• 1 A preliminary version was prepared for the Seminar on “Processes of Change in Chinese Society,” Tor (...)

1I set forth in this paper1 a partial description and preliminary analysis of rural marketing in China. This neglected topic has significance that ranges far beyond the disciplinary concerns of economics. It interests anthropologists in particular because marketing structures of the kind described here for China appear to be characteristic of the whole class of civilizations known as “peasant” or “traditional agrarian” societies. In complex societies of this important type, marketing structures inevitably shape local social organization and provide one of the crucial modes for integrating myriad peasant communities into the single social system that is the total society. The Chinese case would appear to be strategic for the comparative study of peasant marketing in traditional agrarian societies because the integrative task accomplished there was uniquely large; because the exceptional longevity and stability of Chinese society have allowed the marketing system in many regions to reach full maturity prior to the beginnings of modernization; and because available documentation of Chinese marketing over several centuries provides rich resources for the study of systemic development – of change within tradition.

• 2 On the side of documentary research, pioneering work was done by Katô Shigeshi. He and three other (...)
• 3 Fieldwork was made possible by grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Viking Fund (...)
• 4 Research assistance was ably provided by Stephen M. Olsen and William L. Parish, Jr., both of Corne (...)

3Although the scholarly literature on local marketing in China is relatively meager,2 the raw materials for analysis are in abundant supply. Thousands of fang-chih, the gazetteers prepared locally for hsien and other administrative units, provide information, in remarkable detail about local markets and often about the marketing process itself. These and other traditional documentary sources were supplemented during the pre-Communist era of transition by the descriptions of foreign observers, information reported in local newspapers, raw data compiled through fact-finding surveys, and even bits of scholarly field work. The richest resource for the study of rural marketing in mainland China, both before and after 1949, is the large body of potential informants from the mainland now resident in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas – individuals who participated over a period of years in the marketing systems to which their native places belonged. Data for the present study are drawn from my own field work in Szechwan, 1949-1950;3 intensive interviews with a handful of émigré informants in the United States, Hong Kong, and Singapore, a large number of fang-chih; and a variety of other published works.4 I have, nevertheless, barely tapped the potential sources, and this essay falls correspondingly short of comprehensive treatment.

• 5 The two classical studies are: Walter Christaller, Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (Jena, 1933 (...)
• 6 It is convenience of exposition alone that dictates the introduction into this chapter of a central (...)
• 7 This hypothesis is merely an extension of the theory put forward by Berry to account for the fact t (...)

6Central places – the generic term for cities, towns, and other nucleated settlements with central service functions – may be classified in a variety of ways. The approach taken here follows the lead of Christaller and Lösch.5 In the analytical tradition that stems from these scholars, a given central place may be typed according to its position in interlocking spatial systems, within which economic function is associated with hierarchical level.6 It may be suggested that regularity in central-place hierarchies and consistency in the alignment of function with systemic position are enhanced by, if they do not actually result from, a condition of perduring “entropy” – many forces acting on the system of central places in many ways over a period of many centuries.7 Be that as it may, in the case of China at the end of her long and relatively stable imperial era, central places are readily analyzed on the assumption that the economic function of a settlement is consistently associated with its position in marketing systems which are themselves arranged in a regular hierarchy.

• 8 The use of the word “village” to refer to towns that are the site of standard markets is, however, (...)

11It will be noted that the terminology suggested here reserves the term “village” for nucleated settlements that do not support markets.8 “Village community” is a more inclusive term for residential social systems, nucleated or dispersed, which do not involve a market of any type. No generic term is proposed for minor markets or yao-tien, which are intermediate and transitional between village communities and standard market towns. “Market town,” in the terminology used here, is limited to three types of central places positioned at adjacent levels of the hierarchical system of economic centers; each of the three corresponds to a type of market. The standard market, at the lowest of these three levels, has already been characterized. In ascending order, the other two types are here termed the “intermediate market” and the “central market.” To begin with the latter, the central market is normally situated at a strategic site in the transportation network and has important wholesaling functions. Its facilities are designed, on the one hand, to receive imported items and distribute them within its dependent area and, on the other, to collect local products and export them to other central markets or higher-level urban centers. It will suffice at this point to say of the intermediate market simply that it has an intermediate position in the vertical flow of goods and services both ways. In the terminology being introduced here, a settlement that is the site of an intermediate market (but not also of a higher-level market) is termed an “intermediate market town.” The “central market town” is similarly defined.

• 9 It is very nearly valid to say of traditional China that every settlement supporting a yamen was wa (...)
• 10 Hsien-level units also included the chou (department) and t’ing (subprefecture). Details fo (...)

12A typology of central places in the upper reaches of the hierarchy in traditional China is complicated by the distinction that may be drawn between “natural” economic centers and “artificial” administrative centers. The concept of urbanness has, in China, always been intimately associated with the yamen and the wall.9 In the traditional Chinese view, a true city (ch’eng) is the walled seat of a hsien (county), fu (prefecture), or sheng (province).10 Given the hierarchical structure of the imperial administrative system, a tripartite typology of administrative central places is virtually automatic. But what is the relation between this hierarchy of administrative centers and the upper reaches of the central-place hierarchy as determined by economic function?

• 11 “Some Aspects, of the Urban Geography of the Chinese Hsien Capital,” Annals of the Association of’ (...)
• 12 C.K. Yang’s typology of Chinese markets is entirely acceptable so far as it goes. His terminology, (...)
• 13 Chang illustrates his hypothesis with a very atypical case – that of T’ung-kuan hsien, Shensi. Its (...)
• 14 Brian J.L. Berry and Allen Pred, Central Place Studies: A Bibliography of Theory and Applications ( (...)

13Two extreme and easy answers are possible. One asserts that the two series of central places may be conjoined, the other that they are wholly distinct. Both positions are taken in the scholarly literature, and both, I believe, are wrong. Chang Sen-dou in effect gives the first answer.11 His typology of lower-level central places is derived from the pioneering field study of C.K. Yang. After analyzing the markets found in Tsou-p’ing hsien, Shantung, Yang had posited three types of central places, equivalent to those which I have termed minor markets, standard market towns, and intermediate market towns.12 The hsien in question happened to include no higher-level markets, and the hsien seat was classed, quite properly, as an intermediate market town. Chang then accepted C.K. Yang’s example as typical and proceeded to equate the district capital in the administrative hierarchy with the intermediate market town in the economic hierarchy.13 Berry and Pred, in their influential critical review of central-place studies,14 then jump to the conclusion that Chang’s article bas identified the “classic hierarchy” of central places in traditional China and cite a madcap typology that grafts higher-level administrative capitals onto a series of lower-level central places in the economic hierarchy.

