The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900–1950 (review)

"A teahouse is a little Chengdu and Chengdu is a big teahouse" (p. 1). So begins Di Wang's pioneering and well-researched study of the teahouse, a microcosm of urban society in the Sichuanese capital of Chengdu. Linking together the seemingly disparate issues of small business practices, everyday life, and public politics, Wang's thesis highlights how Chengdu's teahouses proved both adaptable and resistant to the homogenizing thrust of reformist elites and state modernizing efforts during the first half of the twentieth century. Wang builds upon rather than revises prior scholarship, which he categorizes into three schools of thought. Japanese scholars have used the teahouse as a symbol of expansion of urban public space; G. William Skinner and William Rowe have stressed the social function of teahouses, arguing that they represent a social network or social club, respectively.¹ More recent studies examine how teahouses during the late Qing and early republic became an arena of contestation between state and society and between elites and commoners. Wang primarily adopts this latter approach, but distinguishes his study, both temporally and spatially, by focusing on the important but understudied city of Chengdu and by emphasizing those periods in which archival documentation is most plentiful: the New Policy reform era, during the first decade of the twentieth century, and 1937–1950.

Any visitor to Chengdu cannot fail to notice the numerous teahouses that line its city streets and parks. Wang notes that by the year 2000, Chengdu had at least three thousand teahouses (p. 287 n. 27). Teahouses, which fluctuated between five hundred and eight hundred in number during the Republican era, were a pivotal institution in the daily lives of Chengdu residents. Based on the number of teahouses, tables per teahouse, and customer turnover, Wang estimates that between 100,000 and 130,000 patrons (between one-fifth and one-quarter of Chengdu's total population) frequented the teahouses on a daily basis. Moreover, the teahouses employed over 60,000 people who worked in this service sector as well as in ancillary businesses such as barbershops, restaurants, and entertainment. In short, the teahouses sustained the small business sector that continues to characterize the city.

Several socioeconomic factors accounted for the popularity of the teahouse in Chengdu. The dispersed nature of farmers' homes in Sichuan's countryside made the market township and its attendant teahouses an important basis for social organization. The highly productive agriculture in the Chengdu Plain increased the number of absentee landlords who lived in Chengdu, and for whom frequenting teahouses became a prime way to pass leisure time or conduct business. Patrons, most of whom were male and from all walks of life, found tea an affordable commodity. The low price of tea ultimately derived from the rich soil of the Chengdu Plain and the lack of an export trade to the more developed eastern coast—two factors that spurred ample, perhaps excessive, production and a glut on the local market. Moreover, because well water in the city was highly alkaline and bitter and transporting river water and buying fuel (wood) to boil water was costly, many patrons frequented their neighborhood teahouse to boil medicinal herbs, stew meat, and buy boiled drinking water.

In Part 1 (Chapters 1–3), Wang addresses the economy of the teahouse by focusing on issues of management and labor in the context of an extractive state. "The government's basic policies toward the teahouse from the late Qing to the Communist victory emphasized control, restriction, and punishment" (p. 83). He portrays teahouse owners and their patrons as resisting state authority in both passive and active ways. This contentious relationship was manifest in the sparring between the Chengdu municipal government and the Teahouse Guild, whose membership became mandatory for all teahouse owners after a state mandate of 1929. The guild had a dual function of negotiating the price for bowls of tea and granting...