Despite the scholar-officials' suspicion and disdain for powerful merchants, the latter often colluded with the scholarly elite. The scholar-officials themselves often became involved in mercantile affairs, blurring the lines of who did and did not belong to the merchant class. Even rural farmers engaged in the small-scale production of wine, charcoal, paper, textiles, and other goods. Theoretically it was forbidden for an official to partake in private affairs of gaining capital while serving and receiving a salary from the state. In order to avoid ruining one's reputation as a moral Confucian, scholar-officials had to work through business intermediaries; as early as 955 a written decree revealed the use of intermediary agents for private business transactions with foreign countries. Since the Song government took over several key industries and imposed strict state monopolies, the government itself acted as a large commercial enterprise run by scholar-officials. The state also had to contend with the merchant and artisan guilds; whenever the state requisitioned goods and assessed taxes it dealt with guild heads, who ensured fair prices and fair wages via official intermediaries. Yet joining a guild was an immediate means to neither empowerment nor independence; historian Jacques Gernet states: "guilds were too numerous and too varied to allow their influence to be felt."