The development of Chinese accounting and bookkeeping before 1850: insights from the Tŏng Tài Shēng business account books (1798–1850)

Claims have repeatedly been made for the importance of double-entry bookkeeping (‘DEB’) for capitalism’s development in the West, so it is valuable to explore the bookkeeping and accounting practices of economically successful organisations elsewhere. Our paper reports our exploration into the original account books contained in the archive of Tŏng Tài Shēng (‘TTS’), a substantial Chinese ‘grocery/merchant-banking’ business whose surviving books span a period from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. The TTS archive is the most complete and integrated surviving merchant archive from before China’s forced opening to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. Our findings about its accounting processes and records (of which we give illustrations) shed critical light on the nature of indigenous Chinese bookkeeping and business organisation and on the larger questions about Chinese commercial culture and the path of its development, for comparison with those about the West. We find no evidence in the surviving account books of TTS to support previous arguments in the literature that at this period Chinese accounting practice for successful businesses (must have) had its own ‘Chinese DEB’ comparable to Western DEB.