2. In the Shops
Handicrafts—Silk—Factories—Guilds—Men of burden—Roads and canals—Merchants—Credit and coinage—Currency experiments—Printing-press inflation
Meanwhile industry flourished as nowhere else on earth before our eighteenth century. As far back as we can delve into Chinese history we find busy handicrafts in the home and thriving trade in the towns. The basic industries were the weaving of textiles and the breeding of worms for the secretion of silk; both were carried on by women in or near their cottages. Silk-weaving was a very ancient art, whose beginnings in China went back to the second millennium before Christ.*45 The Chinese fed the worms on fresh-cut mulberry leaves, with startling results: on this diet a pound of (700,000) worms increased in weight to 9,500 pounds in forty-two days.47 The adult worms were then placed in little tents of straw, around which they wove their cocoons by emitting silk. The cocoons were dropped in hot water, the silk came away from its shell, was treated and woven, and was skilfully turned into a great variety of rich clothing, tapestries, embroideries and brocades for the upper classes of the world.* The raisers and weavers of silk wore cotton.
Even in the centuries before Christ this domestic industry had been supplemented with shops in the towns. As far back as 300 B.C. there had been an urban proletariat, organized with its masters into industrial guilds.49 The growth of this shop industry filled the towns with a busy population, making the China of Kublai Khan quite the equal, industrially, of eighteenth-century Europe. “There are a thousand workshops for each craft,” wrote Marco Polo, “and each furnishes employment for ten, fifteen, or twenty workmen, and in a few instances as many as forty. . . . The opulent masters in these shops do not labor with their own hands, but on the contrary assume airs of gentility and affect parade.”50 These guilds, like codified industries of our time, limited competition, and regulated wages, prices and hours; many of them restricted output in order to maintain the prices of their products; and perhaps their genial content with traditional ways must share some of the responsibility for retarding the growth of science in China, and obstructing the Industrial Revolution until all barriers and institutions are today being broken down by its flood.
The guilds undertook many of the functions which the once proud citizens of the West have surrendered to the state: they passed their own laws, and administered them fairly; they made strikes infrequent by arbitrating the disputes of employers and employees through mediation boards representing each side equally; they served in general as a self-governing and self-disciplining organization for industry, and provided an admirable escape from the modern dilemma between laissez-faire and the servile state. These guilds were formed not only by merchants, manufacturers and their workmen, but by such less exalted trades as barbers, coolies and cooks; even the beggars were united in a brotherhood that subjected its members to strict laws.51 A small minority of town laborers were slaves, engaged for the most part in domestic service, and usually bonded to their masters for a period of years, or for life. In times of famine girls and orphans were exposed for sale at the price of a few “cash,” and a father might at any time sell his daughters as bondservants. Such slavery, however, never reached the proportions that it attained in Greece and Rome; the majority of the workers were free agents or members of guilds, and the majority of the peasants owned their land, and governed themselves in village communities largely independent of national control.52
The products of labor were carried on the backs of men; even human transport moved, for the most part, in sedan chairs raised upon the bruised but calloused shoulders of uncomplaining coolies.* Heavy buckets or enormous bundles were balanced on the ends of poles, and slung over the shoulder. Sometimes dray-carts were drawn by donkeys, but more often they were pulled by men. Muscle was so cheap that there was no encouragement to the development of animal or mechanical transport; and the primitiveness of transportation offered no stimulus to the improvement of roads. When European capital built the first Chinese railway (1876)—a ten-mile line between Shanghai and Woosung—the people protested that it would disturb and offend the spirit of the earth; and the opposition grew so vigorous that the government bought the railroad and heaved its rolling stock into the sea.53 In the days of Shih Huang-ti and Kublai Khan imperial highways existed, paved with stone; but only their outlines now remain. The city streets were mere alleys eight feet wide, designed with a view to keeping out the sun. Bridges were numerous, and sometimes very beautiful, like the marble bridge at the Summer Palace. Commerce and travel used avenues of water almost as frequently as the land; 25,000 miles of canals served as a leisurely substitute for railways; and the Grand Canal between Hangchow and Tientsin, 650 miles long, begun about 300 A.D. and completed by Kublai Khan was surpassed only by the Great Wall in the modest list of China’s engineering achievements. “Junks” and sampans plied the rivers busily, and provided not only cheap transportation for goods, but homes for millions of the poor.
The Chinese are natural merchants, and work many hours at the business of bargaining. Chinese philosophy and officialdom agreed in despising traders, and the Han emperors taxed them heavily, and forbade them to use carriages or silk. The educated classes displayed long nails as Western women wore French heels—to indicate their exemption from physical toil.54 It was the custom to rank scholars, teachers and officials as the highest class, farmers as the next, artisans as the third, merchants as the lowest; for, said China, these last merely made profits by exchanging the fruits of other men’s toil. Nevertheless they prospered, carried the products of Chinese fields and workshops to all corners of Asia, and became in the end the chief financial support of the government. Internal commerce was hindered by the likin tax, and foreign trade was made hazardous by robbers on land and pirates on the sea; but the merchants of China found a way, by sailing around the Malay Peninsula or plodding the caravan routes through Turkestan, to get their goods to India, Persia, Mesopotamia, at last even to Rome.55 Silk and tea, porcelain and paper, peaches and apricots, gunpowder and playing cards, were the staple exports; in return for which the world sent to China alfalfa and glass, carrots and peanuts, tobacco and opium.
Trade was facilitated by an ancient system of credit and coinage. Merchants lent to one another at high rates of interest, averaging some thirty-six per cent—though this was no higher than in Greece and Rome.56 Money-lenders took great risks, charged commensurate fees, and were popular only at borrowing time; “wholesale robbers,” said an old Chinese proverb, “start a bank.”57 The oldest known currency of the country took the form of shells, knives and silk; the first metal currency went back at least to the fifth century B.C.58 Under the Ch’in Dynasty gold was made the standard of value by the government; but an alloy of copper and tin served for the smaller coins, and gradually drove out the gold.* When Wu Ti’s experiment with a currency of silver alloyed with tin was ruined by counterfeiters, the coins were replaced with leather strips a foot long, which became the foster-parents of paper money. About the year 807, the supply of copper having, like modern gold, become inadequate as compared with the rising abundance of goods, the Emperor Hsien Tsung ordered that all copper currency should be deposited with the government, and issued in exchange for it certificates of indebtedness which received the name of “flying money” from the Chinese, who appear to have taken their fiscal troubles as good-naturedly as the Americans of 1933. The practice was discontinued after the passing of the emergency; but the invention of block-printing tempted the government to apply the new art to the making of money, and about 935 A.D. the semi-independent province of Szechuan, and in 970 the national government at Ch’ang-an, began the issuance of paper money. During the Sung Dynasty a fever of printing-press inflation ruined many fortunes.59 “The Emperor’s Mint,” wrote Polo of Kublai’s treasury, “is in the city of Cambaluc (Peking); and the way it is wrought is such that you might say that he hath the Secret of Alchemy in perfection, and you would be right. For he makes his money after this fashion”—and he proceeded to arouse the incredulous scorn of his countrymen by describing the process by which the bark of the mulberry tree was pressed into bits of paper accepted by the people as the equivalent of gold.60 Such were the sources of that flood of paper money which, ever since, has alternately accelerated and threatened the economic life of the world.