• 15 China’s Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations (Chicago, 1953). Ch. V.
• 16 “In the Lake Tai area in my own native district, Wukiang, the garrison town is much smaller and les (...)

14The second of the two possible extreme answers is advanced by Fei Hsiao-t’ung.15 There are, in Fei’s analysis, two types of urban centers – the “garrison town” and the “market town” – which must be kept analytically distinct. They differ in type of site, “aspect,” and function. The former are walled towns, imposed artificially on the landscape from the top and located in accordance with considerations of defense; they serve administrative functions. Market towns, by contrast, are unwalled (or at best protected by a less substantial bulwark not built as a public work), a natural growth on the landscape, and located in close congruence with the transport network; they serve commercial functions. To support his view, Fei notes that the size ranges of the two types quite overlap, with many market towns surpassing nearby garrison towns in both population and enterprise.16

• 17 Chou-ts’un’s exalted status in the hierarchy of central places cannot be considered an anomaly resu (...)

16The error is well illustrated by reference to the area studied by C.K. Yang, Chang’s authority on market towns. It can readily be shown that Tsoup’ing, a hsien seat and an intermediate market town, is economically dependent on Chou-ts’un, a central market town with no status in the administrative hierarchy. Chou-ts’un is administratively inferior to the seat of the hsien in which it is located (Ch’ang-shan), whereas in economic terms, Ch’ang-shan, like Tsou-p’ing, supports only an intermediate market that is dependent on the central market in Chou-ts’un.17 A comparable illustration is provided by Chu-chou, a river port in Hsiang-t’an hsien, Hunan, which is also a central market town without status in the administrative hierarchy. Hua-yang hsien, Szechwan, to cite another relevant case, included in 1949 no less than eight intermediate market towns and one central market town, none of which served as the hsien seat.

• 18 It would appear that within the same systems there is seldom any overlap in the size of central pla (...)
• 19 A number of other distinctions among the three hierarchical types of market towns will be introduce (...)

19In general, as one moves in this hierarchical typology from each type of central place to the next higher, the number of households increases18 while the proportion of the labor force engaged in agriculture falls. In addition, as one progresses from village to central market town, each type is more likely than the last to be walled and to support the worship of ch’eng-huang, the urban deity par excellence. The typical intermediate market town is at least partially walled and supports a shrine to ch’eng-huang. Central market towns and cities in traditional times were usually completely walled and had a full fledged ch’eng-huang temple; this was true even of those centers, like Chouts’un, that had no formal administrative status. Thus, it can be seen that position in the hierarchical typology of central places generally correlates with urbanism, whether defined in terms of variables familiar to the urban sociologist or in the common-sense terms of the Chinese layman.19

• 20 For a sophisticated treatment of this aspect of periodic marketing see James H. Stine, “Temporal As (...)

21On the side of the producer or trader, the periodicity of markets is related to the mobility of individual “firms.” The itinerant peddler, toting his wares from one market to the next with the aid of a carrying pole, is the archetype of the mobile firm in China. But equally characteristic of the traditional rural market are the wandering artisans and repairmen who carry their “workshop” about with them, and other itinerants purveying services of all kinds from letter-writing to fortune-telling. Why are these facilities mobile? In essence, because the total amount of demand encompassed by the marketing area of any single rural market is insufficient to provide a profit level that enables the entrepreneur to survive. By repositioning himself at periodic intervals, the entrepreneur can tap the demand of several marketing areas and thereby attain the survival threshold.20 From the point of view of the itinerant entrepreneur, periodicity in marketing has the virtue of concentrating the demand for his product at restricted localities on certain specific days. When a group of related markets operates on coordinated periodic (as opposed to daily) schedules, he can arrange to be in each town in the circuit on its market day.

• 21 Stine (p. 70) puts the matter succinctly: “The consumer, by submitting to the discipline of time is (...)

23From the point of view of the consumer, the periodicity of markets amounts to a device for reducing the distance he must travel to obtain the required goods and services. We begin here with the restricted nature of those requirements on the part of the average peasant household. General poverty, value emphases on frugality, and traditional consumption norms all contributed to a minimal definition of subsistence needs in the peasant household. Furthermore, these needs were in considerable part supplied without recourse to marketing, for the peasant household produced (or received through wages in kind) much of what it consumed; self-sufficiency was a virtue. Under these circumstances: (1) no household needed to market every day; and (2) the number of households required to support a daily market was very large. In most parts of agricultural China, especially prior to the eighteenth century when the rural population was distributed relatively sparsely on the land, the number of households required to support a daily market would have meant marketing areas so large that villagers at the rim could not manage the trip to and from market in a single day. A market meeting only once in three or once in five days, however, could achieve a viable level of demand if only one-third or one-fifth as many villages fell within its dependent area. Thus, when markets are periodic rather than daily, market towns may be distributed far more densely on the landscape so that the most disadvantaged villagers can manage the trip to market in a reasonable period of time.21 Even when the number of households within a marketing area increases to the point where sufficient demand is present for the market to convert to a daily schedule, from the point of view of the peasant consumer such a change offers little advantage if the household’s needs are such that marketing only once every five or six days is the most, efficient way to meet them.

• 22 I except here the most basic of all the natural units – the diurnal cycle.

25The pulsations of economic activity that occur as both mobile firms and mobile consumers converge on rural markets define one of the basic life rhythms in all traditional agrarian societies. The marketing “week,” along with the many other temporal cycles that regulate human activity in any society, may usefully be dichotomized as either natural or artificial. Cycles of the former type22 are tied to the motions of the heavenly bodies, obvious examples being the lunar month and the various seasons of the solar year. Cycles of the latter type are units of so many days, which recur in complete disregard of calendars tied to the motions of the sun or moon; when not artificial in origin, they have, like the Western month, been freed from the natural cycle that gave them birth. Most traditional agrarian societies have but one system of market schedules attuned to cycles of one or the other type. The five-day marketing week of traditional Java and the seven-day marketing week of feudal England are typical artificial cycles, while the ten-day marketing week of Tokugawa Japan is an example of marketing rhythms tied to a natural cycle, in this case the lunar month. In China both types of marketing weeks obtain, each in a variety of versions.

• 23 Longer-term cycles are relevant only to the scheduling of fairs, as opposed to markets. It is unfor (...)
• 24 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, III (Cambridge, 1958), 396. “In the Shang period (...)

