Texts and terminology

As in many other regions of the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, descriptive and normative formulations of work and work organizations by urban or rural elites, often those in the service of the state or polity, are the most easily available sources, while written indications of self-perception by working people are rare. Strikes and work riots are reported from the official point of view rather than from the point of view of those actually engaged in labour unrest. “Labour” or “work” is discussed in various contexts.

The texts created by the government which concern work and labour are legislation and administrative regulations. Those were codified in the Great Ming Code, Da Ming lü, of 1389, as well as in legal commentaries, in the collected statutes of all administrative branches and ministries of the Ming government (Da Ming huiyao), the more detailed statutes and precedents (zeli) of individual ministries, and in handbooks for local officials. A prominent example are the regulations Gongbu changku xu zhi [What Should Be Known about the Working Sites and Storehouses of the Ministry of Public Works],Footnote 4 compiled in 1615, which constituted the Ministry's supervision and accounting guidelines for its work and maintenance projects.

The sources written by rural and urban elites that refer to work in the private sector also consist of more hands-on compendia concerning agricultural techniques and agricultural home industries, such as agricultural handbooks or encyclopaedias. The purpose of those works is to inform landowners and officials about the most efficient use of material resources and labour and thus, ultimately, to maintain the social order. They are neither “classics of labour”, nor exclusively technical compendia in their own right.Footnote 5 One rare extant sample of a handbook written for craftspeople, namely carpenters and joiners, is the fifteenth-century “Classic of [the patron saint of construction artisans] Lu Ban”.

Family precepts (jiaxun) are another type of source that can be of special use in identifying which professions were the most desirable within particular families or lineages.

The rise of commercialization during the mid-Ming also found its expression in the genre of merchant route books and manuals, which contain information – interspersed here and there – on ethical maxims in commerce.Footnote 6 In the middle- to late-Ming era, guild houses were founded as hostels and institutions for developing merchant networks based on the principle of a common region of origin. It was only in the eighteenth century that self-characterizations by merchants and also by artisan corporations became more frequent.

“Labour” is expressed by the term lao , which has the connotation of “toil”, “pain”, and “exhaustion”, or qin , which implies diligent or industrious work. Both refer mainly to physical work, especially in agriculture. Another designation for work is gong . Since this character is derived from a tool-like object, probably a carpenter's square, it is predominantly associated with craft or proto-industrial production. In contrast to lao it can designate the worker as well, and, in addition, in public accounting it is a measure of one day's workload, the average workday. Finally, work in the sense of “making a living”, shenghuo , occurs in many instances in a contemporary agricultural handbook with reference to farmers and farmhands.

In China's political economy since the first millennium BC, the ruler's subjects were obliged to render service to the state in the form of corvée labour. The general term for corvée is yi . This was initially associated with military service, but in the Ming dynasty it also referred to service in civilian tasks, mostly in construction and water conservation. Sometimes yi was also combined with lao or gong. In the course of the Ming dynasty, the relatively strict system of artisan registration and work service as a form of tax in kind was gradually replaced by monetary tax payments. For the later developments, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is interesting to study the change from the concept of yi as “unpaid corvée labour” to “wage labour in the service of the state”, which, though it did not exactly imply “free” wage labour, was more emancipated than the restrictive system at the beginning of the Ming dynasty.

A fourth term, zhi , which is associated with service for the state, designates both administrative work and the position held by a government official. In comparison with yi, this term stands out more constantly during the course of the second millennium.

Further designations of interest for the period in question are “hired labour”, guyong , or the “hired labourer”, gugongren , as well as dian , tenancy/bond service, with its extensions diannu “ ‘nearly free’ tenants”,Footnote 7nupu , “bondservants”, or dianpu ,Footnote 8 “agricultural bondservants”, and nu , “a person who does service for a particular master and/or manages his land”,Footnote 9 a term often rendered as “slave”.

Work valuations: the positions and usefulness of workers in society

As a rule, moralist considerations of labour from the Confucian point of view take as their point of departure the statement on the complementary fields of human action: the administrative work of the mind as opposed to subservient physical labour. This can be traced back to the Confucian exegete Mencius (372–281 BC):

The other important model is that of the “four occupational groups” (simin), consisting of scholar/officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants. This can be found in the Guanzi [Master Guan] (third century BC):

Political thought reflecting on these two basic concepts is also interspersed in the works of many Ming thinkers. Recent Chinese historiography emphasizes the fact that a number of Ming philosophers, even if they were not part of the mainstream, no longer believed that the first two of those groups, the scholars and farmers, were the foundation or “roots” of society and that merchants and artisans mere derivatives or “branches” which needed to be kept under control. Such ideas were formulated in collections of essays or works on political practice and statecraft.Footnote 12

For instance, Zhao Nanxing (1550–1627) claimed that all four groups were “fundamental”;Footnote 13 Wang Daokun (1525–1593) argued that, although in earlier periods taxation had been light for peasants and heavy for artisans and merchants, this should be adjusted, so that the valuation for all groups would be identical in practical and financial terms.Footnote 14 Feng Yingjing (1555–1606) maintained that merchants were even more important than farmers and shouldered a greater responsibility for securing the subsistence of the people than the other groups.Footnote 15 Finally, Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) declared that artisans and merchants were already cherished by the ultimate Confucian models of morality, the legendary sage kings of antiquity, and should by all means be considered fundamental.Footnote 16 However, such views remained exceptions to the norm. The dominant view was the conviction that agriculture in combination with subsidiary production, mainly textiles, was of the greatest importance to the state and that specialization in manufacture and commerce was undesired and suspect.

