Taxing heaven's storehouse : horses, bureaucrats, and the destruction of the Sichuan tea industry, 1074-1224
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Taxing heaven's storehouse : horses, bureaucrats, and the destruction of the Sichuan tea industry, 1074-1224
（Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series, 32）
Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1991
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Note
Based on author's doctoral dissertation
Includes bibliography (p. [445]-467) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Tea-growing was a prosperous industry in Sichuan when Wang Anshi's New Policies created a Tea and Horse Agency to buy up Sichuanese tea and trade it to Tibetan tribesmen for cavalry horses. At first the highly autonomous Agency not only acquired the needed horses but made a profit. After the Jurchen conquest of North China, however, market realities changed and the Agency's once-successful policies ruined tea farmers, failed to meet quotas for horses, and ran a deficit. The Agency made entrepreneurs out of bureaucrats but ultimately became ruinously tyrannical as the system of state rewards and punishments drove its personnel to actions that crippled key sectors of the economy. In this study of fiscal sociology, Smith explains how the new Tea and Horse Agency transformed the Sichuan local elite into imperial civil servants eager to tax their own region, and explains other results of its exercise of aggressive bureaucratic control during the Song.
Table of Contents
- Part 1: Linking tea and horses - geopolitics and horse supply during the Northern Song - horses and defense, geography and horse supply, the frontier marketing system, reshaping horse procurement
- market segregation and the structure of the Sichuanese tea industry on the eve of the tea and horse trade - Sichuan and the dissemination of tea culture, the structure of the Sichuanese tea industry on the eve of the tea monopoly
- bureacracy, social mobilization, and the political integration of Sichuan - Sichuan's magnate society, magnate society under former and later Shu, rebellion and political mobilization during the Song. Part 2: Introduction to part two - Wang Anshi's theory of bureaucratic entrepreneurship - the entrepreneurial leap - attributes of the intendants, the tea market enterprise
- autonomy, risk reduction, and entrepreneurial expansion - autonomy and the neutralization of rivals, risk reduction through personnel control, agency influence over County Magistrates, boundary spanning and agency control of subsidiary markets, motivating personnel
- the impact of bureaucratic power on the Sichuan tea economy - reversing the entrepreneurial leap, trimming the Agency's sails - from entrepreneur to manager, the THA and the Sichuan tea industry
- the limits of bureaucratic power in the tea and horse trade - exchanging tea for horses, losing control of the trade, flying dragons in rocks and mud. Appendices: Northern Song tea and horse agency chiefs, co-intendants, and assistant intendants by years
- Southern Song tea and horse agency intendants
- sources on careers of the Northern and Southern Song tea and horse agency intendants
- tea and horse agency revenues and subventions paid to other agencies, 1074-1115.
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