Qianlong’s Moneybag: A Guide to Politics and Business

Understand the fate of merchants in the Qianlong era, and you will understand two thousand years of political and commercial rivalry in ancient China!

Focusing on the salt trade during the Qianlong reign, this book reveals the complex interactions between salt merchants and Emperor Qianlong over the profits of the industry. It lays bare the dealings between emperors and merchants:

- Salt merchants ingratiated themselves with imperial power by continually sending silver to Emperor Qianlong, at one point becoming the emperor's "purse".

- Through layers of regulation and occasional crackdowns, Qianlong kept the salt trade firmly under imperial control.

Caught between the market and those in power, salt merchants could only struggle to survive. Their rises and falls also reflected the political and commercial environment and social landscape of the Qianlong golden age.

This is not only a history of the rise and fall of salt merchants during the Qianlong reign, but also a two-thousand-year history of political and commercial rivalry that reveals how power controlled capital in the imperial era, and how capital influenced politics and society. It offers a unique perspective on the political and economic workings of the Qing dynasty and traditional Chinese society as a whole.