26It will facilitate exposition to review the whole Chinese inventory of short-term temporal cycles.23 There were, to begin with, two cycles of the type that recurs in complete independence of the sun or moon. One, the hsün (“decade”), is ten days in duration, each day in the cycle being named after one of the ten kan (“stems”), which have a fixed sequence. The other is twelve days in duration, the cycle being similarly defined by the fixed sequence of the twelve chih (“branches”). The stems and the branches have been used ever since the Shang period as a day count,24 and the almanacs prepared for Chinese peasants today still record the “stem” and the “branch” of each day in the lunar calendar. Another available cycle of great antiquity is provided by the twenty-four solar fortnights (chieh-ch’i) into which the tropical year is divided. The onset of each fortnight, all of which bear traditional names relating to the round of seasons in the north, is likewise recorded in the almanacs everywhere available in rural China. These fortnightly dates provide the fixed points in the solar year that the peasant needs to regulate the seasonal round of agricultural activities.

• 25 Cornelius Osgood, on p. 88 of Village Life in Old China (New York, 1963) cites the case of a specia (...)

28The two conventional subdivisions of the Chinese month that have relevance here are the lunar decade, to which the term hsün is also applied, and the lunar fortnight. The three lunar hsün begin respectively on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of the lunar month; in the case of 29-day months, the third hsün lacks one day. The first lunar fortnight, which runs from the Ist through the 14th of the lunar month, is always shorter than the second, which is either 15 or 16 days in duration.25

• 26 All figures taken from Needham, III, 390-406.
• 27 A singular irony may be involved here, for it is quite possible that the artificial hsün originated (...)

29To summarize, the traditional cycles to which marketing schedules could be tied are: the lunar hsün or decade (averaging 9.84 days), the independent hsün (10 days), the independent duodenary cycle (12 days), the lunar fortnight (averaging 14.765 days), and the solar fortnight (averaging 15.218 days).26 Of these, only the independent hsün appears not to be used in modern China as a basis for marketing schedules.27

• 28 A definitive delimitation of the distribution of duodenary schedules would require reference to all (...)
• 29 Lo-p’ing hsien. Amano, p. 81.
• 30 Shang-lin, Kwangsi, is an example of a hsien all of whose markets follow regular 3-day schedules of (...)
• 31 One example is provided by the capital of Ning-hai chou on the promontory of Shantung: five markets (...)

32The three scheduling systems based on the duodenary cycle are general throughout a band that runs across southern China, broad in the west and narrowing toward the east. The line separating markets with duodenary schedules from others to the north (with schedules based on the lunar hsün) runs across the northeastern hook of Yunnan, roughly bisects Kweichow, crosses northeasternmost Kwangsi, and ends in Kwangtung (just where I have not been able to ascertain). With minor exceptions, the area of duodenary schedules appears to be limited to the upper drainage basins of the Hsi (West) and the Hung (Red) river systems.28 (Markets in the downstream plains and deltas of both river systems, in Kwangtung and in Tongking, follow schedules based on the lunar hsün.) In the area of duodenary schedules as a whole, the periodicity of markets becomes steadily more frequent as one moves from west to east. Twelve-day market schedules appear to be quite rare, and the only cases known to me occur in Yunnan.29 Six-day schedules are by far the most common of the three in Yunnan and Kweichow as a whole. Three-day schedules are found only occasionally in the west, especially in and around cities, and more generally toward the east.30 Market schedules based on the duodenary cycle occur only very sporadically outside the provinces mentioned.31

• 32 The various schedules in a scheduling system are set out in the form introduced here (note the inte (...)

33The lunar hsün family of scheduling systems is general throughout the rest of China. Three closely related scheduling systems in this family – providing for one, two, or four market days per decade – parallel the set already described, which provides for one, two, or four market days per duodenum. All schedules based on the lunar hsün are designated by citing the dates of markets in only the first of the three hsün in the lunar month. A “3 market” thus meets on the 3rd, 13th, and 23rd of the lunar month, a “3-8 market” on the 3rd, 8th, 13th, 18th, 23rd, and 28th of the lunar month. The two-per-hsün scheduling system which provides even spacing of market days is designated as follows: 1-6, 2-7, 3-8, 4-9, and 5-10. All but the last schedule yields six market days per lunar month. These may be combined to form various four-per-hsün schedules, as follows:32 These schedules provide eleven or twelve market days per lunar month.

• 33 John K. Fairbank, Alexander Eckstein, and L. S. Yang, in their useful survey of China’s traditional (...)
• 34 For examples, see Amano, p. 72, Katô, p. 21, Yamane, pp. 499-500.

34One-per-hsün schedules occur only rarely in China.33 Rural markets with such schedules are for the most part limited to remote mountain valleys or to such peripheral areas as the tip of the Shantung peninsula.34 Two-per-hsün schedules, by contrast, are the most widespread in all of China; with the possible exception of Kwangsi, none of the eighteen provinces is without examples, and throughout most of northem China such schedules are general. Four-per-hsün schedules are often used by intermediate or central markets in areas where two-per-hsün schedules are followed by standard markets.

• 35 Feng-shan hsien ts’ai-fang ts’e, Kuang-hsü 20 (1894).
• 36 C.P. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories (London, 1941), p. 56; Ta kung pao (18 February 1961). T (...)

37It has already been noted that scheduling systems yielding only one market day in ten or twelve are rare in China. The still longer “fortnightly” marketing weeks are correspondingly rarer. I have come across only one hsien – Feng-shan, Taiwan, just prior to the Japanese occupation – for which schedules of one market per solar fortnight are reported.35 As for the lunar fortnight, I am able to cite only two cases: the “great markets” held in the 1930’s on the 2nd and 16th of the lunar month just inside the north and south gates of Ta li, a hsien seat in Yunnan, and the market that in 1961 was being convened on the 1st and 15th of the lunar month in T’ing-ssu-ch’iao, a town in Hsien-ning hsien, Hupeh.36

• 37 Two-per-hsün schedules are standard for rural Korea in modern times. It is possible that the Korean (...)

40The spatial distribution of marketing schedules in modern times strongly suggests that the oldest set of schedules in China – that originally adopted by the ancients in the valley of the Huang – was the one-per-hsün system, and that in the southwest the one-per-duodenum system was prior. As marketing structures developed, it may be hypothesized that at first higher-level markets and later standard markets “doubled” their schedules by adding one new market day; eventually these two-per-hsün and two-per-duodenum schedules became the most common systems in rural China.37

• 38 The 3-per-hsün schedules listed earlier provide market cycles slightly more than two-thirds of whic (...)

