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

• Author: Kuhn, Dieter

Taxing Heaven's Storehouse is an outstanding contribution to Song studies and Chinese economic history at the same time. This study of the duda tiju chamasi (Tea and Horse Administration) presents probably the most profound study of any Song institution yet available in any Western language. Even the most recent publication on the history of the Sichuanese tea industry by Jia Daquan and Chen Yishi, Sichuan chaye shi (Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 1988) cannot be compared as far as the use of source material and economic analysis are concerned. Smith's book introduces the reader not only to the political and economic history of Sichuan prior to Song times but provides the social background and the historical evidence to understand how the tea and horse trade could have been established and how it has worked in this area. This study by Paul J. Smith is meticulously researched, the reasoning well pondered, the evidence amply annotated; the text is fluently composed, the story behind the tea and horse trade very well told, and it is exciting to read. It is an admirable work of scholarship that has grown over many years to full maturity, but has at the same time lost nothing of its original drive. "All historians of China, whether of Song or of other eras, must be in the author's debt" (William T. Rowe, Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies 22 |1990-92~: 22); I could not agree more.

Apart from the "Introduction", four "Appendices" which provide materials on the Intendants, Revenues and Subventions, and a massive body of "Notes", "Bibliography", "Glossary" and "Index," the volume consists of seven chapters arranged in two parts. Part one deals with the historical and geopolitical background for the horse supply during the Northern Song, the economic basis and structure of the tea industry on the eve of the tea and horse trade, and the social development in Sichuan, in particular relating to social mobility, as well as Sichuan's political integration. Part two opens with Wang Anshi's theory of bureaucratic entrepreneurship, and continues with chapters on the entrepreneurial leap and entrepreneurial expansion, leading to a discussion and analysis of "The Impact of Bureaucratic Power on the Sichuan Tea Economy", and its limits.

To understand the tea and horse trade connection in Sichuan and to appreciate its importance for the political and economic history of China the story has to be sketched in a few sentences. Smith investigates why there was an urgent need for horses in China, and why and when Sichuan appeared on the economic map of the horse trade. "From the rise of the mounted archers around the fourth century B.C. until the incursion of European imperialism in the eighteenth century A.D., the chief external threat to sedentary China issued from the nomad warriors of Inner Asia". In north China cavalry outweighed the infantry. Hence horses with the physical qualities of chargers were of the utmost importance for the defense of China's northern border. In Song times the quality of cavalry was to become a problem of vital importance for the dynasty because the Song were confronted with the strong cavalry-based military forces of the "barbarian" neighbors in the north and northwest (the Xi Xia, Liao, and Jin dynasties). They presented a constant danger to the Song. More than once before and after 1126/27, when the Northern Song collapsed, the destiny of the dynasty was hanging by a thread. At the same time the number of horses on the Song pastures had dramatically diminished in Northern Song times. The alarming deficiency in the supply of horses, on the one hand, was due to geographical reasons; on the other hand, horse breeding and horse pastures could not be made attractive to a traditionally agricultural society. Thus a reliable frontier marketing system had to be established in order to procure horses for the Chinese cavalry. The strategies developed before the reshaping of the horse procurement by Xue Xiang in 1060 were devised amateurishly. They were neither profitable nor efficient or reliable. Wang Anshi invited Xue Xiang to experiment with regional sources of financing the horse procurement, which meant capitalizing the horse trade from regional industries in Shaanxi and Sichuan, thus taking a heavy financial burden off the central government. Apart from salt, Shaanxi had not very much to offer to attract Tibetan horse traders. When Xue Xiang introduced Sichuanese commodities, especially Sichuanese silk, into the horse trade, there was an immediate response by the Tibetan horse sellers. It was Wang Shao who after 1070 succeeded in establishing a reliable link between Qinghai horses and Sichuanese tea for the remaining 50 years or so of the Northern Song dynasty. At first, certainly silk constituted the major trade item but, because tea...