The Distant Sound of Book Boats: The Itinerant Book Trade in Jiangnan from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries

        I live near the Terrace of the Top Graduate.Throwing open the windows on all four sides of my little pavilion,    I see book boats coming from the Stream of Zha,        Carried by the rising tide of last night.

– Chen Zhan (1753–1817)¹

The morning arrival of book boats was a welcome sight to Chen Zhan, a distinguished scholar and book collector. As he notes in the comment accompanying his poem, there were no book stores in Xiashi, the town in central Haining county northeast of Hangzhou where he was born and lived for many years: these itinerant peddlers were his only commercial source for books. His remark is of interest to book historians on two counts.² First, it suggests that even in the economically prosperous and culturally sophisticated Jiangnan area (the lower Yangtze delta), bookstores were uncommon in eighteenth-century China: even a town in Haining, a county renowned for its cultural brilliance, lacked one. Second, we learn that a well-connected scholar and book collector such as Chen Zhan would consider travelling peddlers a regular, reliable means of book acquisition.³ Throwing open the windows of his pavilion, Chen Zhan offers us a rare glimpse of the itinerant booksellers who, complementing the bookstores clustered primarily in market towns and county/prefectural seats, played a significant role in the circulation of books in China at least from the sixteenth century onwards.⁴ During the three hundred years from the 1570s to the 1870s, the book trade underwent considerable growth and diversification. The expansion and stratification of the book market over this longue durée depended upon a smoothly functioning transportation network, especially in the Jiangnan area. Taking advantage of a water transport system greatly improved during the first half of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) and a rapidly emerging money economy, book peddlers contributed to the geographical and social expansion of print culture in Chinese society, linking urban centers of book production with consumers of printed matter living in small towns and villages across the Jiangnan area. With the growing complexity and stratification of the book market, a group of itinerant booksellers also emerged who specialized in rare books and solicited the patronage of literati. As Chen Zhan's poem suggests, the increasingly extensive networks between traveling peddlers and private book collectors facilitated the thriving, elite-oriented antiquarian book trade that gained momentum in the later sixteenth century and peaked in Chen Zhan's lifetime.

This article resituates itinerant booksellers and their book boats within the late imperial Chinese bookscape, foregrounding their significance as mediating agents between producers and consumers of books.⁵ Substantial research has been done on itinerant book-distribution systems in early modern England, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.⁶ But little scholarly attention has been paid to the significant role of book peddlers in late imperial China. This gap in the study of Chinese book culture is all the more unfortunate given the numerous references to book boats and book peddlers left by Chinese collectors and scholars in the form of colophons, miscellaneous notes, essays, correspondence, and poems – a treasure trove of evidence that both suggests the importance of the itinerant book trade in late imperial China and furnishes us with the primary sources needed to reconstruct the economic mechanisms, logistical arrangements, and cultural processes of book peddling.

Drawing upon sources ranging from literary works and miscellaneous notes to handwritten colophons and local gazetteers, I sketch a social and cultural profile of the itinerant booksellers in the Jiangnan area from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. A fascinating variety of travelling booksellers inhabited the world of books in this period, from the smalltime peddlers who journeyed from village to village selling shoddy commercial editions to the high-end merchants who dealt in rare editions and frequented the homes of elite scholars. Their social and cultural functions varied as much as their wares and customers. Enterprising travelling booksellers ventured into publishing; intellectually ambitious ones leveraged their book expertise into participation in scholarly debates. Some took...