CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

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Bronze Ejun Qi jie tally
Height 31 (12 V*), width 7.3 (2 7 A)
Middle Warring States Period,
late fourth century BCE
From Qiujiahuayuan, Shouxian, Anhui Province
The National Museum of Chinese History, Beijing
This bronze tally 1 (jinjie) exempted merchants from
road tolls or excise along certain explicitly defined
trading routes within the Chu kingdom. Issued at
the royal capital and renewed annually they were
to be shown to local representatives of the Chu
government. Similar documents made for persons
of lower rank than the beneficiary of this tally
were probably engraved on bamboo, 2 and the
vaulted shape of the bronze tablets, with a "node"
in the center mimics that of bamboo tablets. Their
cast inscriptions, inlaid in gold, are to be read in
eight vertical lines starting in the upper right,
ignoring the "node." Their lengths differ according
to that of the inscribed text, but all the tallies are
equal in width. They were almost certainly manufactured
in sets of five; when joined together, the
five tallies would have formed a complete cylinder
(fig. i).
The tallies found at Qiujiahuayuan comprise two
"boat tallies" and two "wagon tallies," which probably
came from two distinct sets (see fig. 2). Their
inscriptions refer, respectively, to trading expeditions
along water and land routes. The texts refer to
boats and wagons in groups of fifty (with the understanding
that clearly specified equivalents could
substitute for one standard-size "boat" or "wagon"),
and each tally in a set of five may have covered ten
boats or wagons moving together; groups often may
have been more manageable than flotillas of fifty
boats or convoys of fifty wagons. The goods that
were transported are not specified, though they
seem to have included livestock, at least on the boat
expeditions.
The person to whom these tallies were issued,
Ejun Qi ("Qi, Lord of E"), was not himself a merchant
but a high-ranking Chu administrator. 3 The
location of E, his place of residence, is uncertain; it
may have been either at present-day Wuhan — at
the confluence of the Yangzi and the Han Rivers —
or further to the north, near Dengxian in southwestern
Henan province. The tallies recorded the
royal privilege for official trading activities administered
by Ejun Qi. Their royal origin and the high
status of the beneficiary no doubt account for their
luxurious execution. Whether the merchants were
themselves government officials or private individuals
who conducted their business under some
arrangement with Ejun Qi's administration is unclear;
in any case, the tally inscriptions explicitly
state that the merchants were not to be lodged and
fed at government expense — presumably in contrast
to traveling administrators.
The reconstruction of the routes described in
the inscriptions (see fig. 3) is tentative because all
places mentioned have not been securely identified.
Some place names are still in use today
(as are most of the river names), but they may
not designate the same locations as they did in
antiquity. What does seem clear is that the trade
routes for both boats and wagons led Ejun Qi's
merchants to the outermost reaches of the Chu
state. Conducted under government auspices,
these expeditions may well have had the character
of inspection tours. Moreover, the fact that both
boat and wagon expeditions were to end at the Chu
capital of Ying, near present-day Jiangling (Hubei
province), suggests that one purpose of these farflung
commercial operations may have been to
supply the royal court.
The boats of Ejun Qi's merchants traveled all
over the Middle Yangzi basin. A northwesterly route
took them up the Han River, across central Hubei
into southern Shaanxi. An easterly route then led
them down the Yangzi, past Lake Poyang into
Jiangxi and to southern Anhui. A southern route
went up the Xiang River deep into the interior of
Hunan, an area into which Chu had only recently
begun to penetrate; the inscription mentions five
rivers without giving names of settlements, probably
indicating that no Chu administrative centers
had yet been set up here. Finally, the boats proceeded
up the Yangzi to the Chu capital.
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