PART ONE
LATE IMPERIAL ELITES

One
Family Continuity and Cultural Hegemony: The Gentry of Ningbo, 1368-1911

Timothy Brook

One evening in the fall of 1617, Wan Bangfu (1544-1628) and Zhou Yingzhi (jinshi 1580) were drinking with their friends at the Moon Society, a poet's club by the edge of Moon (or West) Lake in the southwest quarter of the city of Ningbo. The two men were celebrating the births of grandchildren. Zhou's daughter-in-law had given birth to a girl, Wan's to a boy, Wan Sinian (1617-93), who would become a leading scholar of the late seventeenth century. Well into their cups, Wan and Zhou decided that the newborns should be betrothed to each other to cement their own tie. The marriage took place as planned, nineteen years later.

Wan and Zhou were among the most highly placed members of the local gentry of Yin county, the prefectural seat of Ningbo, at the turn of the seventeenth century. The Wans had first risen to prominence through military achievements during the founding of the Ming dynasty in the 1360s, for which they had been awarded a hereditary guard commandership in Ningbo. The family was known even then for its literary cultivation: the daughter of the first commander had earned a local reputation for her studies and filial piety. Wan Bangfu's grandfather had been the first to transfer the family from military to civil eminence by becoming an outstanding Neo-Confucian scholar in the tradition of the eminent philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1528). Wan Bangfu had similarly excelled in both military and literary skills, overseeing the defense of the Fujian coast while in office and composing poetry and penning calligraphy while out of office. He had married his son to one of the Xihu ("West Lake") Wens, a most respectable family from the fashionable Moon Lake residential district, and the new couple had produced Sinian.

In terms of family background, though, Zhou Yingzhi was the most eminent man in Ningbo in 1617. The Fushi Zhous were the leading gentry family

of the county. They had recently acquired a new spacious residence by Moon Lake. As the senior member of his generation, Yingzhi was qualified to preside over elite society in all its forms, including the twenty-nine-member Moon Society where he and Wan celebrated grandfatherhood and tied the knot between their lines.

The betrothal of the infants was recalled many years later by their son, Wan Yan (1637-1705). Wan Yan was born the year after his grandfather, Bangfu, finally passed the provincial juren examinations. Like his grandfather and father, Wan Yan married well (a Shaoyaozhi Qian). Like them, too, he was active in literary societies with his friends, "the younger members of the great families of the county"—the Qijie Lis (to whom he was related by marriage), the Nanhu Shens, the Wanzhu Gaos, the Feng'ao Shuis, and others. At the center of much of this literary activity in Yin county was Huang Zongxi (1610-95), the outstanding intellectual of his generation. Huang had been a fellow-student with Wan Yan's father and during Wan Yan's own time was teaching in retirement in his native Yuyao county on the western border of Yin. "Our party" (wu dang ), as Wan Yan called his friends, expressed their common moral and intellectual commitment and their regret for the fall of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) by gathering around Huang. Later Wan Yan took Huang's concerns about Ming history to the capital by helping to compile the official dynastic history of the fallen Ming house on the basis of Huang's research notes. Wan Yan's in-law, Li Yesi, used the same expression, "our party," for the Ningbo gentry coterie that gathered around Huang. In Li's view the Wans in particular were preeminent in "our party." He called them "the model of the gentry lineage."^[1]

This brief glimpse of the seventeenth-century social world inhabited by the upper levels of the Yin-county gentry touches on some ways by which this elite group established its hegemony in the late imperial period. Confucian social theory placed the gentry—those who distinguished themselves by entering the service of the throne via the examination system—at the top of a conventionalized four-tiered hierarchy above peasants, artisans, and merchants. The imperial political system, however, denied them a legitimate voice in the decision-making processes in their native places by empowering them politically only after they had passed the higher state examinations and left for a bureaucratic career elsewhere. This nonenfranchisement allowed the gentry to occupy the pinnacle of the social order at home only extrapolitically. To ensure their hegemony in that context, the gentry developed distinctive economic, social, and cultural strategies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[2] In this essay I do not challenge the institutional definition of the gentry in terms of state titles, but I do supplement it by arguing that sociocultural factors were not only part of the gentry's definition but also necessary to its constitution. I will focus on two strategies that, aside from the main forms of gentry economic dominance—that is, landlordism

and the control of local surplus through marketing and usury—are essential for understanding the maintenance and character of local gentry control: family continuity and cultural hegemony.

Yin County and Its Gentry

Yin county was the seat of Ningbo prefecture. The city, usually known by the name Ningbo, served as both county and prefectural capital. Located at the northeastern corner of Zhejiang province, Ningbo was outside the central Jiangnan core, but it was the region's main commercial city. As a maritime trading center it had been nationally prominent since the Song dynasty. The Yong River that linked it to the sea could carry ocean-going vessels upstream as far as the commercial fiats east of the city wall, and a series of inland waterways leading west to Hangzhou made Ningbo the de facto southern terminus of the Grand Canal, the backbone of China's internal trading network extending all the way to Beijing. When the Song dynasty fell to the Jurchens and the capital was moved to Hangzhou in the twelfth century, Ningbo absorbed many northern elite families that chose to relocate to the region. Entering national politics by its proximity to the Southern Song capital, Ningbo gained a prominence it did not relinquish even after the political center shifted back to North China in the Yuan dynasty in 1279.

Yin enjoyed a flourishing agricultural economy based on a highly developed countywide irrigation system. The watercourses of the western half of the hinterland plain had been developed in the Song and Yuan; however, the hydraulic system of the eastern half achieved its maximum extent only by the latter half of the sixteenth century. Active commercial exchange between the hinterland and the coast combined with agriculture to make Yin a prosperous place in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Both internal grain circulation—wheat moving south, rice moving north—and foreign trade with Japan enriched the city. Designated a treaty port in 1842 and situated only 260 kilometers by boat from the emerging metropolis of Shanghai, Ningbo benefited from international commerce, although the rise of steam-shipping after the mid-nineteenth century led eventually to a modest eclipse in the city's prominence.^[3]

The men of Yin county in the Ming dynasty could look back to the Southern Song for an impressive tradition of degree winning and office holding, and they proved themselves adept at continuing that tradition. Their success led to the rapid formation of a large titled gentry.^[4] In the Ming, the highest metropolitan degree of jinshi was conferred on 293 individuals, a rate of slightly better than three per triennial examination session. The high tide of degree success in Yin came during the twenty-one jinshi examinations held at the capital between 1466 and 1526: Yin natives won this degree at the remarkable rate of five per session. Combined with those who gained only

the provincial juren or the gongsheng degree, the number of people holding examination titles that qualified them for office in the Ming exceeded a thousand. With the exception of the two metropolitan counties where the provincial capital, Hangzhou, was situated, no county in Zhejiang could match this impressive record in the Ming.

The success with which Yin natives acquired degrees in the Ming suggests not only that they must have been well prepared to succeed in the examinations but also, more significant for our purposes, that examination titles were highly valued and aggressively sought by the county's leading families. It is usually assumed that men pursued degrees in the struggle to rise to power in Beijing. I would argue, however, that few proceeded through the exam system with this aspiration. Knowing the odds were formidably against them, they got degrees for another purpose. Titles from the examination system were an entrée into government service, but they were also a key resource in the local context, for they uniquely set apart those with claims to legitimate status. These titles can be viewed as proxies for other power—most notably that derived from wealth—because success in the examinations generally eluded those without considerable financial resources. Full elite status depended on acquiring a state title, not simply wealth; and the status these titles conferred—like wealth—was significant primarily in local, rather than national, arenas of power.

Yin's record in the Qing dynasty is far less impressive: only 131 jinshi for a period of roughly equal duration. Fully one-third date to the half-century after 1851, when degrees were made more available in provinces that had suffered during the Taiping Rebellion. Yin's pre-1851 rate of acquisition—little better than one per session—is therefore uninspiring. Given the well-known commercial and intellectual vitality of the region in the nineteenth century, this deterioration in the ability of Yin men to win degrees might be explained by their pursuit of other goals, such as accumulating landed or mercantile wealth. In other words, the decline in the number of higher degrees by members of Yin elite families possibly reflects a limited erosion of certain gentry-typical strategies within an elite that was being drawn more and more along other avenues of wealth and power, particularly commerce.

A diversification of strategies between gentry and mercantile goals may have been true in Yin to some extent even in the Ming. Mary Rankin has noted that commercialization and demographic growth in Zhejiang through the Qing propelled gentry and merchants toward an "incomplete fusion."^[5] The scale of Yin gentry participation in this incomplete fusion in the Ming and Qing is hinted at in a few biographies of "filial and charitable men" (xiaoyi ) in the 1733 Ningbo prefectural gazetteer.^[6] Sun E, a provincial juren of 1489, was the son of a merchant who had gone off to Shaanxi province but failed to return because he had not made enough money to justify his absence. Sun's mother took charge of his education, and he gained his juren

degree at the relatively young age of twenty. Thereafter he traveled north to find his father and bring him home; his own success canceled his father's failure. Sun's achievement was not the isolated luck of an individual, for a cousin had won his juren in the previous session of 1486. For unstated reasons, the Suns varied their strategies for success, at one time pursuing educational goals and at another following mercantile careers. Another local family, the Xihu Chens, shows the same pattern. Chen Shu (jinshi 1529) rose to the post of vice-intendant of education for Henan province; his great-grandson, orphaned and in straitened circumstances at the age of fifteen, gave up his studies to support his mother and later his own family by running a store. He was able to give his son an education, though his early death in turn forced the son to give up his studies and go into "textiles and grain."^[7] Although neither of these families held a commanding position within the greater gentry, the county's preeminent historian of the Qing, Quan Zuwang (1705-55), regarded the Xihu Chens, and possibly the Suns as well, as belonging among Yin's "eminent lineages" in the Ming.^[8]

The 1877 county gazetteer offers a few similarly brief references from the Qing: a 1765 gongsheng who "worked as a merchant when young in order to support his parents and younger brothers, and later in life turned to a career of scholarship"; an early nineteenth-century holder of the shengyuan degree whose elder brother was a merchant; another shengyuan , a wholesale dealer in firewood, was prevented from going on to a higher degree when his elder brother's death obliged him to stay in business to support the family; an 1832 juren whose great-grandfather had run a drugstore in Beijing.^[9] To some degree, trade was permissible within gentry families that could not support themselves through more conventional gentry-style sources of income.

A significant portion of the Yin gentry nonetheless resisted this willingness to regard the commercial acquisition of wealth with equanimity, even as late as the end of the eighteenth century. Qin Jing, for example, started out as a promising student but decided to go into business to reverse his family's financial decline. (Growing rich through a bureaucratic career could only be a long-term strategy.) His father admonished him with the advice that he should "seek to be a gentleman, however poor, not a merchant, however rich." Persuaded by this appeal to gentry exclusiveness, Qin went back to his studies, winning his juren degree in 1798.^[10] So long as the fusion between gentry prestige and merchant wealth remained incomplete, gentry ideals of a conservative mold were far from moribund prior to the nineteenth century. Indeed, we should probably read the lackluster performance of Yin natives in the exams compared with candidates from the more peripheral parts of Ningbo prefecture as evidence that the Yin gentry were neither expanding nor receiving large infusions from those outside their ranks,^[11] such as mercantile families. The social context of elite life may have been changing as Ningbo was drawn further into coastal and international trade, but the upper

echelons of the Yin elite continued to exercise their dominance in characteristically gentry fashion.

Family Continuity

Family identity is always a resource of dominance when social structure is relatively stable: The longer a family inhabits the elite, the stronger its elite identity. This principle has particular cogency for the late imperial Chinese gentry because gentry status strictly speaking cannot be inherited.^[12] The full implementation of an examination-based bureaucracy in the Song dynasty led to forming a new elite largely composed of men recruited on criteria other than birth. The examination system provided a pathway to elite status that neither crossed the territory of prior privilege nor was hedged with legal barriers to talent in favor of birth. The Chinese political system, at least officially, did not condone the begetting of status by status.^[13]

It should follow from this shift in the Song away from hereditary elites that the ability of elite families to continue to reproduce that eminence declined radically. The view that elite status could not be preserved in the manner of the old pre-Song elites became conventional wisdom within the gentry. As one late-Ming writer observed, "The son of a gentleman it not necessarily able to become a gentleman."^[14] The myth of rapid upward and downward mobility became enshrined in popular sayings: "a gentleman's grace becomes extinct in five generations," or "a patriline has to migrate after five generations."^[15] Previous studies of mobility in China, more concerned with national than local elites, have tended to accept this view of low-level continuity.^[16] However, continuity and mobility, though parallel, are not the same; nor is the relationship between them exactly inverse. Low mobility certainly implies high continuity because the absence of newcomers will leave elite membership unchanged; but high mobility does not necessarily imply low continuity, for there can be considerable continuity of elite families at the same time that a substantial number of new people are entering the elite, particularly when the elite is growing in size, as it was throughout the Ming-Qing period. An exclusive focus on mobility may thus lead to conclusions about the flexibility or openness of a social structure without revealing much about long-term solidarity or stability.

Whether gentry families could withstand the vicissitudes of the post-Song system of political appointment and maintain their status over successive generations is critical for evaluating the centrality of gentry status to local-elite life. If we can detect a marked degree of continuity over time, then it becomes necessary to recognize that degree acquisition is affected by certain probabilities. Rather than an isolated foray into the realm of national political power, it appears as a general strategy for maintaining elite status over generations. Some recent studies have begun to suggest that many families

within the local elite continued in that status over considerably longer stretches than the five-generation rise-and-fall pattern would suggest.^[17] In her study of Tongcheng county, Anhui, Hilary Beattie noted that there existed "an elite group of families some of whose members were prominent in the life of the county throughout most of the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties." Jerry Dennerline found that the elite households in Suzhou's Jiading county in the mid-seventeenth century "were from lines which emerged in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth." Taking an even longer perspective, Robert Hymes in his study of the Song dynasty local elite of Fuzhou prefecture, Jiangxi, remarked that "specific Song or Yuan descent groups can be traced without difficulty into the Qing." They "continue as identifiable social entities important enough to be noted in examination lists and biographies, deep into the Qing dynasty."^[18] William Rowe's article in this volume reaches similar conclusions.

