Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074-1224

503 Pages·1991·17.078 MB·English

by  Paul J. Smith

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Taxing Heaven's Storehouse
HARVARD-YENCHING INSTITUTE MONOGRAPH SERIES
32
TAXING HEAVEN’S
STOREHOUSE
Horses Bureaucrats, and the Destruction
，
of the Sichuan Tea Industry,
1074-1224
PAUL J. SMITH
Published by the COUNCIL ON EAST ASIAN STUDIES, HARVARD
UNIVERSITY, and distributed by the HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS,
Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 1991
Copyright 1991 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Printed in the United States of America
The Harvard-Yenching Institute, founded in 1928 and headquartered at Harvard Univer­
sity, is a foundation dedicated to the advancement of higher education in the humanities
and social sciences in East and Southeast Asia. The Institute supports advanced research
at Harvard by feculty members of certain Asian universities, and doctoral studies at Har­
vard and other universities by junior faculty at the same universities. It also supports East
Asian studies at Harvard through contributions to the Harvard-Yenching Library and
publication of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and books on premodern East Asian
history and literature.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication ^)aca
Smith, Paul J., 1947-
Taxing heaven's storehouse : horses, bureaucrats, and the
destruction of the Sichuan tea industry, 1074—1224 / Paul J. Smith,
p. cm.~(Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series ; 32)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-40641-9
1. Tea trade~China~Szechwan Province~History. 2. Horse
industry~China~Szechwan Province~History. 3. Tea~Taxation~
China—History. 4. Cavalry horses—China—History. 5. China~
HistorySung dynasty, 960—1279. I- Title. II. Series.
HD9198.C5S64 1991
354.5 r3800826l372—dc20 91-7539
CIP
The author wishes to thank Pat McDowell for drawing the maps and John Gates for
indexing the text.
Endpaper illustration: Groom leading the horse Fine-Head Red (nine sut in age; 13 hands,
3 inches, in height), brought in through the Qinzhou market in 1087. From ‘ Portrait of
Five Horses” (Wuma tu) by Li Gonglin (1049—1106).
To my father, Barnet Norman Smith,
and the people he watched over and loved
Acknowledgments
In the ten long years it has taken to see this project to completion,
I have incurred many debts, but more importantly made many friends.
Many sponsors generously supported Taxing Heaven’s Storehouse in
its first phase as a dissertation project at the University of Pennsyl­
vania. The Social Science Research Council funded the basic re­
search for my dissertation at one of the world’s great Sinological
institutes, the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies of Kyoto
University. During my two-year stay in Kyoto I received kind help
and advice from Professors Umehara Kaoru and Shiba Yoshinobu，
as well as the unstinting friendship and assistance of Sugiyama Ma-
saaki. I remain deeply grateful to them and to the scholars and staff
of the Institute and Kyoto University. On returning to the United
States，I received continuing support from the University of Penn­
sylvania, which encouraged me to complete the project as soon as
possible by providing a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. That year
taxed more than Heaven’s Storehouse, as my manuscript grew in­
creasingly fat and my mentors increasingly nervous. Sue Naquin
peppered my margins with impatient queries about why I was tell­
ing her so much about so seemingly little, and there is no question
she was right; the dissertation did contain a welter of undigested
detail. But my chief task at that time was simply to finish, for a
post-doctoral fellowship awaited me at the Center for Chinese Stud­
ies of the University of Michigan, and so I had no choice but to
Vlll Acknowledgments
follow the advice of my advisor, Robert M. Hartwell: There s no
fixing the thing now, so just finish it. You’re only going to have to
rewrite it completely for publication anyway. And of course he was
right as well.
It turns out that dissertations are no less easy to unwrite than
they are to write. Over time, as other projects and my job at Hav-
erford came between me and the dissertation, I think I became a
better historian; thus when I finally got down to the task of cutting
a 750-page thesis in half, I was shocked and dismayed at what in
my youth I had wrought. But again many friends and institutions
came to my assistance. Haverford got the job rolling by transferring
the manuscript—perhaps one of the last ever written on a type­
writer~to disk. A1 Feuerwerker, Bob Hymes, Peter Bol, Valerie
Hansen, Hugh Clark, and Bill Rowe looked at all or parts of the
manuscript in various stages of revision, as did anonymous peer
reviewers at three stages in my career; and all offered comments
that were both helpful and encouraging. I especially value a com-
ment by John Chaffee, who, having read both the fat dissertation
and the thin book manuscript, expressed regret for the details that
had unavoidably been cut.
But three people in particular have helped bring this project to a
close. Vasiliki Limberis entered my life as the process of rewriting
was under way, and she not only agreed to honeymoon with me in
Chengdu, but also to read my revisions as we fought off Sichuan’s
winter chill. I took it as an expression of affirmation that an histo­
rian of early Christianity could read a manuscript on Chinese fiscal
sociology without showing too many signs of impatience.
Richard von Glahn has been my friend and colleague since our
first seminar together under Bob Hartwell, and it has been a special
pleasure to work on northern Sichuan during the Song at the same
time that he worked on the south. Richard has read and commented
on the entire manuscript, and helped me solve innumerable prob­
lems of scholarship, strategy, and morale. Not least, he has helped
me formulate responses to the third key player in this publishing
process, our mutual editor Katherine Keenum. Katherine has had
perhaps the most difficult job of all, for it is she who has had to