Contesting Spatial Order: Merchant Geography in Late-Ming China

Late Ming China witnessed a dynamic scenario of contested spatial representations. Diverse modes of geographic writings by the state, the Confucian literati, the merchants, and the Jesuits co-existed, each group articulating its distinctive spatial imagination of China. Taking the form of route books, an integral part of the then-growing genre of merchant manual, merchant geography stood out as a conspicuous deviation from official geography. It appropriated some conventions of official geographic writing, but re-organized geographic information according to the merchants’ practical needs of travel and business, and produced an alternative type of geographic knowledge about the Chinese empire and its locales. One of its most impressive features is that, in contrast with the official geography that represented a homogenous and homologous imperial space, made up of discrete locales each one of which linked to the administrative center in a hierarchical way, merchant geography conceived the different locales of the empire as horizontally interconnected through concrete links of commerce. This paper investigates the formation and circulation of merchant geography in the late Ming, and compares it with official geography and Confucian literati’s geography, suggesting that merchant geography might have played a crucial role in re-shaping the Chinese geographic imagination and in fostering a fresh mode of local consciousness.