As director of the former research group, “Monies, Markets and Finance in China and East Asia, 1600–1900: Local, Regional, National and International Dimensions,” which during its years of existence from 2005 to 2012 was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), it is for me both a great pleasure and satisfaction to write some introductory words to Dr. Chen Hailian’s book for Brill’s MMF series. This is due to the fact that with this monograph Dr. Chen, member of the research group from 2008 to 2012, makes an important and impressive contribution not only to the mining and monetary history of China during the period from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, but also to Chinese late imperial political, institutional, administrative, legal, social, economic and environmental history as well as to the history of science and technology in general.
The work presented by Dr. Chen has a clear topical, spatial and temporal focus, this being zinc, Guizhou province, and the 1680s to the 1830s respectively. In an attempt to summarize, the most important topics dealt with in this book can be enumerated as follows:
the great and even revolutionary influence zinc, especially in its alloy as brass, has exerted not only on the economy and society of China, but also of Europe;
the substantial demand for, and supply of, zinc on domestic and foreign markets and zinc as an item of global export trade;
in spite of the scant attention paid to this metal in Chinese and other primary sources, in comparison to copper which was considered the value- giving part in Qing Chinese cash coins (which were, strictly speaking, neither copper coins nor bronze coins), the tremendous importance of zinc for the massive production of Chinese cash or small money fuelling the monetarisation of the Chinese market economy, especially in facilitating small transactions;
the physical and natural environment of zinc deposits in China;
the geographical and chronological distribution of zinc mines and mining regions in Guizhou and other provinces;
the development of the tremendous output of metallic zinc in Guizhou and other parts of the Middle Kingdom;
forms of cooperation and co-optation between state institutions and official actors on the one hand and private merchants and investors on the other;
structure and hierarchies in Chinese mining communities, especially on their middle and lower levels;
the Han mining community members’ collaborative and conflictive relationship with ethnically different peoples in the mining regions;
self-perceptions and external perceptions of the different actors, as far as testimonies are available;
migrations of mining and smelting specialists, especially those from Hunan, and with them, transfer of their relevant knowledge and practices;
geological and mineralogical conditions, and thus challenges for miners and smelters for mastering the technical, physical and chemical problems related to the production of metallic zinc, and the nature of useful and reliable knowledge in mastering zinc technology;
technical particularities of traditional Chinese mining and smelting processes, their advantages as well as their limitations;
impacts of the mining and smelting industry on the environment;
characteristics of official and customary legal regulations of the mining and smelting business;
importance and scope of private and state investments into mines and smelters;
exploitation and importance of energy resources, especially of coal, thus relating to an important topic in the Great Divergence debate;
organisation of zinc transports to the mints by state actors and abuses connected with these activities;
importance of the Qing state as an administrative and economic actor in Guizhou zinc production, degree and limitations of its organisational capacity as well as the functional and dysfunctional elements of its actions;
regional, empire-wide, and global dimensions and impacts of the Guizhou zinc mining industry.
With her study on the history of the late imperial Chinese zinc industry, Dr. Chen Hailian has broken completely new ground. As far as I can see, no work exists neither in Chinese, Japanese nor in any western language that can compare with the depth and breadth of her research presented in this book. While concentrating on a seemingly rather base metal and on the backwater province of Guizhou, Chen Hailian’s work makes clear that the extraction and smelting of zinc had effects in polity, society and economy going far beyond the mining localities, the macroregion of YunGui, and the Middle Kingdom itself. This, first of all, is highlighted by the author by means of taking the total development of mining in late imperial China into account, especially the extraction of the mint metals copper, zinc, lead and tin, therefore in many instances enabling her to carry out meaningful comparisons. Second, the book includes a conspicuous global dimension, which is based on the historical fact that Europe, in comparison to India and China, mastered the production of metallic zinc relatively late, that China or, more precisely, Guizhou was then by far the most important producer of zinc worldwide, and that zinc exports from China to Europe were an important element in global trade in the period of early globalisation.
Apart from the thematic depth and breadth, Dr. Chen’s work also convinces by its solid theoretical and methodical foundations. Apart from the commodity- chain analysis, which follows a good from its production to its consumption on the basis of an actor-based approach and which runs through the book like a red vein, the author also uses a number of other methods, like historical text-criticism, her own field research, quantitative and qualitative content analyses as well as historical GIS analysis. It has to be especially highlighted that in the beginning of each of the eleven main chapters, the author shows a solid knowledge of the state of the field, is able to formulate on this basis her own questions, and then to bring to light her own, partly new and innovative standpoints and results. This shows that the author has acquired a broad knowledge of the secondary literature related to political, social, economic, technological etc. topics relevant for her own research and that she is able to make use of the results attained by other historians fruitfully, but also critically, for her own subjects. Moreover, the work is enriched by a substantial number of maps, tables and diagrams which are of great help for the reader for understanding the complexities and ramifications of the individual topics.
