19세기초의 鄕賑 - 江蘇省 太倉州ㆍ鎭洋縣 사례를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This article is a case study of the local relief efforts undertaken by local elites in Taicang Department and Zhenyang County, Jiangsu Province, in the aftermath of the severe floods that swept the area in 1823. The floods forced the Qing court and the local people to take swift relief actions. Although the court implemented government-led relief operations, the efforts had to be supplemented by famine-relief projects funded and supervised by local elites. These locally-led projects included reduced-price sale of grains, disbursement of relief money, mobilizing the poors for work at water-conservancy sites, and more specific measures aiming to save the victims of the flood and poverty. Previous scholarship has shown that active state intervention in famine relief during the 18th century gave way to the prevalence of small-scale relief operations initiated by local elites in the early 19th century. Little attention, however, has been paid to unraveling the specific details of those local operations. By focusing on one specific example of locally-led relief efforts, this article aims to illuminate how each component of the relief operation unfolded and who the donors and managers were. This study demonstrates that local elites, largely composed of local gentry but also including rich commoners and merchants, were active donors in multiple areas of relief activities and that the gentry performed managerial roles in these areas, often assuming more than one managerial positions. Together these findings suggest the significance of civilian donations in public projects and the high public profile these elite managers came to have in this period. In Conclusion, the present study attempts a comparison with another case study of local relief in Baoshan County. This article compares both cases in terms of the roles market towns and their inhabitants played in relief actions, the significance of contributions elicited from pawnshops, and the relations between the selection of managers and their donation amounts.