Economic Space-Time Under the Ming 'Yellow Registers': Taxation and Grassroots Society in the Wanli Chronicles
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. ...