Editor's Note: For the student of business history China has had a peculiar interest. It has illustrated forms and stages of business policy, organization, and technique which have nearly disappeared in the western world but which flourished there in medieval and early modern times. China, in a sense, has been somewhat in the nature of a contemporary ancestor of modern business as we know it. China's town economy, still generally prevailing in the great interior, is reminiscent of the town of medieval and early modern Europe with its small artisans and tradesmen and its market places which characterize the town and petty capitalist system of business; while China's commercial cities have marked the survival of the sedentary merchant and mercantile capitalism, long the great and coordinating business of the East as indeed it was of the West until about a century ago.