Another feature, in my view even more important than other aspects mentioned above, is the utilisation and interpretation of an impressive array of primary sources. In the first place, her critical mining of the rich archival deposits of the Qing period has to be mentioned. This exploitation of over 5000 archival documents is one of the reasons for the high tenor of this study, thus creating a completely new and empirically solid basis for both the comprehension and explanation of the development of the Guizhou zinc mining and smelting industry, especially in terms of production, transportation and consumption of this metal and the role of the state involved in the administration, supervision and monopolization of this economic sector. Another highlight is the analysis of judicial cases related to miners, smelters, smugglers and counterfeiters which provide us with deep and precious insights into social, economic, administrative and legal structures, and this in a sector of the then Chinese society, which due to its low social esteem, was only rarely the topic of elite writing. Apart from different types of archival materials however, Dr. Chen has also unearthed a large number of other historical testimonies, especially records from local gazetteers (difangzhi 地方志), historiographical accounts (especially the Qingchao wenxian tongkao 清朝文獻通考 or “Encyclopaedia of the Historical Records of the Qing Dynasty”), notes and records written by contemporary Chinese scholars and officials, travel accounts of Chinese and Westerners, modern geological reports, oral history as it is recorded in the wenshi ziliao 文史資料 (Culture and History Materials) as well as insights extracted from her own field research experience. All these treasures were used by the author in a cautious and critical way, i.e. always in the awareness that their authors might have been prone to influence or even falsify more or less intentionally the presentation of the facts.
In short, there can be no doubt that this book with both its micro- and macro-historical approaches is not only a path-breaking contribution to the history of mining and smelting in Guizhou province and for our understanding of Qing monetary history (of which zinc production formed an inalienable part), but also provides an important foundation for further research into the manifold aspects of the history of late imperial China, not only in a more China-centred approach, but also when undertaken in comparative and global dimensions. Especially with regard to the latter perspective, and also to the commodity-chain analysis, it is not incidental that George Bryan Souza wrote another foreword to this book, as he acted as an important adviser especially in these respects.
Eventually, this foreword also provides me with an opportunity to thank both the German Research Foundation and also the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange which not only have supported the work of Chen Hailian, but also of other members and associated scholars of the DFG Research Group. Apart from the monographs of Werner Burger, Ulrich Theobald, my own excursion into Marco Polo research and volumes edited by Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Nanny Kim, Thomas Hirzel, Keiko Nagase-Reimer, Ulrich Theobald, Jane Kate Leonard, and Cao Jin, we still expect the monographic contributions by Nanny Kim, Alexander Jost, Cao Jin, and Thomas Hirzel which are all on their way, and which I expect will provide spectacular results similar to those presented in this volume. To this volume, I wish all the best in reception or, in German mining language, “Glück auf!”
Hans Ulrich Vogel
Macau, September 5, 2018
In Zinc for Coin and Brass: Bureaucrats, Merchants, Artisans, and Mining Laborers in Qing China, ca. 1680s–1830s, Hailian Chen has produced an extraordinary and important piece of original research that is a major contribution and advance in the history of Late Imperial China.
She has researched and investigated an understudied topic in the history of Qing China: the social and the political economic life of zinc, an inanimate object and seemingly insignificant base metal. Based upon difficult to find and to handle historical evidence, she has developed a convincing analysis of human and institutional agencies that were responsible for the elevated level of early modern Chinese mining activity. Her arguments concerning how those agents harnessed knowledge and technology to transform and refine zinc-bearing ores to metal is well conceived and developed. China’s use of zinc, as one of two basic metallic components (the other being copper), permitted the state to produce and elaborate brass and coin that positively impacted Qing administration, Chinese society and, via zinc’s commercialization, an emerging Global Economy.
Trained as a chemical engineer, Chen has constructed and produced a work that demonstrates a laudable capacity to adapt her knowledge and technical training and language into prose and arguments that any non-technically oriented reader in the humanities will find intelligible and convincing. She, as a first-rate historian, marshaled a prodigious amount of empirical evidence that was difficult to find, handle, and interpret. It is palpable that she got to know her sources intimately, their authors, and the reasons for their having been written, why and by whom, how reliable and how they could be used and interpreted. Her intimacy with these sources has permitted her to ask and answer a series of questions that go well beyond the economic or political economic boundaries and issues common to mining and establish new ground-breaking insights into the environmental and social impacts of those activities. The evidence that she found and worked with permitted her to innovatively focus on the daily lives of people, policies of the state and of individual administrators and the environmental havoc that mining could produce in China.
By examining that evidence via the prism of zinc’s commodity chain and based upon a thorough command of the secondary literature and the existing debates in the field, she identified and defined an ambitiously successful approach to her topic. It provided a platform, which permitted her to convincingly examine evidence and develop arguments that dealt with a technologically and socially complex topic. This book is a successful example of multi-disciplinary research and exposition. Her work on zinc in China and in Guizhou has broken fundamentally important new ground in our understanding of objects, metals, mining, technology, commerce, and the environment in Late Imperial China.
George Bryan Souza