Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods

I must break the habit of a lifetime of reviewing and begin my review of this book with superlatives. Brokaw offers here an outstanding work of scholarship based on a varied and prodigious range of sources and she presents arguments of exemplary clarity and elegance. Commerce in Culture has enthralled me and will inform debate on the history of the book in China for years to come.

In the last ten years, there has been a surge of interest in the history of the book in China, with books by Lucille Chia (2002), Joseph McDermott (2006) and Kai‐Wing Chow (2004) in English and by Jean‐Pierre Drège (1991, 1994) and Michela Bussotti (2001) in French, to say nothing of books in Chinese and Japanese. Just two years ago, Brokaw herself joined with Kai‐wing Chow to produce an enormous and stimulating volume of essays under the title Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Brokaw and Chow., 2005). Most, but not all, of this recent work focuses on the Ming and Qing dynasties, from the 14th to the early 20th centuries, and attention has been concentrated on the rise of the commercial imprint, on the major publishing centres, on the publication of cutting‐edge scholarship and new literary trends. In this book, by contrast, Brokaw turns her attention to the margins of Chinese book culture, to Sibao, a remote part of inland Fujian province, to “the periphery of a periphery”. This was an area that was intellectually conservative, to the extent that it was intellectual at all, and it lay beyond the tide of the pressing intellectual concerns of the day. Nevertheless, unpromising though the soil might seem, it fostered the growth in the 17th century of an energetic publishing industry that reached a huge swathe of southern China, extending, as Brokaw emphasizes, not only the geographical reach of printed books but also the social penetration down to levels of society hitherto little catered for by the big publishing firms of the major urban centres.

How was this possible? One of the many strengths of this book is Brokaw's focus on the economics of the book trade, and she demonstrates the small level of investment either of capital or of skills necessary to open a small‐scale publishing firm reliant upon woodblock printing technology (xylography). These were household industries reliant upon contributions from all members of the family, male and female, for such tasks as block‐carving, printing, colportage, and so on, and Brokaw takes the trouble not only to set the thriving publishing industry of the Sibao book trade in the context of economic growth in the Qing dynasty but also to explain how the firms created a huge market for themselves by establishing branches and by sending out itinerant booksellers far and wide, and even how the itinerant booksellers were able to function financially by relying on the range of available banking facilities.

Having examined the structure and mechanics of the Sibao book trade in the first half of the book, she devotes the second half to an analysis of the output of the Sibao publishers. Unsurprisingly, they concentrated on publishing staples like school editions of the key texts, which for more than 1000 years formed the bedrock of the curriculum throughout East Asia, in other words, texts of the Confucian tradition like the Four Books and the Five Classics. These were not sophisticated editions, the blocks were often crudely cut and the paper was not of the highest quality, but these books did not go out of date and copyright considerations were minimal; and, most important of all, they appealed to a wide audience in a society in which examination success, based on familiarity with these same key texts, was seen as the mechanism to achieve social advancement. If books of this sort formed the core of the stock of the Sibao publishers, they nevertheless published a variety of other works, too, such as collections of model examination essays (a talent for composition was essential for examination success), family encyclopedias, medical and pharmaceutical manuals, and so on, and even some works of fiction. Few of these were original, mostly being based on books published elsewhere, thanks to the lack of a rigorous copyright system; occasionally, though, the publishers rearranged existing material, introduced additions or even wrote educational manuals themselves. Indeed, they sought to align themselves with the world of scholarship rather than the grubby world of commerce, which they disdained; in fact, however, they were serving the bottom end of the commercial market and their choice of titles to publish was determined principally by what would sell and keep on selling.

The Sibao book trade had passed its peak by the end of the nineteenth century but it survived well into the twentieth century, and thanks to this that Brokaw was able in 1995 to conduct interviews with elderly men and women who had grown up in the Sibao book trade, and even to find physical remains and documentary remnants of the trade surviving in village warehouses. What finally put paid to the trade was, firstly, the introduction of the new technologies of lithography and typography to Shanghai in late 19th century, technologies which required new skills and greater capital investment, and then the abolition of the examination system in 1905, which rendered a large proportion of the stock items produced by the Sibao publishers redundant and unprofitable.

The impact of the Sibao book trade is not easy to assess, for the readers remain largely invisible. To some extent they can be inferred from book design, commentaries attached to the standard texts and prefatory material, but the kind of evidence provided by marginalia and autobiographies is simply not available at this end of the market in China. In her concluding chapter, Brokaw patiently draws comparisons with other publishing centres outside the major cities and emphasizes the economic autonomy of the Sibao publishers. Their intellectual or commercial conservatism meant that established truths went unchallenged and that new currents of thought largely passed them by, but on the other hand, thanks to their efforts, the book was being familiarized in remoter regions and among humbler populations than had been the case before. There is much more, doubtless, to be learnt about the Qing book trade as a whole, and that is why Brokaw expresses her hope in the introduction that this book, “can serve as a baseline or foundational reference for future research in the field of the social history of the Chinese book” (p. 32). But that is to end this review on too hesitant a note, for this is an exhaustive, sophisticated and far‐reaching study and it can only be welcomed for its enormous contribution to the field.