Nine Streets (3 Volumes)

It recreates the Silk Road. In the early Qing, as China's ancient silk civilization moved toward prosperity, another overland international trade route arose: centered on Shanxi and Zhili, it crossed the Great Wall northward, traversed the grasslands, gobi, and deserts, passed through Kulun (present-day Ulaanbaatar) to Kyakhta, and on into Russian Siberia, reaching deep into Europe at St. Petersburg and Moscow. In this era of peace and recovery, trade goods were abundant, capital accumulated rapidly, merchants' status rose, and the tea trade flourished as never before, revealing the beautiful landscapes and cultural products of more than twenty provinces and cities, including Beijing, Inner Mongolia, and Shanxi. It is at once a geography of mountains and rivers and a history of the trade routes.

It celebrates merchants' devotion to the nation. Breaking free from the conventional tropes of wealthy merchant families—ruthless profiteering, concubines vying for favor, and heirs fighting over property—it binds the Confucian merchant's pursuits closely to the fate of the nation. Emperor Shunzhi personally conferred the title of Eight Great Imperial Merchants of Shanxi; Emperor Kangxi, learning from the fall of the Ming, corrected the abuses of the early Qing and united merchants and people in the shared responsibility of prospering the economy and safeguarding the state. They threw themselves into the great national affairs of pacifying the Three Feudatories, recovering Taiwan, campaigning against Galdan, weathering natural disasters, and resisting Japanese pirates. In valuing righteousness over profit and choosing righteousness over gain, they enact life's law of exchange and grow in the wisdom and integrity of Confucian merchants. It is at once an epic of family and nation, a book of worldly wisdom, a classic of the middle-way merchant's craft, and a compendium of encyclopedic knowledge.