The Hidden Land

The Garrison System And the Ming Dynasty

Cheng Gu, Ping Ning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000711004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

"The Hidden Land" means that a large amount of land in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) was "hidden" or unknown, since the land was managed by both the administrative and the military systems, and only the former was made public while the latter was being hidden due to confidentiality issues. This is one of the author's creative findings as a result of his solid textual research and rigorous argumentation.
Since the Ming state management system had a great impact on the land, the population, the taxes and corvée, the imperial examinations, the justice, the grass-roots organizations and the frontier ethnics during the 500 years from Ming to Qing (1636–1912), the views on the garrisons and guards ( weisuo ) in the military system are of great help to review the essential issues of the period, which were often misunderstood or neglected before. In addition, the author introduces the present situation, existing problems and basic historical materials in the Ming study which will be beneficial to the Ming researchers and enthusiasts.

1 A new analysis of cultivated land in the early Ming

The amount of cultivated land in the early Ming has long been a topic of interest in academia. With regard to two very different statistics of the total cultivated amount recorded during Hongwu reign (1368–1398), many Chinese and foreign scholars have offered different explanations. The author of this book, based on studies of official documents and local gazetteers, presents a new viewpoint. In the early Ming, all the cultivated land in China was under the jurisdiction of the civil administrative system or the military system. The amount of agricultural land under the jurisdiction of the civil administrative system was calculated by the Ministry of Revenue and recorded in the veritable records of the early Ming as roughly 4,000,000 qing. However, in Rules for Administrators, compiled in Hongwu 26 (1393), the total area of cultivated land was said to be approximately 8,500,000 qing, which included cultivated land under the military as well as under the administrative system. This essay will attempt to shed new light on the weisuo (garrison) system in the Ming and to provide an estimate of the relative amounts of state (guan) and private (min) land.

i

According to the Ming Shi (the official history of the Ming dynasty compiled by the Qing), in fascicle 77, the emperor

in his Hongwu reign 26 (1393), had all the agricultural land in the country audited, which amounted to 8,507,623 qing, and there was no unaccounted land in the entire country. …But in Hongzhi 15 (1502), the total cultivated land was said to be no more than 4,228,058 qing and the amount of state land accounted for only one sevenths of the amount of private land in the whole realm. In Jiajing 8 (1529), Huo Tao was assigned to compile the Collected Statutes, which pointed out that during the 140 year period from the Hongwu reign (1368–1398) through the Hongzhi reign (1488–1505), the registered cultivated land of the entire country was reduced by more than one half, and in Huguang, Henan and Guangdong the reduction was even greater. That was in part a result of the accumulation of land by the wangfu (princely establishments) or by dishonest local despots who took their land off of the tax rolls. As there were no princely establishments in Guangdong, the loss there was due to official fraudulence in recording or the abandonment of land to bandits.

These words have been cited in historical works for a long time to demonstrate the fierceness of the land annexation or enclosure in the Ming. Some historical works even further speculate that although the cultivated land subject to tax by the Ming government was reduced by half, the requisitioning of grain basically remained the same, which means that the feudal government effectively doubled its exploitation of the farmland that remained on the registers. But some doubts can clearly be raised about these two viewpoints. First, there is the huge unexplained gap between the some 4,000,000 qing of state and private land in Hongwu 24 (1391) recorded in the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty and the some 8,000,000 qing of cultivated land audited in Hongwu 26 (1393). Second, there are no direct or explicit records or traces of any so-called doubling of the land tax burden from the early Ming through the Hongzhi reign in the mid-Ming.