The Lineage in Elite Life

By shifting our unit of analysis for the elite from the family to the lineage, we begin to see that, with its ability to concentrate effort and resources within certain lines or branches, the lineage could anticipate some measure of examination success over generations. As Linda Walton observed in her study of Yin county's Lou lineage in the Song, recognizing long-term elite strategies through lineage allows us to see the late imperial elite "as a large group of lineages who prepared candidates for the examinations and provided office-holders for the state, but who achieved, protected, and enhanced their status locally through a variety of social and economic means."^[19]

Studies of elite mobility conducted in the 1960s doubted the wisdom of tracing elite continuity in terms of lineage. The principal objection was that the privileges of an examination-degree holder extended only to his immediate kin and did not transfer laterally to other lineage members; one or two branches might enjoy good fortune while the status or wealth of the lineage as a whole declined.^[20] Although some horizontal transfer did occur, rarely did all members benefit from the success of one branch. The local elite mainly formed lineages, not to transfer resources horizontally to living agnates, but to limit collateral kinsmen's claims so that wealth and power might be husbanded for future generations.^[21] This burden of sorting out such claims was perceived as an issue within the Ningbo elite, for the county gazetteer of 1788 deplores the practice among the poor of making false kinship claims on wealthy men of the same surname in the hope of extracting support from them.^[22] The goal of mobilizing lineage-wide assets was, therefore, not to enable all members of a lineage to become gentry, but to invest in vertical strategies to acquire or preserve gentry status (and the wealth that made such status feasible) for some members of later generations. From what I

have seen in Yin sources, success did not scatter widely over a lineage but tended to concentrate within certain families or branches.

The obstacles to sustaining gentry status over successive generations were multiple: the division of family property through partible inheritance, the mortality of heirs, and the unpredictability of the examination system all militated against continuity. Through such institutions as shrines, schools, and corporate funding for education and other forms of advancement, lineages attacked the problem of mobilizing sufficient assets to invest in vertical strategies. The lineage was thus formed by its elite members around the principal descent lines to broaden the pool of resources and educated junior agnates that could be drawn upon in the difficult, recurrent effort to renew gentry status through the examination system.^[23] For this reason the lineage is historically and analytically inseparable from the question of the Chinese gentry's continuity.^[24]

Many historians of the region have observed that the lineage dominated the social, economic, and educational opportunites of the individual in northeastern Zhejiang toward the end of the imperial era.^[25] A glance through Ming-Qing sources for Yin immediately confirms the importance of lineage. Certain "families" (jia ) or "lineages" (zu )—the terms are largely interchangeable when referring to agnatic groupings among the elite—are featured repeatedly in accounts of gentry life. For instance, a popular mid-sixteenth-century jingle runs:

The Tus rank tops this side of the Yong,
One of the four great families of which Yin people boast;
Just like the four great gentry lineages of the Song—
Lou, Feng, Shi, and Zheng—who were likewise praised the most.^[26]

The "four great families" were the Jiangbei Tus, the Jingchuan Yangs, the Chahu Zhangs, and the Xihu Lus. By pairing them with the four Yin families that were most successful in fielding bureaucrats in the Southern Song, the verse reminds us that participation in national politics, however much removed from the local scene, remained the key factor in establishing the highest elite status.

The only attempt to assess the continuity of elite status within gentry lineages in the late imperial period is Pan Guangdan's study of Jiaxing prefecture, located northwest of Ningbo across Hangzhou Bay. Pan places among the elite those lineages of which at least five members are named in the prefectural gazetteer of 1878. This admittedly mechanical principle of selection yields ninety-one greater gentry lineages, plus an additional group of sixty lineages of lesser status. Dating their periods of prominence from the generation of the first named member to that of the last, Pan finds that the ninety-one greater gentry lineages remained prominent for an average of slightly more than two centuries. Continuity among a secondary group of

sixty lesser lineages was roughly one century. Given the gazetteer's incomplete and somewhat arbitrary reporting of names, this reconstruction in fact underestimates the actual degree of elite continuity. Pan thus concludes that the gentry lineages of Jiaxing were aristogenic in character, capable of reproducing themselves over time (in the manner of a hereditary aristocracy) and not completely hostage to the vagaries of status acquisition at each generation.^[27]

My reconstruction of the elite gentry lineages of Yin county confirms Pan's general conclusion.^[28] Reaching much further down into the elite of a single county rather than an entire prefecture, I have identified forty-eight lineages that had at least four members holding higher degrees, at least two of which are jinshi (table 1.1).^[29] These criteria arbitrarily exclude lineages that, though less successful in terms of degree acquisition, may have won local prominence by other means; it also ignores lineages whose members have proven difficult to identify. The resulting sample, nonetheless, includes to my satisfaction the families of nearly all the most prominent individual gentry of Yin county through the Ming and Qing dynasties.

(Table continued on next page)

Eight families of outstanding distinction head this list of forty-eight greater gentry. They are led by the Chengxi Fans, holders of a remarkable total of sixty-one jinshi, juren , and gongsheng degrees. The family was known for its private library, Tianyige, which it bought in the sixteenth century from the Xihu Fengs, an eminent Song family then entering its decline; the library still exists as the repository of an exceptional collection of late imperial texts. Next to the Fans in number of jinshi are the Shaoyaozhi Qians, who became leading figures in the Ming loyalist fight against the Manchus; the Fushi Zhous, who through educational and patronage activities became

associated with the finest in Ming gentry culture; the Jiangbei Tus, whose most noted member was the prolific and controversial essayist Tu Long (1542-1605); and the Xihu Lus, two of whom earned reputations for high-mindedness when they were flogged at court in 1522 for challenging the newly enthroned Jiajing emperor in the Great Rites Controversy. The Xicheng Dongs, known in the seventeenth century as an "eminent lineage," won only six jinshi but managed to garner an enormous number of lesser degrees over a period of more than four centuries, a span second only to the Tus. Among the eight, those with the briefest spans (less than two centuries) between their first and last degrees were the Chahu Zhangs, self-conscious spokesmen for Confucian orthodoxy in the late Ming; and the Jingchuan Yangs, who garnered six jinshi over three decades at the end of the fifteenth century, propelled four members into ministerial and vice-ministerial positions, and owned the finest residence in the city of Ningbo.^[30]

Consistent with the selection criteria based on degrees, lineages with more degrees show longer spans of prominence. The average for the eight super-elite lineages is just over three centuries; only the Yangs and Zhangs collected degrees over a period of less than two centuries. At the next level down in Table 1.1, the average degree span is more than two and a half centuries; among lineages that acquired less than four jinshi degrees, the average is 190 years. These spans seriously underestimate the duration of a lineage's real prominence, for the first and last degrees do not necessarily indicate the lineage's entry into or exit from the elite. There would have been a preparatory period of several generations of lesser degrees leading up to the first higher degree; and at the other end, higher degrees had a sort of half-life that allowed their potency as status indicators to continue even beyond the holder's lifetime.

From Table 1.1 we see that the gentry elite of Yin county did not rise and fall with each title's acquisition and each title holder's death. Membership was relatively stable; the lineages that fielded the highest degree holders formed a small and well-defined group. As long as the imperial order remained in place, local prominence corresponded closely with membership in certain lineages. This should come as no surprise, for elite dominance by its very nature is sustained over time. The success with which the Yin gentry sustained their presence over generations must in turn be recognized as a key element in gentry hegemony and a powerful resource for the old aristogenic gentry families who peopled the county elite.

Gentry Culture

The survival of a limited number of families within the elite over several centuries required more than carefully managing lineage resources; it depended equally on managing the symbolic capital that accrued to gentry status. I

argue here that culture was one of the means most consistently (even though unconsciously) used to achieve a longevity of power.

In the analysis that follows, culture is regarded as a set of practices whose main effect is to project for all members of a society a sense of sharing common values that are good—in other words, a sense that the existing arrangements of class power and dominance are appropriate. Raymond Williams has characterized culture in this vein as "the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes." Culture is hegemonic because it saturates "the whole process of living—not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships."^[31] The elite can pilot that hegemony by identifying and controlling key social activities that reinforce its status in the eyes of subalterns and make its authority appear inarguable.

We can sense how well this definition applies to the world of late imperial China and the practices of its gentry in the short story "Divorce" that Lu Xun, a native of the neighboring prefecture of Shaoxing, wrote in 1925. Aigu is fighting her husband's attempts to abandon her, and their conflict is brought to Seventh Master for resolution. Seventh Master is introduced as a man from the city who "exchanges cards with the magistrate."^[32] At the beginning of the scene in which he presides over the divorce negotiations, Seventh Master deftly establishes his authority by examining and commenting upon a Han dynasty relic, an anus-stopper from a corpse. This parody of the taste for antiquities among the gentry only underscores the unassailability of the symbolic capital concentrated in the status display. Aigu launches into her complaint against her husband but is swiftly intimidated into silence by a second high-cultural gesture: Seventh Master has his servant fetch a (to Aigu) mysterious flat bottle the size of a tortoise shell and takes snuff from it. Without denying her claim, this lower-level gentryman is able to wield cultural symbols in meaningless display to cancel the conflict. Power in this context means the ability to be seen as powerful, a visibility that cultural affectation could establish with great force.

It should not be surprising to find Lu Xun illustrating the continuing potency of gentry culture as late as the 1920s, for gentry culture of the late imperial period was still alive in the Republic. Indeed, its characteristics proved singularly impervious to alteration. Despite incorporating mercantile elements into the elite through the Qing, gentry culture continued to determine the skills and idioms that elite men were expected to master. Wealth alone could not create status: it had to be mediated by cultural forms that rendered wealth acceptable. In part the gentry were able to dominate the gentry-merchant alliance that emerged in the Qing by supplying and controlling those forms. No member of the late imperial elite, either aspiring or arrived, could overlook the gentry's self-made styles and strategies. Not for lack of other terminology did the opponents of the early twentieth-century

declining rural elites label them "wicked gentry " (lieshen ), for they still clung to the fading aura of gentryhood for their paltry legitimacy.

The particular forms of cultural activity that gentry culture favored covered a wide range. Ritual, literary exercise, artistic appreciation, scholarship, philanthropy, and patronage were all regarded as appropriate activities through which both the crowning Confucian concept of benevolence (ren ) could be realized and the gentry's priority at the top of the Confucian social order could be reaffirmed as unassailable. These cultural practices lent substance to gentry hegemony in several ways in addition to the sort of aggressive symbolic display caricatured by Lu Xun. The two I examine are the reinforcement of associational networks among the gentry and the creation of a recognized public sphere for gentry activism; both became part of the gentry's cultural identity.

Associational Networks in Gentry Culture . The key to the dominance that these old gentry families enjoyed in the county lies in their interaction with each other. They did not exist in isolated eminence; instead, they were consistently forming and reforming ties, building networks that favored men of equal status and disadvantaged lesser gentry and nongentry. Friendship, marriage, political commitment, and cultural pursuits all furnished opportunities for the elite to associate with one another. Through such social interaction, the leading families found a common identity and made entry into their charmed circle difficult. In this context, family continuity was critical, for it provided ready-made ties to other dominant families in the gentry elite's network. These ties could pass from generation to generation almost automatically, especially when members of the elite, like the betrothed newborns of the Wan and Zhou lineages, found themselves playing a part without any voice in the matter.

The intensity of the ties among the county gentry is reflected in another sixteenth-century jingle recorded by Li Yesi of the Qijie Lis:

The Fu family of Huijiang and the Jiatang Wus:
Their huge gates face each other, their buildings touching roofs;
The Zhangs and Lus support each other like a pair of willows entwined;
The Zhus and Chens, living together in one place, are likewise so inclined.^[33]

The families in the first line are the Wuxiangqi Fus and the Lianghu Wus. Together with the Qijie Lis they were known as the "three great families of eastern Yin." In the third line appear the superelite Chahu Zhangs and the Xihu Lus. In the fourth are the Jiangshan Chens and possibly the Maodong Zhus, a family that had won two jinshi degrees in the latter part of the fifteenth century but by the late Ming was of little consequence.^[34] All but the Zhus are found in Table 1.1.

The verse is silent on the types of ties we tend to look for in elite networks,

particularly marriage ties, which are poorly reported in the available records for Yin. But it is revealing of one aspect of elite association—physical proximity. The Fus and Wus are pictured as living within sight of each other, the Zhus and Chens as neighbors. At first glance, the solidarity between the Zhangs and Lus would appear more symbolic than physical because the Lus lived in the city's exclusive Moon Lake area, whereas the Zhangs' native village was some six kilometers southwest of the city wall. "A pair of willows entwined," however, is probably not pure metaphor, for the Zhangs probably maintained a residence in town near the Lus. We have already seen that a family could maintain both a rural residence and a second house in town in the case of the Fushi Zhous, who acquired a property on Moon Lake in the sixteenth century.

Of the forty-eight lineages in Table 1.1, I have been able to determine addresses for forty-two. Twenty-four of these forty-two lineages were based either within the city of Ningbo or in its immediate suburban area. Another eleven, among them the Chahu Zhangs and the Fushi Zhous, identified themselves with villages west and southwest of the city within ten kilometers of the city wall. This area was the part of Ningbo's hinterland plain first drained and farmed during the Song dynasty. Of the other seven lineages, five were located on the eastern plain, and two were in major towns in the peripheral upland. If we restrict our sample to the nineteen lineages placed highest in Table 1.1, eleven lived in or adjacent to the city, and the rest lived on the hinterland plain. However the sample is determined, the distribution of elite lineages is skewed more heavily to the urban core of Yin county than is true for the population as a whole. As the Zhou family's possession of a second residence inside the city indicates, this survey underestimates the urban concentration of elite families. At the very least, it suggests a tendency for elite lineages to gravitate toward the political and commercial core of the county, adjacent not only to the center of power but also, and as important, to each other.

The concentration of elite residence in or near the city of Ningbo reflects the associational pattern of gentry life. This relationship is underscored by Wan Yan's reminiscence about the betrothed newborns that furnished this article's opening story.

When I lived in Guangji ward in the prefectural capital, I was neighbors with many noted families. The Shens, the Huangs, the Zhangs, and the Gaos all lived there. My great-great-grandmother Wang was related to both the Huangs and the Zhangs, so I had cousins in both families.^[35]

Wan further comments that in the winter of 1656-57 he and these cousins, thrown together during a period of civil unrest, formed a literary society, and that half the members were young men from the neighboring families.

Wan Yan's story brings us to the central issue of culture and its critical

function in gentry hegemony. The connections between Wan and his associates, facilitated by residential proximity, were lent greater substance through a cultural practice unique to the gentry, the writing of poetry. The gentry came, in a sense, culturally equipped to exercise their hegemony over local society by the cultural expertise nourished by elite life-styles: a confident competence in the arts of reading and writing, an ability to interpret and manipulate the symbols of the Confucian order, an appreciation of complex artistic media through which elite values found expression, an understanding of courtesy and deference and their effective use in social encounters, a knowledge of acceptable models and precedents for decision making. These skills were automatically gained through neither classical study for the examinations nor acquisition of the wealth needed for leisure and cultural display, but they were polished through exposure to the practices and society of highly cultivated elites. Several generations might be required for the upwardly mobile to master these social and cultural marks of good breeding, without which they could not hope to be admitted to the upper levels of societies like that of Ningbo, where a mature gentry was firmly established.

