2.2 the Economy of Early China the Treatise on Food and Money

Our focus on Classical China has thus far been primarily on the areas of political and intellectual history, and we have relied very heavily on narrative sources. However, the Shiji, which was written a century after the close of the Classical age, and subsequent early Imperial histories give us a considerable amount of information concerning issues of economics: tax and landholding patterns, infrastructure development, and so forth. This section and the one that follows explore some of the information that these early sources provide concerning the basic structures of the social history of early China. What follows here is a translation and commentary on the relevant portions of an early economic text; the next section surveys very briefly issues of technological change in agriculture, metallurgy, and water conservancy.