According to the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty, “the total amount of state and private cultivated land” in the early Ming was as follows:

According to this source, “the total amount of cultivated state and private land” in the early Ming was approximately 4,000,000 qing with little change. However, Huo Tao, the Minister of Rites during the mid-Ming, Jiajing reign (1522–1566), declared that “at the beginning of Hongwu reign the total cultivated land amounted to more than 8,496,000 qing.”¹ Although the expression, “the beginning of Hongwu reign,” was not accurate, it was used in the Collected Statutes of Great Ming, which were compiled in the Hongzhi reign (1408–1505) and published in the Zhengde reign (1506–1521). According to this source, during Hongwu reign, the total amount of cultivated land in the country was 8,500,000 qing. When Huo Tao discovered that the statistics in the Collected Statutes were so different from those reported in Hongzhi 15 (1502), he was confused and suspected errors in the documents. When modern historians found the great disparity between the two records of the amount of cultivated land in the Hongwu reign, they treated it as a topic for research over more than the last half century. The representative studies are as follows:

Japanese historian Shimizu Yasuji offered his explanation in 1921, arguing that the figure of some 3,800,000 qing in Hongwu 24 (1391) documented in the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty refers only to the area of cultivated and uncultivated land, whereas the statistics of approximately 8,500,000 qing documented in the Collected Statutes of Great Ming refers to the total area of cultivated and uncultivated land, plus hills and wetlands.²

Subsequently, after consulting a great many gazetteers, Fujii Hiroshi of Hokkaido University pointed out that the statistics of about 4,000,000 qing in Hongzhi 15 (1502) documented in the Collected Statutes of Great Ming included cultivated land, uncultivated land, hills and wetlands all together. Therefore, he disapproved of Shimizu Yasuji’s interpretation and presented his two new viewpoints. Firstly, of the 8,500,000 qing documented for the Hongwu reign, 2,200,000 qing, reported by Huguang province, was a clerical error in the placement of digits, which resulted in the number being mistakenly multiplied tenfold. That figure should therefore be revised to 220,000 qing. The figure of more than 1,400,000 qing reported by the Henan Provincial Administration Commission, meanwhile, was arrived at by mistakenly adding an extra 1 at the beginning of the number. Consequently, it was mistakenly increased by 1,000,000 qing. By just correcting these two “errors,” approximately 3,000,000 qing would be subtracted from the total of over 8,000,000 qing. Secondly, the other interpretation presented by Shimizu Yasuji is that the cultivated land audited during the Hongwu reign included both the actual land (that is, approximately more than 3,800,000 qing) of cultivated land on which taxes were levied and the arable land to be cultivated. That is, this number is obtained by subtracting the mistaken statistics released by Huguang and Henan from the approximate 8,500,000 qing, as documented in Rules for Administrators and the Collected Statutes of Great Ming.³ This conclusion indicates that Fujii Hiroshi believes that the amount of cultivated land documented in the Veritable Records of Ming Taizu is reliable. Therefore, the amount of the cultivated land from the early Ming to the mid-Ming was not reduced by half, but it actually increased gradually.

Liang Fangzhong offers another explanation of the disparity in statistics. He argues that “one of the main reasons for the disparity in the statistics in the registration and documentation in the Ming is the different definition of the measurement unit mu in different areas.” What Liang means is that the statistic of approximately 4,000,000 qing derives from the use of da mu(big mu) as the unit in some areas, while the statistic of more than 8,000,000 qing is the result of using xiao mu (small mu) in other areas. In other words, the amount of cultivated land recorded in various areas could vary in part according to the different sizes of the units used to measure the land in those areas.⁴

Wu Han, in his article, “The Development of Social Productivity in the Early Ming,” points out that

as of Hongwu 14 (1381), the total amount of state and private land was 3,667,715 qing. In Hongwu 24 (1391), it increased a bit to 3,874,746 qing. After many years of expanding cultivation and a large-scale cadastral survey, the number increased to 8,507,623 qing in Hongwu 26 (1393).This was 4,840,000 qing more than in Hongwu 14 (1381).⁵

Wu Han does not compare the statistics from two years that are close in time (e.g. from Hongwu 24–26), which was a method commonly adopted in similar studies. Instead, he compares the statistics of Hongwu 26 (1393) with those of Hongwu 14 (1381), by passing the statistics of 1391 with the phrase “after many years of cultivation.” Even so, Wu Han’s viewpoint is explicit that both the statistic of less than 4,000,000 qing in Hongwu 14 (1381) and Hongwu 24 (1391) and the statistic of 8,500,000 qing in Hongwu 26 (1393) are convincing. The reasons for such a drastic increase lies in the opening up of new arable land and the comprehensive registering of land by the Ming state.