43But what accounts for the common occurrence of 3-per-hsün schedules? Should not the factors inhibiting 3-per-duodenum schedules also inhibit their counterpart in the lunar-hsün family? The difference stems, I believe, from the inherent irregularity of the 4-per-hsün schedules. The second doubling of schedules within the duodenary cycle yields perfectly regular 3-day marketing weeks, but the second doubling within the lunar hsün cycle yields very irregular spacing, namely, alternating 2-day and 3-day marketing weeks. As we shall see below, when an intermediate market doubles its schedule to 4-per-hsün, in effect it has merely provided a second 2-per-hsün schedule so as to accommodate its two functionally (though not spatially) differentiated markets: one serving its standard marketing system and one its intermediate marketing system. Thus, because of functional specialization as between market days, the irregularity of its “4-per-hsün” schedule presents no problem. But the situation is quite different in the case of a 2-per-hsün standard market, which desires to increase market-day frequency, for in the absence of any functional differentiation, gross unevenness in the spacing of market days presents serious difficulties. While the spacing afforded by 3-per-hsün schedules leaves something to be desired, it is markedly superior in this regard to the 4-per-hsün system.38 This advantage is coupled with another that gives the edge to the 3-per- hsün system: the pressures that lead to the need for more frequent market days build up gradually, and it may be assumed that authorities of a 2-per-hsün market would, in reacting to these pressures, favor the 50 percent increase afforded by a 3-per-hsün schedule over the 100 percent increase of the 4-per-hsün schedule. Once 3-per-hsün schedules are established in a given area, the disadvantages of switching from 2- to 3-per-hsün schedules become irrelevant, for new standard markets can adopt 3-per-hsün schedules from the outset.

• 39 Proof of the proposition that the regular hexagon is the most advantageous shape for marketing area (...)
• 40 The point is worth noting, however, because the only study of rural marketing in China that refers (...)

45In order to set forth meaningful propositions about marketing structures as spatial systems it will be necessary to have recourse to simple models. The most radical of the assumptions made in constructing them is that the landscape in question is an isotropic plain on which resources of all kinds are uniformly distributed. Theoretical considerations based on impeccable geometry and tolerably sound economics tell us that when such an assumption is made, market towns should be distributed on the landscape according to an isometric grid, as if at the apexes of space-filling equilateral triangles. In theory, too, the service area of each market should approach a regular hexagon.39 These expectations apply anywhere in the world – neither the geometry nor the economics is peculiarly Chinese – and it is therefore of no particular moment to report that in six areas of China where I have been able to test the proposition, a majority of market towns have precisely six immediately neighboring market towns and hence a marketing area of hexagonal shape, albeit distorted by topographical features.40

• 41 Martin Yang, 1945, p. 190.
• 42 C.K. Yang, p. 39, refers to the marketing areas of Tsou-p’ing hsien as “economic cells, each… havin (...)
• 43 Field workers have occasionally been misled in this regard by a failure to distinguish between stan (...)

46But are the hexagonal standard marketing areas discrete? That is, do the areas typically overlap? Or, if they fit together in the manner of hexagonal ceramic tiles, do certain of the villages lie on the boundary between two hexagons, oriented toward more than one standard market? Martin Yang, the first social scientist to map and describe a Chinese standard marketing system, has this to say: “On the whole, although there is no clear-cut line of demarcation, each market town has a definite and recognizable area, and looks upon the people of certain villages as its primary customers; in turn, it is regarded by the villagers as their town.”41 My research in Szechwan leads me to concur wholeheartedly: I had little trouble in ascertaining the limits of the standard marketing area that I was studying; the peasants within this area did the great bulk of their marketing in Kao-tien-tzu, the standard market town in question; and they considered it their market.42 There are theoretical reasons, as I shall note in Part Two, for expecting a standard marketing area in which new villages are being established to pass through a phase in which a small number of newly established villages are situated equidistant from two or three markets, but in a stable situation there is no theoretical reason for objecting to the assumption of essential discreteness that is supported by empirical evidence.43

• 44 Hsiang-shan hsien chih, T’ung-chih 12 (1873), ch. 5; Ch’ü-chiang hsien chih, Kuang-hsü 6 (1 (...)
• 45 Data for this computation are given on pp. 5-6.
• 46 Yü-ti chih, ts’e 3 for villages, ts’e 7 for markets.
• 47 Chang Jen-chün, comp. Kuang-tung yü-ti ch’üan-t’u [Comprehensive Atlas of Kwangtung] Canton, Kuang- (...)

48Empirical evidence clearly points to the two-ring model with its total of 18 villages. It is not that every known case of a standard marketing area has a close approximation of 18 villages. My assertion is based rather on: (1) the finding that the ratio between villages and standard or higher-level markets of any sizable segment of the Chinese landscape averages very close to 18; and (2) the fact that variation in the ratios can be accounted for satisfactorily by a developmental model that moves from one 18-village-per-market equilibrium to another – but not by models that posit a stable equilibrium of 6 or 36 villages per market. Data relevant to the second point are included in Part Two; here I can appropriately do no more than cite selected averages. In the 1870’s, the average number of villages per rural market was 17.9 in Hsiang-shan hsien and 19.2 in Ch’ü-chiang hsien, both in Kwangtung.44 The classic field study of Chinese rural marketing – that of C.K. Yang in the 1930’s in Tsou-p’ing hsien, Shantung-shows 21.4 villages per standard and higher-level market.45 The yin hsien t’ung-chih46, compiled in 1937, one of the truly outstanding examples of Chinese gazetteer scholarship, presents detailed data that yield an average of 20.1 villages for each of its 82 periodic markets. I have been able to find records of contemporary date for the number of markets and villages over a really large area only in the case of Kwangtung in the 1890’s;47 the ratio of villages to rural markets for the province as a whole at that time was 19.6.

• 48 Martin Yang, 1945, p. 191.
• 49 Fei Hsiao-t’ung and Chang Chih-i, Earthbound China (Chicago, 1945), p. 172. Households marketed muc (...)

49Our model, then, which is diagrammed as the basic pattern of Figure 1, shows a hexagonal marketing area with the market town at the center, surrounded by an inner ring of six and an outer ring of twelve villages. As is empirically typical, the model calls for six major paths radiating out from the town. These paths are at once the arteries and the veins of an economic system whose heart is the market in the town at its center. Along these paths, in the early morning hours of every market day, typically pass at least one out of every five adults living in the whole array of dependent villages. In T’ai-t’ou, the Shantung village described by Martin Yang, “some member from almost every household in the village is in the town on market day,”48 while in Luts’un, the Yunnan village studied by Fei and Chang, “at least one went from each household each market day.”49

• 50 Ch’iao Ch’i-ming, 1934, p. 15. In this study of a marketing community near Nanking, the intervillag (...)
• 51 “The landlord has an office in the market-town and keeps in touch with his tenants on market-days.” (...)

