This book explores the transformation of Huizhou salt merchants’ social and political status in eighteenth-century China. These merchants left their homes in the remote countryside of Huizhou, conducting business and sojourning in the most prosperous part of the Qing empire (1644-1911), the Lower Yangzi valley. Benefiting from the new salt monopoly policies instituted by Manchu emperors, they became one of the wealthiest merchant groups of the High Qing period (1683-1839).