[3] However, the elites of Huian county and others did not care much for fiscally conservative warnings such as this, and flaunted their wealth in silver.
[3] Ye Chunji came up with a ranking model for consumptionary products on the local level that could be applied to his county and many others in the empire.
[4] The lowest level in Ye's pyramid of goods were the "lesser" (ci) products, which were salt, cloth, vegetable oil, lumber, sugar, fruit, vegetables, fish, and livestock—all of which were traded out of the county by peddlers, itinerant retailers, or merchant wholesalers shipping large amounts of commercial goods.
[4] Ye Chunji noted that most of these goods from his county made their way to the nearby prefectural capital at Quanzhou.
[8] Historian Timothy Brook writes that Ye's description of his county gives the impression that most counties in the Ming dynasty relied on self-sufficient agriculture and textile production while they were largely unaffected by and disengaged with regional commodity networks between large urban markets.