52The standard marketing system also has a modest financial dimension. Shops in the town extend credit to regular customers. Certain shopkeepers and landowners lend money to peasants in transactions that may take place in the town on market day. The rotating credit societies of the peasant are also usually organized in the teahouses on market day and are thereby restricted to villagers from within the system.50 In addition, certain landlords maintain an office in the town that collects rent from tenants.51

• 52 Pp. 49 (Figure 1 caption) and 51-52.

60A notable feature of the intermediate marketing system concerns the distribution of market schedules within it. In the literature on periodic marketing in China, it is usually imagined that schedules are simply distributed among markets in such a way that each shares the same schedule with as few of its neighbors as possible. The purpose of such dovetailing, as noted for instance by Spencer,52 would be to make it possible for villagers to have an open market within reach almost every day and to reduce competition among neighboring markets. However, not only have peasants little need or occasion to market more often than provided for by the schedule of their nearest standard market, but, in addition, it can be shown that schedules are not distributed in the simple manner affirmed or suggested in the literature. Rather, their distribution is designed to minimize conflict between the schedule of a given standard market and the schedules of the higher-level markets toward which it is oriented; the schedules of neighboring standard markets are essentially irrelevant. Stated another way, as new standard markets are established, a schedule will be selected that minimizes conflict with neighboring intermediate markets regardless of the schedules of neighboring standard markets.

• 53 Chin-t’ang hsien chih, Min-kuo 10 (1921), ch. 1. One of the market towns involved lies in H (...)

61The point may be illustrated by reference to the case of Chuan-p’eng-ssu, a market established in the Kuang-hsü reign in Chin-t’ang hsien, Szechwan.53 At the time when it was established, there were four immediately neighboring markets with these schedules: 1-4-7 to the west, 2-5-8 to the northwest, 3-6-9 to the east, and 1-5-8 to the south. According to the principle of minimal conflict with all neighbors, the new market would have adopted a 3-6-10 or 4-7-10 schedule; at the very least it would have avoided any schedule including 5-8. In fact, the new market chose 2-5-8, for the simple reason that the towns to the west (1-4-7) and east (3-6-9) supported intermediate markets to which the new market would be oriented, whereas the towns with 2-5-8 and 1-5-8 schedules were standard market towns with which the newcomer would have minimal commercial ties.

• 54 An equivalent example in a hsien where the 4-per-duodenum scheduling system is standard is provided (...)

62As a consequence of this governing principle, neighboring standard markets often have the same schedule (note in Figure 3.2 Lai-chin-tien, Kaotien-tzu, and Hsin-tien-tzu, all with 3-6-9 schedules), whereas intermediate markets usually have no scheduling conflict with any of their dependent standard markets. This means that in areas of 3-per-hsün schedules, for instance, when the intermediate market has a 1-4-7 or 4-7-10 schedule, then all six of the dependent standard markets must share the only two harmonizing schedules that remain: 2-5-8 and 3-6-9. This situation is illustrated by the intermediate marketing system of which Chung-ho chen is the center (Figure 3.2).54

• 55 Everything that a peasant can do in his standard market can also be accomplished in his intermediat (...)
• 56 The place of the intermediate market in the distribution system gives it certain economic avantages (...)

63It will be noted from Figure 1 that, in addition to portions of the standard marketing areas of all dependent standard market towns, intermediate marketing areas include one complete standard marketing area at the center. This points up the important fact that an intermediate market town functions as the nucleus not only of the larger intermediate marketing system but also of a smaller standard marketing system.55 As C.K. Yang puts it (p. 14), the intermediate market town “usually has two service areas, a primary area including nearby villages attending the market regularly or at frequently, and a secondary area encompassing villages farther away where people come to the market only occasionally for items hard to obtain in their own … [standard] markets.”56

• 57 I have come across only one comparable case in 3-per-hsün areas of a doubled “large” and “small” ma (...)

64This dual status of the intermediate market town is not infrequently reflected in the schedule of the town’s market days. Throughout the areas of China where two-per-hsün schedules are general, many of the intermediate market towns follow a doubled schedule, with one set of two days (say 1-6) known as hsiao-chi (“small market”) and the other (say 3-8) as ta-chi (“large market”).57

• 58 Luan chou chih, Chia-ch’ing 15 (1810), ch. 2.

65In such cases, the market functions as a standard market on the hsiao-chi days and as an intermediate market on the ta-chi days. Thus, while the schedules of standard markets dependent on such an intermediate market must not conflict with its ta-chi schedule, it is of no consequence if they coincide with its hsiao-chi market days. An example is provided by K’aip’ing chen in Luan chou early in the nineteenth century. This town held its “large” market on a 5-10 schedule, with which none of the surrounding markets conflicted, but its “small” market was on a 2-7 schedule, which was also followed by standard markets in two of the surrounding towns.58 Whereas the irregularity of 4-per-hsün schedules would be disadvantageous for a standard market, in the case of an intermediate market like K’ai-p’ing chen, the irregularity of the doubled schedule is less apparent, for each of the regular 2-per-hsün schedules serves a functionally distinct market.

• 59 In the case of Li-ling hsien, Hunan, for instance, markets on a daily schedule in 1948 included all (...)
• 60 The one exception is provided by Ta-pu hsien, Kwangtung, in which the two intermediate markets foll (...)

66In general, as the above examples indicate, when the scheduling systern of a higher-level market differs from that of its dependent standard markets, the schedule of the higher-level market is the more frequent.59 All but one of the few cases known to me where the reverse is true are urban and can be accounted for in terms of complete differentiation of hierarchical function whereby intermediate markets are not also standard markets.60

• 61 Chang Sen-dou, p. 42, asserts that the bookstores of a hsien were found only in the capital. It may (...)

68The situation was rather different in the case of the local elite. Everything that set them apart from the peasantry encouraged their attendance at the intermediate market. They were literate, and in the intermediate as opposed to the standard market they could buy books and stationery supplies.61 Their style of life was if not exalted at least gentlemanly, and from time to time they needed to purchase foodstuffs, decorative items, or cloth of a quality that for a peasant would be sheer indulgence and hence unavailable in standard markets. They were men of comparative wealth, and the intermediate market town offered a range of opportunities for money lending and investment unmatched in their standard market towns. They were also men of leisure, and it was only in intermediate or higher-level markets that tea and wine-houses especially equipped to fill the idle hours of leisured gentlemen were available. In short, while the regular needs of the peasants were met by the standard market, those of the local elite were met only by the intermediate market.

• 62 Data from Ch’ang-shan hsien chih, Chia-ch’ing 6 (1801). The central marketing system centered on Ti (...)