This was the case even though official attitudes towards merchants were often ambiguous. Officials were aware of the important role of merchants, and still seemed very critical of their dealings. One example is given in Zhang Han's (1511–1593) essay on the four occupational groups.Footnote 17 Timothy Brook has perceptively analysed the section on merchants. Brook's essay shows that despite the traditional view that merchant activities were “secondary” or “derivative”, an opinion Zhang Han traced back to the “sage kings” of antiquity, Zhang Han described the merchant networks of his times in detail, and pleaded for taxes on merchants to be reduced on the grounds that this would enhance commerce and thereby actually increase state revenue.Footnote 18 The existence of a profit motive was fully realized and taken for granted. Zhang Han was more critical of artisans and argued strongly that they should return to “fundamental” agriculture, even if that seemed very unlikely. In comparing the profit made from artisanal luxury production and agriculture or home industries, he says that:

To the Confucian scholars in the sophisticated urban society of the high and late Ming, the nostalgic notion of merely four occupational groups must have seemed at least ideologically desirable, even though most people were aware of how antiquated it was. In order to drive home the message that scholars and farmers (or scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants) were the “good”, that is fundamental, groups, some writers developed an extensive list of fourteen and even twenty-four groups. For instance, Yao Lü (fl.1597) explained that in addition to the four respectable and the two tolerable categories (Buddhist monks and soldiers), the following classification applied: “Daoist priests, doctors, soothsayers, astrologers, physiognomists, geomancers, sedan chair carriers, horse dealers, coachmen, shippers, hairdressers, pedicure masters, beauticians, courtesans and prostitutes, actors, acrobats, and bandits”.Footnote 20 The author reprimands all those except the first six as being unproductive and vulgar, but also acknowledges that their services were highly cherished by their clients.

There may be an element of irony in this fine categorization of various service trades. Huang Zongxi, the eminent Ming-loyalist historian and political philosopher, more sweepingly blames the “unproductive and parasitic” groups beyond the first four in a typical condemnation of what he thought of as really non-fundamental trades such as those serving for amusement and for religious needs.Footnote 21

Buddhist work ethics: a variant belief system

Time and again, Confucians professed profound contempt for Buddhist and Daoist clergy, whom they considered unproductive. Since education in the Confucian orthodoxy was indispensable for a successful career as an official, and thus for attaining positions esteemed most highly, such dismissive reflections on the representatives of the competing belief systems carried particular weight. Needless to say, Buddhist and Daoist clergy saw things quite differently. Moreover, the impact of lay Buddhism became greater during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), and the influence of Buddhism on syncretistic popular beliefs was considerable. In simplified form, Buddhist tenets on work ethics from the eighth to the twelfth centuries can also be found in contemporary family precepts of the mid-Ming.

The monastic population was basically not supposed to work for a living, but instead to achieve spiritual liberation through meditation and religious exercises. The Vinaya (Lü/Ritsu) school of East Asian Buddhism devised elaborate regulations for the behaviour of monks and, on principle, forbade any other way of maintaining one's subsistence than by living on donations or begging. Other schools, especially meditational Buddhism (Chan), emphasized the usefulness of work as a means of regeneration after strenuous meditation practice, but also for the upkeep of the monastic community. The classical adage “one day without work [means] one day without eating” is attributed to one of the founders of Chinese Chan, Baizhang Huaihai (720–814). According to his recorded sayings, even as a venerated teacher Baizhang insisted on working physically with the other monks.Footnote 22 This text may represent hagiography, but the general tendency is well attested that Chan monastic communities not only relied on donations but also performed physical labour.

It is traditionally assumed that Baizhang Huaihai established the first rules for the Chan monasteries,Footnote 23 which were adapted and expanded over time. The last great recompilation was made at the command of the Emperor in 1335 and reprinted in 1424.Footnote 24 By then it had become a standard set of guidelines. These rules state, for instance, that if monks are called to work together (pu qing), they should all comply, with the exception of the elderly and the ill. This rule refers explicitly to Baizhang Huaihai's adage by admonishing the monks that “a day without work is a day without eating”.Footnote 25 This could be any type of work which monks might wish to shun, not only work in the fields; Buddhist ceremonies can also be very strenuous and physically demanding.

Buddhist occupational ethics from the Song dynasty are most clearly formulated in two texts from the second half of the twelfth century that were written by lay Buddhists and expressly address all believers, not only the clergy.Footnote 26 They belong to the school of Pure Land or Amidist Buddhism. This school, which was also active during the Ming dynasty, does not strive for gradual or sudden awakening to the truth of Buddhist teachings through meditation during one's lifetime, but hopes that the individual will be reborn into the so-called “Pure Land”, or paradise in the West. If that proves impossible, accumulation of karmic merit is the next best option for attaining a position of higher karmic status in the next reincarnation. Work is valued in terms of its usefulness for acquiring better karma, and for helping others to do so. Moreover, work is judged according to the extent to which it allows the worker to maintain the five basic precepts of Buddhism, which are binding for both lay people and the ordained clergy: no killing of sentient beings, stealing, sexual licentiousness, lying, and alcohol.Footnote 27 The “Admonishments for Particular [Types of People]” by Wang Rixiu from 1160 discusses thirty-six walks of life, varying according to occupation, gender and age group, and personal destiny.Footnote 28 Among these, eighteen groups are distinctly professional.

