AMONG THE “FOUR PEOPLE” (SIMIN 四民), scholar–administrators, the literati, ranked highest (not surprising, as they were the architects of the hierarchy); peasants, who produced the food to sustain the empire, ranked next; artisans and craftsmen, who created clever and useful things, were third; and merchants, who moved and sold commodities, profiting off the labor of others, were last. However, this theoretical classification with deep Confucian roots had little bearing on social, economic, and political realities. Court and Country contains many accounts of the lives of common folk outside the ranks of the officialdom, offering curious glimpses of lives and livelihoods around the empire.

PEASANT-FARMERS

The hospitality of the common people

Chinese hospitality (hao ke 好客)—literally meaning “enjoying having guests” or treating guests well—knows no boundaries. This generosity is reflected in the following account from Court and Country:

In hosting an honored guest, families will go to extremes, taxing their paltry resources to put on a good face. Thus, when a county official and his attendants stopped by a Wang’s homestead—a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation occurrence for the family—they intended to pull out all the stops by killing their only hen so that they might lay a sumptuous feast, though doing so would mean losing the entire brood on which the hen was sitting.