This comprehensive study of transport systems in south-western China during the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries is the thirteenth volume to issue from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-supported collaborative research project on “Monies, Markets and Finance in East Asia, 1600–1900”. Like most volumes published by this group, it stems from research focused on the mining of monetary metals (copper above all, but also silver and zinc) in south-western China (Yunnan and Guizhou provinces) during the Qing dynasty. Nanny Kim's book is devoted to the transport systems created to funnel these monetary metals from the mines to the metropole, and ultimately to the imperial mints in Beijing and other cities. At its peak, the imperial government procured over 7,000 tons of copper and zinc annually from the south-west. Although initiated by the imperial state, the elaborate transport infrastructure developed to deliver monetary metals was also a boon to private trade and facilitated integration of this distant region into the dynamic commercial economy of late imperial China.

Kim's study is divided into two parts. The first, in five chapters, examines the riverine transport systems through the Yangzi River Gorges linking Sichuan and Hubei provinces, the main water route for the shipment of monetary metals to state mints. The second part, comprising four chapters, examines the combination of overland and river routes from Yunnan to Sichuan in which human labour was paramount, as animal traction and carts were feasible only for short stretches. Kim combines assiduous documentary study with extensive field research along with 41 maps and 77 photographs, drawings, and art reproductions to illuminate the operation of these transport systems in meticulous detail.

Both parts of this transport system faced intractable geographical and logistical barriers to the movement of goods, notably the treacherous rapids and shoals of the Yangzi Gorges and the jagged-toothed karst landforms of the Yunnan–Guizhou plateau. Kim presents the environmental history of this region as a dynamic interaction between the physical landscape of mountains, rivers, and forests on one hand and the boatmen, porters, and engineers seeking to tame it on the other. As Kim repeatedly reminds us, the landscape itself was in constant motion in reaction to human settlement, land clearance and deforestation, and the cooling climate of this era. Much attention is devoted to the technologies of transport – ship design and construction, road, bridge, and waterway engineering, navigation, and “tracking” (human labour to haul boats upstream against the current) – and the organization of labour. Ultimately, although some efficiencies were achieved, particularly regarding passage through the Gorges, premodern technologies proved too limited to generate transformative breakthroughs. Moreover, vital as these metals were to the monetary system, the state devoted only modest resources to improve the transportation infrastructure, especially in contrast to its investments in the Grand Canal transport system or Yellow River flood control. Public investment in transport improvements, especially in Yunnan, was mostly concentrated in the early eighteenth century, when copper procurement first developed on a major scale. After this initial phase of government-led initiatives, further actions were largely undertaken through what Kim refers to as “private philanthropy”. In fact, these localized efforts, led and funded by entrepreneurs and brokers who profited from commercial transport, more likely were driven by economic interest rather than eleemosynary inclinations. As the scale of metal production diminished by the late eighteenth century, the Yunnan transport system was increasingly utilized for long-distance transport of commercial goods such as Pu'er tea, medicines, hides, salt, and eventually opium.

Even in the heyday of the transport of monetary metals most of this work was entrusted to private agents who organized the caravans of boats and pack-bearers needed to relay cargoes from the remote south-west to the metropole. The professional brokers and transport agents who put together overland caravans maintained regular chains of relay stations, warehouses, porters, and mules, hiring additional porters and mules as needed. To be sure, in times of crisis such as the Qing–Burma War of 1765–70, the government was compelled to resort to forced impressment of local people to muster sufficient labour for its needs. But ordinarily, and increasingly true with the passage of time, the transport system was operated under private auspices. In contrast to the common stereotypes of boatmen as shiftless, devious, and impoverished, Kim shows that a well-defined socio-economic hierarchy maintained order and stability among entrepreneurs, skippers, pilots, skilled crew members, oarsmen, and trackers. Indeed, Kim asserts, there were no unskilled jobs in the transport system – even the most laborious tasks, such as tracking, required experience and skill. Kim finds that labour at all levels of this hierarchy of tasks in private shipping was reasonably well compensated. It was, she says, a harsh life, but not a desperate one.

The social history that emerges from Kim's intimate portraits of the distinctive communities and social networks fostered by the development of water and overland transport in the south-west is one of the great pleasures of this book. Her portraits of the people engaged in the multifarious aspects of transport capture a mobile society often elided from social histories focused on land-bound farming families. At the same time, contrary to common assumption, regular work in transport sustained communities that remained anchored in local territories and enjoyed relatively advantageous living standards.

Kim concludes that the south-western transport systems displayed “a dynamic, transformative encounter between local and introduced practices and traditions, involving intensification, commercial orientation, and technological change” (p. 487). Although the initial impetus for these transport systems was driven by the state's keen interest in obtaining monetary metals, complementary market demands were crucial to sustaining their development in the face of unfavourable environmental conditions. By the nineteenth century, market-driven trade had displaced state procurement as the system's motivating force. Still, without technological transformation to overcome the formidable landscape, further development had reached an impasse.