Seen from the perspective of work ethics, this fascinating sequence contains the message that high and low social positions are predestined by the karmic merit acquired in previous existences, but are by no means unchangeable. The karma of the present and the subsequent existence can and must be shaped and improved by conscious effort. What is specifically bad about butchers, cooks, fishermen, and bird catchers is that they kill sentient beings deliberately in order to make a living. The same is true of sericulturalists, and by extension merchants, who might deal in silk. Those responsible for killing were obliged to appeal frequently to Amitabha and to vow that all the sentient beings killed by their direct or indirect action should be reborn in the paradise of the Pure Land. The prostitute and the wine seller are called upon to vow that all those led astray by their doings should likewise be reborn in paradise. Maids and servants should succumb to the destiny that theirs was a subaltern position, but work to improve their positions in this or the next life. The position of the artisan, especially the carpenter, is ambivalent. He is doing good for others by providing them with housing or material objects, but he cannot gain riches through his profession, nor can he afford to live in the houses he has built. Yet working with utmost diligence will also lay the foundations for his karmic improvement. Unexpectedly, the soldier is not condemned for killing living beings.Footnote 29 For this group, service to the state is deemed to be both important and desirable. The text stresses that this class is nourished by the tax payments of the commoners and admonishes soldiers to be aware of that fact. They should be mindful of their task of maintaining peace and of working for the security of the state and the people.Footnote 30

As can be seen from family precepts, such convictions of what was a desirable profession and what was not did not remain confined to the religious realm; they also pervaded the secular sphere to a certain extent. Ideas about enhancing one's karma on more general terms, expressed in so-called “ledgers of merit and demerit” in morality books, but without the direct relationship to professional occupations, originate from the Song,Footnote 31 such as those of Wang and Yan. In the late Ming and early Qing, they were taken up again as ideas about individual self-cultivation took on greater importance and certainty about one's place in society gave way in the course of continued commercialization and growing political and social ambiguity.Footnote 32

Legal provisions on free and unfree labour

The Great Ming Code was established in several stages soon after the Ming dynasty was founded; it was finalized in 1397, and applied in adjudication together with an increasing corpus of sub-statutes. It defined crimes and punishments, and the general principles for the application of the law.Footnote 33 Labour-related legislation concerned administrative tasks executed by officials and sub-officials, military discipline, standards of security, the obligations of hired artisans in government workshops or those that fulfilled corvée duties, particular groups in the household registration system, such as salt producers, and finally convict labour, which was also exploited in salt and iron production.Footnote 34 The disciplinary intention of this codification is very clear, and it extended from minor to capital crimes. Obedience, diligence, and punctuality were instilled in over a million people working in tributary labour relations.

Legislation on labour issues between civilians was not codified into specialized categories. The Ming penal code did specify general classes of crime to which labour conflicts could also lead, such as cursing, physical violence, and homicide.Footnote 35 Philip C.C. Huang has suggested that the Qing code perceived subsistence agriculture on independent family farms as the standard pattern of economic organization.Footnote 36 Accordingly, neither the Qing nor the Ming codes showed much concern with hired wage labour, although its existence is attested to.

To conceptualize the difference between free and unfree labour in Ming China, it is necessary to consider the status of “good” commoners (liangmin) and that of the debased class (jianmin). These concepts are not clearly defined in the Ming penal code. In Qing law, mean people included “slaves or bondservants (nupu), entertainers, including prostitutes and actors (changyou), and those employees of government offices who were usually referred to as ‘yamen runners’ (lizu)”.Footnote 37 In Ming penal law, the “servants” or “slaves” (nubi, nupu) formed the lowest stratum in society, and an intermediate class of tenant farmers and hired labourers also emerged in that society. The status of the debased class was abolished by government decree between 1723 and 1735.Footnote 38 This explicitly referred to particular regionally confined groups in the empire, such as “musician households” in Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces, “beggar households” or “fallen/lazy people” (duomin) in the Yangzi Delta, and people living on boats (Dan households) in South China,Footnote 39 as well as to hereditary retainers in Huizhou prefecture.Footnote 40

The group of bondservants is the most difficult to define, as has been shown by Joseph McDermott and Harriet Zurndorfer. Their status varied between the extremely unfree and the almost free. The fact that “they could own, inherit, sell, and rent land and moreover, exploit other [bondservants]” complicates the situation.Footnote 41 As a rule, the bondservants and their families were recorded on the household register of the master; they no longer existed as independent households and often took on the family name of their masters.Footnote 42 Their status could be hereditary or non-hereditary,Footnote 43 and was not in all cases permanent. When people commended themselves to the patronage of powerful households, a phenomenon that increased during the very late Ming years, there were cases where they were not even dispossessed of their property.Footnote 44

The tasks of bonded labourers included services for the landlord, such as security, entertainment, assisting at family rituals, and carrying sedan chairs.Footnote 45 Article 272 of the Great Ming Code specifically forbade the habit of powerful or wealthy households demanding that their tenants carry the master's sedan chairs at no charge as part of their obligations. Instead, the sedan chair carriers had to be reimbursed.Footnote 46 However, from the perspective of the lawgiver this humiliation of the tenants was the lesser offence. Nobody was entitled to be carried in a sedan chair unless with official authorization. Consequently, the breach of the statutory law was a more serious crime, which was sanctioned with corporal punishment of sixty strokes with the heavy stick.Footnote 47 That tenants were randomly used for the purposes of landlords is also remarked on and criticized in a mid-sixteenth century agricultural handbook which lists transport of rice and weighing flour as typical tasks unreasonably demanded of bondservants or tenants.Footnote 48

