Name: Zhihao J.
Date: 03/23/2014
Class: HIST 119

Primary Source Analysis on The Salt Merchant’s Wife

1.) Bo Ju-Yi is one of the many famous poets in the Tang dynasty. He presents his poems in a variety of style. More specifically, he mostly addresses social and political issues that are unjust to ordinary people. In this particular poem, he addresses the issue of merchants gaining too much profits that the government can’t obtain enough taxes revenue. 2.) This poem expresses excessive richness of a merchant through a third person’s perspective --- his wife. By doing so, the merchant’s wealth is more emphasized here because not only can he live a luxury life but his wife also can. I personally believe that the narrator is the author Bo Ju-Yi because he is criticizing the way that merchants gain too much money and also challenges the social problem that a person can obtain wealth easily without working hard. 3a.) According to the basic ideas of the poem, the audiences might be intended to be the scholar officials who want to challenge the social problem that the merchants on the bottom of the social classes gain too much profits without any kinds of production while the educated scholar officials on the top of the social classes gain much less profit. The merchant’s wife is mentioned several times throughout the poem. She does absolutely nothing and yet is able to live a much better life than the scholar officials can thanks to her wealthy merchant husband. The contrast between the merchant’s wife and the scholar officials is rather hateful that the author intends to inform and encourage the audiences to think and criticize this unjust situation. This idea is very important because the scale of social classes where the scholar officials are higher ranking than the merchants does not justify the situation where the merchants are gaining so much more profits than the scholar officials. 3b.) I personally believe that the audiences are from the author’s class. Recall the social classes that are ranked according to the amount of production, It seems like throughout the entire poem the author is criticizing the fact that a merchant can gain so much wealth without having to produce something while the scholar officials that are well educated and behaving in their role earn so much less profit. Both the intended audiences and the author desire to change this unjust social problem. 4a.) Multiple values are being expressed in the poem. Nevertheless, the ideas of “Material wealth” and “Loss of moral values” are being stressed the most by the Bo Ju-Yi. All of these values majorly reflect the more commercialized Tang dynasty where people are more likely to prioritize materialism over moral values. However, the author would definitely disagree with all these values as he is a confusianist who believes that people should behave in their roles in order to create a stable society. Thus, he writes this poem to criticize these values and arouse people’s desire to change them. 4b.) Recall the merchant’s wife is originally from a humble family where she practices her virtues and behaves in her role. However she loses all of her moral values once she gets married to the wealth merchant as the author critiques “On one side she shouts to her servants, on the other, yells at her maids.” Both “shouts” and “yells” link into the idea of loss of moral values. According to Confucianism, she is supposed to have a friendly relationship with her servants and maids instead of yelling at them and bossing them around. Her moral values are totally lost in the surrounding of excessive wealth because she does not practice the proper relationships with people that work for her anymore and therefore thinks that she can use her wealth to control those people that work for her. Similarly, both “servants” and “maids” reflect her social status due to her excessive wealth and thus link into the idea of material wealth. Those two words show that all the social classes are classified by material wealth that she gets to have both servants and maids because of her wealth. 5a.) This poem essentially demonstrates the fact that the Chinese economy grows a lot larger with much more commercialized activities going on during the Tang dynasty. As more and more trades come in during the Tang dynasty, the idea of materialism also rises up in people’s mind. Merchants are getting more and more greedy towards material wealth while they don’t produce anything. One social problem that arises is that merchants obtain too much profit but the government gets not as much profits as they should be getting 5b.) as the author critiques “the lesser part goes to officials, the greater part goes to himself.” These contrary words “lesser” and “greater” are tied into the problem with the merchant’s moral values. The merchant is not granted to have the greater part of the profit. However, because the merchant is morally wrong and decides to steal the greater portion of the profit, leaving the little portion to the officials. This leads to a bigger picture that Bo-JuYi depicts in the poem. The government is centralized but with less control on the local level therefore, they are not as regulated and effective in controlling the local source of profit from Iron and Salt as they are in the Han dynasty as Bo Ju-Yi says “But Sang Hong-Yang. Died many years ago: this happened not in the Han alone, it happens also now.” In the Han dynasty, local profit is controlled well enough that each party is getting the amount of profit that they should be getting. Another social problem that ensues to arise is that hard-work is not the only way to gain wealth as the author critiques “This salt merchant’s wife was lucky to marry a merchant; All day long fine food to eat, all year long good clothes.” “Lucky”, “marry”, “fine” and “good” are tied into the idea of merchant being extremely wealthy. Thus, his wife does not need to work any but can enjoy a life as luxuriously as the merchant can. “Lucky” and “marry” even further emphasized the merchant’s wealth because the merchant grants the marriage with a woman on the condition that he can raise not only himself but also his wife. This ties in broader historical background with the idea of commercialism that a lot more wealth is flowing in the society.