71Central marketing systems, too, are circuited by itinerants, particularly those whose product or service is in little demand or of such a nature that too frequent exposure in the same market town is undesirable (e.g., patent medicine salesmen and storytellers). A variety of spatial models for central marketing systems are possible; those that appear to be most commonly approached by empirical Chinese cases are four, two involving Model A intermediate marketing systems and two involving Model B subsystems. These are diagrammed in Figure 4. Circuits may be illustrated using Model AB and 3-per-hsün schedules, as in the upper right of Figure 4. By following triangular routes that bring him back to the central market for every other market day on its schedule, the itinerant can achieve complete coverage in four hsün (39-40 days). During this period he will have spent six evenlyspaced market days in the central market, two market days each in the six intermediate markets, two market days each in the six standard markets that belong to no other central marketing system, and one market day each in the six standard markets which also belong to another central marketing system. Central marketing systems inwhich schedules are perfectly attuned to one another, as in this hypothetical example, are rare. But it appears to be generally true that the ta-chi schedule of a central market is normally eschewed by other markets within the central marketing system. An example is provided by Chou-ts’un, the important market town in Shantung that has been cited before in other contexts. As of the early nineteenth century, its ta-chi schedule, 4-9, was followed by only one other market in the entire hsien – and that one was in the far north, quite probably outside Chou-ts’un’s maximal marketing system.62

• 63 Cf. C.K. Yang, pp. 32-33: “Only four stores in Sunchiachen and seven stores in the County Seat [bot (...)

73Let us now look over the total complex of nested marketing systems and survey, first of all, the downward flow of merchandise. Exotic goods shipped to the central market town, and other goods produced in it, are distributed in part through the central market itself, in part by itinerants who circuit both intermediate and standard markets throughout the central marketing system, and in part to firms in the six intermediate market towns. Merchandise received by firms in each intermediate market town, together with other goods produced there, are similarly distributed: in part through the intermediate market itself, in part by itinerants who circuit standard markets within the intermediate marketing system, and in part to firms in the six standard market towns. The firms receiving goods in this downward flow consist, in the case of standard market towns, chiefly of small shops; in the case of intermediate market towns they include distributors who supply itinerants as well as dual wholesale- retail establishments;63 and in the case of central market towns they include most prominently wholesalers equipped with warehouses. Merchandise that is consumed by the peasantry or required by petty craftsmen flows down through the system to every market; consumer goods for the local elite and supplies for artisans move no further down than the intermediate market; while consumer goods of interest chiefly to the bureaucratic elite, together with industrial supplies, normally go no further than the central market town itself.

• 64 Particular cases are described in detail, pp. 129 ff.

75Amano,64 who studied marketing in several towns in Hopei and Shantung, makes it clear that a hierarchy of credit arrangements parallels the hierarchical distribution and collection system, and that “mobile firms” not only operated on credit but participated in the vertical flow of goods both ways. For instance, an itinerant fan-tzu who in the first instance operated as a buyer for a local-products dealer in the intermediate market town, might at the same time handle goods purchased with a loan extended by that dealer; as he circuited the standard markets he both sold sundry goods and bought local products.

• 65 Yamane, p. 502. Prior to 1726, licenses were issued by each hsien or chou.

76Yamane’s research on Shantung market towns suggests that the distinction between minor and standard markets on the one hand and intermediate and central markets on the other was, during the Ch’ing period at least, fundamental with respect to the role of government. The lower-level markets (hsiao-chi in the usual terminology) supported only petty unlicensed brokers, and were self-regulated and self-taxed. By contrast, intermediate and higher-level markets (ta-chi) were officially registered, their brokerage firms were licensed by the provincial treasury, and market taxes were tapped as a source of official revenue.65 Whether the formal distinction between kuan (“regulated”) and i (“free”) markets is peculiar to Shantung, and just how closely it corresponds to the dichotomy between minor/standard and higher-level markets are moot questions. But it is a reasonable hypothesis that in traditional times a given market’s transactions were more likely to be regulated and taxed by bureaucratic officials the higher its position in the functional hierarchy of central places.

• 66 Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago, 1956), p. 70 ff. It may, in the case of Chin (...)

80Chinese marketing systems have important social as well as economic dimensions. The standard marketing system in particular is a unit whose social significance for the peasantry and for peasant relations with other groups deserves major attention. In order to suggest an emphasis suited to my purpose in this section, I shall call it henceforward the standard marketing community. There is good reason, I believe, for attempting to analyze this type of community not only as an intermediate social structure but also as a culture-bearing unit – the locus in the Chinese case of Redfield’s “little tradition.”66

• 67 As used in this book, “agricultural China” refers to a specifically defined contiguous area inclusi (...)

82We may begin by asking how big this area normally is and how many people the community typically includes. So as to avoid the protraction of citing numerous examples, I present a set of estimates that incorporate and reconcile data from all relevant empirical cases available to me. Table 1, based on a simple graphic model, points up the obvious but nonetheless extremely important fact that the size of standard marketing areas varies inversely with density of population. In regions where the population is sparsely distributed on the land, marketing areas must be large in order to encompass enough demand to support the market; in densely settled regions they are small. The table also reveals a relationship that common sense does not necessarily foretell – namely, that the average population of marketing communities increases along with population density only up to a point. As densities rise above 325 persons per square kilometer – and as standard marketing areas fall below 27 square kilometers in size – the average population of marketing systems begins to decline. A full understanding of why marketing areas come to be as small as they are in very densely settled areas must await the analysis of change in Part Two, but there is nothing mysterious about the kind of relationship that Table 1 shows between the population and the area of marketing systems. Given a steady decline in the size of marketing areas as one moves from densely to very densely populated regions, it is apparent that the point must eventually be reached where ever smaller areas cannot sustain ever larger agrarian populations. In agricultural China67 at the end of the republican period, that point fell in the 300-350 density range.

• 68 I see no merit in the notion that “walking distance” is in any sense a determinant of the size of m (...)

84The majority of standard marketing areas, then, are of a size that puts the most disadvantaged villager within easy walking distance of the town – 3.4 to 6.1 kilometers.68 In the modal case (see bottom of Table 1) marketing areas are just over 50 square kilometers in size, market towns are less than eight kilometers apart, and maximum walking distance to the town is approximately 4.5 km. The average (mean) population of the standard marketing community is somewhat over 7,000.

• 69 Standard marketing systems in northwestern Szechwan were atypically large in the late republican pe (...)

85It is clear, then, that even in the case of the typical community – 1,500 households in eighteen or so villages distributed over fifty square kilometers – we are not dealing with a cozy primary group structured through bonds of great intimacy or intensity. On the other hand, unused as most students of China are to thinking of marketing systems as communities and given the burden of the relevant literature, we are likely to be led far astray in this regard. Let me illustrate with the community centered on Kao-tien-tzu, the standard market town I studied in Szechwan. With some 2,500 households in 1949-1950, it was an atypically large system.69 Did the average peasant even recognize much less know the members of so many households?

