During the Ming Dynasty, with the continuous and rapid development of the commodity economy, a prosperous commercial network has been formed.

At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the policy of "emphasizing the original and suppressing the last" was pursued. In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the status of merchants improved, and some scholars believed that they were successful in business, which was equivalent to reading in value, and the phenomenon of "Yi Jia Yi Confucian" and "abandoning Confucianism and becoming Jia" also began to appear. In addition, books for commercial use began to appear. Due to the development of commerce, various localities have begun to produce a large number of goods with local characteristics and distribute them to other places, making the regional division of labor increasingly obvious.

With the development of urban transportation, the commercialization of agricultural products and the development of handicrafts, a huge commercial network has been formed in the country. At that time, Nanjing and Beijing were the largest commercial cities in the country; Xi'an was an important town in the northwest, and along the North-South Grand Canal, a large number of new commercial cities such as Qingjiangpu, Jining, Linqingzhou, Tianjinwei, and Hexiwu appeared; and a number of new small and medium-sized cities appeared one after another between and around the ancient cities. Private trade activities are carried out on a regular basis. At that time, foreign trade was divided into two types: "tributary trade" and private trade. Overseas smuggling of "maritime merchants" and "Haihu Dajia" on the southeast coast is also active.

With the failure of the circulation of the "Da Ming Bao Banknote" issued during the Hongwu period of Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, the entire monetary system turned to the silver standard. Another characteristic of the economy of the Ming Dynasty was the prosperity of the town economy, and the surrounding cities such as Jining, Huai'an, and Yangzhou were very developed due to the continuous flow of merchant ships along the canal. Due to the prosperity of the commodity economy, the southeast region has become the economic distribution center of the whole country. Due to the prosperity of the commodity economy, the Ming Dynasty formed merchant groups differentiated by origin, called "merchant gangs", such as Huizhou merchant gangs, Jin and Shaanxi merchant gangs, etc. These merchants used the "guild hall" as a place of contact, supported each other, and became bigger and bigger.