In the context of labour relations, an important issue is the transition from bonded labour to the freer arrangements of hired labour and tenancy. The transition occurred at a time corresponding roughly to the late Ming and early Qing. From the 1580s, workers hired for one year or longer were considered legally inferior to their employers. In consequence, crimes committed by hired labourers were sanctioned more harshly than those of their masters or other commoners. For instance, Article 336 of the Great Ming Code, which concerns “Honourable and Mean Persons Striking Each Other”, stipulates (§3) that striking hired labourers was not punishable if no bone fractures were caused; if fractures occurred, the penalty was to be reduced by one degree from that for ordinary civilians.Footnote 49 The code spells out more crimes that were to be punished with different severity according to the status (slave, hired worker, ordinary civilian) of the person who committed it. It was only in the course of the eighteenth century that the status of the hired labourers was improved.Footnote 50

During the Qing dynasty, which had already established its rule in Manchuria by 1636, a particular group of bondservants rose to importance. They were specifically subject to the service of the government and military establishment, which was registered in the so-called Eight Banners. Individuals having the hereditary status of bondservant could nevertheless attain official positions of great influence and receive substantial emoluments, as did Cao Yin (1658–1712), Director of the Imperial Weaveries and Salt Commissioner.

In sum, the Ming Code is explicit about crimes committed while on duty in the service of the state, and crimes involving corporal violence that occurred between private employers and employees. Yet legislative rules for litigation between civilians that concerned wage issues or other labour-related conflicts not leading to assault and battery were still beyond the focus of mid- and late-Ming legislation. There is sound evidence of such litigation only from the late eighteenth century onward.Footnote 51

The ranking of individual occupations

The Ming Code specifies a variety of occupations directly linked to particularly low status. Generally speaking, “mean people” were legally discriminated against and suffered higher penalties than commoners or officials for the same crime. Marriage between those social outcasts and commoners was also forbidden.Footnote 52 Musicians and actors were particularly singled out as partners not suitable to marry.Footnote 53

An idea of how particular occupations were ranked can be demonstrated using family precepts, a common genre in the Ming that became even more widespread during the Qing. This was also closely linked to the perception of the four occupational groups and those not covered by these four great categories. The family precepts of the Huo clan in Foshan from 1481, for instance, explain which occupations are to be avoided: gunpowder production, because it is too dangerous and many people die from it – sulphur is bad for one's health; entering kilns and laying bricks (i.e. kiln building) – the kiln might collapse; gelding animals and selling beef – those who slaughter pigs should also change their trade; learning martial arts and soldiery; counterfeiting cash and making false silver ingots; catching wild birds or snakes; iron smelting and producing cooking pans, copper gongs, or other metal implements – the danger of fires should not be underestimated; work relating to funerals – only carpentry is acceptable (presumably for coffins); repairing umbrellas, because of the smell; and collecting rags, which is a demeaning job.Footnote 54

From these prescriptions, with their restrictions on occupations that involve the killing of living beings and human death, the fear of high-risk occupations and a certain affinity with Buddhist and Daoist principles can be understood. Such notions certainly prevailed in the greater part of the population. This is not to say that everybody shared the values of the Huos of Foshan, one of the thriving industrial and commercial centres in the vicinity of Canton.

There is a dark side to one of the trades considered respectable in the family precepts of the Huos: carpentry. According to studies by Klaas Ruitenbeek, the reason why it was respected but also feared was that carpenters were thought to be able to influence the fates of those living in the houses they constructed by means of building magic.Footnote 55 The manual for carpenters, Lu Ban jing, a rare example of an architectural guidebook written by a practitioner for the practitioner, includes a large variety of protective and harmful charms which can be incorporated into parts of newly built or renovated houses. It also points out which positions are auspicious or ill-fated for any type of construction. The charms described in the book were thought to be able to influence the lives of all humans and animals dwelling in the respective houses or stables. A protective charm might be:

A negative charm would be: “A broken rice bowl and a single chopstick cause sons and grandsons to end up as beggars. Lacking food and clothing, they will be always cold and hungry, after having sold their house, they will live under bridges or in temples.”Footnote 57 Both objects were meant to be hidden in the door frame.

The rationality behind the warning to beware of the wrath of carpenters has already been analysed by contemporary observers. Some of them were convinced that this sorcery was justified by the stinginess and maltreatment of carpenters by employers or customers.Footnote 58 Yet, keeping the carpenters contented was not only a matter of fair wages or prices for the labour they performed. As Ruitenbeek explains, the social position of carpenters was very lowly relative to the importance of their technical skills in everyday life.Footnote 59 According to Shi Tianji (1659–after 1737), the author of a household encyclopaedia from Yangzhou, the best way to prevent harmful building magic was to acknowledge the skills of the carpenters and treat them fairly:

It is thus very likely that carpenters adopted a menacing image which would cause customers to pay the prices and wages demanded in return for a high quality of construction and the security of their homes and families.

