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Survival through transformation: how China's Suzhou-centred world economy weathered the general crisis of the seventeenth century

In 1684, the Kangxi emperor (reigned 1661–1722) made the first of his Southern Tours. Reflecting on his inspection of Suzhou, he wrote: ‘I had always heard of the prosperity of Wu. Now I’ve seen its natural conditions and local customs. Generally they set great store by the false and extravagant and are satisfied with comfort and pleasure; those who pursue commerce and crafts are many, those who till the fields are few. Consequently families rarely are able to store anything up and human relations are bad.’ Less than a decade later, Kangxi’s trusted bondservant Cao Yin penned his assessment: ‘Suzhou is heaven.’ These descriptions were written less than a decade after the Manchus had finally completed their ‘great enterprise’, suppressing the last organized resistance to their Qing dynasty (1644– 1912). Both refer to what had emerged in the preceding Ming dynasty (1368–1644) as the urban core of the empire’s richest and most advanced region, centre of the Middle Kingdom’s city-centred world economy. They are clearly in tension with one another – but, like all great urban centres, Suzhou was an amalgam of extremes. Although the parable of the blind men and the elephant is originally south Asian, it was long known in eastern Asia. One could thus