4 - Huizhou Merchants and Their Financial Institutions

Summary

Chapter 4 develops the analysis of Chapter 3 by exploring how some wealthy Huizhou merchants carved out a dangerous approach to dealing with the government’s salt monopoly. Ingeniously adapting a strategy similar to that tried with their ancestral halls, they sought to place themselves inside an authorized institution of the state, the salt monopoly, and then turned the humble salt certificate into a financial instrument to their great advantage. By tricking the court’s incompetent representatives, Huizhou salt merchants were able not just to create great fortunes at government expense, but also from 1617 turn the government’s massive debt to them into a set of highly lucrative hereditary salt monopoly appointments for them and their sons. This chapter also deals with the private, secular variants of pawnshops that Huizhou merchants increasingly set up in the much of east China and the Yangzi Valley from the sixteenth century onward. It describes a reduction of the reported interest rate, both for individuals and for merchants, over the course of the dynasty, from 50 percent down to 20 percent, as more and more ordinary people relied on short-term infusions of capital for their living needs.