One of the most famous characterizations of urban occupations originates from Chen Duo (c.1488–c.1521). Chen held a hereditary office as a guard commander in the large metropolis, Nanjing, but he was also an accomplished composer, scenario writer, musician, poet, and painter.Footnote 61 In realistic descriptions this author captured what was typical about people from all walks of life in this large city.Footnote 62 Chen did not explicitly rank the occupations, as in family prescriptions or Buddhist exhortations. Rather, his collection of 136 songs, “Huaji yuyun” [The Entertainer's Abundant Rhymes], covers a wide variety of occupations and professions in manufacture and in the private and public service sectors, as well as in branches of trade, with one song dedicated to each occupation or shop.Footnote 63 The songs were combined in the Chinese conventional order, according to the particular melodies and rhythmic patterns on which they were sung. They are formulated in simple language and enjoyed great popularity. They were first published in a collection of 1611 and reprinted several times.

What strikes the reader about these couplets is the ironic tone of many of them, as well as the hint of social critique, and the sympathy expressed especially with the lowbrows of Nanjing city. In some of the poems, the author takes the perspective of the workers, asserting their importance. The scaffolder says “The scaffold dangles dangerously in the air; if it wasn't for me, who could do this job?”,Footnote 64 and the worker who bows cotton to fluff it up, “If you want it warm and cosy, you can't do without me”.Footnote 65 The connection between the mechanism of supply and demand and the value of goods and services is expressed in many of the verses. The firewood and charcoal dealers are chided for selling their goods at high prices in the cold season, thereby taking advantage of the hungry and poor.Footnote 66 In contrast, the lantern dealers, who sell decorative articles for festivals, should store their goods until next year if customers are “too lazy to buy”.Footnote 67

Chen Duo bestows the most praise on those artisans whose fortunes were based on their skill and industriousness rather than good luck or nobility. For instance, the bricklayer is described as follows:

Honour is likewise accorded to other artisans who are continuously and industriously engaged in production, even though their crafts do not earn them wealth, and even though they sleep little and work until late at night. This includes the wood turners – always sitting with their backs bent – and the felt makers – who have to withstand the stench of their materials.Footnote 69 Greed and acquisitiveness are often commented on ironically. Thus Chen Duo criticizes the midwife who, immediately upon the birth of the child, says that she expects an honorarium for “washing the child on the third day”.Footnote 70

Others less fortunate than those who could learn a craft or profession also appear in these verses, and sympathy is expressed for the lot of beggars, peddlers, load carriers, and donkey drivers.Footnote 71 Sarcasm is heaped on service trades that are shown to be superfluous and useless, such as marriage matchmakers, who do not always find perfect matches,Footnote 72 or Daoist and Buddhist clergy, who think more about worldly matters such as food and money than about giving spiritual guidance, or whose reason for turning to Buddha was lost love rather than spiritual awakening, as in the case of the Buddhist nun. Soothsayers, geomantic advisers, who were consulted about the right position for siting graves, and quack doctors also belonged to this category.Footnote 73 Moreover, the author criticizes cheating and fraudulent practices, such as those of building contractors who sold used and rotten materials pretending they were new, and the wasteful lifestyles of those who made excessive profits, such as the salt merchants in charge of the government monopoly on salt, and business brokers in general.Footnote 74 The last group of professions in the collection are those in menial public security service, such as guardsmen at gates, archers, prison wardens, escorts for convicts, and the informants of officials. Quite obviously, the author was well acquainted with these, and considers their services useful, though in some cases gruesome.Footnote 75

In sum, this set of skilled and unskilled occupations in crafts and services and trade establishments of all types conveys a nuanced image of a complex socio-economic structure. Here human labour was highly commodified and commercial transactions were carefully monitored by the municipal authorities. Fairness was valued highly in these verses. It is symbolized in the subsequent poems on shops that sell scales and shops that sell dry measures for grains delivered as tax payment at public granaries. Not all the poems are ironic. Some, such as the latter two, insist on the importance of honesty in producing and selling scales and measures. Behaviour of this type, in addition to skilled work in either trade, as, for example, of the butcher, whose dexterous handling of his knives earned him approval,Footnote 76 is clearly the ideal expressed here. This type of work ethics can be characterized as merchant and artisan ethics.

Gendered division of labour

As can be seen from the previous source, although not represented to the same extent as male workers, women were all but absent from the streets of Nanjing. Specific poems are dedicated to the Buddhist nun, the prostitute, the female peddler, and the midwife. The fisherman's wife, who mends the nets, is mentioned in the entry on the fisherman's household.Footnote 77

Estimates of the extent of urbanization during the Ming suggest rough figures of between 9 and 10 per cent, with great variance among China's macro-regions.Footnote 78 Life in rural settings could imply various degrees of production for self-subsistence and for the market. Between 1500 and 1650 commercialization had also reached the countryside, where the number of market towns increased. This trend occurred earlier in the north. In the Yangzi Delta it was later, though stronger and more sustained.Footnote 79 For the latter region, Li Bozhong assumes that about 10 per cent of the rural population did not depend on agriculture for a living.Footnote 80

Since the foundation of Imperial China in the third century bc, taxation in kind for farming households included grains and textiles. The theoretical gender division of labour implied that men did the agricultural work and women wove fabrics. This principle was expressed as “nangeng nüzhi” [men plough, women weave]. In her studies on gender and labour in China, Francesca Bray has pointed out that although this norm was maintained as an ideological guideline by all dynasties, in reality it was gradually eroded.Footnote 81

In the Ming dynasty Confucian elites tried to reverse this trend in order to correct conditions towards what seemed to be proper relationships within households. Their efforts, which included reintroducing sericulture and silk weaving in regions where it had long since been abandoned owing to lack of profitability, were also implemented with enthusiasm by the Qing emperors until the eighteenth century.Footnote 82 According to Bray, to Confucian intellectuals and officials “the economic significance of work was at best secondary”.Footnote 83 Orthopraxy, doing the right thing at the right time, was at stake when men wove and women worked in the fields or took up other economically profitable occupations such as growing or processing cash crops.Footnote 84 If gender roles in the division of labour were changed, that might endanger social stability and the hierarchical structure of society, with its basic differentiation between those who wielded power in the state and those who were ruled, between the elder and the younger generations, and between the sexes.