Viewed from this perspective, family continuity was more than an empty symbol of established authority. By passing on the appropriate cultural orientation from generation to generation, a family steeped in gentry traditions was better positioned to train its young men to acquire and hone skills essential for succeeding in both serving the state and maintaining status at home. Culture should thus be thought of as providing a repertoire of activities by which the gentry could create and maintain networks of personal ties with each other and set themselves apart from those who had not mastered the nuanced language of elite life.

A good example of the mastery of this repertoire is Zhang Shiche (jinshi 1523). The Chahu Zhangs entered the sixteenth century with a reputation for living communally in accordance with the Confucian ideal of kinship harmony.^[36] After three decades in bureaucratic office, in his years of retirement from the 1550s through the 1570s Zhang Shiche embodied the Confucian model of gentry responsibility by actively participating in a wide range of sociocultural activities. His name appears in numerous inscriptions, dedications, and publications connected with important projects in the region: Chongde Shrine, raised in posthumous honor of a Taoyuan Chen for lightening the tax burden of local peasants; the Donggang Sluice, built in neighboring Dinghai as part of a large gentry-sponsored hydraulic project to improve irrigation on Yin's eastern plain; the Dinghai county school; a private academy; four bridges, one of which was known as Minister Zhang's Bridge; and the prefectural gazetteer of 1560, for which he served as editor-in-chief.^[37] Zhang Shiche was the mentor of the younger elite cohort of the 1570s, of whom Tu Long was the principal figure. We see him, for example, at a select reception for the Suzhou painter Wu Zhoushi when the latter visited Ningbo

in the 1570s. In addition to his eldest son Bangren, this coterie included Tianyige library owner Fan Qin, the poet Shen Mingchen, two Jiangbei Tus, and two other eminent gentry.^[38] Zhang Shiche's presence among these younger men in turn placed his own family in a central position within that generation, so that when Zhang Bangren published his collected poetry several decades later Tu Long wrote the preface recommending the work.^[39]

Cultural pursuits thus were organized through the networks of elite society, and mastering cultural skills was necessary for those who sought access to those networks. Entry into the elite world of the gentry was difficult, even more so if one lacked formal gentry titles. Occasionally an interloper could break in by other means. A contemporary of Zhang Shiche, Lu Chuanmei, was a merchant whose father had come to Yin to escape pirate troubles elsewhere along the coast. Lu was annoyed at being unable to deal with the "powerful lineages" of his neighborhood. His lineage biographer says that he overcame their exclusion and came to their notice by cultivating "virtuous conduct."^[40] Its exact meaning is not indicated, although Lu's mercantile wealth hints that he was buying his way into the elite. Entry into the gentry's world could thus be facilitated by strategically adopting gentry "virtues" (which could be measured by donations) as well as discouraged by ignorance of them.

Literary accomplishment was a key basis for signaling status and forming groups among the elite. Yin sources are particularly rich in information concerning poetry clubs, especially in the mid-seventeenth century when they provided Ming loyalists a refuge from the calamity of the Manchu occupation in 1645. The collapse of the Ming dynasty provoked a major crisis for the Ming gentry. Their legitimacy as the local elite rested on an agreement to serve imperial power in return for the highest tokens of status. Loyalty to a fallen dynasty, which such a contract demanded, essentially marginalized the existing gentry elite. They were not supposed to acquire further degrees or hold office under the new rulers, though some of course did. Bereft of public careers and further access to legitimizing state titles, the gentry in the immediate postconquest period turned to literary groups as the safest way to honor the fallen dynasty and display their own status. Indeed, the Yin elite achieved something of a reputation in this regard, for Quan Zuwang notes that "the gentry of Ningbo, whose distress had driven them into retirement, became nationally prominent after the fall of the Ming." The postconquest poetry clubs that Quan declares most noteworthy—like the "eight gentlemen of West Lake" and the "nine gentlemen of South Lake"—were highly exclusive. But he says there were many other "societies and gatherings" (she hui ) besides these.^[41] He describes in some detail the Discarded Silk Society (Qixu She), formed by his ancestor, Quan Meixian, who chose for its name the appropriately gloomy emblem of discarded silk to express how the late-Ming gentry perceived their prospects under the Qing dynasty. In addition

to several Quans, the society's members included seven members of the most successful lineages listed in Table 1.1 and five men from other well-known families.^[42]

Somewhat later, as their emotional response to dynastic collapse faded, some greater gentry of Yin sought to come to terms with the political crisis of transition by turning, as Wan Yan did, from the romance of the poetry of remorse to the labor of scholarship by attempting to reconstruct the causes of the Ming's decline. The intellectual tradition spawned by this reaction—from Wan Yan to his student Quan Zuwang and thence to his student Jiang Xueyong (juren 1771)—has been called the Eastern Zhejiang School of historiography.^[43] The focal figure for this interest and its original inspiration was Huang Zongxi, living in retirement in the next county and presiding over a scholarly circle called the Society for the Discussion of the Classics (Jiangjing Hui).^[44] This coterie arond Huang Zongxi, which Wan Yan and Li Yesi referred to as "our party," was based on existing networks among the leading families of Ningbo: a Dingyuan Wan, a Qijie Li, a Quan, a Shaoyaozhi Qian, a Longgu Chen, and a Qingjiezhen Rong, among others, were counted in this group. History neither excluded nor replaced poetry, however. Although Wan Yan says that the poetry group he formed with his neighbors in 1656-57 made a point of not talking about "historical records and the suppression of disorder," his presence in the Huang group indicates that the poets and the intellectuals did not move in separate worlds. Indeed, essentially the same elite families in Huang Zongxi's coterie can also be found gathering around Li Yesi in the Mirror Lake Poetry Society. By the next generation, poetry and history were fully combined in the Candid Society (Zhenshuai She), formed by Quan Zuwang and others in 1742. The network that existed among these men passed on through their families, for Li Yesi's son, Wan Yan's younger cousin, and the sons of several others in Huang Zongxi's circle met together at exclusive semiannual drinking parties later in the century.^[45]

Nongentry elites appear to have had little place in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social networks that operated through these cultural associations; at least, local sources do not indicate their presence. Formal gentry status continued to define access to this cultural realm, and associational activity within this realm was the mantle of exclusiveness in which the elite wrapped itself.

Gently Culture and the Public Sphere . The gentry's typical cultural practices served as mechanisms for not only bringing them together but also enlarging their presence in the public sphere of local society. This public sphere may be defined as the arena of nonstate activity at the local level that contributed to the supply of services and resources in the public good. It existed throughout the late-imperial period, but the types of activities pursued in this arena prior

to the latter half of the nineteenth century were restricted because of the state's anxiety about local autonomy. Given the limited state resources available for local development, it was essential that the gentry adopt this role. As the state was forced more and more to rely on local decision making to maintain local stability, the public sphere grew gradually until, under the impact of the Taiping Rebellion and subsequent reconstruction, it expanded quickly to create a substantially new and greatly enlarged local political arena.^[46] Prior to this enlargement, and to some extent even after it, the greater gentry occupied almost entirely the center of this public sphere in Yin county.

The historical origins of this public sphere are to be found largely in what Susan Mann has called the "liturgical" services that the state expected of the gentry. Max Weber derived the notion of "liturgy" from the Athenian practice of having the elite discharge various public responsibilities at private expense; similarly, in China local elites were expected to render services for the benefit of the local community, usually to ensure public order. Chief among gentry responsibilities were operating welfare services, supervising public works, and maintaining local institutions. In some areas, the gentry might also involve themselves in regulating local trade because, as Susan Mann has pointed out, "orderly markets and contented merchants were as important as schools and granaries to community well-being."^[47] The Yin county gazetteer of 1788 contains an intriguing reference to "high-handed gentry" extracting payments from small-time merchants who traded in Ningbo's main commercial area on the river fiats east of the city wall about 1640. The assistant maritime commissioner for the region stopped this practice by punishing the bond servants who were acting as the gentry's agents and forbidding them to enter the area.^[48] The gazetteer presents this practice as extortion, although possibly the gentry's agents were simply collecting customary fees that both they and the merchants accepted as the price of liturgical supervision. Although problems inevitably arose, the state not only accepted but also encouraged gentry involvement in the public sphere, for it met needs for which state funding was inadequate or unavailable. For their part the gentry embraced the opportunity because this public service both heightened their social standing and more immediately augmented their incomes.

In some instances the gentry undertook activities in the public good at the behest of the state, whose practice of understaffing local administration made policy implementation impossible without help from some quarter. Famine relief particularly needed cooperation from local elites. The wealthy were called on to contribute grain, and the gentry were mobilized to manage its distribution, reinforcing the notion that the gentry should work in the public good. This division of labor is documented for a famine that struck Yin county in 1751:

During the Eastern Zhejiang famine of 1751, the magistrate deputed gentry to go to the wealthy people and encourage them to make donations. Li Changyu (jinshi 1754) and his friend Tu Ketang (juren 1751) rushed about encouraging people to forward grain and were successful in amassing the required amount. The magistrate suggested setting up a central soup kitchen, but Li Changyu pointed out the dangers of doing so..... [He argued that] the better method would be to draw up ward registers and distribute grain directly to the people [in their home areas] The magistrate agreed to his plan and thousands of lives were saved.^[49]

Li Changyu's plan called for excluding yamen runners and involving the area's "wealthy households" as well as the local tax captains in overseeing the distribution of the relief grain, but it also held them doubly responsible for making sure that irregularities did not arise. The men of nongentry wealth whose grain made the relief effort possible were thus kept subordinate, subject to the gentry's managerial power. Mary Rankin has noted the role of welfare activities among the local elite in stimulating the growth of the public sphere during the post-Taiping reconstruction period.^[50] Local-elite activism of this type was already found among the eighteenth-century gentry, however, though its influence in generating a public sphere was limited by the state's stronger supervisory presence.

According to this account, Tu and Li were able managers, but the motivation and justification for their activities rested on more complex cultural meanings. Active involvement in relief demonstrated commitment to general values, like benevolence toward social inferiors, with which the gentry were imbued. Men at the upper reaches of the Yin gentry could claim the moral credentials to take the lead in projects benefiting local society, and by doing so they would further enhance the image of moral responsibility with which the gentry associated themselves. By the same token, they could maintain their claims to superiority over elites with lesser cultural credentials.

Tu Ketang's ability to exploit cultural norms in this way is demonstrated in another context. When his father was, for reasons unstated, imprisoned and sentenced to a beating, Tu chose to embody the kind of filial behavior integral to gentry Confucian norms by begging the presiding official to allow him to be punished in his father's place. Such a grand gesture, with many historical precedents, was part of the lore of Yin gentry dedication during the difficult dynastic transition between the Ming and Qing.^[51] A conventional Confucian official might be expected to accept the substitution, or, more magnanimously, to waive the punishment altogether, and Tu was probably hoping to alter the course of justice by this act. As it happened, his offer backfired; the annoyed official increased his father's sentence by forty strokes.^[52] Despite the unsatisfactory outcome, Tu Ketang's attempt illustrates some cultural dimensions of the elite's public actions: moral motiva-

tion rooted in the Confucian tradition, dramatic public display, strategic appeal to basic norms, tension between the values of official duty and kinship solidarity, and the preservation of such gestures in gentry-controlled sources. Tu's part in the relief work of 1751 is integral to these strategies.

Far commoner among the gentry's liturgical duties than famine relief, and more central to their elite identity, was the funding of local institutions and local construction projects. Some of these, particularly larger hydraulic systems, involved at least the supervision if not the active involvement of local officials, but the gentry were the major source of support. All such projects had two aspects in common: they were accessible to the public (not restricted to an exclusive group, as in the case of a lineage shrine), and they were viewed as necessary to maintain the social fabric or economic infrastructure of the county. The number of institutions and projects that belonged to the public realm was great. They included schools, academies, city walls, granaries, bridges, ferry docks, hydraulic systems, orphanages, temples to state-sanctioned gods, shrines to local figures, even Buddhist monasteries.^[53] Gentry involvement in these institutions was varied. Financial support was most common. From the seventeenth century onward the use of private wealth for public purposes became increasingly respectable, although private donors are infrequently named in Yin gazetteers. Choosing instead to reflect the gentry's persona as literati, these gazetteers far more consistently report essays, steles, and poetry written to commemorate the public projects with which the gentry were involved and to which they lent the prestige of their names.

Schools automatically attracted gentry support, given their direct link to the examination system by which gentry status was ratified. The local magistrate was responsible for supervising schools, but the gentry were conscious that it was largely their responsibility to keep the schools in operation so as to prepare local sons for the exams. The prefectural gazetteer of 1733 reports accordingly that rebuilding the county school in 1664 was accomplished by "the gentry of the county" under the direction of the county magistrate and further that its restoration in 1727 was financed by gentry contributions.^[54]

In projects that served a larger constituency, the gentry were often assisted by "wealthy commoners," probably a polite reference to merchants. For example, "gentry and wealthy commoners" supported rebuilding the city wall in 1658.^[55] Irrigation systems attracted the involvement of both "gentry and elders" (i.e., esteemed commoners), according to Zhang Shiche's text commemorating the building of the Donggang Sluice. As we noted in the case of the 1751 famine, the gentry considered the public sphere their particular domain and believed that their involvement should predominate over that of other powerful groups in society. A contemporary of Zhang's stresses that the management of hydraulic systems should be in the hands of "members of the families of gentry," who would be expected to monopolize appointments to

the position of embankment captain (tangzhang ). Respecting this claim, local officials in 1820 "called together the gentry to manage and complete" the reconstruction of the Fengpeng Sluice.^[56]

Philanthropic activity was thus part of gentry life: It enhanced their reputations, justified their dominant position, and notified all that the public sphere depended on them. By mobilizing not only their wealth but also the accompanying educational and artistic skills, the gentry appeared essential to maintaining local society. The late imperial public sphere remained in their hands.

The gentry's domination of the public sphere does not imply total exclusion of lesser folk; rather it appears that the latter's contributions tended to go to more modest local institutions. The only full account I have found of charitable work by men outside the ranks of the greater gentry in eighteenth-century Yin is a full-page account in the 1733 prefectural gazetteer of the creation in 1730 of a charitable cemetery in the western hills. The account names nineteen men and one Daoist priest under the ambiguous epithet shimin ("gentry and commoners"). The greater gentry is not totally unrepresented: the list includes two Chengxi Fans, neither of whom earned a higher degree, though they had cousins who did. There is also someone named Chen Zhaoshen, whose brother Zhaojia won a gongsheng degree in 1731.^[57] But the other sixteen are complete unknowns. This could signify that a public cemetery was not an institution the greater gentry considered worthy of their attention. But the more intriguing hypothesis is that being named in the gazetteer indicates that the Yin elite in the eighteenth century was obliged to acknowledge men who did not bear full gentry credentials but who, on the grounds of wealth, were asserting elite status in certain contexts and receiving public recognition for it.

