Taxation System

Do you know how much grain a Ming Dynasty farmer in Zhangzhou could get from one mu of land? 100 to 150 jin. After paying taxes, he kept less than 75%. But that’s not the most startling number. What really got me was this: a patch of land no bigger than the Jiulong River plain somehow supported far more people than the official records showed. I spent a long time digging through the Wanli Zhangzhou Fu Zhi: Tax and Corvee. What I found was a paradox. The census rolls compiled in 1381 were already seriously outdated by the 1570s. Too many people had evaded taxes and corvee labor, slipping into places the government couldn’t see. ...

Do you know how much of his harvest a Ming Dynasty farmer in Zhangzhou had to hand over to the imperial court? Over a quarter. And that’s before the poll tax and corvee labor. When I first stumbled across that number in the Wanli Zhangzhou Fu Zhi: Tax and Corvee, I sat there for a moment. 32 volumes of local chronicles, and every single one is a ledger. Shi, Dou, Sheng, He, Shao, Chao — grain quotas precise to six decimal places. ...