The medicinal marketplace : commerce, medicinal materials, and vernacular knowledge in the Qing and Republican China

Abstract

This thesis examines the rise of medicinal marketplaces in China from the 18th to early 20th centuries and emphasizes the centrality of medicinal marketplace in understanding the vernacular knowledge and material transformations of Chinese medicinal materials. With the consolidation of Qing rule, the thriving interregional trade had given rise to several specialized market towns as significant distribution centers between producing areas and consumer market. They were not only geographical locations for economic activities but also a site where materials, people, and knowledge intertwined in the making of medicines. It was a place where medicinal materials were gathered, manufactured, and transacted, and also a relational field where medicinal materials were evaluated, compared, assigned qualities, given names and prices. The first two chapters investigate the trading network and sociotechnical system within the marketplaces. It identifies two key nexuses of medicinal trade, within which the medicinal marketplaces functioned as the key nodes for the assemblage and re-distribution of medicinal materials. Marketplaces here are also explained as sociotechnical systems functioning in rural contexts. The following four chapters foreground the everyday knowledge, techniques and practices in harvesting, cultivating, trading, and processing of medicinal materials. I present three key findings regarding changes of vernacular knowledge and practices brought about by vibrant trading activities. First, the harvesting of medicinal materials in major producing areas gradually shifted from individual to organized work. In response to the exhaustion of natural resources, cultivated herbs gradually gained more recognition. Second, the large variety of medicinal materials made it necessary to transform them into “standard” commodities and into patent medicines. Medicinal materials were no longer treated as stable objects, but as crude substances that needed to be transformed and manipulated in different stages of transaction. Third, commercialization had generated a new body of practical knowledge on the identification, authentication and manipulation of medicinal materials shared by collectors and merchants. Their ways of knowing highly relied on practical experience and embodied skills, generating a set knowledge different from that of elite scholars.