Of the aforementioned interpretations, Fujii Hiroshi’s views are the most influential. As far as more recent studies are concerned, a Chinese scholar, Fan Shuzhi, argues that

during the Hongwu reign, when the Yellow Registers were compiled by the Huguang Provincial Administration Commission, it was highly likely that an extra digit ‘two’ was added to the beginning of the number (202,175.75 qing) of cultivated land. Such a clerical error increased the cultivated amount by 200,000,000 mu.

In Henan, “a ‘one’ was likely added to the beginning of the 449,469.82 qing, therefore, mistakenly increasing the cultivated amount by 100,000,000 mu.”⁶ Last year, an American historian, He Bingdi (Ho Ping-ti) cited Fujii Hiroshi’s research in a paper he published in the journal Social Sciences in China. He celebrated Fujii Hiroshi as “the most insightful and perceptive” historian of the Ming period.⁷

The aforementioned are the general views of some Chinese and foreign historians on the statistics of the cultivated land in the Hongwu reign.

ii

When discussing the amount of cultivated land of over 8,000,000 qing “in Hongwu 26 (1393),” Chinese and foreign scholars frequently cited Rules for Administrators, Collected Statutes of Great Ming, published during the Zhengde reign, the revised Collected Statutes of Great Ming of the Wanli reign, and the Gazetteer of Houhu. These books were all compiled or revised by the court or other government agencies; they are therefore rather authoritative. Although some other individual books also occasionally included records of the overall cultivated amount, the statistics they cited all came from these officially published documents. Therefore, our discussion will focus on these books.

According to Rules for Administrators, “the total amount of the agricultural land audited by twelve Provincial Administrative Commissions and independent prefectures and departments amounted to 8,496,523 qing.” On the compilation of Rules for Administrators, the Veritable Records of Ming Taizu, fascicle 226, had this to say:

the Emperor thought that as to various agencies with higher or lower positions and different hierarchies with major or minor functions, if there were no legal hand books on the specific functions of offices, the succeeding officials might be ignorant of the details regarding their duties and executive business. Therefore, the emperor ordered the Ministry of Personnel and Hanlin Chancellors to compile a book on the model of the Six Statutes of the Tang, specifying the duties of officials from the Five Military Commissions, the Six Ministries, the Censorate, and their subordinates.

In the 3rd month of Hongwu 26 (1393), this book, titled Rules for Administrators, was finished and was ordered to be issued to the personnel in the central government as well as to local officials. Later, many historical documents regarded the statistics, the more than 8,000,000 qing, recorded in Rules for Administrators, as the number from Hongwu 26 (1393), but, in fact, since the compilation of Rules for Administrators was accomplished in the 3rd month of Hongwu 26 (1393), the amount of cultivated land must have been calculated no later than Hongwu 25 (1392); therefore, it is inaccurate to date these statistics to Hongwu 26 (1393).

The Collected Statutes of Great Ming, published during the Zhengde reign, lists two different figures of cultivated land. One was documented in Rules for Administrators, which argued that “the total amount of the cultivated land summarized by the twelve Provincial Administration Commissions and other Zhili prefectures and subprefectures amoun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A new analysis of cultivated land in the early Ming
• 2 The transformation of the Ming garrison system in the Qing
• 3 Territorial administration in the Ming dynasty
• 4 The “Garrison” category of household registration in the Ming
• 5 Yongning Guard: a southeastern coastal fortress in the Ming: (On the urgent need for the preservation of ming garrison sites)
• 6 Military affairs of the late Ming
• 7 A guide to the study of the Ming history
• 8 Forty years of studies on the Ming history
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index