Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (review)

The title of this work does not begin to suggest the impressive character of Cynthia Brokaw's study. She has chosen an unusual approach to evaluating the book trade and reveals how books penetrated even the lower classes of Qing society. Rather than look at the book trade as a whole or at leading publishers, she investigated the production and distribution of cheap editions printed inexpensively in a remote section of western Fujian province. She explains how two Hakka lineages based in the Fujian province's isolated Sibao basin prospered by producing woodblock books throughout the eighteenth century. Far from established trading routes and potential markets, the Hakka publishers operated by dispatching lineage males as traveling sales teams or bookstore operators in Fujian, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Jiangxi, and eventually into Guangxi and Yunnan.

Brokow details how the manufacture of books took place in family-based firms usually connected to either the Wu or Zuo lineages, but sometimes linking both. Families in the book trade usually continued to farm, balancing the work according to the seasonal demands of each. Some lineage branches of the Wu and Zuo remained exclusively farmers or took up other sideline occupations. Capital investment in publishing remained relatively low, and in prosperous times successful publishers plowed their profits back into larger residences and lineage properties.

In the eighteenth century, Sibao publishers enjoyed a steadily expanding market for their cheap editions because of the spread of primary education, as well as the outward migration of Hakka into previously sparsely settled areas of southwestern and south China. As traveling salesmen, Sibao natives stayed away from major administrative centers and concentrated their efforts in more distant and less prosperous communities. They regularly employed Hakka connections, but sold their books to the general public. The business remained fairly steady until around 1820 but slowly declined thereafter. Then in the early twentieth century, Sibao's publishers' production and trade rapidly diminished as modern lithographic printing drove woodblock books steadily out of the market.

Her study is both long and detailed. In the first three hundred pages, she describes the Sibao area and explains how the publishing business operated, beginning with carving the woodblocks, through acquiring cheap local bamboo paper, and on to printing and binding. Then she discusses the methods of transporting, storing, and selling these editions along various trade routes that are described in the text and the appendices. In the next 270 pages, she discusses the kinds of books produced. Here Brokaw again displays remarkable command of the varieties of educational texts, handbooks, and manuals as well as the fiction, poetry, and elite arts Sibao produced in the Qing period. She emphasizes the cheap and popular character of Sibao's production and compares Sibao output with that of rival publishing centers in southern China. In addition to the content of books, Brokaw carefully assesses the appeal of each variety of book and how the books were used.

Brokaw's study contains fourteen chapters, seven appendices, thirteen tables, eight maps, ninety illustrations, and an extensive bibliography. The publisher, demurred at printing all Brokaw's carefully constructed tables and so placed four appendices comprising 108 pages on the web at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/publications/pubspage2.htm.

In addition to Brokaw's command of her materials, there are three other impressive facets of this work. First is the methodology Brokow employs; second, her conclusions both clash and confirm with notions about how pre-modern Chinese commerce worked; and third, she believes that the catalogue of Sibao published works reveals how printed works penetrated almost all levels of Qing society and promoted the orthodox neo-Confucian ideology while allowing space for variant ideas. Her work will attract considerable attention on all three counts.

Because there are no established archives relating to Sibao's trade, Brokaw employed a combination of anthropological and...