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The article presents a summary of the academic dissertation "Real Wages and Wage Inequality in China, 1858-1936," by Se Yan of Peking University. An overview of the chapter-by-chapter structure and contents is given, noting its construction of a nominal wage series of employees in the Chinese Maritime Customs service in multiple cities. Additional subjects addressed by the work include the changes of skill premiums in Chinese workers over the period, the dynamics of the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers, and the creation of a cost of living index.

The article seeks to provide information on the price of salt in China towards the end of the Ch'ing (Qing) dynasty, emphasizing the impact such prices had on the lives of China's poor. The price of salt is compared to the average wages received by Chinese unskilled laborers, or coolies. The retail price of salt is also compared to the retail price of rice in order to make conclusions about salt's real price during this time. The authors conclude that the price of salt was not exorbitantly large, and only caused economic difficulties in China's Yangtse valley. Various economic reports concerning these prices are analyzed by the authors.

This paper provides the first estimates of housing price movements for Beijing in late pre-modern China. We hand-collect from archival sources transaction prices and other house attribute information from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for Beijing during the first two centuries of the Qing Dynasty ( 1644-1840), a long period without major wars, political turmoil, or significant institutional change in the Chinese capital. We use hedonic methods to construct a real estate price index for Beijing for the period. The regression analysis explains a major proportion of the variance of housing prices. We find that house prices grew steadily for the first half-century of the Qing Dynasty and declined afterwards in both nominal and real terms through the late eighteenth century. Nominal prices grew starting in the late eighteenth century and declined from the early nineteenth century through 1840. But these price changes occurred with contemporaneous price changes in basic measures of the cost of living: there was little change in real tenns to the end of our period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]