Toward the Transformation of Local Hegemony

The gentry of late imperial China was never an aristocracy, but it was aristogenic in character; that is, the cultural conditions of elite life favored reproducing the same relatively restricted elite group over time. Deprived of any legal claim to long-term membership in the elite, gentry families nonetheless succeeded reasonably well in preserving their status from generation to generation. They strategically used the financial and human resources of their lineages to continue to win state titles through the examination system, using this continuity itself as a resource for securing future benefits in the social networks of marriage and friendship that bound them together. They also established long-term ties with other families by successfully manipulating the cultural resources that their training and elevated status made available to them. Associational practices such as proximate residence and the formation of literary and scholarly societies were important in setting this upper

elite apart from the rest of the less prestigious or merely wealthy, who could enter the high ground of elite status only by assiduously cultivating gentry cultural skills and connections. The result was the hegemony of the gentry in the social processes of local life.

The cultural skills that helped make hegemony possible also provided this aristogenic gentry with the means to participate in the emerging public sphere, which during the Qing consisted of a range of infrastructural projects designed to guarantee social reproduction. These projects were at least formally in the purview of the state, and the gentry were often required to work in concert with state representatives. State power was the local elite's only major rival. As the public sphere grew in the nineteenth century, the waning ability of the state to intervene in managing local affairs enabled the gentry, long accustomed to some measure of involvement in the emerging public sphere, to move decisively into the gap.

The gentry's shift from junior to senior partnership in managing public resources within the local arena occurred as the ranks of the gentry opened wider to admit commercial elites and as gentry families themselves played more conspicuous roles in trade. The shifting basis of local power coupled with the erosion of the state's monopoly on political functions in the nineteenth century correspondingly weakened the legitimating ideology underpinning gentry hegemony; this in turn increased vulnerability to lower-level mercantile competition for elite status, especially in the nineteenth century, and began the end of traditional gentry dominance even before the fall of the imperial order.

The antitax uprising of Zhou Xiangqian in 1852 is emblematic of both this erosion and the limit to which it could go even in the nineteenth century.^[58] Zhou Xiangqian was one of the Zhouhanzhen Zhous, a Sichuan lineage that in 1355 had changed its surname (originally Liu) and fled to Ningbo to escape the rebellion of Liu Futong, with whom they had become associated because of their common surname. Zhou Xiangqian had purchased the degree of jiansheng . He claimed relation to someone who had once served as a county magistrate in Shandong, though the identity of that person is not obvious from the surviving sources concerning this lineage. Perhaps the official was an affinal relation. The lineage clearly prospered in the eighteenth century, for it started constructing an ancestral shrine in 1795. Its prosperity probably derived from local marketing: Zhouhanzhen was the main market for the agriculturally prosperous south-central portion of the county, on the Yong River that linked Yin to Fenghua to the south, and the Zhous dominated it. The Zhous were thus a successful commercial-agricultural lineage, but their status as members of the official elite was marginal, propped up with only a minor title at the crowded bottom of the gentry where many a Yin lineage vainly sought entry into more substantive status.^[59]

Zhou Xiangqian, like most nonprivileged landowners, was annoyed that

the greater gentry were allowed by local custom to pay a lower tax bill on their landholdings because they could submit their taxes directly to the magistrate's office in a red envelope (and at a lower copper-to-silver conversion rate) instead of paying tax collection officials in white envelopes at a much inflated conversion rate. After discussing this inequity with other local nonprivileged landowners at a New Year's drinking party, Zhou decided to appeal to the local magistrate against what he regarded as an "inequity" (bu gong dao ). He did so by working his way up through the gentry elite. He first approached a "powerful gentryman" in the city to present his complaint to the magistrate, but the man refused. He next sought support in Hangzhou, presumably from powerful Yin natives who resided there, in the hope of resolving this matter at the provincial level, but again his petition failed. Frustrated at his inability to find redress among those who did not consider him part of "our party," Zhou turned to his final option. He refused to pay the tax. Invoking as his ancestor the Three Kingdoms military hero, Liu Bei, Zhou led a broad popular uprising. The magistrate fled in terror. A second magistrate arrived on the scene and defused the crisis by persuading "the gentry inside and outside the city of Ningbo" to cancel the distinction between red and white envelopes.

This story leaves us with some suggestive observations about the state of nineteenth-century gentry hegemony. First, gentry titles, even as insubstantial as a purchased jiansheng , were still perceived as indicators of elite status among wealthy commoners. Otherwise Zhou Xiangqian would not have bought one, and it probably qualified him to assume leadership in this tax protest. In the next decade, the enormous number of juren degrees conferred on Zhejiang natives in the special "grace examinations" (enke ), given out in compensation for the losses suffered during the Taiping Rebellion, attests to the continuing appeal of state titles.

Second, the greater gentry of Yin county in 1852 continued to enjoy hegemony over local matters that, like taxation, were properly within the jurisdiction of the state. They received preferential treatment at the hands of the state, and they alone could intervene in its administration. Zhou Xiangqian would otherwise not have approached certain members to intercede on his behalf. The hegemony of the upper gentry was further strengthened by formal organization, for the magistrate who resolved the issue says that he presented his propositions to the gentry at their office (ju ) in the City God Temple.^[60]

Third, however, the resentment of Zhou and others at the lower end of the local elite over their lack of access to privileges in the tax system indicates that the cultural construction of status based on gentry qualifications and privileges could be challenged. Like other lower gentry who led protests against unjust tax levies in the Qing, Zhou Xiangqian was moved to rebel less because of a generalized sense of injustice than because of his objection to

being excluded from the tax favors enjoyed by the greater gentry.^[61] This suggests that lesser elites were not always willing to sanction the full extent of gentry hegemonic practices in the local setting. Zhou's dilemma was that he could only look for politically influential support among the very men who benefited from the practices he sought to dispute.

Zhou Xiangqian was unsuccessful in shaking the aristogenic basis of gentry hegemony in Yin. He failed not simply because the state was stronger than the challenge he posed but because there stood, interposed between disgruntled lesser elites and their demand to redefine elite status on the basis of wealth alone, the very hegemonic structure they sought to overthrow. Gentry hegemony was still the order of the day among the elites of Yin county in the 1850s, but the challenges were growing. Social changes would accelerate as the empire drew to a close, though it would be another century before that hegemony had been completely transformed.

Two
Success Stories: Lineage and Elite Status in Hanyang County, Hubei, c. 1368-1949

William T. Rowe

In 1946 the Han lineage of Jiangxia county (which included the Hubei provincial capital, Wuchang) published the fourth edition of its genealogy.^[1] Listed as general editor was one Han Jiwei, a graduate of Fudan University in Shanghai. Immediately upon graduation, Jiwei had assumed the presidency of a small municipal technical college at Hankou, subsequently leaving to take a post in a local iron and steel firm, and eventually setting up his own steel mill. He had done well, for at the time of his genealogy's compilation, he was general director of the Hankou Steel Trade Association. Han Jiwei was a direct sixteenth-generation descendent of a man who in 1368 had been installed as Wuchang prefect by the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty.

The conventional picture of late imperial Chinese society as marked by rapid social mobility, long doubted by some, has come under increasing attack in recent years.^[2] Yet a case such as that of Han Jiwei still seems somewhat startling, in the suggestion it offers of an hereditary local elite solidly entrenched despite dramatic political, economic, and social change over nearly six centuries. Was his an isolated case? The evidence presented in this article argues that, at least in one local area, it was not. In this region of the confluence of the Yangzi and Han rivers (map 2.1), almost precisely at the geographic heart of China proper, very long-term continuity of local elite lineages was not the exception but the rule.

In comparison to European or Japanese landed elites, those of late-imperial China faced formidable obstacles to reproducing their status over generations. China had no significantly widespread system of hereditary aristocratic rank. Access to political office and its concomitant social and economic rewards was in theory—and, within limits, in reality as well—determined by merit rather than birthright. Most damaging of all was the

near universality in China of partible inheritance; when combined with the pervasive legal principle of free alienability of land, this practice effectively prevented preserving intact estates from generation to generation. Whereas in much of Europe primogeniture and entail allowed landed elites to keep the patrimony relatively undivided, Chinese elites with few local exceptions seem not to have had recourse to any such "feudal" protections for their status.^[3] How then did certain elites remain so entrenched? In this paper I will suggest some tentative answers, by drawing a comparative profile of several prominent lineages from a single local area.

The basic materials for this study are fourteen genealogies (zupu ) from lineages of south-central Hubei.^[4] Nine of these lineages were from Hanyang county; the remaining five were from contiguous counties.^[5] The Hanyang genealogies include all those known to exist today, incorporating all those from the county listed in the standard bibliographies compiled by Taga Akigoro and by the Genealogical Society of Utah,^[6] as well as others I myself have discovered in China and the United States. Still, the sample presents some problems. It is clear that only a small percentage of published genealogies from the area have survived and that only a minority of Hanyang's prominent lineages are represented here. Among these, our group of lineages is potentially self-selective because the very fact that they troubled to publish genealogies suggests that they had a long local pedigree to advertise, which indeed they did. Based on my broader reading of Hanyang county sources, however, I have found no reason to believe that, in either their generational depth or any other respect, this group of elite lineages was atypical of those in the area as a whole.

Let me introduce at the outset several notes of caution regarding the relationship I wish to draw between lineages and elites. First, the membership of the lineages studied here was far from exhaustive of the elite stratum in the Hanyang area. Second, membership in these or others of what I have termed "elite lineages" by no means guaranteed that a given individual would enjoy elite status; within such lineages, component patrilines did better or less well, and their fortunes rose and fell nonsynchronously over time. Third, the territorial arena within which these lineages or their elite members exercised dominance was not precisely coterminous; as we shall see, for most this arena was one or another subdistrict (xiang ) of Hanyang, rather than the county as a whole. Finally, it was not necessarily true that a given member of the local elite would belong to any formalized lineage group, "elite" or otherwise, although it should become evident that the individual would very likely belong to one.

With these cautionary notes in mind, however, I propose to argue, first, that the lineage provided a considerable corporate resource to be drawn upon by its members, in a wide variety of ways, to achieve and reproduce personal or familial elite status. Second, in Hanyang at least, this powerful

instrument allowed members of certain advantaged lineages to maintain local elite status over many centuries in the late-imperial and Republican periods. Finally, and in light of the above qualifications rather less conclusively, our genealogical evidence suggests that in this area of China the idea that families might rise from local agrarian roots below into the local elite was little more than a myth.

The Logality

Hanyang county straddles the Han River just at its point of confluence with the Yangzi (map 2.1).^[7] The terrain is flat and deltalike, laced with rivulets and dotted with backwater lakes and marshes. Although the hazards of flood are considerable, the soil is fertile, and the area's paddy-rice agriculture can produce handsome surpluses in nonflood years. Agricultural surplus and excellent water transportation, combined with the proximity of the great inter-regional trading center of Hankou, allowed Hanyang and its environs to develop after the late Ming into one of the most commercialized local systems in China. Its commerce entailed not only market gardening and fishing to feed the nearby urban population but also, increasingly, production of cotton and ramie to serve extraregional markets. Handicraft spinning, weaving, and other artisanal sidelines such as oil pressing were highly developed; consequently, nonadministrative market towns (zhen ) proliferated, though not as intensively as in the hyperdeveloped Jiangnan.^[8]

In the character of its local elite as well, Hanyang occupied a position somewhere between Jiangnan and the rest of the empire. Concentration of landownership was high, but not as high as in the richer Yangzi and Pearl river deltas. This landlord wealth was reflected in levels of academic achievement, which were among the highest in Hubei but still low enough to attract immigrants from Jiangnan seeking to capitalize on Hanyang's weaker competition for the local quota of civil service examination degrees. Based on the evidence of gazetteer biographies and lists of examination degree holders, the elite of the area seems to have been rather broadly based, including members of some thirty to forty prominent descent groups. As was true elsewhere in China, it probably also grew over our period as a percentage of the total population. Whether it was an open elite is another question.

Founding the Line

The assignment by subsequent generations of the honored place as "founding ancestor" (shizu ) to one rather than another lineage forebear was a decision complicated by many factors, as we shall see. Nevertheless, with certain exceptions, lineages in Hanyang most often dated their founding from' the generation during which they had relocated to the county and declared it

Map. 2.1.
Hanyang County, c. 1880.

SOURCE: Hanyang xianzhi 1867; Hanyang xian yutu 1901; Hanyang xian xiangtu 1933.

their legal native place. All the lineages in our sample knew clearly how they had arrived in the area and could chronicle the generations of descent from the first immigrant in convincing detail. Table 2.1 depicts when and from where the local arrival took place for all lineages under consideration and reveals remarkable similarity between the cases. Of the fourteen lineages, eight had come from neighboring Jiangxi province, and all but one of the remainder from Jiangnan (southern Jiangsu or northern Zhejiang). They were thus part of the great westward population shift that has marked the Yangzi valley for nearly the past millennium. We might expect that many of these people had come following Zhang Xianzhong's devastations during the Ming-Qing transition, when, in Wei Yuan's famous phrase, "the people of Hubei filled up [the depopulated] Sichuan, and Jiangxi filled up Hubei." In fact, however, only one of our lineages arrived during this period, and it came only from Macheng county in northeastern Hubei. The Ming-Qing transition did see a considerable immigration into the Yangzi-Han confluence area, but these early Qing arrivals had come too late to establish themselves as leading lineages of the area. For the most part, the roles of dominant lineages had already long been cast.

The majority of our lineages arrived in the confluence area during the Yuan-Ming transition: fully half came almost precisely at the moment of the Ming founding, and two others slightly before or after that event. Why? Several lineages stated, rather conventionally, that their ancestors were "fleeing military disorder" in their former locality, and this must generally have been true.^[9] However, no fewer than five of our kin groups acknowledged their descent from officers in the army of Ming Taizu, and two others also descended from officials of that same general era. The founder of the Caidian Yao, Yao Fulong, had come from Jiangxi to command the Xiang-Han Garrison; the Yaojiazui Yao founder, Yao Xingyi, commanded the Hubei courier detachment. Both changed their registration upon retirement from office and settled in Hanyang county. Feng Xingshan and Gui Fuyi held military posts and subsequently settled in Mianyang and Jiangxia counties, respectively. Han Yi, rewarded for his military service with the civil post of Wuchang prefect, moved his family permanently to Jiangxia. Liu Ben changed his registration to Hanyang county in 1466, after retiring from service as Hubei provincial judge. And the lineage with the longest demonstrable local pedigree stemmed from Zhang Deyi, who had moved to Hanyang while filling his family's hereditary military command under the Mongols and whose son moved almost immediately into a civil official post under Ming Taizu.^[10] The founding of the Ming, in sum, seems to have been a pivotal event in forming subsequent local-elite society.

