Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A painting of a gentry scholar with two courtesans, by Tang Yin, c. 1500. The four occupations (simplified Chinese: 士农工商; traditional Chinese: 士農工商; pinyin: Shì nóng gōng shāng), or "four categories of the people" (Chinese: 四民; pinyin: sì mín), [1] [2] was an occupation classification used in ancient China by either Confucian or Legalist scholars as far back as the ...
The social structure of China has an expansive history which begins from the feudal society of Imperial China to the contemporary era. [1] There was a Chinese nobility, beginning with the Zhou dynasty. However, after the Song dynasty, the powerful government offices were not hereditary.
The four occupations were the shì (士) the class of "knightly" scholars, mostly from lower aristocratic orders, the gōng (工) who were the artisans and craftsmen of the kingdom and who, like the farmers, produced essential goods needed by themselves and the rest of society, the nóng (農) who were the peasant farmers who cultivated the land which provided the essential food for the people ...
Shanxi merchants were among the earliest Chinese businessmen and their history could be traced back to the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period.Southern Shanxi first came into commercial prominence due to its proximity to the political and cultural centers of ancient China.
The political systems of Imperial China can be divided into a state administrative body, provincial administrations, and a system for official selection. The three notable tendencies in the history of Chinese politics includes, the convergence of unity, the capital priority of absolute monarchy, and the standardization of official selection. [1]
The Han government continually strove to provide economic aid to poor farmers, who had to compete with powerful and influential nobles, landowners, and merchants. The government tried to limit the power of these wealthy groups through heavy taxation and bureaucratic regulation.
Even before this, the state must have halted its employment of former merchants in the government salt and iron agencies, since an edict of 7 BCE restated the ban on merchants entering the bureaucracy. [72] However, the usurper Wang Mang (r. 9–23 CE) did employ some merchants as low-level officials with a salary-rank of 600 bushels. [72]
This system licensed trade with Western merchants: licences were granted to a number of Chinese merchants as long as they helped to collect duties from the Westerners, successfully aligning trading interests with the government's revenue collection. This was the predecessor for the later Cohong system. [11]