Abstract:Researches on modern Sino-Japanese exchanges tend to focus on famous influential names, ignoring common people like obscure merchants. But it is only when such people, with their respective contributions to the progress of history, are taken into serious account that historians are able to produce a fuller panorama of the past. This essay seeks to reveal the characteristic functions of the merchant class in history by discovering the unknown life of Wang Tizhai, a Zheiiang merchant who travelled to Japan during the early Meiji period.