Bray demonstrates that the social reality was quite different from what conservatives considered to be the correct order. Some activist local administrators would promote female silk making in districts where it had died out. Among them were the sixteenth-century governor Lü Kun, who tried to reintroduce silk making in the northern province of Shanxi, and the mid-eighteenth century governor Chen Hongmou in neighbouring Shaanxi province. For Lü Kun, women who did not work in sericulture, silk reeling, or silk weaving seemed to be “without occupation”, no matter what other work they actually did.Footnote 85 Meanwhile, especially in the Yangzi Delta, men had long since taken over work in textile production. In the cities they worked as professional high-class silk weavers, and some made a living by calendering, a finishing process in which cotton cloth is pressed by heavy stone rollers. In the course of time, in the rural proto-industry in the Yangzi Delta, entire families would often work either in silk weaving or in cotton production and processing, and no longer produce their own food.Footnote 86

On the other hand, evidence that women did continuously work in the fields, and thus, from the point of view of conservative circles, assumed the role of the men, is not very firm. Li Bozhong observed an actual increase in specialization in agricultural work for men and textile work for women, at least in the Yangzi Delta, with a peak in the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote 87 Li asserts that there are many indications in mid-Qing sources that women participated in farm work, but this was mostly weeding, harvesting, or pumping water, which, he argues, was not continuous physical labour carried out under great time pressure, unlike preparing the soil or transplanting rice seedlings.Footnote 88 According to this view, women abandoned any previous agricultural occupations for the more profitable textile work of sericulture, silk reeling, and cotton spinning and weaving in those regions where this was possible.

Depending on the respective food crops and textiles, such activities could be even more profitable. From evidence for the nineteenth-century Yangzi Delta, we know that a woman spinning and weaving cotton for 200 working days would earn 83 per cent of what a hired labourer would receive for working 180 days, and if she were engaged throughout the whole year she could feed herself and 1.5 other people.Footnote 89

This suggests that in the economically most advanced regions, gender roles in the division of labour were not inverted, and that the general tendency was for both men and women – and children – to take up or be made to participate in the more profitable occupations, if circumstances permitted. An important source for the situation in the heart of the Yangzi Delta, entitled Bu nong shu [Farmers’ Help] or Shenshi nongshu [Mr Shen's Book on Agriculture], was written and circulated in Huzhou prefecture. Its author made suggestions to landowners for the efficient management of estates. In its initial form it can be dated to the last years of the Ming dynasty, in the 1640s; additions from later compilers bear the dates 1658 and 1662.

Next to technical information on the timing of agricultural processes, plant protection, and raising silkworms, the book includes advice on personnel administration, such as wage payments, provisions in kind, especially food and drink, and the general treatment of farmhands, hired textile workers, and tenants. It also comments on the gendered division of labour and makes observations on smaller family farms. While affirming the tenet that “men plough, women weave”, it reported that in this particular region every family was weaving. Advice is given on how to calculate the costs and the gains of hiring two women to weave silk for one year, including their wages and provisions.Footnote 90 About food provisions, the author holds that “although women and girl servants cannot do really hard physical work, they should still get a taste [of good food and drink], because how could someone who never gets a bite of meat for a long time not stretch out their hand and steal it?”Footnote 91 As for the rations of rice, served in soup and as plain, cooked rice, “women receive half of the male rations”.Footnote 92

The section devoted to female employees and female work (nü gong) states that as a rule, in the western villages of Huzhou, they mostly wove cotton cloth, reeled silk, and spun and produced linen, while in the eastern villages they either raised mulberry trees and carried out miscellaneous agricultural tasks or they wove.Footnote 93 Comparing the contribution to household income from female labour and male labour respectively, the author asserts that the fortunes of the family depended on the industriousness of the wife. “Even though she concerns herself only with silkworms and hemp, which does not seem to make much difference for the economic fate of the household, her diligence will cause all other activities to flourish, and her laziness will make them fail.”Footnote 94 The author does not expressly mention household work and child rearing.

Returning to the question of whether women were engaged in any agricultural labour at all, this handbook, which treats the cultivation of rice, other grains and vegetables, mulberry trees, and cattle raising, does not mention any gendered division of labour for those activities. Women are explicitly mentioned only at one point, where it admonishes the farmer that “wheat should be sown very evenly. Don't save on labour on this or let women or servants be remiss [with this assignment]”.Footnote 95

As opposed to India and Japan,Footnote 96 where transplanting rice was one of the prominent tasks of women, there is less evidence in Chinese sources. In a large encyclopaedia, one reference to a rice-transplanting song (“Cha yang ge”), by the author Yang Wanli, has the verses, “The farmers throw the rice seedlings, the farmer women catch them, the small children pull up the seedlings, the big children insert them.”Footnote 97 Two more entries are more specific to one particular region. The section on the local customs of the prefecture in the gazetteer for Yunyang in present-day Hubei provinceFootnote 98 says that “men and women both transplant rice seedlings, they play the drum and sing with it”.Footnote 99 This is even more explicit for Jingzhou prefecture, in the same province. “For transplanting rice seedlings, they often employ women, the men beat the drum to show the rhythm, or they transport the food. When asked, they reply: ‘[Our] hands and feet are clumsy and slow, not as nimble as those of the girls’. ”Footnote 100