• 70 Exceptions were for the most part limited to the households of “outsiders” living on or near the hi (...)

86If Mr. Lin, the 45-year-old peasant with whom I lived, may be considered at all typical, then the answer is yes. For Mr. Lin had a nodding acquaintance with almost every adult in all parts of the marketing system.70 He could, moreover, identify and describe the community’s leading elite families, in no matter which of the dispersed villages they lived. He knew details about peasant families on the other side of the market town that most Americans would not know – and would not care to know – about their next-door neighbors. Mr. Lin’s social knowledge of Kao-tien-tzu’s marketing community was more impressive, perhaps, than that of the agricultural laborer who shared his compound or the transport coolie who carted his tangerines to market, but it paled by comparison with the informed social wisdom of any leisured gentleman among the community’s local elite. The long-robed landlord might nod to only a favored few, but he recognized everyone he passed on the way to market and appeared to carry in his head a full dossier on each.

• 71 This assertion takes into account the comparative stability in the membership of Kao-tien-tzu’s mar (...)

87But is it after all so remarkable? The peasant in Kao-tien-tzu’s marketing community had, by the age of fifty, attended his standard market more than three thousand times. He had, at least one thousand times on the average, been jammed into a small area along one street with the same male representative of every other household in that community.71 He made purchases from peasant vendors whose homes lay in all directions from the town, and more to the point, he socialized in the teahouses with fellow peasants from village communities far removed from his own. Nor was the peasant alone in this, for in Kao-tien-tzu there was a teahouse for everyone, and few persons who went to market failed to spend at least an hour in one or two. Codes of hospitality and sociability operated to bring any community member who entered the door quickly to a table as somebody’s guest. Inevitably an hour in the teahouse enlarged a man’s circle of acquaintances and deepened his social knowledge of other parts of the community.

• 72 Personal communication of 8 February 1964. Also see Jean A. Pratt, “Immigration and Unilineal Desce (...)

89It means, too, that daughters-in-law tend to be taken from within the marketing community. Marriage brokers – who in Szechwan operated in certain teahouses of the market town – and mothers of marriageable sons are able with considerable assurance to scan the entire standard marketing community for potential daughters-in-law, seldom, however, do they know enough to find candidates from households outside the system. There is, in short, a distinct tendency for the standard marketing community to be endogamous for the peasantry. An interesting confirmation of this point comes from Jean Pratt Watts’ study of a Hakka village community in the New Territories of Hong Kong: the most active and successful marriage broker in the village was a widow of means who I indeed went with exceptional frequency to her market town, Tai Po, which has a daily schedule-where she kept tabs on marriageable girls in the larger community.72 In consequence, the arrangements whereby one lineage traditionally gives its young girls as brides to another tend to be concentrated within standard marketing communities, as are also the more nearly ad hoc alliances that may have no immediate precedent. The affinal bonds of the peasant thus constitute another network that spreads through the standard marketing community and gives structure to the whole.

• 73 Several examples from Chin-chiang hsien, Fukien, are cited by Father Amyot in his description of th (...)
• 74 Mizuno Kaoru, Hokushi no nôson [North China’s Villages] (Peking, 1941), p. 171.

90On the agnatic side of kinship, I suspect that the standard marketing community plays a role in lineage organization that may resolve a vexing analytical problem. New villages have traditionally been founded in China either by a single family or by a small group of patrilineally related families. The households in such a new settlement constitute in effect an offshoot of the lineage localized in their village of origin, often not far away. Through segmentation of this kind over a period of centuries, certain portions of the Chinese rural landscape have come to support a number of localized lineages of the same surname, all historically related by virtue of descent from a common ancestor, but each situated in a different village or market town.73 Why is it that in some cases neighboring localized lineages perpetuate or achieve organizational unity, whereas others, agnatically related through equally recent bonds, function as independent systems? My suggestion here is that, since peasant families have much social intercourse within their standard marketing community but little outside it, interlineage ties contained within a single marketing system are likely to be perpetuated whereas bonds between localized lineages sited in different standard marketing areas tend to erode with time. In the region of Szechwan where I did my research, Hakka families surnamed Lin were heavily concentrated in the three standard marketing areas centered on Kao-tien-tzu, Lai-chia-tien, and Ta-mien-p’u. The Lin households within each, however, seemed to be separately organized, with headquarters in teahouses of their respective market towns. Mizuno notes that in north China it is market towns rather than villages that normally support ancestral halls.74 It may well be, therefore, that we should look to the standard marketing community as the usual locus of the “composite lineage.”

• 75 Cf. Maurice Freedman, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (London, 1958), chs. 8-9.
• 76 Fang-chih themselves occasionally provide a glimpse of the controlling power that a dominan (...)

91I have another suggestive case to mention in this regard. In the standard marketing community of Kang-wei, Hai-ch’eng hsien, Fukien, an easy majority of the entire population belongs to a single composite lineage. The market itself was in 1948 controlled by the ta-fang (literally “great branch”), one of the component lineages localized in a village to the north of the market town. In the Kang-wei market the three grain measurers, the livestock agent and pig weigher, the chief of the palanquin bearers, and even the head of the beggars were all drawn from the ta-fang, and buyers from the ta-fang had special privileges at market. In this case, the ascendant social position of the ta-fang within the composite lineage is clearly expressed within the economic system of the marketing community. It would appear that just as the dominant branch in a localized lineage is, in appropriate circumstances, able to assert supreme power in the village community,75 so the dominant localized lineage within a composite lineage may arrogate preponderant control in the marketing community.76

• 77 C.K. Yang, pp. 18-20.

93Elsewhere in China, control of the market may be more widely dispersed among the several founding villages. A common arrangement in Shantung rotates responsibility for market management among the participating villages; during each hsün of the lunar month, a given village or several villages jointly undertake to provide and subsidize public measurers to render service as honest brokers free of charge. The examples cited by C.K. Yang, however, indicate that dispersed control of this kind is limited to minor markets and less important standard markets; in the case of intermediate markets (and apparently some of the larger standard markets), authority tends to be concentrated, both because communal control by the large number of villages involved is infeasible and because the commission fees at a large and prosperous market constitute too lucrative a prize to be ignored by groups with the power to claim it.77

• 78 Cf Hsiao Kung-chuan, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle, 1960), pp. 3 (...)

