Ya tsu is a manner of contract which combined mortage and lease of lands and houses, and it means renting of a house or a piece of land by means of trustint money or silver in advance for the tent. This article deals only with ya tsu of farms. As population growth of tenant farmers brought about relative shortage of land, there arose a keen competition among them for tenements. Some of them, in hope of being given a preference, began to pay in advance certain amount of rent for the year either in copper coins or in silver. As the competition intensified more and more, the amount of money offered in advance gradually increased, till there appeared ` chung ting ch'ing tsu '重頂軽租, which meant to pay a large amount of copper or silver in advance at the beginning of the term of a contract with paying an insignificant amount of rent annually. And the landlords used the money they received from their tenant farmers for money-lending business at high interest. The rise in the amount of money thus deposited led to expulsion of the poorer class of tenant farmers from competition, leaving only substantial, stable farmers. It sometimes happened that because a landlord had not ready money to pay back the deposit to a tenant farmer when he threw up his lease, the farmer transferred his lease to another farmer who gave him that amount of money for it; while there appeared a group of big farmers who leased a large area of land from one or more landlords to sublet the land to poor farmers of the lower class at higher rent than they themselves paid to the landlords. The relationship between a landlord and a tenant farmer when the land was leased by ya tsu resembled that when the land was leased by t'ien mien 田面. Many recently published reports of the investigation into old rural practices have described the right of a tenant farmer who deposited a large amount of money by ya tsu as ` t'ien mien ', but there was a great difference between them, and it can be said that the more the practice of ya tsu developed the more declined the practice of t'ien mien.

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Agricultural societies always have large seasonal fluctuation of money demand. Harvest seasons need large amount of small value currencies which are handed to scattered peasants, while much of these currencies are hoaded within regions during the farmers' slack seasons. So that, currencies had two inconsistent functions before managed monetary system appeared. One is as local currency which circulates and stagnates in corresponding with local money demand fluctuation. The other is as interregional currency which persistently guarantees universal value. Monetary system of the Qing dynasty splited two functions into silver bullion as inter-regional currency and copper cash as local currency. They dindn't set up any fixed exchange ratio between two currencies. This swaying system played a role in preventing emergence of autonomous local mints. Moreover, considerable supply of official copper cash under the divided system in the 18th century guided Chinese society to overvalue local products and local currency against silver. Undervalue of silver purchasing power, led local economy to refrain from forming trade surplus oriented structure. Continuous silver influx following the 16th century incured pro-trade bias over China. Then Chinese empire selected a way of stabilizing local economy by disuniting internal and external liquidity. But world-wide appreciation of raw material after 1890's provoked exessive demand of peasant products and local currency to an unknown extent, so that gradually transformed the divorced monetary system into united one which consisted of silver dollar and bank note.

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According to G.W. Skinner in China local markets are systematically integrated by a traffic network and form a wided ranging market. His thinking is quite new in that he explains the integration of higher ranking and lower ranking markets, but he overlooks the counter connection between them. This study shows through a study of the cotton trade that in Szechwan some regions were integrated into a national market and others remained independent of it. From the mid-Qing period, the indigenous cotton industry of Szechwan developed in the Tuojiang and Fujiang 沱江・〓江 vallies, north-west of the Szechwan basin. Its raw cotton and cotton cloth was sold in the surrounding prefectures and provinces. On the other hand to the east and south where Yangtze 長江 flows through, the import of raw cotton from Hupei province continued, but there the imported cotton was woven into cloth and sold to neighboring regions. Between these two cotton producing areas there were location that imported both Szechwan and Hupei cotton. In Szechwan te the largest entrepot for the import of cotton and export of rice was Baxian 巴県 (重慶). Here over 10% to the half of all the 牙行 (brokers) in Szechwan would gather to play middleman between Szechwan and other provinces. Hupei cotton was imported to Szechwan through cotton brokers, cloth brokers, and sundries brokers. But as soon as indigenous cloth (Szechwan cloth) began to flow to Baxian in during the early 19th century, the import of Hupei cloth decreased and the cloth brokers found it difficult to maintain their businesses. Sellers of native cloth could directly sell it to native cloth shops without the mediation of reliable cloth brokers because it was local product. So the cloth brokers accused native cloth shops of not paying bang fei 〓費 (a kind of business tax on trading) and reported them to the Baxian authorities. The government ordered local shops to pay the tax; but neither prohibited trade of native cloth nor put the shops under mediation by brokers. Therefore, the brokers could not bring the cloth shops into their trading system and declined as the amount of imported cloth decreased. The cloth brokers represented the economy which depended on imported goods; and the indigenous cloth shops represented the economy which substituted for imports. The decline of the former and development of the latter show that the economy of Szechwan was becoming independent of the national market.

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