Commerce in Culture
Subtitle: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Harvard East Asian Monographs)
Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center
Published: April 30, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 673
ISBN-13: 9780674024496
Subjects: Asian / Middle Eastern history: c 1500 to c 1900; Economic History; Publishing industry; History; History - General History; History: World; China; Asia - China; Commerce; History / China; Book industries and trade; Booksellers and bookselling; Publishers and publishing; Sibao
Description: "Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops managed by Sibao natives, this industry supplied much of south China with cheap educational texts, household guides, medical handbooks, and fortune-telling manuals - ordinary texts of no compelling scholarly interest or bibliographic value." "Commerce in Culture traces how the poverty and isolation of Sibao necessitated a bare-bones approach to publishing and bookselling and how the Hakka identity of the Sibao publishers shaped the configuration of their distribution networks and even the nature of their publications." --Book Jacket.