What punishments did ancient people receive for late marriage and late childbearing? What are the patterns of changes in fertility policies in ancient times?

In fact, in ancient times, emperors of almost every dynasty hoped that people could have more children and increase the country's population. After all, China's territory is still very large and can accommodate so many people. Moreover, in ancient times, the strength of a country was basically measured by its population. After all, everyone's technological level has not been improved. It does not mean that you already have aircraft and artillery here, but I am still fighting with cold weapons, so generally The side with more people fighting will definitely have an advantage. Therefore, in ancient times, people who married late and had children later were specifically punished. It is also very interesting to look at the changes in the entire fertility policy.

In many people’s minds, “family planning” means having fewer children. This view is one-sided. The concept of family planning is the behavior of human beings to regulate their own reproductive behavior in a planned way, including both "reducing production" and "increasing production". For a long time in ancient China, the "family planning" policy was implemented to encourage people to have children.

Reward fertility and set up special "child care" officials

In the early Warring States period, the total population of our country was only more than 10 million. By the time Qin Shihuang unified the six countries, the country's population had doubled. The royal family of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty declined, the vassal states competed for hegemony, wars continued, and death was huge. However, the population did not decrease but increased. This was the result of the "family planning" policy implemented by the vassal states at that time to encourage more children. For example, in the Battle of Wu and Yue, when the Yue Kingdom was defeated, Gou Jian worked hard to implement the strategy of strengthening the country. One of the important measures was to encourage childbirth and increase the domestic population.

Judging from the records in "Zhou Li·Di Guan·Da Situ", it can be concluded that the Chinese government during the Western Zhou Dynasty paid great attention to population maintenance. Among the so-called "to maintain interest and nourish the people", the first one is "Salesian". Zheng Xuan's annotation is: "Salesian means love for young children. Three people give birth to children with their mothers, and two people give birth to children." The system of the Yue State in the Spring and Autumn Period was that women had to report to the government when they were about to give birth, and the government sent doctors to guard them. The reward for giving birth to a boy is two jugs of wine and a dog, and the reward for giving birth to a girl is two jugs of wine and one pig. For those who have three children, the government will assign wet nurses to nurse them ("Guoyu·Yueyu"). In Qi State, the government also has a special "child care" officer who is responsible for rewarding "glorious mothers". For example, a mother with three children can be exempted from paying taxes; if she has one more child, the whole family's taxes will be exempted; if a fifth child is born, , the government also sent a nanny, and the rations for Lao Wu and the nanny were all borne by the state. In addition, there are "orphan-in-charge" officers in various places who are responsible for finding adoptive families for orphans. The families who adopt orphans are given free treatment, and the "orphan-in-charge" officers have to visit them frequently.

One of Gou Jian's important policies to revitalize the Yue Kingdom was to encourage childbirth and increase population.

Starting from the Qin and Han Dynasties, such functions became the legal responsibilities of state and county yamen. "Book of the Later Han·Jia Biao's Biography" records that when Jia Biao was the magistrate of Xinxi County, robbery and murder occurred in the south of the city and infant drowning occurred in the north of the city. Jia Biao ordered him to drive to investigate. The officer thought that compared with the two, robbery and harm were more important, and he was about to take him to the south of the city. County Magistrate Jia got angry and said: "It is common sense for bandits to harm people; it is unnatural for a mother and her son to kill each other." Violation of the road." Then he drove north. In the past few years, thousands of lives have been added to Xinxi County. They all said that they relied on County Magistrate Jia to survive, so all the boys were named "Jia Zi" and all the girls were named "Jia Nu". In the Northern Song Dynasty, the government-run Salesian Bureau appeared, which is recorded in history. However, private families were still encouraged to come to the Bureau to adopt children. The officials gave money and rice or assigned wet nurses. There was even a saying that "they do not raise healthy children, but raise beggar children." Since the Song Dynasty, Salesian bureaus have gradually become popular, and later they were also called Yuyingtang. However, the specialized "Zhang Gu" officials were no longer assigned to the establishment and were assigned to miscellaneous duties.

Forced early marriage, and those who did not marry at the appropriate age were severely punished

While encouraging childbirth, Yue also forced early marriage. It stipulates: "If a strong man does not marry an old woman, if an old man does not marry a strong wife, if a woman does not marry at seventeen, her parents will be guilty; if a husband does not marry at thirty, his parents will be guilty." From the perspective of the family planning policy of the Yue Kingdom, today's popular "Sister-brother love" and "twilight love" with great age disparity are strictly prohibited. Young men are not allowed to marry older women, and old men are not allowed to marry younger women. Not only that, parents who marry out of marriageable children must also be punished. Later, the State of Yue was able to defeat the State of Wu and rise again. Although there were many reasons, they were not unrelated to the implementation of the "family planning" policy.

Rewarding families who have more children is only one aspect of ancient China’s “family planning” policy. On the other hand, it is to solve the problem of imbalanced gender ratio between men and women of childbearing age, and one of the important means is forced early marriage.

In early ancient China, "late marriage" was once advocated. In the Western Zhou Dynasty, the legal age for marriage was 30 years old for men and 20 years old for women. However, during the period when the "family planning" policy was implemented to encourage more children, the age of marriage was often greatly advanced. For example, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the State of Qi implemented a "family planning" policy with a age limit of 20 for boys and 15 for girls, encouraging citizens to marry early. Some dynasties even advanced the marriage age for women to 13 years old. In addition to lowering the age of marriage, some dynasties in ancient China also advocated "second marriage". For example, the Tang Dynasty advocated the policy of "a man marries a widow and the widow remarries", denying the old concept that it is unseemly for a man to marry a second-married woman and that women "will stay together for the rest of their lives".

