Dr. George Qiao (Amherst College)

During the Qing, central Shanxi was home to millions of traveling merchants who established the empire’s most powerful business network. These merchants went far afield, penetrated northern frontier regions such as Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang, and connected these markets with those in China’s southern provinces. Based on a wide range of primary sources, this talk examines the ways in which the outpouring of long-distance merchants and their commercial success had profoundly transformed the local societies of central Shanxi. I will show that the concentration of merchants and commercial wealth had eroded traditional sociocultural fabrics in central Shanxi that had characterized the late imperial Chinese society—such as the dominance of the gentry, the entrenchment of Confucian moral tenets, and the stability of family institutions. Instead, what we find in central Shanxi during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a merchant-dominant society where unprecedented wealth quickly accumulated in an underdeveloped area, commerce replaced official careers as the purpose of education, and families and lineage organizations struggled to cope with the absence of men and the corrosive effects of wealth. With the confluence of all these factors, central Shanxi became a place like no other in pre-modern China.