Paul: Why is the demographic statistics of the Ming Dynasty so outrageous?

Paul, columnist of Wen/Observer Network

At present, the seventh national census is being carried out in various places, which is very tedious, time-consuming and labor-intensive, but it is of great significance. As a matter of fact, population statistics has a long history in China. As early as the Warring States Period, Qi had a saying that "people are often read at the end of autumn". In the Qin Dynasty's system of unifying the world and evaluating local officials, there is a hukou, and the central government requires local governments to report the increase and decrease of the number of hukou.

In the history of population development in China, the Ming Dynasty is an important period. Most scholars who study population history believe that the actual population in the late Ming Dynasty has exceeded 1 million, and some scholars believe that the population in the late Ming Dynasty reached 19 million. Then the question is, did enumerators go door-to-door to register in the Ming Dynasty? How are these population figures calculated? Is it credible? The author would like to share some views with readers around these problems.

How to make population statistics in Ming Dynasty

Long before the establishment of Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang had noticed the importance of household registration statistics. He once ordered the collection of the registered permanent residence of the Yuan Dynasty, which was used to count the population and collect taxes. In the occupied areas, Zhu Yuanzhang also issued "Huyou", which not only contained the names and places of origin of private households, but also farmland and real estate, which gathered the two elements of population and property.

According to the Records of the Early Years of the People's Republic of China, Zhu Yuanzhang attached great importance to this. Every time he conquered the city by personal expedition, he gave out "household reasons" to the people, and "all spent their own money". In this way, these people can receive Mo Bao, the future emperor of Ming Taizu, which is valuable.

The statue of Zhu Yuanzhang, the great ancestor of the Ming Dynasty

After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang paid more attention to the household registration, and soon issued an important document to the whole country: "Household Post". The so-called "household post" is similar to today's household registration book, which is filled in by households and records the population, native place, age, grassroots affiliation and other information of each household. The household post is printed by the central household department, with the font size and the official seal of the household department. The completed household posts are uniformly distributed to the state and county governments, and the local governments organize manpower to carry out the census and fill in the household posts. Fill in the household post in duplicate, one for the household department and one for the people themselves. State and county officials will also sign the completed household post to show their responsibility. In the whole process, the imperial court will mobilize the army to carry out inspections. If there is any confusion, the relevant personnel will be severely punished.

The content recorded in household posts is quite detailed, but it is only a static statistic after all. With the passage of time and the vicissitudes of life, the content of household posts is bound to be out of touch with the actual situation, and the Ming Dynasty needs an equally rigorous and dynamic statistical method. So in the fourteenth year of Hongwu, the yellow book of tribute appeared.

The yellow book is richer in content than household posts. Through the yellow book, the state combines population management, tax collection and local governance to classify each household. Different from today's geographical division of household registration, the household registration in the yellow book pays more attention to the corresponding taxes of the people. In the Ming Dynasty, there were household registration categories such as civilian households, military households, craftsmen, and kitchen households. Except for special circumstances, these household registration properties were inherited from generation to generation. Different household registration corresponds to different taxes, which is essentially a system of matching households.

The Yellow Book not only records the population information, but also indicates and distinguishes the types of household registration, including the "abnormal zero" households who do not undertake labor because of widowhood and loneliness, and all of them should be clearly recorded in the Yellow Book. In this way, officials can not only understand the population of the local area, but also grasp the situation of tax service.

Of course, such a useful yellow book can't be made only once. During the reign of Hongwu, it was stipulated that a yellow book should be compiled every ten years, which was under the unified command of the Ministry of Housing and the specific responsibility of the local prefectures and counties. It was called "making yellow books". Before each large-scale construction, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Affairs distributed samples of yellow books to the whole country, and the local government made two copies in every mile according to the samples, and arranged for officials to go to the countryside to fill in information and verify the contents door by door. One of these two booklets is left in place, with green paper as the cover, and the other is with yellow paper as the cover, and handed in to the household department. The so-called "yellow" book comes from this.

How to keep so many pornographic books has become a big problem. The imperial court has to check the yellow books from time to time, so it can't be too far away from the yamen. However, there are a large number of yellow books in the country, and every ten years, new yellow books are continuously sent to the capital, so there must be enough space, and safety issues must be guaranteed, especially to prevent fires.

