T'ang-Sung China witnessed the unprecedented growth of trade and industry, the emergence of a complex and activist bureaucratic state, and the rise of powerful and unified empires of the steppe. All three trends intersected in Wang An-shih's New Policies of 1068-1085, which sought to reverse potential military disaster by radically expanding the taxing power of the bureaucratic state in order to finance an expansionist policy of defense. This dissertation analyses one representative facet of the New Policies, the projection of state control to the previously untaxed tea industry of Szechwan to finance critical imports of Tibetan war horses from Tsinghai.

The first three chapters provide historical background on the Szechwanese political economy, tea, and Sung horse procurement. They survey Szechwan's economic development from Ch'in-Han to Sung and the creation in the eleventh century of a foundation for centralized taxation through political mobilization of Szechwanese elites; the spread of tea cultivation and consumption from Szechwan to coastal and northern China and post eighth-century devolution of the Szechwanese tea industry with the loss of comparative advantage to the south east; and the unique geopolitical constraints on Sung horse procurement in a multi-state system.

The last three chapters examine the operation and impact of the tea and horse trade. Epitomizing Wang An-shih's theory of bureaucratic entrepreneurship, by monopolizing Szechwan's tea and linking it to the horse and state export trades the Szechwanese-run Intendancy for Tea and Horses stimulated unparallelled levels of tea production, elicited adequate supplies of horses, and generated entrepreneurial profits for the state without impoverishing tea cultivators. But the Jurchen conquest of north China in 1127 eliminated the export market for Szechwanese tea and cut off Sung China from its chief horse suppliers, forcing the Intendancy to turn from entrepreneurship to confiscatory and ruinous taxation, and undermining its capacity to obtain sufficient cavalry horses to meet defensive needs. The tea and horse enterprise offers a paradigm for analyzing the capacities and limits of bureaucratic economic control, and the impact of centralized taxation on Szechwan's millenium-long first cycle of economic development.