Owning Tanning in PR China: Khubilai Khan Legacy and Its Role for Modern Knowledge Property Regime

Patents, trademarks, public goods, or IP are all modern concepts that emerged from Early Modern Western European traditions. In this lecture I will use the example of tanning—a task conspicuously absent in historical documents—to illustrate China’s historical approaches to knowledge ownership. My case in point is a thirteenth century legal clerk under the rule of the Mongolian Khubilai Khan who established the scholarly practice of ‘rectifying names’ to secure the states access to expert labour. Tax policies further contributed to a growing historical invisibility of craft work and related material knowledge. I will also show how scholarly and elite historical sources further contributed to a historiographic segregation whereby researchers view crafts and property in Premodern China as either unrelated or as a resolved case of disinherited craftsmen set in opposition to an imperial state and literati elite who owned it all.