Zhu Yuanzhang chose the Houhu Lake in Nanjing, which is now Xuanwu Lake, to build a house on the island in the lake and store the national yellow book. It's close to the imperial city, not far from the yamen of the Ministry of Finance. The natural water surface eliminates the possibility of outsiders going to the island casually, ensures the safety of the yellow book, and has the natural advantage of preventing fires. It can be described as an excellent place.

data map

in the Ming dynasty, the system of making yellow books once every ten years continued for a long time. In order to store a large number of yellow books, the island of Xuanwu Lake was gradually covered with yellow book warehouses. In theory, the imperial court can clearly grasp the changes of the country's population through the yellow book made every ten years.

How outrageous was the demographic statistics of the Ming Dynasty

From the perspective of system design, the demographic statistics of the Ming Dynasty were not as rigorous as today, but they were also quite rigorous. Academic circles generally believe that the national population statistics of about 6 million in Hongwu fourteen years have high credibility. Then, since the Yellow Book is revised every ten years, does it mean that the population data after that are equally credible? We might as well look at several sets of figures first.

as far as the whole country is concerned, in the official documents of the Ming Dynasty, there were 11,415,829 households and 66,598,337 households in the first year of Yongle, which are the highest numbers of Ming hukou in official statistics. Anyone with a little common sense will have time doubts about this "highest value". In the traditional era, the peak value of the national population should be the end of the Taiping period. In the Ming Dynasty, the country was nearly 3 years old, but the peak value of the population appeared in the first year of Yongle, which was only 3 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China. This is obviously abnormal.

If the household registration figures recorded in official documents are linked together, it will be even more abnormal. In the first year of Yongle, the statistics reached its peak, but in the second year of Yongle, it suddenly shrank, with the number of households and population being 84.8% and 76.5% respectively of the previous year. In one year, the number of people in the whole country was less than 15 million. In the following years, the number was relatively stable, but in the tenth year of Yongle, the number of registered permanent residence suddenly rose again, almost returning to the level of the first year of Yongle. However, in the 11th year of Yongle, the figures plummeted again and fell back to the level of the 2nd year of Yongle.

if we go back, we will find that the data of the first year of Yongle may not be normal. In the thirty-fifth year of Hongwu, that is, the fourth year of Jianwen, there were 1,626,779 households and 56,31,26 people in China. It is unbelievable that the population of the whole country can increase by 18% in just one year.

similar situations are not unique. For example, it is recorded in Ming Shi Lu that from the 14th year of Chenghua to the 15th year of Chenghua, the population of the whole country soared by nearly 1 million, but it fell back in another year. In the twenty-third year of Chenghua, the population actually dropped by more than 15 million over the previous year.

in the late Ming dynasty, the official population figures were even more wonderful. In the more than 6 years from the first year of Qin Long to the seventh year of the Apocalypse, there was a slight difference in the number of households and mouths in only three years. For more than half a century, the population figures of the Ming Dynasty have hardly changed!

The national statistics are obviously unreliable, and the local demographic statistics are also unreliable. There are also many absurd statistics in local chronicles. For example, in Shaoxing Prefecture, there were about 4, men and less than 18, women in the 14th year of Wanli.

Another example is mian yang County, Hubei Province. It is reported that there were 25,346 males and 13,876 females in the first year of Jiajing County. Such a wonderful ratio of male to female is obviously abnormal.

There are obvious problems with the population recorded in many local chronicles. For example, Wujiang County Chronicle compiled during Jiajing years records that there were 361,686 people in Hongwu four years, but in Jiajing fifteen years, only 95,667 people were left. In the prosperous Suzhou mansion, after more than 1 years of peace, the population has dropped by more than 7%, which is incredible.

data map

today, we can easily find these problems, and the Ming people will naturally not turn a blind eye. It has long been pointed out that making pornographic books every ten years "costs people unlimited money, but it is shelved". When compiling the Yellow Book, most officials in charge copied the old book or even filled it in at random.

after the establishment of the Qing dynasty, I received the yellow book of the Ming dynasty and found that the data in the late Ming dynasty had no reference value at all. Even the names of households in the yellow book in Chongzhen years are exactly the same as those in Hongwu years. The most amazing thing is that the Ming Dynasty perished in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, and the Qing people actually found the Yellow Book in the twenty-fourth year of Chongzhen. I don't know which official who is too active, but he has compiled the next yellow book in advance.

