Unlike the most efficient black-brine wells, at a considerable distance from the Ziliujing gas wells and furnaces, the rock-salt wells were in Ziliujing. The enormous power wielded by the large lineage-based firms, given their control of the brine pipes between Gonging and Ziliujing, vanished almost overnight.^[103] The erosion of their economic base was accompanied by the erosion of the elite status which was based upon it. Although they remained a presence at the yard until the Communist revolution, by the 1920s power and influence was passing to a new breed of men.

The introduction of rock-salt wells heralded another change in the balance of power at the yard. Before their large-scale exploitation, gas supplies far exceeded brine supplies, and untold quantities of natural gas were allowed to escape everyday for lack of a better use. As productivity at the rock-salt wells increased, gas became dear, and gas-well owners, many of them independents and newcomers to the yard, were able to set the terms of trade. At the same time, excess supplies of brine and the structure of the rock-salt wells themselves introduced a new-style entrepreneur. Men who controlled the irrigation of the wells, contracted to pump the wells, managed the growing number of credit institutions at the yard, and owned or rented furnaces were the economic powers to contend with in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Among the leaders of this new generation of salt merchants were several whose early careers had been spent as high-level managers for the large lineage-based firms. By the end of the 1920s, their former employers were deep in debt and no longer able to dominate the affairs of the salt-merchant community.^[104] The new salt-yard elite would play an important role in reviving the salt industry, particularly after the Japanese invasion of eastern China made unoccupied China almost solely dependent on Sichuan salt. However, their interests would remain diversified in a way that the nineteenth-century integrated salt firms never were.

The great salt lineages of nineteenth-century Fu-Rong provide an important example of an early modern local elite whose dominance was based entirely on control of industrial and commercial wealth. The structures through which dominance was exercised were not unique to the salt yard, but rather they represented adapting universally available lineage institutions to the needs of locally based industry. The lineage trust integrated commercial and productive resources and, for a time at least, protected corporate industrial interests against the personal interests of individual family members. As such, the experience of the Fu-Rong lineage trusts represents an important transitional stage in China's early modern economic development. The lineage trust provided members of the Fu-Rong elite with economic advantages over smaller merchant operators, allowed a small number of

firms to control a large portion of the labor market at the yard, and facilitated the exercise of traditional gentry roles. Even among those families with a history of degree and office holding, the salt business remained the focus of activity and the source of power and wealth.

Whereas changing economic conditions accompanying the Taiping invasion of eastern China helped propel the rise of an industrial elite in Fu-Rong, the political trauma that followed the fall of the Qing was a key element in its decline. The 1911 Revolution brought new opportunities for political participation and new threats to the markets won during the last years of imperial rule. For the twentieth-century salt-yard elite, the rules of the game had changed. Business relations became more complex, and the insecurity of trade under the post-Qing warlord regimes meant that few were willing or able to invest in the kinds of integrated salt empires that had been the strength of Fu-Rong merchants in the past. Politics now meant juggling a complex combination of ties to local warlords and militia chiefs, Guomindang officials, and officers of a Salt Inspectorate run under the auspices of foreign powers and a central government that had exerted little influence in local society. Business resources ceased to be sufficient determinants of status in the new Republican social arena. Even in this preeminently industrial Chinese city, access to these new political forces determined both business success and the maintenance of local elite dominance.