Commercial Publishing in Late Imperial China: The Zou and Ma Family Businesses of Sibao, Fujian

The history of the book and the impact of print culture are relatively new subjects in scholarship on late imperial China. While some work has already been done on the literary aspects of these subjects—on questions of authorship and genre, on literacy and reading audiences, on the transmission of values and beliefs through print, and so forth—less attention has been paid to the economic and social organization of the publishing industry.

The present study focuses on just this subject: the economic and social organization of the family publishing firms of the Zou and Ma descent groups that flourished in Sibao, western Fujian, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ¹ Sibao, to be sure, never achieved fame or even much in the way of recognition as a publishing center; nor are the Zou and Ma names at all well-known among Chinese bibliophiles. There are very few references to the Zou and Ma publishing industries in either contemporary sources—gazetteers, local biji, and literary collections—or modern secondary scholarship on the history of publishing in China. ² Reasons for this obscurity are easy enough to find: The isolation of Sibao, located in a mountainous, not-easily-accessible area of western Fujian, far distant from the capital, meant that it was unlikely to come to literati or official notice. Since the Zou and Ma publishers did not specialize in fine, expensive editions, neither Qing collectors nor modern bibliophiles have been drawn to the study of Sibao imprints. Moreover, by far the greatest number of surviving imprints are relatively recent products, dating from the high or late Qing, thus not qualifying as rare editions deserving the attention of modern book scholars.

Nonetheless, there is some evidence that Sibao was, despite its apparent obscurity, a publishing center of some importance in south China through most of the Qing dynasty. Signs of past prosperity can be found in Sibao itself in the great mansions built by the wealthier publishers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it is still possible to visit the small, stall-like rooms within these houses that were used as printing workshops (and now as pigsties or storerooms) and to see outside them the large stone tubs used in the past to hold the printing ink. Moreover, the Zou and Ma genealogies and other family documents allude relatively frequently to the families’ publishing histories. More reliably, surviving woodblocks and Sibao imprints reveal that the Zou and Ma produced a long list of titles in a wide range of different subject categories. The Classics, particularly editions of the Four Books, and children’s educational texts like the Three Character Classic (Sanzi jing), the Hundred Family Names (Baijia xing), and the Treasury of Knowledge for Children (Youxue gushi qionglin) were the staples of their collection, presumably because, given the importance of the examination system, they could count on a steady demand for such texts. But the Zou and Ma produced histories, poetry and essay collections, vernacular fiction, household encyclopedias, guides to everyday etiquette and family ritual, collections of rhymed couplets, medical and prescription handbooks, morality books, almanacs, and manuals of geomancy as well—in short, the whole range of texts associated with the varied demands of the increasingly literate population of Qing China. ³ While these facts do not necessarily validate Zheng Zhenduo’s claim that Sibao was, with Beijing, Nanjing, and Xuwan (Jiangxi), “one of the four great bases of woodblock printing” in the Qing, ⁴ they do suggest that the Zou and Ma publishers are worthy of study as commercial publishers of the late imperial era.

Research on the commercial publishing houses of Sibao has just begun; it will be years before a comprehensive picture of the scope of the Zou and Ma businesses and the cultural significance of their publications can be drawn. This introductory essay describes and analyzes the organization and operation of the Zou and Ma businesses; in particular, I am interested in the ways in which the family nature of the businesses shaped and possibly encouraged their success as publishing...