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WELLINGTON K. K. CHAN
charitable halls were not merely institutions in which merchants participated; they were merchant institutions initiated and dominated by merchants. In Canton, Governor-general Chang Jen-chün once observed that charitable halls were particularly numerous in Kwangtung because there were a large number of rich merchants.24
Several factors contributed to these developments. The first was a change in the composition of the merchant class by 1900. By turning themselves into entrepreneurs, a number of officials and gentry members had joined the merchant class. Men like Yen Hou-hsin and Chou Chin-piao who came from official backgrounds took the lead in the formation of the Shanghai Commercial Consultative Association and later the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce. The founders of Ai-yü shan-t’ang in Canton probably had official backgrounds as well. Two had taotai rank and the house they bought had belonged to their friend, an official salt merchant who had gone bankrupt.
A second factor was these merchant founders' conscious borrowing from the West. It is not enough to argue that they started charitable halls because as a group they commanded great wealth. For then the question arises: Why had the rich salt merchants or the cotton merchants not done the same before? Insofar as the merchants who sponsored charitable halls came from the treaty port areas, it seems that these merchants had been influenced by the work of the Christian missionaries. In one case, an orphanage was founded in Shanghai in 1892 by merchants and the district magistrate after there were reports of alleged cruelty to orphans in the missionary orphanage.22 Indeed, Po Leung Kuk's emphasis on tracking down kidnappers was in response to complaints of a similar sort, while Tung Wah Hospital's emphasis on healing and hospital care paralleled the activities of missionaries like Peter Parker in Canton. This in no way means that works of philanthropy were alien to the Chinese merchant's ethos. The merchant's traditional justification for acquiring wealth was in order to benefit the rest of society. What was new was not the attitude, but the organisational mechanism they now employed to further their ends.
A third factor was the local officials' increasing reliance upon the leaders of the trade and handicraft guilds from the 1860's. They were asked to help conduct tax farming, and to organise contributions in money and labour towards the reconstruction of public