Ye Chunji (
.
Life and career
He was a native of
He came up with a model of county commerce with goods of greatest, great, and lesser importance—the latter being non-subsistence surplus goods that could be traded out of the county for commercial profit.
He issued an order to limit wedding expenses in the 1570s, stating "The frugal man with only one bar of silver currency can have something left over, whereas the extravagant man with a thousand can still not have enough".[3] However, the elites of Huian county and others did not care much for fiscally conservative warnings such as this, and flaunted their wealth in silver.[3]
Model of county commerce
Ye Chunji came up with a ranking model for consumptionary products on the local level that could be applied to his county and many others in the empire.mulberry,
cotton,
hemp, and
ramie, the essential raw materials for local textile production.
[4] The lowest level in Ye's pyramid of goods were the "lesser" (
ci) products, which were salt, cloth, vegetable oil, lumber, sugar, fruit, vegetables, fish, and livestock—all of which were traded out of the county by peddlers, itinerant retailers, or merchant wholesalers shipping large amounts of commercial goods.
[4]
Ye Chunji noted that most of these goods from his county made their way to the nearby
Timothy Brook writes that Ye's description of his county gives the impression that most counties in the Ming dynasty relied on self-sufficient agriculture and textile production while they were largely unaffected by and disengaged with regional commodity networks between large urban markets.
[8]Notes
- ^ Brook, 15, 199.
- ^ a b Brook, 15.
- ^ a b Brook, 208.
- ^ a b c d e Brook, 199.
- ^ Brook, xx.
- ^ Brook, xxi, 89.
- ^ Brook, 199–200.
- ^ a b Brook, 200.
References
- (Paperback).
- The College Board 2006 AP World History Free Response Questions.
