China’s large and valuable pre-1949 cattle trade is effectively invisible to historians. Trade was completely decentralized, and transactions were often conducted clandestinely, leaving behind little record. Alongside the few discernible routes, cattle trade ran simultaneously in all directions corresponding to the changing value of animals over their lives.

Faced with the challenge of recreating the outlines of China’s cattle trade, this paper begins with a methodological question: how to conduct business history of an industry that had few major firms, no centralized accounts, and no clear geography of comparative productive advantage. Our method was to create a composite of over two hundred local snapshots taken from newspapers, ethnographic and government reports, and our own interviews of former trade intermediaries known as niufanzi. These two types of data complement each other, expanding our geographic scope to include large parts of the country that documentary evidence overlooks, and crucially, introducing the first-hand perspectives of the many different people involved in the trade, adding substance to what would otherwise simply be a parade of numbers. Together, these sources reveal China’s cattle trade to have been a network of overlapping systems, one that combined distance trade, specialized demand and the intensely local needs of seasonal markets.