Neglected Historical Sources on the Late Ch’ing and Early Republican Rural Economy

-58NEGLECTED HISTORICAL SOURCES ON THE LATE CH'ING AND EARLY REPUBLICAN RURAL ECONOMY David Faure Chinese University of Hong Kong The late Ch'ing and early Republican rural economy is a very rich field for research. The material available, however, is extremely scattered and confusing. In this paper, it is my object to draw attention to some of this material, indicate how it may be used, and note some of the pitfalls. In case this sounds ambitious, let me make clear from the start that my experience is limited to Kiangsu and Kwangtung. However, I shall show that the problems that arise in studying these two provinces are fairly general. Traditional sources As always, a major source of information would be the official records, such as the Ch'ing shih-lu and the gazetteers. In addition, one might add the genealogies, the nung-shu and other handbooks, innumerable pi-chl. and documents directly used in farm management, such as land contracts, account books, and tax records. Some of these sources are fairly well-known, but let me just summarize what information may be obtained and how it contributes to our knowledge of the rural economy. This paper was presented at the International Ch'ing Archives Symposium, Taipei, 1978, and has been slightly revised. The author wishes to thank the organizers of the symposium for providing the opportunity to put together this material. -591 . Concerning production, the pressing problems in the current literature are: what was grown, how much was grown per unit area, and how extensively individual crops were grown. Answers to these questions would give us a basic estimate of production, and if we have knowledge of year-to-year variations of the harvest in addition, we would have a fairly good grasp of annual total productions. The gazetteers are invaluable documents on the types of crops grown in a district. They are particularly useful as a guide to the extent of particular crops, e.g. cotton, mulberry, New World crops. They seldom give us the acreage sown to the crop within the district, but by comparing gazetteer reports, we can generally locate the extensiveness of the crop across districts. This kind of work has been demonstrated very successfully by Ho Ping-ti.1 Gazetteers are also very useful as a source for local variations in the techniques of production, e.g. crop-rotations. However, they are not very useful on questions of crop yield and cultivated acreage. Almost invariably, acreage figures given in gazetteers are tax figures. Yield figures are rare, and if at all given, are given for special types of land, such as sacrificial land. Yield estimates from rent are 2 unreliable. Specialized texts that provide numerical data are better sources for figures on agricultural yield. There are very few of these, but I have come across some, notably: the Pu nung-shu. Ku Yen-wu's Jih-chih lu. Pao Shih-ch'en's Chi-min 7 ssu-shu. and Tao Hsu's Tsu-ho. -60The question can be justifiably asked if the numerical data in these texts are at all accurate. This question, of course, can only be answered through detailed comparison of sources. But it is possible to point to a tradition in these texts that emphasized numerical calculations in such a way that the results were not intended to be fictitious: One has only to look briefly at the Pu nung-shu to see that in the late Ming, there was a tradition in these handbooks to teach not only the technology of agricultural improvement, but also the methods of farm management. It would not even be far-fetched to say, in the case of the Pu nung-shu. that the focus was the maximization of profits. Ku Yen-wu, on the other hand, was interested in the oppression of heavy rent and tax on the Chiang-nan peasant, and he noted the crop yield in relation to the amount that the peasant had to pay as rent or tax. Pao Shih-ch'en, who was among the Tao-kuang chingshih scholar-officials who learnt from Ku's writing, wanted to find out the total crop yield in Su-chou fu to...