In ancient China, penalties for violations of the family planning policy were also very severe. For example, in the early Han Dynasty when Liu Ying (Emperor Hui) was the emperor (195 BC to 188 BC), there was a clear "fine" plan. According to the "Book of Han·Hui Di Ji", in 189 BC, Liu Ying ordered: "If a woman is not married between fifteen and thirty years old, it will be counted five times." "Suan" was a unit of measurement for calculating the head tax at that time. It was the taxation method set by the founding emperor Liu Bang in the fourth year after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Citizens over the age of 15 and under the age of 56 must pay a head tax. Each person has a tax. The amount of the payment is 120 yuan, which is called "one calculation". The five calculations are 720 yuan. In other words, if you are of the right age and do not get married, you are violating the "family planning" policy and you will have to pay a fine of five times the head tax. This fine was not considered low at the time. Based on the average price of grain in the entire Western Han Dynasty, which was around 100 yuan per shi, 720 yuan could buy seven or eight shi of grain, which was at least a year's ration for an adult.

As soon as Li Shimin, Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, became emperor, he issued the "Ling Yousi Encouraging the Common People to Get Married and Become a Timely Edict" in the first month of the first year of Zhenguan (AD 627) to encourage childbirth and mobilize wealthy people to sponsor marriages. Poor bachelors who cannot afford a wife use the quality of family planning and the number of widowers as performance indicators for local leading cadres to assess.

In order to promote the "family planning" policy, ancient China also had various family planning "slogans" and "slogans". Of course, the main theme was to encourage more children. There are many slogans to encourage more children, but there are at least two that are deeply rooted in people's hearts and influenced the entire feudal era. One is "Having more children means you will be blessed. Raise children to protect yourself from old age"; the other is "There are three ways to be unfilial, and the worst is not having children."

The transformation from "more people is a blessing" to "more people means poverty"

In ancient China, some scholars were aware of the serious problems caused by excessive population growth and worried that " The problem of overcrowding led to the slogan of having fewer or even no children. The representative figure was Wang Fanzhi of the Tang Dynasty. Wang Fanzhi was a popular poet in the early Tang Dynasty. He had a rough life and suffered many hardships. He converted to Buddhism after the age of 50. He opposed "multiple births" and put forward the idea of ??attaching importance to the quality education of the population. He wrote many family planning "slogans" in vernacular in the most popular form of poetry at the time. The most famous one is the line in his poem "Big Tree in Leather Clothes", "It's not necessary to have too many sons, one is enough to do things." It means, don't have too many sons, just have one who can do things. The most popular "family planning" slogan in China twenty or thirty years ago, "A couple can only have one child," has its original origin here.

By the Song Dynasty, some scholars estimated that China’s total population exceeded 100 million for the first time. In this context, Ma Duanlin, a famous scholar in the late Song Dynasty and the author of "Tongkao", formally proposed the "family planning" theory of "fewer births" and "eugenics", focusing on population quality and overall quality.

Young people’s view on age at marriage continued until the Song Dynasty and then showed an upward trend. The Northern Song Dynasty also followed the Kaiyuan Order of the Tang Dynasty, which stipulated that "men are allowed to marry at the age of fifteen and women at the age of thirteen." By the Jiading period of the Southern Song Dynasty, it had been changed to sixteen years for men and fourteen for women. As for the actual age of marriage, men are usually around 20 years old, and women are usually between 15 and 19 years old.

However, by the end of the Ming Dynasty, people had more thoughts and worries about the problem of "overcrowding". Literary writer Feng Menglong said: If each couple always has one boy and one girl, there will never be an increase or decrease, and it can last for a long time; if there are two boys and two girls, the number will double every generation, and it will only increase but not decrease, how to support them?< /p>

In the late Qianlong years of the Qing Dynasty, the octogenarian Emperor Qianlong expressed his worries about excessive population growth in an edict: Thanks to the blessing of God, the country has been peaceful for more than a hundred years. thing, but the population has also increased by more than ten times than before. It is impossible for one person to farm to feed more than ten people, and the food produced is no longer as abundant as before. In addition, the land occupied by the cottages is also increasing exponentially. There are fewer people engaged in production and more people consuming food. This is incompatible with the common people. livelihood is closely related.

If we continue to waste food at will because of a good year, the people are lazy, and the fields are barren, there will inevitably be a day when there is not enough food to eat, and the economy will be in distress. I am very worried about this!

Gong Zizhen, who was active in the Daoguang period , Wei Yuan and others are also extremely anxious about China's "increasingly populous and increasingly narrow atmosphere" and are very sensitive to the possible great turmoil. In addition to the ancient propositions such as "equity", they also advocated voluntary or compulsory migration for the large number of idle people in society who were "not scholars, not farmers, not workers, and not businessmen." Wang Shiduo, a scholar who had witnessed the Taiping Rebellion occupying Nanjing, straightforwardly attributed the outbreak of the Taiping Revolution to China's "too many people" and proposed a series of measures to reduce the population that went beyond and even went against reason. His central argument is: "The reason for the chaos in the world is: too many people (more women, so there are more people). More people lead to poverty (not enough land to support them)." Because "there are many women in the world, the reason for the chaos", he proposed to reduce Among the population measures, in addition to the policy of massacre of "rioters", more were targeted at women, such as promoting the method of drowning girls, giving cold pills to kill fetuses, strictly prohibiting remarriage, establishing virginity houses, etc.

The population view of China's traditional era has been subverted, and the transition from "more people is a blessing" to "more people means poverty" has finally occurred.