RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1968 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d 40 zation MARJORIE TOPLEY sometimes helped to integrate groups of neighbouring communities who would be encouraged to form associations to resist their disruptive activities. Religion, then, was often a means of fortifying existing groups of people with common interests or roles in the community. It also sometimes brought organized groups into being among those already having common interests but no other form of organization. In certain circumstances it gave rise to organizations contributing to the integration of whole communities: when all individual members of a community had a status or interest in common. Ancestor worship did so when all villagers were kinsmen; temple organization might do so when it could appeal to all members of the community as residents, for whom a particular god had significance. In both cases wealth and education were needed to bring such organization to its highest development and were themselves factors limiting control. In certain circumstances secret organizations might provide some form of village cohesion: either through a common interest in resisting them, or, when economic and social conditions reduced the differences among members of a community, through common membership of such bodies. This kind of integration would probably last only as long as the conditions reducing differences among the community members lasted. NOTES 1 This paper was prepared originally for a seminar on micro-social organization on China held at Cornell University in October 1962 and sponsored by the Sub-committee on Chinese Society of the Joint Committee on Contemporary China of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. It has been slightly abridged and rearranged by me for publication here. I have been limited in my use of published material to works available to me in Hong Kong. The research notes to which I refer were collected during field studies in Singapore during the years 1951-52 and 1954-55, and during the early 1960's in Hong Kong. 2 See his Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (London, Athlone Press, 1958), and Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (London, Athlone Press, 1966). 3 See for example Hui-chen Wang Liu. "An Analysis of Chinese Clan Rules: Confucian Theories in Action", in Confucianism in Action, ed. David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1959) pp. 63-64. 4 See his Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1960) p. 335. 5 For example Hsiao, ibid., p. 329 and 359ff. Page 45 Page 46 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1971 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g BOOK REVIEWS 219 testify, long ago revealed the theoretical relevance of much of the earlier literature on China: it is pleasing to note, therefore, that some of the contributors to this volume are now combining field research with an extensive use of the available documentation on China. This has led to a much more sophisticated treatment of theoretical problems and has, I feel, made such works much more interesting to read and more intellectually attractive for people in other disciplines. The essays in this volume, apart from one by Professor Arthur P. Wolf, were in their original form papers written for, and discussed at, a conference on Kinship in Chinese society, held in New York in 1966 and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (New York). As it is not possible for a workaday sociologist to discuss every paper meaningfully and in detail in a short review, I shall comment on only a few of the papers, not because they are necessarily the best or the more significant but simply because I have some comments on them. The first essay is by Professor Myron L. Cohen, who discusses a key problem: the structure of the Chinese family. Professor Cohen argues that the relevant components of the chia (family) can be reduced to three: the chia estate, the chia group, and the chia economy, and that the connection between the three components can assume a variety of forms or types. As he writes, 'the Chinese family has by and large been described in terms involving or assuming the existence of a chia in which the estate is concentrated, the group is concentrated, and the economy is inclusive'. Much of his essay is taken up by a rigorous discussion of chia variations, such as that an inclusive economy can be found in association with a dispersed estate and, of necessity, a dispersed group. Professor Cohen concludes that 'the possibility arises that a good deal of the movement of persons in Chinese society, movement connected with "horizontal" or "vertical" social and economic mobility, or with efforts to achieve such mobility, in fact occurred within a chia framework'. The points he makes are important and crucial: they illuminate basic concepts used to understand Chinese society; and I am persuaded by his claim 'that there may be more to domestic units than meets the demographer's eye'. There is certainly some evidence from nineteenth century Hong Kong to ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1975 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d MERCHANT ORGANISATIONS IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA; PATTERNS OF CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT WELLINGTON K. K. CHAN* In recent years, a growing number of scholars have begun to re-assess the conventional wisdom about institutional ossification in late traditional and early modern China. The new view is that the Chinese economic and social institutions of this period had great resilience and flexibility, and that the men who ran these institutions demonstrated a good deal of ingenuity for purposeful change. Such a re-assessment can be supported by examining the pattern of