The Tax and Corvée Registers of 1385

Background

The Hongwu entries in the gazetteer's annals are mostly remissions: rent remitted in 1370, the autumn grain in 1372, both taxes in 1376, half the autumn grain on official land and all of it on private land in 1381, and school fields granted in 1382. Beyond remission, the collection of tax and corvée required registers that could be checked. Among the Hongwu entries, only the eighteenth year records the making of such registers.

What was done

十八年乙丑，四月，五色云见。造赋役册，定民户上中下三等，凡徭役取验。 — Kangxi Lishui County Gazetteer, 卷之一·邑纪·十八年乙丑

Translated: In the fourth month of the eighteenth year, five-coloured clouds appeared. Tax and corvée registers were made, households were fixed in three grades, upper, middle and lower, and all corvée was verified against them.

The method recorded is that registers were compiled, households entered in three grades, and every levy of corvée checked against the register. The appearance of five-coloured clouds is the gazetteer's own way of noting an anomaly; this entry reproduces it without reading it as a sign of institutional change.

Consequences

The immediate result was the grading of households and the verification of corvée against the register. The registers were remade repeatedly afterwards: the single-whip method was memorialised in 1569; in 1571 the magistrate Liu Yinglei measured the fields and removed more than four thousand shi of "flying" grain; and in 1581 the magistrate Chen Zizhen measured the fields again and found a shortfall of more than 84,693 mu against the original quota, which the gazetteer attributes to land gradually washed away by the lake.

Uncertainties

First, the gazetteer does not relate these registers to the Ming yellow registers or fish-scale maps, and gives neither the method of compilation, nor the number of volumes, nor where they were kept.

Second, the criteria for the three grades — persons, land, or both — are not stated.

Third, it is not clear whether the shortfall found in 1581 is measured against the quota fixed in 1385 or against the measurement of 1571; the gazetteer says only "the original quota".