One final lineage among our sample represents something of a special case. The Ye owed their local roots to two men of the early Qing. Ye Wenji

(1636-1694), a native of Lishui (Jiangsu), operated a small general store in Nanjing and read medical treatises as a hobby. Sometime in the mid-seventeenth century he arrived at the great commercial port of Hankou and realized his ambition to open an herbal medicine shop and clinic. Apparently, Wenji had the good fortune to treat a Manchu prince who was bivouacking near the city, and the successful outcome brought immediate fame and fortune to his Hankou practice. More concretely, Wenji also hit upon two patent medicines, an eye drop and a medicated wine, which achieved tremendous local sales. Wenji eventually retired to Nanjing, leaving his Yekaitai Medicine Store in the care of an agent, and for three generations his descendents enjoyed a scholarly life-style there, based upon the profits of the Hankou store. On the death of Wenji's grandson Hongliang in 1750, however, the latter's three sons decided to divide their patrimony. One son, Ye Tingfang (1733-79), took as his share the Yekaitai store. Tingfang moved his family permanently to Hankou to more closely oversee the shop's operations, though he continued his literati life-style and remained aloof from daily business management. He was subsequently honored as founder of the Ye's Hanyang line.^[11]

The Ye were somewhat unusual because their elite position in Hanyang county derived solely from a commerical windfall in Hankou. Yet their uniqueness should not be overstated. In subsequent generations most Ye households behaved as literati landlords, presenting themselves in local society with singular success as proper Confucian gentry. So successful were they, in fact, that one suspects their case was replicated, less dramatically but rather frequently, in the history of other prominent lineages both locally and elsewhere. In any event, the Ye did share with our other lineages the common feature of having entered Hanyang society at the top, pre-equipped with high status and considerable wealth. Whether this wealth was derived from commercial or bureaucratic sources, it is noteworthy that not a single prominent Hanyang lineage whose genealogy survives had achieved its elite status primarily on the basis of local agricultural success.

Economic Bases of Elite Maintenance

The existing literature on maintaining elite status by lineages in late imperial China has emphasized two factors: landholding and bureaucratic service. Scholars have argued heatedly over the relative importance of the two in elite strategies, but for the most part the debate has considered these the only significant alternatives.^[12] There are, of course, several good reasons for this. The records left by most elites stress their authors' mental conformity to the ideal of the "planter-scholar" (gengdu ), and undoubtedly a fair amount of reality supported this idealized self-image.^[13] Nevertheless, the evidence

from Hanyang reveals that, beyond land ownership and official position, both commerce and military service played important—in some cases paramount—roles in maintaining wealth and social position.

Landholding . It is obvious, I think, that most component households of most lineages, however elite, subsisted on income from agriculture. It is thus no surprise that each of our fourteen lineage founders was credited with acquiring a sizable rural estate, which in almost all cases became the ceremonial center for the subsequent lineage organization. In the Luo, for example, the founder is depicted as wandering peripatetically through central China, fleeing military strife, until he reached the Chuannan area in southern Hanyang county. There in a dream he was told that if he broke ground at that spot he would have countless progeny; naturally, he did so.

The more common situation, however, resembled that of Yao Xingyi, who, when appointed to a lucrative military post in Hanyang, used the proceeds to procure tracts of paddy and mountain land in the county's south-central portion "in order to bequeath to his heirs." Similarly, Liu Ben in the mid-fifteenth century used his official salary to buy a large estate in the sparsely settled area of Lianhuadi, southwest of the county seat, from which his descendents spread out to acquire land throughout this Xiannan subdistrict (xiang ).^[14] The ease of acquisition of large tracts of property by lineage founders undoubtedly had much to do with the ready availability of land around the Yangzi-Han confluence at the start of the Ming, due to the devastations of peasant rebellion, the radical redistributionist policies of a new regime, and a still relatively undeveloped local agriculture.^[15] Most of our genealogies suggest that their founding ancestors were pioneers in land reclamation. The two brothers who founded the Ling, for example, are said to have spent five years clearing and draining their new property in the Guan-qiao area of western Hanyang before it could be successfully cultivated or even inhabited.^[16]

This desire to root oneself in agriculture touched even the mercantile Ye. Shortly after relocating from Nanjing to Hankou, Ye Tingfang procured a large tract of rural land in east-central Hanyang, around the town of Huang-lingji. Unlike contemporary England, where "commercial profits were rarely large enough to buy up whole estates, [and so] merchants were more likely to find close association with landowners through marriage,"^[17] Chinese gentry-merchants by Qing times could easily buy into the rural elite. The Ye did this with a passion. According to a family account book from the mid-nineteenth century, Tingfang's descendents had by that time accumulated well over one thousand mu of land in both Hanyang and their former native county in Jiangsu.^[18]

Although the Ye were extreme in being so clearly merchants first and landowners second, this pattern of ploughing commercial profits into land was hardly unusual during the Qing. The Yaojiazui Yao lineage, for exam-

ple, around 1683 acquired the enormous rural estate that later became their official native place, using profits (reputedly more than a million taels) gleaned from the Liang Huai salt trade by two brothers of the thirteenth generation.^[19] One cannot simply assume that capital acquired from commerce was invested in land for status rather than profit. By the 1860s one branch's rural property included substantial acreage in southern Hubei's booming Yangloudong tea country, which was so phenomenally profitable that the successful merchant Yao Lunzhi gave up his business in order to devote full time to his family's landholding accounts.^[20]

Was landholding on a large scale thus sufficient by itself to maintain a lineage's elite status over several centuries? I think not. For some patrilines within lineages, such as that of Yao Lunzhi, landholding was certainly very lucrative. In the genealogy of our other Yao lineage, too, we are told that certain component lines were so wealthy from the proceeds of their land that they even chose to decline official posts.^[21] Nevertheless, the general pattern of behavior of all our lineages, the Yao included, suggests unquestionably that in the long term landownership alone proved economically inadequate for maintaining status. Each sought and found additional avenues of support.

Bureaucratic Service . The socially approved complement to land ownership was office holding, and the approved route to office holding was via the civil service examination system. However, when one totals the number of examination successes enjoyed by our lineages, one cannot but be struck by how relatively unsuccessful they were. Table 2.2 presents the number of successes in the two upper-level examinations (juren and jinshi ) achieved by the overall Hanyang county population and by several surname groups within that population. First, I list several surname groups for which we have genealogies, even though the successful examination candidates bearing those surnames were not necessarily from these lineages; then I list for comparison some other local surname groups that I suspect to be roughly comparable in size.

Although the sources do not provide data needed to disaggregate successful examination candidates by actual lineage rather than surname, it nevertheless seems clear that the relative success rate of groups under study was low indeed. This is even more striking when we consider the lowest recorded degree level, the gongsheng . While the Hanyang population as a whole enjoyed thousands of such successes over the 224-year period (1644-1867), the Lao surname achieved only one, the Ling none, the Luo nine, the Yao six, and the Ye six. Given the financial resources available to these groups for education, it seems fair to conclude that, ideology to the contrary, academic success was simply not an important strategy adopted by these lineages to ensure continued local prominence.

For persons of wealth, influence, and good breeding, of course, lack of an

TABLE 2.2. Upper-Level Civil Examination Passes in Hanyang County, by Surname, 1644-1867
		Juren	Jinshi
Hanyang county total		350	79
Surnames with surviving genealogies
	Lao	1	1
	Ling	0	0
	Luo	4	0
	Yao	2	0
	Ye	4	2
Some other local surnames
	Jiang	10	3
	Hu	14	3
	Wang	10	1
	Wu	16	3
SOURCE : Hanyang xianzhi (Hanyang county gazetteer, 1867), ch. 16.

upper-level examination degree was no insurmountable obstacle to entering bureaucratic service, and indeed each of our genealogies claims a handful of ancestors who did hold bureaucratic posts. However, a pattern seems to emerge here as well. Descended often from a founding ancestor who was himself a middle-level bureaucrat, our lineages tended to produce a few distinguished officials in early generations, followed by several centuries of only sporadic government service or none at all. For example, the Ling produced two county magistrates in the early fifteenth century and no officials thereafter; the Luo, two magistrates and a subprefect in the Ming and none in the Qing; the Caidian Yao, a magistrate, a prefect, and a senior secretary of the Board of Rites in the fifteenth century and not a single civil administrator in the next five centuries.^[22] These histories suggest two stages in elite strategies: An early period of zealous pursuit of public office effectively consolidated the lineage's wealth and local prestige for many generations to come; subsequent descendents turned their energies toward more inward looking husbanding of this legacy and developing its material potential.

In its own way the Hankou Ye replicated this pattern at a later time. Despite their commercial roots, the Ye, the most recently arrived of our lineages, produced Hanyang county's most celebrated officials of the mid-and late Qing. The Hanyang line's founder Ye Tingfang had himself been a stipended scholar of his native district in Jiangsu. His son Weiwen became a jinshi in 1788 and rose to become secretary of the Board of Punishments. One of Weiwen's grandsons, Ye Mingfeng, was a juren of 1837, and another was the

famous and ill-fated Commissioner Ye Mingchen, a jinshi of 1835 and grand secretary after 1856.^[23] After this brief fluorescence, the Ye never produced another examination success. In the late Qing and early Republic they purchased a number of local government posts, in some of which—notably fiscal posts such as domestic customs and salt bureau superintendencies—they actually served. Ye Mingchen's grandson, the restaurateur Ye Fengzhi, served as informal adviser to a warlord governor of Hubei, and his son Yong-zhai was a member of the Provincial Assembly.^[24] But these were positions transparently designed to protect and enlarge family fortunes in a turbulent political era. Like the older Hanyang lineages, the Ye had reached and passed their peak of political glory early in their organizational life. After the generation of Ye Mingchen, the Ye devoted themselves primarily to direct management of their expanding commercial ventures.^[25]

Indeed, only a single case among our lineages failed to follow the general pattern, and this exception was symptomatic of another set of status maintenance strategies. One Zhang lineage, descended from a line of Yuan military officers, produced only two important civil officials in its six-century history in Hanyang, but these could not have come at more opportune times. One, Zhang Rui, even though his father was a Yuan general, took and passed the jinshi examination the first time it was offered under the Ming (1370) and served in a succession of provincial posts. The second—the exceptional case—was Zhang Jing, a jinshi of 1618 who made an effortless transition from local official service under 'the Ming to similar service under the Manchus, rising eventually to become president of the Board of War.^[26] Elite lineages of Hanyang were an extraordinary flexible group, and, as the Zhang demonstrated, this flexibility was not impaired by dynastic loyalism.

Military Service . We customarily think of the Chinese gentry, much like their English namesakes, as a thoroughly amilitary ruling class that had risen out of the ashes of an older military elite. Thus it comes as something of a surprise to find so many prominent local lineages owing their origins to military service. In part we may dismiss this as the short-term product of an anti-Mongol Han nativist rebellion and the turbulence of dynastic change. It is somewhat more difficult to explain an elite lineage like the Zhang, which could convincingly trace its origins to a line of hereditary military officers, but even here we can point to their good sense in adeptly moving from military to civil bureaucratic service when the alien and peculiarly militarized Mongol dynasty gave way to more familiar Chinese-style regimes under the Ming and Qing. Was the role of military service in maintaining elite status reduced to insignificance, then, after the fourteenth century? In at least one Hanyang case it most definitely was not.

The Caidian Yao lineage was described in a preface to its mid-nineteenth century genealogy as made up predominantly of "farmers and fishermen,"^[27]

and in numbers this may have been true. Yet as a general depiction of the Yao descent group in Hanyang it certainly conceals more than it reveals. The Yao were extremely diversified in both occupation and status. A key component of this diversification was military service, a tradition that went back to the circumstances of its founding in 1368. Unlike any of the other lineages surveyed here, and unlike the vast majority of Hanyang county residents, all Yao member households bore an hereditary military registration (junji ). Legally, at least, they were soldiers, not ordinary commoners (min ). This basic fact of the Yao's existence contributed to their maintenance of local-elite status in several ways.

First and foremost, it gave them land. The Yao's founding ancestor, Yao Fulong, had been appointed by Ming Taizu to command Hubei's Xiang-Han Garrison and transferred his native registration to Hanyang. We are told that he purchased a tract of private paddy land (mintian ) in the heart of Hanyang's lake country around Mount Zha and then acquired a large stretch of military colony land (tuntian ) near Zhaojiafan. Both of these he leased to tenants. Fulong then received an imperial commission to undertake massive reclamation of land along the lakeshores and Yangzi and Han riverbanks. All the property he purchased or reclaimed was reclassified as "military land" (juntian ), a designation it retained into the 1890s, when the Qing government sought to resurvey the land and reevaluate its fiscal status.^[28] Legally, military land fell into an ambiguous category between state and private. As hereditary military colony headmen (tuntou ), Yao Fulong and his descendents held essentially stewardship responsibilities over this property, but, as was true throughout most of China, over time stewardship became effective ownership. Gradually during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries regional officials handed over ownership rights to such land to its occupants, in return for assumption of somewhat modified land tax burdens.^[29] It is uncertain whether the Yao received title to all the land accumulated by Yao Fulong, or whether this was divided between them and others of the original military colonists. It is clear, however, that they received the lion's share, which was thereafter subdivided as parts of various Yao patrimonies.

