This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution - understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations - was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power. The larger context for this study is the 'rural-urban divide': the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

本书是杭州市社会科学院组织纂写的“南宋史研究丛书”中的一种。著者首先分析宋代经济所处的发展阶段和南宋经济的时代特色。然后分门别类依次介绍了南宋矿冶业、铸钱业、军工业、造船业、纺织业、陶瓷业、造纸业、印刷业，酒、盐、茶等食品加工业，以及漆器、文房四宝和工艺品制造业的情况。最后又探讨了南宋手工业的总体特征及其成就与不足，并给出其解释。本书资料翔实、论述精辟，可以说是一部研究南宋手工业史的难得之作。