That the other forty-three references in this encyclopaedia are not gender-specific cannot entirely answer the question, but, as the last one cited shows, the fact that women transplanted rice was so unusual for some observers that they had to inquire about it. Possibly the various risicultural regions of China were characterized by different habits. One sample given in Francesca Bray's work refers to yet another region in Hubei province where women, who might not have belonged to the ethnic Han, worked the earth with a hoe.Footnote 101 To the Confucian ideal of decorum, which saw the home as the proper place of female labour, this was a breach in the behavioural code, which might disrupt the social order.Footnote 102

For promoting the traditional social hierarchy, including the gendered division of labour, Confucian elites and the ruling Manchu emperors provided the public with positive illustrative images of a harmonious agricultural work setting. This can best be seen in the Gengzhi tu [Illustrations of Ploughing and Weaving], an album of illustrations with poems on risiculture and sericulture. It was first published between 1137 and 1145,Footnote 103 and was subsequently reprinted and expanded, especially to include poems by Qing dynasty emperors. It was also adapted in Japan and Korea.Footnote 104 Despite its increasing distance from reality, this was the work that exemplified what, since the twelfth century, had been deemed the proper division of labour: that between men and women, the elder and the younger, the landowning and the employed, and between industrious rice farmers, silkworm raisers, and weavers.

Figure 1

The print shows that transplanting rice seedlings was a male task; an onlooker is present, in this case a woman with food containers. Keng-tschi t'u, Ackerbau und Seidengewinnung in China; ein kaiserliches Lehr- und Mahnbuch (Hamburg, 1913), plate 28, ill. I.9. Japanese reprint, dated 1676, of a Chinese woodblock print edition of 1462.¹⁰⁵Reproduced courtesy of Walter de Gruyter publishers, Berlin/Munich. Used with permission.

Labour conflicts and wages

Labour conflicts apparently increased in the late Ming dynasty. Some of them were indirectly related to remuneration, but these were no simple wage conflicts such as those that can be found in the legal records of the eighteenth century. Theoretical debates on the concept of a just wage, depending on skill and the specific contracts between employers and employees, such as the treatise by Zacchia,Footnote 106 were rare in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. However, the duration of the working day, as well as details concerning non-monetary remuneration in the form of food and drink played a considerable role in the practical planning and accounting of landlords who employed hired labourers. This is evident from “Mr Shen's Book on Agriculture”.

According to the book's author, the exact amount of meat, wine, and rice gruel to be served, and the appropriate timings for the meals, in summer and in winter, greatly influenced worker motivation in a period when the price of labour had increased.Footnote 107 He gives the following advice:

The text goes on to explain in detail the usual provisions for workers according to the “old rules”, and what was necessary at present. For instance, whereas the previous arrangements envisaged workers in summer and autumn being served meat the first day and vegetables on the two subsequent days, it was now necessary to serve meat every other day.Footnote 109 As for rice wine, the old regulations indiscriminately envisaged one measure for three persons. Now, workers were to be given one measure per person if they performed hard physical labour, a half measure if the tasks were of medium difficulty, and no wine if they performed light work or remained indoors on rainy days.Footnote 110

All of this shows that labour had become scarcer, putting agrarian workers in a better bargaining position; that it was wages in kind, and food and drink in particular, which could make the difference in terms of work motivation; and that an element of efficiency had been integrated compared with the century prior to “Mr Shen's Book on Agriculture”. What was at stake here were market conditions, even if this is not directly addressed in the handbook.

Famous cases of labour unrest included those among silk weavers in Suzhou in 1601, who protested against an extra tax imposed on them by a eunuch tax commissioner. They were to pay a fee for every bolt of silk before it was marketed.Footnote 111 With the tacit support of local elites, a relatively small group of silk weavers protested openly and killed several tax collectors in the town.Footnote 112

A similar situation occurred in the Imperial Porcelain Manufactories in Jingdezhen in the same year, when potters protested, in much greater number than the weavers, against another eunuch director who had tried to extort an impossible number of first-grade porcelain wares from them. A few years earlier, Tong Bin, a kiln worker, had thrown himself into the kiln in despair at the excessive demands being made by the same director. Tong became the patron saint of the Jingdezhen potters. Those potters burned down part of the Imperial Manufactory in 1601, and production for the state ceased until the end of the Ming dynasty.Footnote 113

A third field of conflict was mining. This was more latent and less focused on one place or one series of events. During the latter half of the Ming dynasty, coal and mineral miners periodically rose up in protest at the manifold state prohibitions on mining operations that were other than very small scale. The government generally suspected miners of unruliness and of having a high criminal potential because they were migrants and difficult to control.Footnote 114

In all three cases or scenarios, the conflicts were reported by the authorities. No texts recording the thoughts or words of the workers themselves have been transmitted down to us. In the first two situations, later historiography sets the issues into the greater context of discontent with the oppressive administration of eunuch officials. The Qing dynasty, which followed the Ming, often used this feature of the late Ming to legitimize its own rule, and was careful especially to lighten taxation and reduce its dependence on eunuchs for administrative purposes.

