ECONOMY AND TRADE
When we think about the economy of classical China, what comes to mind first is the Chinese silk and the silk roads. The silk roads are not exactly a specific route for vast trading, they are actually just the connections and patterns used for trading silk and other goods. Silk was considered as a high end luxury. There was a lot of extensive internal trade throughout China because of the products and goods that originate from there.
(More on Silk Road) |
WEALTH
“In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral…” - [1] Graeber, David. “Debt: the first 5,000 years” p. 260 For more on Confucianism, go to our culture section.
|
CHINESE AGRICULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE ECONOMY
|
During the Zhou dynasty, there is evidence of canals and extensive irrigation. The writings of Confucius (551-470 BCE) mention 44 food plants including horticultural crops. China's economy depended traditionally on wet rice agriculture, a labor-intensive method of cultivation in which you had to work twice as hard for less food. Chinese farmers solved this problem by using their families as their labor forces. Traditional agricultural technology and population growth thus became closely related: the best chance a Chinese peasant had to improve his life was to have a large family, intensify the family effort to cultivate rice in the traditional way, then use whatever extra income the family generated to buy more land until the amount of land owned matched what the whole family, working together, could farm at maximum productivity — or even exceeded the family's capacity. (See source here.)
|
STANDARDIZING WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
During the Qin dynasty’s reign of power, they standardized coinage, weights, and measurements. This is a big part of Chinese economy because that is when they decided what type of payment is going to be used depending on how much product is being bought. (More on Standardizing weights and measures)
|