This paper will provide a new perspective on the history of merchant organizations in the Qing. It begins by explaining how the demands of state projects on the southwestern frontier in the late eighteenth century led to an increase in informal (or illicit) methods of fund-raising. It then situates the emergence of merchant groups in the southwestern market town of Chongqing within this history of local state fund-raising, and explains how central policies designed to curtail the freedom of local officials to extract revenue from the market inspired new forms of merchant organization. It then traces the history of Chongqing's merchant organizations and their role in regulating the city's market over the nineteenth century. It concludes with suggestions about how to reinterpret the historical links between the political economy of Qing local administration, the institutional development of merchant groups, and the evolution of state systems to manage the market in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.