Second, the Yao had claims to a number of military or quasi-military posts in their home area, which gave them both income and local power. They were members of the hereditary officer class that, as Romeyn Taylor has shown, the Ming took over with few modifications from the Mongols.^[30] The Yao's basic post was commander of a wei , a unit of some five thousand men, but with the move of the capital to the north during the Yongle reign (1403-24), Yao men were also charged with collecting tax grain from the local area and conscripting transport labor for the newly instituted northern grain tribute. By Qing times their military duties had essentially become those of local grain tribute administrators.^[31] These duties were apparently onerous, and at some point the Yao obtained imperial approval to have their

hereditary assumption of this post made voluntary. Thereafter, many Yao men shunned the job, but several, including Yao Yukui (1791-1861) and his son Wanchen, allegedly served with distinction, initiating important reforms in the management of transport personnel at the Hanko depot.^[32]

When the duties of the grain transport service declined in the later nineteenth century due to commutation to cash payments, and when the structure of the Qing military establishment changed following the Taiping Rebellion, certain Yao men continued their lineage's military tradition in new ways. Although not a function of birthright per se, their achievement of these positions was certainly aided by their continuing possession of a military registration. For example, Lieutenant Yao Caishi (1842-1907) was awarded the Blue Peacock Feather for his work in combating riverine smuggling at the Xintan customs station in southern Hanyang. His cousin Yao Caihe became commanding officer of a Xiang Army detachment at Hankou.^[33]

Finally, beyond the more tangible rewards of land and careers, their hereditary military status provided the Yao with access to a network of patronage and influence outside the normal channels available to other local elites. Let me cite but two examples. In the 1820s Yao Yukui found himself imprisoned by the Hanyang magistrate as a result of charges brought by antagonists in a lawsuit. Yukui sent his younger brother to ask a high grain transport official to intervene, citing his family's military registration and many generations in the transport service. This official sent a letter to the Hubei governor, who directed the Hanyang magistrate to overturn the charges against Yukui. Seventy years later, when the Qing sought to reassess military lands in Hubei, Yao Caishi used his connections with a local Xiang Army commander to have Yao lineage lands protected from any tax increase.^[34]

How much of an anomaly was the military character of the Caidian Yao? There must surely have been other locally powerful lineages who also held military registration or participated regularly in the grain transport bureaucracy, but were they numerous enough to be statistically important? This is a subject for future research. Yet it is significant, I feel, that I had known of the Yao's existence for years with numerous references to their various activities in Hanyang county but only recently discovered their military registration. Not a few such lineages may lie similarly concealed.

Commercial Activities . In his seminal 1941 article, "The Rise of the Gentry," R. H. Tawney depicted this nonaristocratic English landed elite as an essentially "bourgeois" stratum; its power grew along with the market's expansion, and it largely maintained itself by a close relationship with trade. Although subsequent scholars have found Tawney's picture overdrawn, most would probably accept a more moderate version of his thesis.^[35] By contrast, the gentry of China are commonly seen as avoiding any major participation in trade—other than investment in financial institutions such as

pawnshops or Shansi banks—until the last decades of the nineteenth century. After all, the dominant Confucian tradition ostensibly despised commercial profits. The lack of primogeniture in China would also seem not to have provided the push necessary to get younger sons off the patrimonial estate and into trade, as happened in parts of Europe. The biases inherent in our most commonly consulted historical sources have systematically reinforced this view. For example, one would search in vain through the sanitized biographies of Grand Secretary Ye Mingchen and several of his kinsmen in the Hanyang county gazetteer for any mention of their economic dependence on commercial activity.^[36]

The Ye were, of course, merchants first and foremost; what Chang Chung-li has termed a "gentry-merchant clan."^[37] But others of our lineages, whose origins were not primarily mercantile, also participated significantly in commercial ventures. For some, involvement in trade may arguably have come rather late in their collective histories. The Liu of Lianhuati, for example, seem to have been primarily rural landlords until the 1870s, when several of their members founded leather goods and related firms in Hankou and Wuchang.^[38] Others, like the Luo of Hongshanmiao, engaged in commercial activities since at least the late Ming, but they seem to have kept these secondary in their overall strategies of maintenance.^[39] However, still others' commercial ties were both long-lasting and basic to their group interests. Both Yao lineages fell into this last category.

By the eighteenth century, if not before, members of the Caidian Yao lineage had begun to apply the financial acumen acquired as grain transport administrators and managers of their large rural estates to many mercantile ventures. Some became involved in the enormously profitable Liang-Huai salt trade; others opened a chain of old-style banks at Hankou; at least one became a porcelain merchant at the great industrial center of Jingdezhen in Jiangsi. In the second half of the nineteenth century they moved systematically into Hankou's interregional copper trade, with the Yaochunhe Store around 1870 and the Yaotaihe Store about 1890. Managed by two different branches of the lineage, the stores were at once spiritedly competitive and part of an overall Yao strategy for lineage enrichment; both were extremely successful. The Yaotaihe Store was destroyed during the 1911 Revolution, but it was rebuilt in the British Concession and subsequently opened numerous branches throughout the city.^[40]

Our other Yao lineage, centered at Yaojiazui, made huge early profits in the Liang-Huai salt trade; beginning in the sixteenth century, it founded more than a dozen silk and cotton textile dealerships in local commercial centers throughout the river confluence area. In the nineteenth century they, like their namesakes from Caidian, gained a foothold in the empirewide copper and lead trade.^[41] Though rural-based, they were by no means rustic literati landlords.

What percentage of lineage members were involved in trade? One suggestion is provided in the genealogy of the Luo, whose compilers fortuitously decided to list the primary occupations of some 135 member households that had moved out of the local area. Of these, 45 (exactly one-third) were listed as merchants, the remainder being distributed among farmers, scholars, and other callings.^[42] Although it is likely that the proportion of merchants among those who moved away was higher than that among those who stayed at home, it is also clear that the Luo were far from the most commercialized of our lineage groups. Thus, if this one-third figure overstates the percentage of merchants among our elite lineage members, it may not do so by much.

Regardless of the actual numerical significance of merchants in our lineages, there is no doubt that the merchant component exercised a disproportionate degree of influence within the groups, just as it did within Hanyang society as a whole. In the case of the Ye and the Caidian Yao, for example, we have seen that the lineage estate itself was purchased and bequeathed by successful merchants. In the Yaojiazui Yao, Yao Mingli (1855-1906), the enormously wealthy founder of the Yaochunhe Copper Store, rebuilt the lineage temple in the early twentieth century, and the enterprising widow of Yao Zhongjie (née Li) not only expanded her late husband's Yaotaihe Store but also initiated and largely funded the 1923 Yao genealogy compilation. Around 1910 Luo Liangmo, scion of a small and relatively junior line within his branch of the Luo lineage, became head of that branch (fenzheng ) by virtue of his commercial success. Similarly, around 1930 Hankou industrialist Liu Songping called together the heads of his lineage's several branches, reconstructed the lineage temple, rewrote the lineage rules, and commissioned the recompilation of the genealogy.^[43]

In late-imperial and Republican Hanyang, then, the interpenetration of commercial and rural elites was rather thorough. As long as merchants played their Confucian roles well, they were not only accepted into elite society but actively welcomed. For their part, rural elites showed little aversion to engaging in commercial pursuits. They did so throughout our period but increasingly over time, as the profitability of trade became ever more apparent.

Modem Sector Careers . As seen in the story of Han Jiwei with which I opened this essay, the evidence of our genealogies far from supports the conventional picture of a tradition-bound local elite, gradually displaced in the years after Shimonoseki by a new, progressive-minded, Westernized elite drawn from different social origins. Rather, we see the same families and social groups that dominated Chinese local society for generations quite successfully adapting and maintaining their status following the dramatic changes of industrialization, republicanism, and abolition of the examination

system. Not only did they adapt, but in many cases they also seem to have been at the forefront of change.

As was the case with English landed elites, those of Hanyang seem to have profited considerably from industrialization. Commissioner Ye Mingchen's grandson, Ye Fengzhi, for instance, operated a chain of electrical equipment dealerships in Shanghai and elsewhere, and in 1924 he cofounded the Han-Huang-Chu Steamship Company. One of Han Jiwei's kinsmen opened a modern printing firm in Wuchang in the 1930s, another an eyeglass dealership in Hankou, and a third a smelting plant in Hanyang city.^[44]

More in keeping with their literati image, the generation born in the 1880s perceived the benefits of Western-style education and used these new skills to carve out for themselves important places within Republican China's new professions and rapidly growing technocracy. For example, Yao Fangxun of the Caidian Yao graduated from Hubei province's first Western-style secondary school and then from the Provincial Police Academy, becoming police commissioner of Jingmen county. His brother Fangchi, a graduate of Liang-hu Normal College, became education commissioner of Yingshan and Jing-shan counties. Yao Changxuan of the Yaojiazui Yao as a child received a classical education in preparation for the civil service exams, then adroitly shifted tracks to obtain a B.A. from Lianghu Normal College. Both his brother Changzong and his son Guangpu received degrees from Hubei Provincial Law School. All three served in numerous county and provincial posts, in such areas as legal administration, public security, and public works; Changzong in 1930 became Hanyang County educational commissioner. Zhang Qingyun, a Provincial Law School graduate, became a prominent lawyer in Wuhan during the 1920s.^[45]

Such individuals were neither more cynically self-serving than modern professionals in other societies nor were they hypocritical in embracing Western-imported aspects of New China. Nevertheless, they quite comfortably retained strong elements of their inherited cultural and status group legacy. Indeed, their success in the new career arenas of twentieth-century China seems often to have heightened their attachment to this heritage. Barrister Zhang Qingyun and entrepreneur Han Benxu, for example, edited their lineages' genealogies, as did industrialist Liu Songping, founder of the "Wuhan Association for the Encouragement of Progress." Both the frequent compilation of genealogies in the twentieth century and the prominent role taken in this process by professional and entrepreneurial elites suggest that, as Morton Fried pointed out several decades ago, a surprisingly positive correlation existed between the rise of the industrial city and the resurgent appeal of old-style lineage organization.^[46] Liu Songping himself offered one reason for the link when he argued that the way to construct an orderly, modern China lay in revitalizing its natural building blocks—the great corporate lineages.

Residence Patterns

The conventional depiction of Chinese lineages held that this type of "traditional" social organization was incompatible with urban life. For example, in her classic study of clan rules, Hui-chen Wang Liu based her case for a fundamental conflict "between the Confucian value scheme and the city mode of living" on lineage rules that cautioned members about the moral hazards of urban life.^[47] As late as 1977, Hugh Baker argued that "in the face of opportunities for comparatively rapid individual economic advancement, the drive to a group unity of the kind afforded by the lineage seems to have been much less strong. City-based ancestral trust groups of the type found in the rural lineage were probably rare."^[48] But this view, based on a forced dichotomy of urban and rural life-styles and attitudes, has been attacked in recent studies that stress instead the "continuity" or "continuum" between urban and rural in China.^[49] Moreover, G. William Skinner suggests that lineages by no means shunned the city; they often thrived there. In Skinner's view, "The more urbanized the local system, the more favorably [the lineage] was situated to pursue advantageous mobility strategies and maximize profits from its corporate holdings."^[50]

Information on residence contained in our genealogies supports this notion of the high compatibility of lineage organization with urban life. In general, the chief magnet for lineage members not actually working in agriculture was the nonadministrative market town (zhen ). The most important (after Hankou) of Hanyang's many market towns was Caidian, a Hah River port whose population around 1800 may have reached thirty thousand.^[51] Several of our lineages were effectively headquartered there. One Yao lineage listed its native place as Yaojialin, a Caidian suburb; the Yaojiazui Yao lineage listed Caidian as headquarters of one of its branches; the Liu lineage listed the small village of Lianhuati as its native place, but actually its ancestral temple was in Caidian, where its most influential members dwelled. Others of our lineages were headquartered in other major zhen . The Luo lineage was centered on Chuankou, a medium-sized Yangzi River port upstream from Hankou, and the Ling at Guanqiao, the chief market town of western Hanyang county. Although the Ye was effectively centered in Hankou, its formal "ancestral home" of Huanglingji was the major market town of south-central Hanyang. A similar pattern obtained in counties surrounding Hanyang: the Han lineage was headquartered in Jinkou, an important Yangzi River port in Jiangxia county, and the Liu of Mianyang county were centered at Liujiahe, a suburb of the major Han River port of Xiantao.

When we look at relocation to the great regional metropolis of Hankou, we are no longer considering simply a step up the graded hierarchy of central places. Although located in Hanyang county, Hankou was oriented primarily to the national rather than the local economy, and its connection with its

regional hinterland was at best tangential. Dominated economically and socially by interregional traders of non-Hubei origin, Hankou never provided a congenial place of congregation for rural landlord literati. It was entirely possible for local elites dwelling close to the great port to have no connection with it whatsoever; on the evidence of its 1876 genealogy, this seems to have been the case with one of our Zhang lineages. Clearly those elites who did establish themselves in Hankou, as did most lineages in our sample, did so out of a deliberate commitment to enter a qualitatively different sphere of activity and consciousness.

Numerous reasons, including civil or military official service, might call one to Hankou, but most people were attracted by commercial opportunity. For example, according to the genealogy biography of Yao Quan (1858-1914), the subject's immediate family had been severely hurt economically by the Taiping devastations, and its decline had been further hastened by the passion of Quan's father for literati pursuits and his corresponding neglect of family accounts. At the father's insistence, Quan spent his youth diligently acquiring a classical education, all the while chafing at his family's increasing impoverishment. Immediately upon the fathers's death, however, Quan hurried to Hankou to "study commerce" (xuemao ); he eventually became a wealthy salt merchant.^[52]

Most of our lineages similarly established a lasting Hankou connection. The Ye and the Lao, of course, were first and foremost Hankou people, and the two Yao lineages had particularly strong and enduring Hankou components. There was also movement by other groups:

The Guanqiao Ling . The genealogy records seven members who relocated to Hankou. The first of these, an eleventh-generation descendent, set up a raw cotton dealership there around 1750. Five more followed in the thirteenth generation and another in the fifteenth around 1820.

The Hongshanmiao Luo . At least six lineage members moved to Hankou. The first, a ninth-generation medical doctor, moved in the late seventeenth century. The remainder were all merchants, two moving in the eighteenth century and the others in the late nineteenth.

The Boquan Zhang . Two members established patrilines at Hankou in the third quarter of the eighteenth century; others followed in the early twentieth.

The Lianhuati Liu . Two brothers moved to Hankou in the 1880s, followed by numerous other kinsmen in the early twentieth century.^[53]

The Mianyang Liu . Between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth century, at least ten lineage members from four distinct branches moved to Hankou and established flourishing patrilines there. All were merchants, many in the tobacco trade.

The Jiangxia Han . The genealogy shows no relocation to Hankou prior to

Han Benxu, a merchant who moved c. 1875. Many lineage members followed in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Mianyang Feng . Lineage members began to relocate to Hankou only in the early twentieth century.^[54]

In sum, we find no movement to Hankou by any members of local elite lineages during the Ming, but a gradual process of relocation begins in the early Qing. The movement accelerated after the mid-nineteenth century and once again around the turn of the twentieth century. Our lineages, in other words, only slowly took advantage of the tremendous commercial opportunities offered by Hankou. I believe that this was due less to any basic aversion to commercial activity than to a well-grounded perception that Hankou, as the home of extraprovincial merchants with high levels of capitalization, was an alien and inhospitable place of business.^[55] This changed in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of several factors, including the intensified development of export agriculture in the south-central Hubei region itself, the restructuring of commercial opportunities afforded by the Taiping razing of the Wuhan cities, and the new opportunities presented by opening Hankou to foreign trade in 1861. Finally, in the new economic and political climate created by the debacle of the Sino-Japanese War and the advent of rapid local industrialization after 1895, the last barriers to urbanization fell away. Many younger members of our lineages—including for the first time substantial numbers from counties beyond Hanyang itself—clearly came to feel that engagement in the new entrepreneurial world of Hankou was not only an opportunity but also an imperative to those who would assist in the great cause of national and lineage salvation.^[56]

Corporate Strategies of Status Maintenance

To this point, I have been speaking of "elite lineages" despite the fact that, after the first few generations, many if not most patrilines within such lineages had likely lost their individual claim to elite status. Is the notion of elite lineages then valid at all? I believe it is, for several reasons. Inclusion within the genealogical table of a descent group of long local pedigree, listing several prominent men, provided even the humblest households some measure of leverage in their dealings with neighbors and the local administration. More demonstrably, men of genuine wealth and power in Hanyang regularly felt the urge to establish, revive, or strengthen kinship ties and organization. Above all there is the simple, evident fact that a regular link uniting elites of one generation or century with those of another was membership in a common, purposely organized lineage group.