In a word, although the Ming Dynasty left a wealth of demographic data, whether it is true or not needs a big question mark. As far as the national data are concerned, only the statistics during the Hongwu period are more reliable, but even the data during the Hongwu period, according to the research of contemporary scholars, did not include ethnic minorities, military status of health centers and the civilian population under the jurisdiction of health centers, and there are still some shortcomings.

as for the actual population of the Ming dynasty in the next two hundred years, most scholars at present infer the population growth rate by selecting more reliable local data, and then estimate it based on the data of Hongwu period. Mr. He Bingdi, the most influential scholar in the research field of population history of Ming Dynasty, thinks that the population of Ming Dynasty was about 65 million in the late 14th century and about 15 million in the 28th year of Wanli. Since then, scholars have revised it, thinking that the population value in the late Ming Dynasty may be even higher, such as "Population History of China?" Ming Dynasty holds that the population of Chongzhen in late Ming Dynasty may be 19 million in three years, and it is about 15 million in seventeen years.

Why is it unreliable

After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, although the yellow book system still existed, the household registration statistics were already inaccurate, which was known as early as the Ming Dynasty. In modern times, however, some people have not made an analysis, and directly quoted the figures recorded in Ming Shi Lu, which has caused many jokes. With the advancement of academic research, especially the in-depth discussion by scholars such as He Bingdi, this issue has been fully clarified and entered a more profound research field. Here, we don't explain it too deeply, but only discuss a key question: why is the household registration statistics in the Ming Dynasty so unreliable?

Mr. He Bingdi gave several explanations in his famous book "Population Descending from the Early Ming Dynasty and Related Issues (1368-1954)": landlords and gentry sheltered households, officials engaged in malpractices for personal gain, merged households, and disrupted household registration, and because the military register was in the charge of the Ministry of War, it was not included in the yellow book. These reasons are valid, but they don't stop there.

a question worth thinking about first is, why does the country count household registration? Since the pre-Qin dynasty, the focus of population statistics in successive dynasties has been to provide the basis for the national tax service, and to make clear the situation of the people who undertake the land tax service through population statistics. Simply put, it is necessary to count the number of taxpayers and who are the taxpayers. In the Sui Dynasty, there was a "reading of the appearance of a big cable", which was copied and checked one by one according to the face to ensure that no mistakes were made.

The yellow book made in the early years of Ming Dynasty is also the same in essence, and its control focuses on people. However, the focus of taxation in Ming Dynasty was not always people. With the development of social productive forces, the role of land is becoming more and more important, and national income gradually depends on land tax, not poll tax and corvee. Therefore, Zhang Juzheng's reform wants to clear up the fields, but he has little interest in checking the population. Later, there was a so-called "spreading the land into the mu" method, which was completely merged into the land.

although the Ming dynasty didn't reach this point, there were also some situations such as "people attached to the fields" and "taking the ding as the poor". In this process, the head gradually changed from the unit of population measurement to the unit of tax payment. The number of "Ding" in a place usually reflects not the population, but the number of tax paying units. Because of this, women and children, especially girls, who have no ability to pay taxes will not be recorded in the statistics, so there is a great disparity between men and women. In the same way, it is not difficult to understand the "semi-ding" that is common in local chronicles. It is not a magical "semi-man", but a semi-taxpayer.

why are there so many "people" missing in Wujiang county, Suzhou prefecture? Obviously, it is also related to taxes. Imperial examination gentry do not undertake corvee, and even land tax may not be paid, so it is naturally unnecessary to record them in the book. Although the elite of the imperial examination only accounted for a very small number of the population, they sheltered many farmers.

Future generations envy the gentry in the south of the Yangtze River for their romance and happiness, but where can they get the money to support this chic and glistening? Of course, it was given by farmers. If the gentry get more, the country will get nothing, so the south of the Yangtze River is getting richer and richer, while the number of people in the national tax book is getting less and less, and the number of registered permanent residence as tax statistics naturally decreases.

Liu Rushi stills

However, we can't overkill it, and think that the Yellow Book of Ming Dynasty has nothing to do with population statistics. It is also far-fetched to completely understand the household registration figures recorded in Ming Shi Lu as tax paying units. The official population figures in the late Ming Dynasty should be a complex product of mixing various types of population statistics. Of course, there are demographic data, but there are also taxpayers, and there are artificial sabotage by officials, which is difficult to use as a single figure.

Especially after the late Ming Dynasty, the relationship between taxes and land became more and more important, while the relationship between taxes and population became smaller and smaller. Whether the household registration number was accurate or not would not have a significant direct impact on the country's fiscal revenue. Therefore, no one paid more attention to the issue of yellow books, which led to the absurd joke of yellow books in the twenty-fourth year of Chongzhen.