Paper long abstract:

The publication of the late Qing and Republican archives of Turpan prefecture have enabled unprecedentedly finely grained studies of the social and economic history of the Uyghur homeland. A newly discovered collection of documents in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin reveals yet another level of local history through their documentation of the charitable granary (yicang 義倉) system in Turpan in the 1890s. While these manuscripts pertain to a distinctly Chinese institution, they are nevertheless written in Chaghatay, although they incorporate much of the language, vocabulary, and even materiality of Chinese documents. In their inclusion of records of debts and assessments of land productivity, as well as correspondence between the granary heads and local farmers and merchants, they show how the charitable granary system articulated with preexisting socioeconomic structures and networks. Overall, they indicate, below the level of local government at the magistrate's yamen that is typically visible to us, a surprising degree of cooperation and transparency as Turkic Muslim elites operated an imperial institution in their own community.