Introduction: Market Cultures of Production and Consumption

In their own distinctive ways, these two studies seek to explore what Fan Lin identifies as the "paradoxical expressions of the materiality and value of the authentic" in the Song era. These conceptions were themselves products of deepening concerns over how to discriminate between the genuine and the false in a social environment that was increasingly saturated with the values of the marketplace. Ultimately, the authors of the primary source texts examined in these two essays were addressing questions of value, and their answers reveal a range of viewpoints on the question of whether value inheres in the material substance of a thing or instead is ascribed to it by its users. Implicit in their responses, too, are latent judgments about whether the value of things is absolute and enduring, or instead subject to the fickle and seemingly arbitrary determinations of the marketplace.

Fan Lin attributes the growing anxiety over fake goods not just to the com-modification engendered by the market economy, but also to the transformation of urban space and new aesthetics of consumption among the Song elite and the urban populace generally. Anecdotes about fraud and fake goods marked the urban marketplace as a world ungoverned by moral authorities. Neither the state's agents nor merchant groups exercised effective regulation of market transactions. Hang associations lacked institutional standing to police their trades in the Song, although the system of official brokers offered some protection to wholesale merchants. Trademarks served above all as emblems of authentication, and the long lists of the famous shops and wares of Hangzhou recorded in Ducheng jisheng 都城紀勝 indicate how valuable reputation was to business enterprises. But branding itself became an invitation to forgery, and surely the most renowned brands were the most likely to suffer from counterfeiting.

Reactions to this profusion of fake goods varied: bogus medicines with potentially fatal outcomes provoked the most strident recrimination, and moral indignation often was vented through dire warnings of karmic retribution. But Yuan Cai 袁采 (1140–1195), while himself invoking the belief that karmic justice ultimately will prevail, also counseled his fellow gentlemen to exercise restraint, remember that the unscrupulous xiaoren 小人 who populate the commercial world are beyond any moral entreaty, and avoid rash reactions such as resort to violence or lawsuits that might have untoward consequences. The pervasive mistrust of the marketplace that courses throughout Yuan's treatise on household management undoubtedly was widely shared. Fears of fraud and deception were stoked by depictions of urban markets thronged with villainous idlers and miscreants (a connection made explicit in Mengliang lu 夢粱錄), but they also bespoke an anxiety about the impersonality and anonymity of market exchange. Hence it is unsurprising that in Hong Mai's 洪邁 (1123–1202) Yijian zhi 夷堅志, even Hangzhou's honest shopkeepers should turn out to be ghosts obliged to toil for a "living." These ghosts—who were said to occupy all rungs of the social ladder in the metropolis—were portrayed as going about their business in broad daylight, in contrast to the shadowy "ghost markets" (guishi 鬼市) of Tang Chang'an, associated especially with the cacophonous night markets of fall and winter where forest goblins come to hawk firewood.¹

Yet we can also detect a different kind of moral message in some of the anecdotes cited by Lin, in which opprobrium is directed not toward the larcenous perpetrators of frauds, but rather the gullible buyers, especially those who seek to acquire exotic goods to flaunt their wealth, taste, or status, as in Hong Mai's story of the cat hoax. Such tales mocked the social-climbing pretensions of the vulgar rich. The merchant author of the Compendium of Treasures and Rarities (Baibao zongzhen ji 百寶總珍集) condoned taking advantage of this hunger for acquisition, especially among the well-heeled but ill-informed customers who would readily open their purses without scrutinizing their purchases too closely.

The obsessive collector (haoshi zhe 好事者) epitomized the morally hazardous terrain where market values collided with aesthetic appreciation. The application of this appellation to both the witless dilettante and the genuine connoisseur illustrates the ambiguity of the desire for acquisition. To a discerning man of taste such as Mi...