Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica

Abstract

Throughout Chinese history, governments, considering gambling injurious to mores and a hotbed of crime, have rigorously prohibited it. For a long time the Manchu-Ch'ing regime followed the precedents of earlier periods in their policy of banning gambling, despite the ban's limited efficacy.  From the 1860s the Ch'ing government, in accord with changes in the historical situation, gradually reevaluated its policy of banning gambling.  This paper discusses the waxing and waning of gambling, policy changes, and the place of the gambling tax in provincial fiscal administration in Kwangtung from the latter half of the nineteenth century.  By penetrating the reasons behind the relaxation and tightening of controls on gambling and the commencement of its taxation, this paper aims, on the one hand, to explain the prevalence of gambling and the difficulties of local fiscal administration in Kwangtung in the late Ch'ing and, on the other hand, to expose the reciprocal relationships between the center and regions, and among officials and gentry.  The entire paper focuses on gambling in people's daily lives, looking at it in the context of the particular characteristics of the responses of the government and society delimited by this period.
This paper takes Kwangtung as the object of research for the following reasons.  Given the importance of fiscal administration, the gambling tax, as an element in the structure of Kwangtung fiscal administration, was a source of funds not to be ignored.  Whether or not you look at it in terms of its absolute figures and relative proportion of revenues, the gambling tax held a position in the structure of Kwangtung provincial fiscal administration with which similar categories of tax in other provinces could not compare.  Gambling, on the one hand, gave Kwangtung a considerable income.  On the other hand, it created numerous social problems.  With the establishment of the constitutional movement at the end of the Ch'ing, the Kwangtung Provincial Assembly launched a frontal assault on the popularity of gambling in the province. The Kwangtung Provincial Assembly discovered, once they considered the fiscal consequences of their moral victory, the loss of an important source of revenue to the provincial treasury, and the hindrance of the operation of government administration. Learning more about the relaxing and tightening of controls on gambling in Kwangtung at the end of the Ch'ing may help us to understand more deeply the benefits and harms of gambling to local governance and, whether gambling is accepted or rejected, the extent to which it can be controlled under bureaucratic administration.