Steven Sangren has recently argued that we ought to think of Chinese lineages less in terms of kinship than of "corporation"; his point is that the

lineage organization is not a simple accident of heredity but rather the deliberate adoption by a collection of economic actors of a group strategy that will, they believe, enhance their life chances.^[57] A less charitable view, propounded most emphatically by Imahori Seiji, would see lineage organization imposed on a willing or unwilling rank-and-file by a leadership that foresees the possibility of turning to its own advantage the community ties thus created by granting the leadership control over collective material resources and allowing them to enforce the social harmony necessary to perpetuate their own superior position.^[58] The two views, of course, are not mutually exclusive, and both are substantially supported by the evidence of our genealogies. In what follows, we will look first at the structure of lineage organization in Hanyang, and then at several potential advantages such organization offered, albeit differentially, to member households.

Group Boundaries and Group Structure . Genealogies, by their very nature, are produced after-the-fact by men who are making crucial decisions about just who are and who are not fellow lineage members (tongzu ). The most critical, though by no means the only, decision to be made in defining group boundaries lay in identifying the proper lineage founder (shizu ). The most common choice taken by our groups was to accord this honor to the first member of the line to move into the local area and change his legal registration, but this was far from the only available option. For several reasons a group might want to date its first generation prior to its arrival in the area: the desire to include within the fold wealthy or otherwise useful kinsmen still residing in the old home area, or the simple wish to establish for the lineage the cachet of greater antiquity than its neighbors. The corresponding disadvantage, of course, was the potential dilution of group solidarity. Even after the founding ancestor had been decided upon, the group was faced with a real choice whether or not to retain as lineage members kinsmen who had moved out of the local area, as well as their descendents. In other words, lineages in practice were not "natural" descent groups but deliberately crafted human artifacts.

Most lineages chose to root their corporate identity firmly in the county of current residence, thus adopting the kind of "localist strategy" Robert Hymes has seen as typical of Chinese kinship organization since the Sung.^[59] Yet they did this in various ways. The Luo, for example, granted themselves an ancient pedigree by claiming knowledge of their family history since the Han; but they followed the common model in making the early Ming migrant to Hanyang their "founding ancestor" and including in their lineage only his descendents. A variant of this strategy was adopted by the Mianyang Zhang, who dated their origins to the Song and, unlike the Luo, opted to locate their founding ancestor in that distant era. They thus placed their migration to Hubei in the sixteenth, not the first, generation, and con-

tinued to claim their old home county in Jiangxi as their formal native place. Nevertheless, in practice they followed the common localist strategy by actually including in their genealogy only those persons descended from the first forebears to have arrived in their current home county.^[60]

Only two of our fourteen lineages differ strikingly from the general localist pattern. According to the internal history of one Boquan Zhang lineage, founder Zhang Deyi had established his line in Huangpi county, north of Hanyang, around 1350. Thereafter some of his descendents had moved to Boquan in Hanyang and others to neighboring Xiaogan county. During the first half of the Ming the three separate county branches retained close ties but later gradually lost contact. Around 1723, however, leaders of all three branches were independently compiling genealogies when they "rediscovered" their common roots and decided to publish a single lineage history.^[61] It is noteworthy in light of G. William Skinner's marketing model of Chinese social organization that the three counties making up the catchment area of the united Zhang lineage did clearly form a single integrated marketing system, linked by countless small rivulets ultimately converging on the Yangzi-Han confluence; yet precisely because their proposed lineage organization spanned county lines they were obliged to defend in detail their actions before a local administration wary of unduly large extragovernmental organizations. As it happened, the chosen scale eventually proved too broad to be practical for the Zhang themselves. Whereas the 1723 genealogy was chiefly compiled by, and gave honored place to, the senior Huangpi branch, the 1862 edition gave precedence to the Hanyang branch, by then clearly the most prosperous. By the time of the 1921 revision, both the Huangpi and the Xiaogan branches had dropped away, and only the Hanyang line was included, even though Zhang Deyi of Huangpi was still listed as founding ancestor and his generation as generation number one.^[62]

Most unusual, and by far most suspect, is the Ye genealogical record. Although the Ye was in fact the most recently arrived of our Hanyang lineages (and perhaps because of this fact), it claimed greatest antiquity of all. It claimed as founding ancestor a step-brother of the founder of the Zhou dynasty (1122 B.C. ) but modestly began the genealogical table only with Ye Yu (d. A.D. 44), a high official of the later Han, making those generations currently alive at the time of compilation generations number fifty-eight through sixty-one. Records of early ancestors are, not surprising, only spotty, but in fact a relatively continuous table of descent is supplied for generations after the thirty-third. This was the time of Ye Gui (b. A.D. 894), who was said to be part of a major migration from North China into the Huizhou area of Anhui province following the collapse of the Tang. Then in the fiftieth generation (sixteenth century), three Ye brothers moved from Huizhou to Lishui county in Jiangsu, which the Ye in the twentieth century still claimed as their native place.^[63]

What prevents all of this from being dismissed out of hand as an arriviste merchant family's desperate search for ancient pedigree is the fact that, of all our genealogies, only the Ye did not restrict itself to descendents of the Hanyang line. They alone conspicuously abjured the localist strategy. Although Ye Tingfang had moved his legal registration to Hanyang in the eighteenth century and although his descendents in Hankou were by far the most prosperous patriline within the lineage and themselves undertook compilation of the 1873 genealogy, they portrayed themselves merely as a relatively junior branch of a much greater, nationally dispersed composite lineage. Tables of descent of numerous other branches, in the ancestral home Lishui and elsewhere, are included in the genealogy. Such detail convinces me that the Hankou Ye, if not actually tied by blood to these predominantly Lower Yangzi "relatives," had at least found sufficient economic cause to form a fictive kinship bond with bearers of their common surname in various downriver localities.

The Ye were exceptional; aggressive inclusiveness was not a usual lineage goal. Most groups, like the Boquan Zhang, eventually settled upon a fairly modest operational size, and it might even be said that an important goal of organizing descent groups into corporate lineages was specifically to exclude possible candidates for kinship. On the very first page of its genealogy, for example, the Luo stated there were many different Luo-surname families in Hanyang and that the work at hand was intended to differentiate those who were truly members of the Hongshanmiao Luo from those who were not. The preface to the combined Huangpi-Xiaogan-Hanyang Zhang genealogy of I723, moreover, frankly admitted that the compilers' desire not to "admit indiscriminately" households into the corporate group had led to considerable squabbling with excluded parties.^[64] This was especially important when more than one descent group sharing a common surname inhabited a common locality, as was the case with our two Zhang lineages from the town of Boquan or the two Yao lineages from nearby areas of central Hanyang county.

The deliberate nature of lineage construction is seen even more clearly when we turn from the question of boundaries to that of internal structure, the lineage's warp and weft: branches (zhi ) and generations (pai ). Our genealogies reveal the lavish attention that lineage elders paid to such questions, which were clearly seen as basic to the group's integrity. The compilers of a nineteenth-century Yao genealogy, for instance, complained in their preface that even though some symbols of common identity such as an ancestral temple had long existed, precisely because in the past "branches were not clearly sorted out and generational characters not clearly assigned," lineage consciousness could be said to have existed in only a very few members.^[65] In looking back over the early history of a lineage one can usually spot a particular generation in which generational characters (zipai ) were first adopted,

and probably the agnates then first articulated their intention to act as a self-conscious descent group, if not a corporate lineage. In following successive editions of one genealogy, moreover, one sees the attempt by lineage elders to prescribe generational characters for succeeding generations, and later, in cases where for whatever reason these had been shunned in favor of other characters, to redraw the table to conform with historical practice.^[66] In many cases, it should be noted, these generational characters were never used by the individual in real life situations; they were simply part of his so-called "genealogy name" (puhui ), used only to locate him in his genealogical table.^[67]

Deciding when to divide a lineage into collateral branches was usually a function of geographic movement out of the ancestral village, but when such movement occurred there was still a choice between remaining within the old branch and lineage, forming a new branch, or leaving the lineage altogether; the option chosen might strongly reflect political relations within the group and overall group goals. Mature lineages such as the Zhang or Yao might have respectively nine or ten branches, each associated with a particular locality within the home county.^[68] The leaders of the branches would meet, usually annually, to take care of joint business and reaffirm intentions for future corporate solidarity. They were not always successful. The Liu of Mianyang, for example, had divided into eight branches in the fifth generation. The 1924 genealogy, however, recorded genealogical tables down to the current twenty-fifth generation for three branches only. One branch was said to have biologically died out, and the other four were recorded only to the twentieth generation, at which point they fell away from the composite lineage.^[69]

Collective Property . Why such a determined effort to shape and maintain corporate lineage structures? One reason might be to serve as vehicles for ownership of property. Vesting ownership of the patrimony or a share of it in a corporate lineage group was one way to avoid the leveling influences of partible inheritance, akin to the entail systems of aristocratic Europe. Alternatively, the corporate lineage might be made proprietor of property accumulated after the fact, as in the "charitable estates" (yizhuang ) advocated by Neo-Confucian social thinkers and actually created in many parts of China. Surveying evidence from the empire as a whole, however, Patricia Ebrey has recently argued that significant amounts of collective property were not the rule outside the southeast and may have existed for only a small minority of Chinese lineages, however formal their organization.^[70] The evidence from Hanyang supports her judgment; ownership of income-producing property seems not to have been an essential rationale for the existence of any lineage group in our sample.

All of our lineages did own an ancestral temple, which was basic to their

collective identity; most if not all also possessed lineage grave sites. Additional collective property was frequently vested in intermediary units between the individual and the lineage as a whole, such as branches and patrilines; the rural estate of the Hankou Ye family and the tea plantations of one line (fang ) of the Yaojiazui Yao were just such cases. However, only six of our fourteen genealogies refer to income-producing property owned by the entire corporate lineage, and even in these cases the amount of such property seems to have been rather small.

Usually the property was referred to as "ritual land" (jitian ), that is, land whose income went to finance the ancestral sacrifices and upkeep of the lineage temple.^[71] Although this term might sometimes be used as a euphemism for lands held for other profit-making purposes, this does not seem to have been generally true in Hanyang; however, we do know that in the Caidian Yao and the Hongshanmiao Luo revenue from ritual land also financed a school for lineage members (jiashu ).^[72] None of our genealogies specifically refers to a "charitable estate," and only two refer to a portion of their collective property as "charity land" (yitian ); in only the Caidian Yao do we have hard evidence that revenue from this land actually supported indigent lineage members.^[73] Nowhere in any of our genealogies are we told of more general distribution of the proceeds of lineage lands to member households.

Corporately owned lineage land was a rather late development in Han-yang, and its amount rose over the course of our period. The Yaojiazui Yao ritual lands, for example, were first acquired in 1683 and added to nine times between 1799 and 1864. The Caidian Yao lands dated only from the early nineteenth century, and those of the Luo only from the post-Taiping era. Additions to corporate lands came either by contribution of wealthy lineage members (the Mianyang Liu property was augmented considerably in the 1920s by gifts of a Hankou merchant, Liu Zhongqi), or, in at least one case, by reinvestment of revenues from the lands themselves.^[74]

Despite this growth, and although the economic importance of corporate holdings varied from lineage to lineage, in no case were they particularly extensive. One Zhang lineage, for example, stated in its 1862 lineage rules that whereas previously revenues from lineage lands had been negligible, the group was at that time acquiring property that would yield a total of six taels per year.^[75] The holdings of the Yaojiazui Yao, which the owners claimed to be extraordinarily large in comparison to those of other area lineages, yielded a total annual rent of less than thirty taels.^[76] Such figures are not insignificant, but they suggest that corporate holdings were miniscule compared to the personal wealth of many individual lineage members and the patrimonial estates of certain component lines. Thus, although it seems clear that collective property was a source of lineage pride and a symbol of kin identity, in the Hanyang area it served neither as a regular means of support for lineage members nor as a viable alternative to primogeniture for perpetuating intact hereditary estates.

Diversification and Distribution . If corporate organization on the part of Hanyang lineages was not intended primarily as a vehicle for capital accumulation and property ownership, it proved useful for providing a human unit of sufficient scale to allow the occupational diversification and geographic distribution necessary for husbanding and developing aggregate, not collective, group resources. We see occupational diversity encouraged in lineage rules; for example, the Yaojiazui Yao states: "Members of our lineage must select an occupation in order to earn their subsistence, whether as scholars, cultivators, artisans, or merchants. They are forbidden to waste their energies loafing, or in idle pastimes, excessive drinking, or gambling, thereby disgracing their ancestors and bringing harm to their home."^[77]

Agricultural activity would ideally be combined with scholarship and official service. Lineages pooled resources in the hope of promoting a member into a position from whence he could dispense official patronage to kinsmen; the revenue from the Zhang corporate lands, noted above, for example, was used to help underwrite the educational expenses of promising lineage boys. More important in the Yangzi-Han confluence area, however, was the combination of agriculture and commerce. We have already encountered the case of Yao Quan, who left his rural home in the 1870s to "study commerce" with a kinsman in Hankou. This pattern, and indeed this phrase, recurs frequently in our sources; unlike Yao Quan, who defied his family to move into trade, in most instances the lad was specifically selected and ordered by his family to apprentice with another lineage member. It is significant that such apprenticeship relations were routinely formed across patrilines and even branches. Similarly, the various mineral dealerships of the Caidian Yao and textile dealerships of the Yaojiazui Yao represented different branches of the lineage, even while they acknowledged their mutual connections by repeating key characters in their shop names and introduced each other to valued extraregional (and eventually foreign) suppliers and customers.

