A Study Of The Hoarder Of Liang Huai’s Salt Merchants During Ming Dynasty

In the mid-Ming dynasty, the salt merchants were divided into “bordermerchants”,“inner merchants” and “water merchants”, which is one importantevent in the salt law history of the Ming dynasty and caused the attention of thehistory field in the early time. Inner merchants played the most important role inthose three groups, and the hoarder were the most characteristics of this group.The hoarder were powerful, who regrated the “salt tickets” and made great profitfrom it. But so far, there are rare research results about them. The author willstudy from the revolution of salt policy, deep analyzing the development process,the management style and the profit situation of the hoarder in the Ming dynasty.For Liang Huai is the biggest and the most representative in the whole salt areain the Ming dynasty, this paper selects Liang Huai’s hoarder r for research.The author analyses “kaizhong system” which is the most important saltpolicy in the Ming dynasty. Then, because of more and more problems appearedduring the execution of kaizhong system, Ming government took some measuresto protect it. The author will choose some main measures which had much influences on the hoarder to descript the management environment of the saltmerchants in the mid-Ming dynasty.The focus of this paper is the analysis from the appearance to the hereditaryposition consolidated of the hoarder. There are three main reasons why the saltmerchants divided into “border”,“inner” and “water” groups. One is the peoplewho had the political right and money managed salt business. Second is saltmerchants could not obtain the salt for long time. And the last one is the Minggovernment took the “Exchange system”. Then,“Yeqi Reform” promoted thedevelopment of hoarder as salt merchants who no longer relied on bordermerchants and could get “salt tickets”. Cross transportation law by YuanShizhen established the monopoly status of the salt merchants and admitted bythe Ming government.The author analyses the management method and profit of the hoarder. Asthe management method, the hoarder bought “salt tickets” with low price fromborder merchants and sold them with high price to the inner merchants whosecapital is weak, getting high profits during the buying-and-selling process.In the words, the study of the hoarder in the Ming Dynasty should not be ignored by people, and there are a lot of problems calling for us to solveurgently.