The Guild Elder and the Matchmaker: How Song Cities Hired People

If a man wanted work in Lin'an, he first had to find the right person. The Meng Liang Lu, juan 19, opens its section on hiring with a list of posts: pawnshop manager, shop assistant at a window counter, the manager of a wine shop or restaurant, the cook (dangtou, 铛头), the waiter (xingcai, 行菜), the buyer (guomai, 过买); then the stewards, scribes, doorkeepers, sedan-chair bearers, kitchen hands, gardeners and the rest of a great household. The list ends with one clause: "each has a guild elder (行老, hanglao) to lead him." Every trade had its own man who supplied the men.

The guild elder

Kaifeng's version is shorter but says the same. "Whoever hires labour — managers, cooks, craftsmen and the like — has a guild elder for each trade to supply them. To find a woman servant, a broker (牙人, yaren) brings her to the door." Workers, stewards, cooks, artisans: each belonged to a trade, and each trade had its elder.

The hang (行) was a trade organisation; the hanglao was a leading man within it. A household did not grab a passing stranger. It went to the elder, who knew who was idle, who was skilled and who could be trusted. What the elder sold was not muscle but one piece of information: this man is reliable.

The list goes on and on. Inside the great houses there were stewards of the various offices, palace guards on duty, imperial physicians, belt attendants, temple supervisors. Hiring covered scribes, ushers, guards, doorkeepers, sedan-chair boys, cooks, kitchen hands, lamp-lighters and gardeners; then the secretaries and inspectors of the six bureaus, the ushers of the five bureaus, the clerks of the inner offices, the minor officials of the Six Ministries — down to the manager a pawnshop needed, the foremen and apprentices a pharmacy needed, and the doorkeepers and shop boys a shopfront needed. From a yamen to a pharmacy, from a kitchen to a sedan chair, anyone needing hands went through the elder's line.

The surety behind the name

The same passage supplies the hard rule. "If a servant absconds, taking goods with him, the original guarantor (baoshiren, 保识人) goes after him." If a hired man ran off with the property, you went to the man who had vouched for him.

That sentence is the hinge of the whole system. Hiring in a Song city worked not by written contract but by personal guarantee. The elder brought the man; the surety answered for him. When something went wrong, before any magistrate was involved, the guarantor was chased for the body. A stranger could be hired in the city because somebody stood behind him.

The women's side

For women there was a separate set of intermediaries. Kaifeng says a broker brings the woman servant; Lin'an is more explicit. When officials' households or rich families wanted a concubine, singing boys and dancing girls, a cook, needlewomen or maids of various grades, "there are official and private yasaos (牙嫂) and procurers; at a word they go out and find them."

The yasao was a broker, licensed or otherwise. What she handled was not only cooking and sewing but also entertainers and concubines. The passage is blunt: the buying and selling of people and the hiring of service ran together, and it cannot be read as a modern employment agency.

Agencies for the road

One more kind dealt with travel. "When officials or scholars wish to set out, return home, take up a post or go to study, there are also land-route elders (chulu hanglao, 出陆行老) who hire porters and attendants and contract for service along the way, with no failures of duty." The source adds its own verdict: nothing went wrong on the road — that was the selling point.

Right beside hiring stood the "Four Offices and Six Bureaus" (四司六局): for an official spring banquet or a rich family's feast, a complete staff could be borrowed or hired — tent-keepers, tea-and-wine men, cooks, tray-bearers, fruit men, honey-preserve men, vegetable men, lamp men, incense men, and the stewards who arranged it all. Lin'an's service economy did not stop at individuals; whole teams could be hired as a set. That is the same trade seen from the other end.

The ledger the sources do not show

There are no rates. How much the elder took, what percentage the broker charged, what a porter earned for a journey: neither book says. Nor is the line between elder and broker drawn cleanly, since the two titles overlap in the two texts. Nor is there a count: how many elders or brokers Lin'an had is not recorded.

One distinction matters. These men were not the xianren (闲人), the idlers who attached themselves to rich young men for meals and errands. The elder and the broker held lists and had sureties behind them. One waited in the street for a job; the other kept names in a book.

Both books file this trade among the city's infrastructure rather than its customs: the Meng Liang Lu puts hiring after entertainment quarters, warehouses, associations and idlers, and immediately before the rental of banquet services; the Dongjing Meng Hua Lu puts it between carting and money, and fire prevention.

Put together, the labour market of a Song city was a net woven from names: elders leading men, sureties answering for them, brokers handling the women's side, road elders handling the journey. There was no labour bureau and no notice board. There was "I know him" and "someone answers for him".