宋代市民生活の一側面 : 關撲について (特輯 東洋史上の都市)

Abstract

There are several complete documents of the Sung dynasty, which throw light on the contemporary urban life. These documents contain valuable sociological, economic and ethnological materials; The present author has collected data on "kuan-p'u" from among these documents. The nature of "kuan-p'u" which seems to have Played a significant role in urban life in the Sung dynasty has not been hitherto made clear. "kuan-p'u" was a kind of bitting play and at the same time a form of commercial transaction. There were merchants who made speciality of "kuan-p'u", and peddlers often made use of this method in their derlings. The author elucidates the rules of "kuan-p'u" and its various cases as the result of his extensive documentary search in the contemporary records as well as in the novels and plays, and corrects wrong notions on "kuan-p'u" hitherto held by some scholars. "Kuan-p'u" was practised as late as the Ch'ing dynasty, but it will be responsibility on the part of the economic historian to define the place of "kuan-p'u" in the economic life of urban Chinese.