A contract is the writing down of an agreement between two sides as a record to rely on. A sale needs a deed, renting someone else's land needs a deed, and several people going into business together need a deed. With the paper in hand, a later dispute can be checked against it.
In the third year of King Gong of Western Zhou, the inscription on the Qiu Wei he records Qiu Wei exchanging jades and furs with Ju Bo for land, with officials as witnesses. It is an early written record of a land transaction.
The sale, loan and tenancy contracts excavated at Turpan and Dunhuang from the Tang have complete formats, and the practice of signatures and middlemen was well established.
In the Ming and Qing, Huizhou and other places left large numbers of land deeds, partnership papers and hiring papers, and the contract became the foundation of trust in private commerce and property.
Contractual Credit Culture is the class in the chapter on Commerce on private written contracts: tenancy, partnership and sale were often backed by a deed, and credit was written into it. The inscription on the Western Zhou Qiu Wei he records a deal of jades and furs for land, the Tang contracts excavated at Turpan and Dunhuang have complete formats, and Huizhou and other places left large numbers of Ming-Qing land deeds, partnership papers and hiring papers.
