Abstract
Due to the fall of its northern region, the Song Government lost the channel to trade horses with the northwest nomadic tribes across Shaanxi area in the beginning of the Southern Song. In order to satisfy the demand for horses due to the fights against the Jurchen, Song started buying horses from the southwest tribes from Guangxi, and these horses were known as “Guang Horses.” Previous studies have carefully examined the issue in terms of the process, number of horses, means of exchange, trading agencies, transportation routes and even the relationship between the Southern Song and southwest tribes. However, most existing studies makes their approach from the horse policy perspective, without noticing the meaning behind the horse trade was in fact a long-distance trade connecting the southwestern tribes with Guangxi, Fujian, and even the overseas. This paper argues that, as the Ziqi Kingdom which rose from the horse trade gradually seized the salt ponds from the Dali Kingdom, the status of salt in the horse trade declined sharply. On the other hand, the burgeoning demand for brocade from the Southwest tribes shifted the horse trade that was mainly a salt-horse exchange in the early-Shaoxing reign to instead a brocade-horse exchange after the mid-Shaoxing reign. Disputes about the lucrative horse trade rights resulted in the request to open a new horse trade market in Yizhou. Behind the request was the dispute between the Ziqi Kingdom and Luodian Kingdom, Yongzhou and Yizhou, and essentially also the conflict between Fujian, where most of the smuggled brocades originated, and the Military Commission of Guangxi. After the Guangxi Military Commissioner Fan Chengda suppressed the Xing’an merchants, who dominated the smuggled brocades of Fujian, in the early Chunxi reign, the Military Commission of Guangxi started to get involved in the triangular trade between brocades from Fujian, mercury from Guangxi and horses from these western tribes, and eventually made the Fujian brocades an officially recognized trading item in the Guangxi horse trade.
Keywords
Guangxi Horse Trade, Ziqi Kingdom, Yizhou horse trade, Xing’an merchants, Fujian brocades
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