institutional developments in the various types of Chinese merchant organisations during the late Ch'ing. Merchant organisations represented some of the most influential economic and social institutions in Chinese society. Several times in its long imperial era, new organisations were created and existing ones improved upon in response to changing environmental conditions. These institutional changes were particularly active during the nineteenth century, because the Chinese merchant community, for reasons of domestic troubles and foreign trade, was itself undergoing major and rapid changes. One index to gauge these changes was the trend towards broader based institutions. These catered to wider economic and social concerns than the traditional commercial guilds (called under various names such as hang-hui, kung-so, t'ang, chao, kung, ko and tien), which had narrow and particularistic interests. Traditional guilds remained powerful, however, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, following the defeat of the Taipings, guilds in many areas experienced vigorous growth because new ones were needed to re-establish the internal market system ravaged by the rebellion. Yet, in 1903, when the central government * Dr. Chan is Assistant Professor of History at Occidental College, Los Angeles. The author wishes to express his appreciation to the American Council for Learned Societies and the Harvard-Yenching Institute for their generous financial support which made possible the writing of this paper. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q 187 Municipal Council, 718 volumes and pamphlets were purchased from Wylie for Tls 1,767.50 to form the nucleus of the society's library. The Shanghai Municipal Council stipulated that the society would be responsible for providing “suitable rooms and a librarian”, and should they fail to do so, the books would be given to another organization. O. R. Crockett was appointed the "honorary librarian" in 1864, the first of at least twenty-eight people to hold this office. Over the years they represented at least four nations, England, the United States, Germany, and France. The third librarian, the American-born Frenchman Henri Cordier who compiled the monumental Bibliotheca Sinica, was the real founding father of the library. Unlike many members of the society, Cordier was a young man newly arrived in China, and full of both curiosity and energy. He immediately struck up a friendship with Wylie and was instrumental in the transfer of his books to the library. His first task for the society was to compile a catalogue of its recently assembled collection. As he recalled later: On the first of April, 1871, Mr. Ney Ellis, then a merchant, took me to the library, which was indeed in a most dilapidated state in a large room of the Commercial Bank Building... I began at once the Catalogue of the books, which was published the next year (1872) at the Ching-Foong General Printing Office. This catalogue showed 1,300 titles in Western languages, arranged according to Klaproth's classification, "at least in its principal divisions", with Wylie's books noted with asterisks. Not catalogued were an additional 1,023 volumes in Chinese, mostly from Wylie, and the **Transactions of Learned Societies and Periodical Publications, which form one of the most important classes of the Library**. Cordier noted in the preface: However valuable this collection may be, its deficiency is very great; and many a volume which an Orientalist ought to find is sought in vain through the pages of the Catalogue. Now that the paucity of our resources is known, no doubt people will come forward and help us fill the blanks. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g 204 Hunter, Jane, The Gospel of Gentility, American Women Missionaries in Turn-of the Century China, New Haven Yale University Press, 1984 Hunter, W C. The 'Fan Kwae' at Canton, London Kegan Paul, 1882 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen Publishing) Hunter, William, Bits of Old China, London K Paul, French, 1885 Hutchison, James Lafayette, China Hand, Boston and New York Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1936 Hutchison, Paul, ed. A Guide to Important Missionary Stations in Eastern China Lying Along the Main Routes of Travel, Shanghai Mission Book Company, 1920 Hyatt, Irwin T, Jr, Our Ordered Lives Confess. Three 19th Century Missionaries in East Shantung, Cambridge (Mass). Harvard University Press, 1976 Ichiko, Chuzo, Political and Institutional Reform, Cambridge History of China, vol II, 375-415 Inglis, Brian, The Opium War, London Hodder and Stoughton, 1976 International Mission Council, Christian Education in China, A Study Made by an Education Commission Representing the Mission Boards and Societies Conducting Work in China, New York, 1922 Isaacs, Harold Robert. Images of Asia, New York and London. Harper and Row, 1972 Jesuits, Letters from Missions, The Travels of Several Learned Missioners of the Society of Jesus translated from the French in 1713, London printed for R Gosling, 1714 1 Johnston, Alan James, The Footprints of the Pheasant in the Snow, Portland Me Johnston, 1976, 1978 Johnston, R. F, From Peking to Mandalay, London John Murray, 1903 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen Publishing) Twilight in the Forbidden City, London Victor Gollancz, 1934 (Hong Kong Reprint Oxford University Press) Jones, Francis Clifford, Shanghai and Tientsin, With Special Reference to Foreign interests, London Oxford University Press, 1940 Kemp, Emily Georgina (b 1860), The Face of China. Travels in Eastern, Northern, Central and Western China, with Some Accounts of New School, Universities, Missions, New York Duffield and Co. 1909 Chinese Mettle, London and New York Hodder and Stoughton, 1921 ================================================================================