Commerce, Agriculture, and Core Formation in the Upper Yangzi, 2 A.D. to 1948

Vol. 9, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1988 COMMERCE, AGRICULTURE, AND CORE FORMATION IN THE UPPER YANGZI, 2 A.D. TO 1948* Paul J. Smith Introduction The story of the disasters that punctuated Sichuan's long climb to pride of place as China's most populous province is well known. As shown in Figure 1 , the forty years that Mongol armies battered at Sichuan's defenses before breaking through to topple the Southern Song in 1279 decimated the provincial population to something like a twentieth of its late-Song peak. A region rich enough to have earned the sobriquet 'Heaven's Storehouse ' (tianfu) was reduced to a backwater frontier, and backwater it remained until population growth and commercial revival in China as a whole stimulated the redevelopment of Sichuan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But then disaster struck again in the early 1640s, as the armies of Zhang Xianzhong, the Southern Ming, Wu Sangui, and the new Qing dynasty itself all used Sichuan as a battleground for rebellion and imperial ambition. For a second time the native population was killed or scattered and the economic infrastructure destroyed. This time recovery, powered by the surge of migrants from Huguang, Lingnan, Fujian, and Jiangxi, was astonishingly rapid. The region regained its lateSong demographic peak sometime in the eighteenth century, then more than tripled in population in the next century and a half to surpass 100 million individuals by 1983. The full extent of Sichuan's seventeenth-century disaster is still a matter of controversy, while assessment of the thirteenth-century holocaust has just begun.1 Certainly the calamities have fueled the impression in popular * I would like to thank the members and staff of the Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, for their generous help and support in the preparation of this article. The original version was presented at the International Conference on Spatial and Temporal Trends and Cycles in Chinese Economic History, 980-1980, co-sponsored by the ACLS-SSRC Joint Committee on Chinese Studies and the Rockefeller Foundation, convened in August 1984 at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy. 1 On the Mongol campaigns and Sichuanese resistance see Hu Zhaoxi 1982 and 1984, and Chen Shisong 1985. On the demographic impact of Zhang Xianzhong's campaigns and the wars of conquest and consolidation in Sichuan see Hu Zhaoxi 1980; Suzuki Chusei 1952:6696 ; and Entenmann 1982. Figure 1. Population of the Upper Yangxi, A.D. 2-1948 (1,000 Households) 9000 8000 7000 6000H 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000H 2 140609 7421080 12001282 1391 1542 1685 1800 1948 Sources: Robert M. Hartwell, "Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750-1550," Table 1, p. 369, supplemented by Sichuan tongzhi 64/9a and Hu Zhaoxi, Zhang Xianzhong tu Shugaibian lian che Huguang dian Sichuan, pp. 50-51. 5"K I3 Commerce, Agriculture, and Core Formation in the Upper Yangzi3 and historical imagination of a Sichuan successively cut off from its past, repopulated each time by the outsiders who came in to build anew on the ashes of the previous disaster. From this perspective the history of Sichuan in the last millenium and a half can be divided into three discrete epochs, defined and separated from each other by catastrophe: a sevencentury cycle of growth spanning the Sui-Tang reunification to the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song; a 350-year cycle of low-level recovery aborted by rebellion and the collapse of the Ming; and the three-hundred years of recovery and rapid growth constituting the rise of modern Sichuan. But if we step back far enough and attempt to put the disasters themselves into perspective it becomes possible to uncover trends that link the three successive epochs, and to relate changes in Sichuanese society and the economy to secular developments in the larger Chinese world. By adopting a long historical perspective, it is possible to show how throughout the imperial era changes in the spatial distribution of Sichuan's population related to expansion of the region's agrarian base, and to the development of trade relations with neighboring regions to the east and south. The themes I will pursue are as follows. From about...