95The discreteness of the standard marketing community is given religious expression in yet another way. Service groups of the devout participate in religious festivals by organizing joint offerings to the deity being celebrated and by participating as a group in the procession. Over thirty such groups took part in Kao-tien-tzu’s annual fair in 1950, and with the exception of three from Chengtu, each group was limited in membership to a single standard marketing community, those from outside communities being identified by the name of the market town in question. It is likely that the hsiang-hui (“incense societies”) and shan-hui (“mountain societies”) that conducted pilgrimages to sacred shrines in traditional times were normally organized within the standard marketing community, if only because the bureaucracy discouraged organized religious activity on a larger scale.78

• 79 An account of 1836 describes the establishment of an organization on Ho-nan island, near Canton, wh (...)
• 80 Hsiao, pp. 288-289, 306-308.

96These examples indicate that a variety of voluntary associations and other formal organizations – the composite lineage, the secret- society lodge, the committee on arrangements for the annual fair, the religious service society – take the standard marketing community as the unit of organization.79 Occupational groups, too, may be organized within the standard marketing community. One teahouse in Kao-tien-tzu was the meeting place of an association of animal breeders, another the headquarters of associations of carpenters and housebuilders. Still other voluntary associations, especially those related to agricultural production (cropwatching or irrigation societies, for instance), although not coterminous with the marketing community, tended to be wholly contained within it.80

• 81 Documents specifying the weights and measures to be used in individual markets are cited by Kuramoc (...)
• 82 C.K. Yang, pp. 20-21. The situation in this regard was, as late as 1950, very similar in the Szechw (...)
• 83 Cited in Amano, p. 156.

99The most obvious case in point concerns the weights and measures associated with the marketing process itself. While they are standardized and in fact closely regulated within any one market,81 considerable variation occurs from one standard market to another. In eleven markets investigated in 1932, C.K. Yang found ten different standards for the tou, the dry measure used to portion out grain. The ta-ch’ih (“big rule”) used to measure homespun, and the ta-ch’eng (“big scale”) for weighing bulky products likewise varied within a wide range from one market to the next.82 In his study of crop marketing along the Peking-Hankow railroad, Ôhashi Ikuei found that purchasing agents working out of central market towns were forced to carry with them tables of equivalence for the weights and measures used in the various local markets of the system.83 Data of this kind point up the relative independence and isolation of the standard marketing community qua economic system – and thereby point to the very circumstances that underlie the cultural idiosyncrasy of each. In the last analysis, it is traditional marketing patterns of long standing that account for the fact – to cite a typical example – that the cross-stitch designs with which every Szechwan girl painstakingly adorns the hangings for lier bridal bed bear the characteristic stamp of her standard marketing community.

• 84 Willem A. Grootaers, “Temples and History of Wan-ch’üan (Chahar), the Geographical Method Applied t (...)

100An equally obvious case in point concerns religious folklore, and in this regard many illustrations can be gleaned from Grootaers’ geographical analysis of temples and folklore in northern China.84 One of the maps shows, for instance, that the cult of Hei Lung, the Black Dragon, is concentrated in a single circumscribed section of Wan-ch’üan hsien, Chahar. Reference to large-scale maps of this region strongly suggests that this particular area, in which six temples to the deity in question are extant, is in fact the standard marketing area centered on the town of Chiu-p’u. In the marketing community of Kao-tien-tzu, the lore of Tung-yüeh and his hellish bureaucracy inevitably looms large in the peasant’s conception of the other world, but in the religious culture of surrounding marketing communities, this deity and his court are of relative insignificance.

• 85 Li Mei-yun, p. 212.

104This observation leads to my second point: marketing systems at each level in the hierarchy have a distinctive significance for interclass relations. From this point of view, the standard marketing community can be seen as the locus of such intercourse as petty traders have with the peasantry on the one hand and with the local elite (primarily through the mechanism of market control) on the other. But its primary significance pertains to the relations between peasantry and “gentry.” Whereas many individual villages could boast of no families that were at once landed, leisured, and literate, every standard marketing community included in traditional times a number of so-called “gentry” families. And it was in the market town that these elitist families exerted “social control,” to use the usual imprecise term. Every gentleman who aspired to even informal leadership normally held court in a particular teahouse at his standard market, and disputes among peasants in different village communities were usually mediated by such leaders in the teahouses on market days.85 It was in the market town, too, that landlords or their agents dealt with tenants, and upper-class officials of the secret-society lodge made the policy decisions that affected peasant welfare throughout the community.

• 86 Erik Wolf refers to the Janus-faced qualities of the individuals who serve as “brokers” between com (...)
• 87 Hsiao Kung-chuan’s monograph is rich in detail concerning the interrelations between peasant villag (...)

105The concept of the local elite as an intermediary and a buffer between the peasantry and the bureaucratic elite is – though the terminology may seem peculiar – a familiar one. And so is the view of the petty trader as a middleman between the peasantry and the merchants in higher-level central places. Both functioned as “brokers”86 who at once shielded the peasant from an outside world that lie distrusted and selectively filtered and transmitted to him its products – a few necessities of exotic origin, imperial edicts as “adjusted” to local conditions, bits of the great tradition as distorted by storytellers or of elite ideology as adapted by hsiang-yüeh lecturers.87 My point here is simply that these Janus-faced “brokers” – whether cultural, political or economic – operated at the level of the standard market town, not the village. It was the standard marketing community that they linked to or – depending on one’s perspective – isolated from the institutions of the larger society.

• 88 As noted in the preceding section the intermediate market town served as the center not only of an (...)

106The social sphere of the intermediate market town88 is essentially a world the intermediaries of rural society have to themselves. Insofar as the intermediate marketing system is a social community, it is one that normally excludes both the peasantry and the bureaucratic elite. In the teahouses, winehouses, and restaurants of the intermediate market town, representatives of the local elite from the whole ring of surrounding standard marketing communities direct the affairs of the wider area served by the intermediate marketing system. The situation is comparable in the case of merchants, traders, and artisans whose business world is primarily confined within a given intermediate marketing system, for their intraclass affairs are also conducted in the intermediate market town. But perhaps the most interesting of the social relations peculiar to the intermediate marketing system are the interclass dealings between the gentlemanly elite and the merchants of the market town itself. For the crucial negotiations whereby, on the one hand, “gentry” capital is invested in the pawnbroking, moneylending, artisan manufacture, and commercial enterprise of the intermediate marketing system and, on the other, the capital of the artisan and tradesman is invested in agricultural land and translated into the coin of social respectability – these dealings, too, are carried on in the teahouses and townhouses of market towns at this level.

• 90 Ho Ping-ti, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (New York, 1962), ch. 2.

108Ho Ping-ti’s discussion of the relations between merchants and bureaucratic officials in the Ch’ing period90 suggests that the picture painted by Fried as of 1948 can hardly be dismissed as a modern deviation produced by the new forces that came into play during the republican period.