Reframing imperial China’s indigenous accounting history: further discoveries in archival materials from the three centuries before 1850

Abstract

How far did the indigenous accounting of China's historically successful economy parallel Western double-entry bookkeeping (DEB)? We propose a scheme for classifying stages of bookkeeping that approach full DEB, review recently available nineteenth century Chinese accounting manuals and re-examine how far their recommendations reflect practice to be found in original account books contained in the archives of the Zigong brine wells for 1916-1917 (which have been argued to be essentially unchanged from the nineteenth century Qing era and perhaps earlier) and in the surviving accounts of the Fēngshèngtài salt traders of Henan province spanning 1854-1881. We introduce the accounting records we have now discovered from merchanting businesses in Anhui province, which span 300 years and survive from the 1590s onwards. These are all more sophisticated than the ‘merchant-banking' accounts in the vast archive of Tŏng Tài Shēng covering 1798-1850, and in the case of the Anhui merchants' accounts comprise ‘balance sheets' that include monetary values for physical as well as monetary assets, matching their owners' ‘capital'. We tentatively conclude, on the basis of the evidence now emerging, that despite its variety of forms indigenous Chinese style accounting practice may in some cases have captured the structural essentials of DEB’s content and functions and might be labelled ‘Chinese-style double-entry bookkeeping' ('CDEB'), over which Western bookkeeping had no conceptual advantages.