The voice of the workers: self-expression in work songs

For the period 1500 to 1650 it is difficult to discern the voice of the workers. Turning to the folk songs collected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographers can yield faint echoes of those voices, though. They cannot be dated with certainty, but it is probable that they originated from after 1650. Since the early twentieth century, systematic collection projects have been dedicated to Chinese folk songs and stories. The most recent results of such efforts are two multi-volume series on Chinese folk songs, one edited in Taiwan and the other in the People's Republic of China.Footnote 115

Important categories within such collections of Chinese folk songs include children's songs, love songs, and work songs (haozi). That work was accompanied by singing in order to keep up the rhythm required for continued repetition of particular procedures can be proven from at least the Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 220).Footnote 116 The term haozi for work songs is more recent and can be dated to the sixteenth century.Footnote 117 Some of the songs in the two collections mentioned refer explicitly to events or objects in the Republic of China or People's Republic of China, and thus reflect the changing situation in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the collections also contain some features that connect to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One is the typology of work songs, which is related to work procedures already in existence in the late Ming period; another is the protagonists of the songs, who worked in labour relationships which also characterized the period 1500–1650.

Large categories of work songs are the songs for earth pounding and rice transplanting, the songs of the sailors and fishermen, songs for guiding oxen and other animals, for carrying loads, and the songs of the street sellers. These occur, in varying number, in all the provinces in a sample taken here covering Sichuan in the central west, Shanxi in the north-west, Shandong, Jiangsu,Footnote 118 and Fujian on the east coast, and Guangdong in the south. The categories of labour relations most prominently represented were reciprocal, thus the subsistence farming and household work of the farmers’ wives, and commodified labour in the form of long-term or short-term contract workers. One might reasonably surmise that the concentration of explicit social accusation which can be found in the song collections is of a more recent date.Footnote 119

Social accusation occurred in all provinces; it is inherent in the texts as well as in the titles of the songs, such as those from Sichuan province sung by hired labourers: “The conscience of the boss is black”, “The heart of the boss is as vicious as a nail board rake”.Footnote 120 A similar case is that of the farmer's child bride (tongyang qi or xiao xifu). The system of minor marriage, evident from the tenth century onward, provided for girls to be adopted at a very tender age and raised in the household of their future husband, where they were expected to work for his family.Footnote 121 Songs about the plight of both the hired worker and the child bride, whose husband was often younger than herself, could be heard only faintly, if at all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but they became more important as the respective labour regimes disappeared or were formally abolished in the twentieth century.

Two examples from Jiangdu in Jiangsu province north of the Yangzi River, thus not the wealthy part of the Yangzi Delta, contain information worthwhile citing here, even though they probably originated after the seventeenth century. Both are structured in a twelve-month sequence, detailing the hardships for the respective times of the year. The narrative in both cases begins in gloom and ends in downright despair.Footnote 122 The hired worker starts out in the first month seeing wealthy people celebrating the New Year, but he himself wears poor clothing and cannot get his fill with the meagre meals served at his master's house. The young girl is sent, in the first month, to cut reed and wood for fuel in thorny shrubs, which causes injuries and bleeding. She is given heavy chores, the master and his family scold her continuously, the food and clothing are bad. When she becomes ill, nobody troubles to look after her. After demanding that wood be acquired for her coffin, she sends for her mother, urging “if mother will arrive one step earlier, we will meet, if she arrives one step slower, she will only be able to cry for me”. The editors remark that this song was sung during the rice transplanting process, just as the young shoots were being pulled from the seedbed or “mother field” (mutian).

The great variety of tasks carried out by the long-term worker is outlined for each month of the year. During the year, except for bad food and clothing, continuous reprimands for alleged inefficiency oppress him most. Despite the worker weeding, harvesting, and harrowing thirteen mu every day, and scooping river mud for fertilizing five to six mu per day (compare the two mu per day which Mr Shen thought sufficient), the master still scolds him. However, the worst is at the end: in the twelfth month, after the master has calculated his wages, he learns that he has toiled in vain for a whole year. This topos, which can be attributed to the fact that certain sums for food or debts incurred could be deducted from the worker's wages, also occurs in other songs of long-term workers, for instance in Sichuan.Footnote 123 Yet this is not the entire picture.

Even though labour conditions were oppressive for many of the agricultural population, not all folk songs are work songs, nor do all work songs contain social accusation. In fact, songs of love and courtship prevail in the collections referred to above. Moreover, even though work songs that narrate the position of employers are much rarer, one sample from Shanxi province, again drawing on the twelve-month structure, laments the fact that in the third month workers had to be hired, but that it was very hard to feed them three meals a day, and goes on to enumerate, in the manner of Mr Shen's handbook, all the dishes that needed to be provided.Footnote 124 Finally, there are also songs that express the “Joy of the Farmer”:

Though one must be cautious about retrospectively attaching meaning from later to earlier situations, the comparison of the clearly datable textual evidence for the mid- and late-Ming period with more recent folk songs highlights issues that can be understood as continuities spanning the centuries: that the incentives to work among all those who were not actual family members depended on the investments employers made in terms of monetary remuneration, but much more so on remuneration in kind, and on the social valuation of the workers. Juxtaposing Mr Shen's handbook with the songs of hired workers gives the impression that the bargaining positions of the parties concerned differed markedly over time. However, looking at the small-scale employer of Shanxi province and the Sichuan worker's complaints, the contradiction between employers and employees appears synchronously too.