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The Water Mill and Northern Song imperial patronage of art, commerce, and science - China
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2002 by Heping Liu
The wineshop entrance is not wide open but blocked by an elaborate xingma, or horse barricade, made of vertical and horizontal timbers topped with brackets and a gabled roof. This seemingly ordinary-looking barricade has in fact an extraordinary origin, as pointed out by Cheng Dachang (1123-1195), a late twelfth-century minister of personnel with encyclopedic interests:
From Jin [265-420] and [Northern] Wei [368-534] times on, when officials achieved distinctive high ranks, they would be honored with the installation of xingma at the entrances of their agencies and residences.... Such barricades are now called chazi and installed in front of government agencies [generally]. (33)
Thus, these horse barricades represented a mark of official rank. The wineshop of The Water Mill has acquired the prestige originally reserved for distinguished government officials. This change occurred in the mid-tenth century. When the city of Kaifeng was preparing to welcome the grand tour of a Five Dynasties emperor, (34) it was ordered that horse barricades be installed at the entrances to all wineshops, teahouses, and other commercial sites. The practice persisted, and the horse barricade, as an insignia of honor, became an index of increasing prosperity and the government sanction of commerce. A closer look into the foreshortened entrance of the wineshop behind the horse barricade reveals a half-hidden male figure, either a customer or shop servant. Although the figure is on his way out, the opened door reveals a passage into the hidden interior and serves as a link between the outdoor activities and a party of officials drinking upstairs in an open pavilion. Such a scene may appear to be casual or ac cidental but is in fact a calculated and distinct device of Northern Song court art that draws the viewer into the interior and engages him with the activities shown there. (35)
The Northern Song government held a strict monopoly in both the production and sale of wine and liquor and guarded the lucrative business jealously. In the years from 961 to 967, Taizu issued several decrees to impose increasingly heavy punishments, including the capital penalty, on violations of monopoly. (36) In the Northern Song this monopoly was administered through three imperial wineries in the capital and an elaborate network of wine agencies (jiuwu) outside the capital: the Legal Winery (Fajiuku), which produced wine for imperial events; the Inner Winery (Neijiufang), which produced wine for court uses; and the Chief Fermentation Bureau (Duquyuan), which produced distiller's yeast, restricting its sale for imperial and private uses. (37) Wine production and sales outside the capital fell under the supervision of the Chief Wine Agency (Dujiuwu) through its numerous regional and local agencies. The wine agency was a winery-wineshop that produced and sold its own wine and had jurisdiction over a number o f smaller wineshops. The government also granted franchises to private persons. (38) This background tells us that the wineshop in the Shanghai scroll, like the nearby water mill, is either a government-owned operation or a franchise farmed out by the government to a private person. The presence of several government officials on the upper floor, marked by their red robes and "hats with two horizontal legs," seems to underline the wineshop's official status. Thus, the water mill and the wineshop could have been partners on three levels: both are state-owned properties; the same wheat is used for processing flour and brewing liquor; and both are operated to produce revenue for the government.
