The Making of a Smuggler: Discovering the Shanxi Merchant Network in the Gao Pu Jade Smuggling Case

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Beijing-centered Qing Empire expanded westward and engulfed the entire Mongolian steppe, where they maintained rare long-term peace and exerted strong control over the diverse nomadic groups for the next hundred years. While the process of the Qing expansion has been well documented, scholars have yet to explore how the Qing imperial project led to unprecedented development of long-distance trade across its massive territories and in turn reshaped the Chinese commercial landscape. In this paper, I tell the unknown story of Dashengkui, a Chinese trading firm with an origin in early Eighteenth Century Mongolia, which developed into the champion of the Sino-Mongol trade and arguably the largest private trading enterprise in Chinese history prior to modern times. By tracing its developmental trajectory and analyzing its modus operandi, I will not only reconstruct how the challenges of the newly thriving Sino-Mongol trade brought about new business practices and organizations unprecedented in Chinese history, I will also reveal the processes through which Dashengkui’s operations evolved into an integral part of the Qing imperial apparatus in Mongolia. In addition, I will suggest how Dashengkui’s story will help us revise existing perceptions of traditional Chinese business and the spatial economy of early modern China, as well as contribute to the comparative studies on the relationship between empire and commerce in world history.