Organization based upon kinship ties also allowed geographic distribution of group members. Lineages adhering to the localist strategy would theoretically drop from membership households that moved permanently to localities far from the home area, and such examples appear with regularity in our genealogical tables. Violations of this procedure could and did occur, however, when the dictates of commerce made lineage contacts in outports desirable. Groups such as the Luo and the Mianyang Liu, for instance, had members residing at most major commercial centers of Hubei, Hunan, and Jiangxi.^[78] Most ambitiously far-flung was the Zhang of Mianyang, which maintained cadet lines in Chongqing, Guangzhou, and dozens of localities along the vast Yangzi-Han-Xiang river system, as well as at Chuankou in Hanyang, Babukou in Xiaogan, and other smaller ports of the immediate confluence area.^[79] Most likely these lineages were affiliated with the "Han bang" (Han River guild), a loose confederation of merchants from the lower Hah valley who shipped and marketed their region's produce—above all,

cotton and ramie—throughout central and western China. In any case, members seem to have used their lineage ties as the basis of what Philip Curtin has called a "trade diaspora,"^[80] a common enough phenomenon in late imperial China, most familiarly associated with the somewhat grander Shanxi, Huizhou, and Ningbo merchant families.

Internal Control . Hilary Beattie has convincingly argued that the impetus to impose formal lineage structures was felt by the elite most deeply in the wake of major social upheavals.^[81] The chief instance she cites, that of the Ming-Qing transition, very likely did spark a surge of lineage building in Hanyang, as it did in Beattie's southern Anhui, but our surviving sources are silent on this point. We do, however, see a period of both frantic recompilation of lineage rules and reconstruction of lineage temples in the aftermath of the class warfare and local devastations of the Taiping Rebellion, and this activity is often explicitly identified as a response to the special needs of this era.^[82] It is also surely no coincidence that seven of our fourteen genealogies date from the uncertain period between the effective collapse of central government in 1915 and the Japanese occupation of 1937 or that no less than three were compiled in the immediate postwar years (1946-48).

Lineage organization was a fundamental method of social control, in the interests of both the group as a whole and its leadership in particular. The lineage rules of one of our Zhang lineages, first drawn up in 1723 and reiterated several times through the 1920s, provide an example of the sort of solidarity lineage elders sought to impose on their kin. Members were enjoined to observe lineage exogeny and to refrain from filing lawsuits against kinsmen or hoarding grain when kinsmen were in need. In 1723, three lineage elders submitted this proposed code to the local magistrate, successfully requesting that he formally ratify both the code and the power of the lineage headman (zuzhang ) to discipline the membership. They based their petition rather ominously on the need to "instruct in filiality" (jiaoxiao ) bad elements within the lineage , who might otherwise routinely take advantage of weaker relatives.^[83]

Lineage headmen in Hanyang enjoyed considerable disciplinary powers. The powers stipulated for the Caidian Yao head, for example, included not only the ceremonial (overseeing ancestral sacrifices and members' weddings and funerals) and the financial (collection of rents, payment of taxes on sacrificial lands, and support for lineage widows, orphans, and examination candidates) but also those powers to "admonish and reform" deviant lineage members.^[84] In some cases headmen also enjoyed the power of proxy tax remittance (baolan ) for the lineage group.

This tax power is seen most dramatically in the 1723 Zhang petition for lineage incorporation. In requesting the unusual privilege of incorporating across county boundaries, the petitioners proposed a system under which

lineage headmen would collect grain tribute assessments from all lineage members and remit these directly to the authorities. They described this as an example of "rural community self-help." Though a cynic might simply see lineage leaders enriching themselves by exacting a commission as tax farmers, I think the chief motivation was otherwise. The petitioners appealed to the local magistrate to allow them this right, above all "in order to avoid the extreme vexation of runners and prompters coming at the end of the year."^[85] In other words, the magistrate would get his money free from the profiteering of unsavory bureaucratic underlings (distaste for whom was shared by officials and local elite alike), and the wealthier members of the lineage would be spared the extortion of tax clerks who hitherto had held them responsible for defaults of their poorer kinsmen. By incorporating themselves the way the Zhang did in 1723 elites within the lineage undertook to guarantee payments by kinsmen, assuming the power to discipline defaulters, and by drawing up a clear genealogical table they conveniently excluded bearers of their surname with whom they did not acknowledge kinship and for whom they wished not to accept fiscal liability. In this as in many other ways, the internal imposition of discipline over lineage members was closely tied to solidarity versus the outside world, government and neighbors alike.

External Relations . In their relations with the outside world, Hanyang lineages apparently sought a balance between insularity and integration, between pursuit of narrow lineage and wider community interests. Lineage solidarity and group resources were crucial weapons in the contest for control of local material resources. The Caidian Yao, for example, engaged in a running feud over property rights with another locally powerful descent group, the Yu, which began in the 1750s under Yao Guanghan (d. 1805). In the early nineteenth century the feud was revived by Yao Yukui (1791-1861), who filed suit in the county yamen to guarantee access by Yao fishermen to lakeshores owned by the Yu. This so-called "lineage lawsuit" (zusong ) dragged on for more than fifteen years, kept alive by repeated filing of charges and countercharges.^[86] Such feuds provided useful means not only to pursue material advantages but also to deepen solidarity within the group. The Yao genealogy for instance makes a great point of the fact that Yao Yukui, not from a fishing household, was yet willing to suffer considerable personal hardship on behalf of poorer fishing kinsmen; it seems hardly coincidental that this same Yukui spearheaded the mid-nineteenth-century recompilation of the Yao genealogy and restoration of the group's corporate property.

While pressing such group claims, however, lineage elders usually took care in their relations with the wider community to assume leadership and philanthropic roles appropriate to Confucian local elites. Local Hanyang sources regularly list the contributions of members of our groups to county

school construction, water control, flood and famine relief, repairs to altars of local tutelary deities, financing of river lifeboat services, and so on.^[87] Not surprising, several prominent members of our lineages also played leading roles in organizing and commanding local militia resistance to the Taiping rebels in the 1850s.^[88] The credit for such public service activism accrued to the individual, of course, but also in a more general way to the corporate lineage. For example, even the hostile history of the Ye compiled in the People's Republic emphasized that the ostentatious magnanimity of certain members was reflected in a positive local image of the group as a whole and in good public relations for its various business enterprises.^[89]

Confucian social leadership could sometimes be turned to the advantage of the group in very practical ways. For instance the Yao-Yu feud just mentioned seems to have begun when Yao Guanghan succeeded in having himself placed in charge of a project he had devised to construct a Yangzi river dike protecting south-bank farmland. The Yu perceived the project as favoring Yao holdings at Yu expense. When, a century later, Yao Yukui had himself appointed by Governor Hu Linyi to conduct a cadastral survey for reassessing grain tribute obligations in the wake of the Taiping wars, the Yao genealogy unabashedly gloated over this opportunity to benefit their own lineage and correspondingly disadvantage the Yu.

More generally, social activism was useful in maintaining the lineage's cultural hegemony—the sense within local society that members of such lineages justified by their conduct possessing a greater than normal share of local wealth and resources, and that they were in some sense the common population's social betters. Championing local causes and displaying visible philanthropy (by no means necessarily devoid of genuinely felt moral imperatives) were means of perpetuating this charisma; so too was a public posture of cultural refinement and educational achievement. We have noted that members of our lineages on the whole were not unusually successful in the civil service examinations, yet they certainly did receive a better than average education in classical arts and letters, conspicuously displayed in such ways as patronizing local educational institutions. Yao Guangmei, for example, expended great money and effort to have the Hanyang county quota for stipended scholars raised around 1805, and Ye Zhaogang—not a scholar but a proprietor of the Beijing branch of his family's medicine store—renovated the hostel for Hanyang county examination candidates at the capital.^[90] They also patronized promising nonkin local scholars, financed the publication of literary works, founded and participated in local literary societies, and collected rare books and art objects.^[91] All these were ways of exemplifying through their life-styles the gengdu (planter scholar) ideal.

What was the geographic scale of our lineage members' social activism and the range of their influence? Studying the early modern British local elite, Alan Everitt has spoken of the "county community" as the basic com-

ponent element of elite society.^[92] In China as well, an interlocking, self-conscious local community seems to have played an important role in shaping elite lineages' behavior; but whereas the locus of this community in China as in Britain might at times be the county (xian ), the evidence of our genealogies argues that more often identity was focused on a subcounty unit. At the very least, the Han River formed a clear boundary for lineage power; several of our groups speak repeatedly of their attachment to the area known as "Hannan" (that portion of Hanyang county lying south of the Han), and the two of our Hanyang lineages that did not hail from the area (the two Boquan Zhang lineages) seem to have moved in an orbit separate from the others.

But the spatial unit by far most commonly invoked in our genealogies is the subcounty administrative division, the xiang . Hanyang county had eight such subdistricts, each centered on a major market town (xiangzhen ) such as Caidian, Huanglingji, Boquan, or Guanqiao. For most of our lineages the xiang was the social horizon—most member households dwelled within its borders, and the lineage headquarters was the xiang- level town. When elite activism extended beyond the immediate kinship group, it often explicity focused on the subdistrict community (xiangdang ). Lineage leaders wrote routinely of "the people of our xiang ," expressed concern over xiang problems, and participated in xiang- wide public projects.^[93] Most Hanyang lineages, in short, seem to have been precisely the sort of xiangzu (xiang- centered lineage) identified by Fu Yiling as the characteristic Ming-Qing kinship group,^[94] and their leadership the very type of the xiangshen (subdistrict gentry or—better—"local elites") so commonly encountered in late imperial sources.

Our materials allow us only to speculate on the degree of local dominance exercised by this subdistrict community of elites, but it may have been considerable. In the Qing, for example, the subdistricts were the major units of land-tax assessment and collection—Hanyang's twenty-one tax precincts (li ) were directly subordinated to them in the fiscal hierarchy^[95] —and the sub-district elite must have enjoyed great leverage in the fiscal process. When, in the twentieth century, the xiang were transformed into units of "local self-government," with their administrative seats at the xiang- level market towns,^[96] our lineage leaders would seem to have been ideally placed to derive maximum advantage from these currents of "modern" political change.

Conclusion

The collective profile we have drawn of elite lineages in Hanyang and adjacent counties above all presents remarkable long-term continuity. There was certainly some downward mobility within the elite; the 1867 county gazetteer reveals for example that the Cai—after whom Caidian had been named—"was in former generations a great lineage, but now has much declined."^[97]

There was also from time to time a bit of new blood, as epitomized by the Ye. It is noteworthy, however, that the Ye entered the Hanyang elite through the back door, as it were, from outside the region via the interregional marketplace of Hankou. Whatever the limitations of our sample, the evidence of these fourteen genealogies suggests not only elite continuity but also nearly complete absence of promotion into the elite from local, rural roots.

The modern social hierarchy in Hanyang county seems to have been largely the product of a single revolutionary era, the first reign of the Ming dynasty. Other scholars have noted similar developments elsewhere. Looking at the origins of local elites in Hunan, for instance, Peter Perdue has remarked on the very high percentage who established themselves at the start of the Ming (in Hunan as in Hanyang most of these came from Jiangxi). Jerry Dennerline and Hilary Beattie have similarly noticed a lasting social hierarchy by lineage established during the Yuan-Ming transition in the Yangzi delta and in southern Anhui, respectively.^[98] The evidence seems to be growing, therefore, for a new periodization of Chinese social history that would treat "post-Mongol China" as a discrete temporal unit.

Especially fascinating is the pattern displayed in our sources (and noted also for Hunan by Perdue) of frequent elite descent from soldier officials in the victorious army of Ming Taizu. One is even tempted to see in this something of an analog to European-style feudalism, with families of elites being essentially enfeoffed in return for military service. This impression is strengthened by the fact that two of our lineages, the Boquan Zhang and the Caidian Yao, were actually descended from lines of hereditary military office holders. In China, of course, such enfeoffment was hardly as widespread or as systematic as in Europe, but it may not have been wholly absent.

For most of our lineages, the cause of their rise was not the same as the means of their subsequent maintenance. Unquestionably, all benefited in great measure from the vast landholdings bequeathed by lineage founders. Yet, because no effective alternative to partible inheritance was found or apparently even sought, the adequacy of the landed estate as a basis for elite maintenance declined over generations with a cold mathematical logic. Thus the picture we observe is one of considerable flexibility, versatility, and adaptability in maintaining the economic bases of local status. One aspect of this adaptability was the capacity to transfer one's allegiance and political service from one regime to another. A second was the ability to fit quite comfortably into the new structure of economic and political opportunity offered by Western-inspired industrialization and state-building efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Indeed, it might even be said that the very impossibility of maintaining status over generations on the basis solely of land gave the Chinese elite an advantage over its European counterpart in the face of major structural change, by having so thoroughly conditioned it to the need for constant flexibility and innovation.

Probably the most striking aspect of this flexibility was a diversified occupational portfolio, which gave an honored place to careers in trade. Corresponding to this was an apparently deliberate group strategy of geographic distribution, which included—even emphasized—urban residence. Like their British counterparts, members of our local elite were (in Namier's famous term) "amphibious"—equally at home in town and countryside.^[99] Since very early in their histories most lineages had been centered in market towns, and over the nineteenth and twentieth century their urban membership grew in number, in the urbanness of their place of residence (more and more moving to metropolitan Hankou), and in their relative influence within the lineage. Well before the close of our period many of our lineage members might be classified as "pseudo-gentry," the term used by Everitt to describe the portion of the British elite that lived in cities, supported itself from neither a rural estate nor administrative office holding and yet by its cultured life-style and wide-ranging connections was popularly seen as belonging to the gentry stratum.^[100]

Finally, our local elites displayed flexibility and versatility in using corporate lineage organization to maintain their status. Lineage structures were neither predetermined by heredity nor necessarily identical; rather, our actors used the rich cultural repertoire of organizational tools at their disposal (native places, generational characters, scales of branch and lineage organization, etc.) deliberately and creatively to fashion formal groups of maximum practicality. They were also able periodically to restructure such organizations as situations changed. Corporate lineage groupings varied in function as well as form, rendering futile any attempt to generalize too broadly about "why" lineages organized. For example, though collective property seems not to have been a critical factor underlying any of our groups, its importance clearly varied from one lineage to another. Other incentives for organization included those to diversify assets, to ward off predations of state functionaries, and to compete more effectively for local resources. The lineage group had many potential uses, and even within a single local area different groups organized for different sets of purposes.

To all, however, organization was useful in some way, and the evidence argues eloquently that the lineage group was a major vehicle for reproducing elite status over the course of generations and centuries. The primary effect of partible inheritance, then, and the chief difference between the Chinese local elite and their European counterparts, may have been just this: for the Chinese the more populous lineage, rather than the individual patriline, served as this vehicle. Lines rose and fell, but the lineage endured.

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.