Research On The Smuggling Of Tea-Horse Trade In The Northern Song Dynasty

The Tea-Horse Trade mainly refers to the economic and trade activities between the Chinese dynasties and the western and northern border ethnic groups.Compared with the former dynasty,the Tea-Horse Trade of the Northern Song Dynasty has a more distinct political and military significance.In the Northern Song Dynasty,the operation and management of the official camp tea and horse market were quite large,and it showed a tendency to be systematic and institutionalized.The government set various laws and policies to monopolize the tea-horse market.However,on the one hand,the strictness and maturity of the tea law system in the Northern Song Dynasty could not ban smuggling activities,and completely monopolize the ability of tea-horse exchanges;on the other hand,for smuggling participants,�the stricter,the thicker�.The direct transaction with the nomads in private,low cost and high returns,so the Northern Song Dynasty tea and horse market had always been accompanied by complex and different types of smuggling activities,which had a huge impact on the official camp tea and horse markets.The smuggling of tea horses is an illegal act prohibited by the officials in the Northern Song Dynasty.However,in the context of the intermittent and limited scale of trade in the market,tea horse smuggling effectively meets the huge demand of border groups for tea.Driven by high profits,the Bureaucratic and honors,who are represented by senior officials and frontier generals,and the merchants who are mainly based on the people in the border areas had all joined the smuggling trade.At that time,the smuggling of tea horses was mainly through direct smuggling on the sidewalk and smuggling through the wrong way,especially the remote roads around the market,which became a prone area for smuggling activities.Among them,private tea is mainly produced in Sichuan,and most of the horses come from the Tubo tribe in the Hehuang Valley.With the development of smuggling trade,the price of tea and horse with certain flexibility has been formed.The smuggling of tea horses interfered with the court's acquisition of war horses,which aggravated the corruption of officials and restricted the development of the official tea-and-horse trade.Therefore,the Northern Song Dynasty government had always been sparing no effort,but with the development of the social economy and the decline of the court's control,it was difficult to avoid that the profit of tea flows into the pockets of tea merchants.