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table 6.2
Grain Production in Agro-Military Colonies
during Yongle’s Reign
Grain Production
Juan and Page No.
Year
(in piculs)
in Ming Taizong shilu
1403
23,450,799
26: 8a
1404
12,760,300
37: 4b
1405
12,467,700
49: 4b
1406
19,792,050
62: 6a
1407
14,374,270
74: 3b
1408
13,718,400
86: 9a
1409
12,229,600
99: 4b
1410
10,368,550
111: 6b
1411
12,660,970
123: 6b
1412
11,787,000
135: 4b
1413
9,109,110
146: 3b
1414
9,738,690
159: 4a
1415
10,358,250
171: 3b
1416
9,031,970
183: 4a
1417
9,282,180
195: 3b
1418
8,119,670
207: 3a
1419
7,930,920
219: 6b
1420
5,158,040
232: 3a
1421
5,169,120
244: 2a
1422
5,175,345
254: 2b
1423
5,171,218
266: 3a
Shandong, Datong, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Liaodong, and their reports generally concluded that the system was not working well.36
In his grandiose scheme, Yongle used the military farms to try to achieve several goals: expansion of his borderlands and tax base and control of human and material resources. Once again, the report card is mixed. Although Ming historians have made much of Yongle’s successes in revitalizing the military farms, by the end of his reign several such farms reported that they were too strapped for cash to live up to the government’s expectations. The statistics in table 6.2 clearly show that grain production was high in the early years of Yongle’s reign, but this rate was sustained for only a generation.37
Streamlining the agro-military colonies was one of the means by which 117
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Yongle tried to achieve his goals of expanding the empire, consolidating defense, and controlling resources. The other means, which was at least as important, was revamping and rebuilding inland waterways, particularly in the lower Yangzi delta. During Ming times, the fifty-thousand-square-kilometer delta had the city of Zhenjiang on its west, the East China Sea on its east, Yangzhou on its north, and Hangzhou Bay on its south. It included part of the Nanjing Metropolitan Area (Yingtianfu) and Zhejiang Province as well as all of what is now Shanghai. The land in the delta is broad and level, and most of it is less than ten meters above sea level. Topographically it is like a saucer, with Lake Tai at the center, surrounded by some 250 lakes of various sizes, all linked to the mighty Yangzi. It has through the ages been a rich region, producing rice, silk, cotton, tea, wheat, fish, and rape and other plants used to make edible oils. In order to control these critically important resources, Yongle placed the rehabilitation of the Wusong River, also known as Suzhou Creek, high on his list of priorities. The Wusong River flows from Lake Tai through the northern part of Shanghai and forms a part of the Yangzi estuary before it empties into the East China Sea. At the Wusong estuary are several emerald isles, of which the largest is Chongming. It was on Chongming Island that Yongle’s shipwrights constructed flat-bottomed boats for inland-waterway transport and for travel between China and Korea in the relatively shallow Yellow Sea.38
South of the Yangzi delta are numerous lakes and streams, around and over which, during the fifteenth century, it was common to find cities and towns built. Yongle took measures to prevent the recurrent floods that had beset these
“towns on the water,” the lower Yangzi delta in general and western Zhejiang in particular. These measures included dredging and rerouting the problem-atic lakes and streams so as to improve water conservation and farmland irrigation. But his most important hydraulic project was the rebuilding of the Grand Canal into the formal grand transport system of the Ming empire. It is believed that as early as 1403 Yongle had decided to move the capital to Beijing; consequently, deploying more troops and repopulating the area became the major preconditions to reconstructing Beijing as a capital city. And in order to feed his troops, their families, and the new immigrants coming from various parts of the empire, he needed to import su‹cient grain from the south. The ways and means of transporting so much over a distance of nearly 1,600 kilometers therefore became Yongle’s most challenging reconstruction task.39
Early during the Ming dynasty, Yongle’s father had used sea transport to supply his troops in the north, and between 1403 and 1415 Yongle also used such shipments, which annually hauled between four hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand piculs of husked rice to the north. But the sea transport of 118
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grain around the Shandong peninsula was hazardous because tidal waves, storms, and reefs often caused the ships to wreck and sailors to drown. Song Li, Yongle’s energetic minister of public works, told His Majesty that sea transport was not only perilous but also uneconomical, averring that the construction and operation of flat-bottomed boats for inland-waterway transport would be much safer and cheaper. A sea-transport ship required more than one hundred persons to man but could haul only one thousand piculs of tribute grain per trip. But for the cost of building a sea-transport ship one could build twenty smaller riverboats, each with the capacity to haul two hundred piculs of grain and needing only ten people to operate. Song pointed out that the operation of twenty such riverboats might require twice as much manpower as one sea ship but would together transport a total of four thousand piculs, or about four times more than one sea ship could haul. Yongle, who had been searching for a more reliable, safer, and less expensive way to transport grain, was obviously convinced that Song’s idea would accomplish all of the above.
Soon after the court finished celebrating the 1411 lunar New Year, Yongle ordered the reconstruction of the Grand Canal with the twin aims of linking the fer-tile Yangzi delta to north China and utilizing small boats to haul tribute grain to his future capital in Beijing.40
Before Yongle seized the throne, the Grand Canal did not directly reach Beijing; the old Union Link Channel (Huitonghe)—from Mount Anmin in Dongping to Linqing (both in Shandong)—was unnavigable because the Wen River, from which the channel received its water, had been silted up by recurrent flooding on the Yellow River, of which it was a tributary. At the time of Yongle’s enthronement one-third of the eighty-kilometer-long channel was neither deep nor wide enough for navigation. But as the troops and new immigrants continued to swell, Beijing needed at least 1.5 million more piculs of grain annually, in addition to that imported via the sea route. Yongle had been forced to import grain via interior overland-plus-waterway transport. Grain-carrying riverboats from the south navigated along the Huai River to the Yellow River and o¤-loaded their freight at Yangwu, Henan, from which coolies from Shanxi and Henan carried the grain overland for some 170 li (approximately eighty-five kilometers) to Dezhou. The grain was then sent on another waterway, the Wei River, to Beijing. Such transport was strenuous, slow, and expensive, and imposed heavy burdens on the corvée system.41
Making the Union Link Channel navigable had become the linchpin of the rebuilding of the Grand Canal, and Yongle chose none other than Minister of Public Works Song Li, assisted by Deputy Minister of Punishmen
t Jin Chun, to do the job. Song Li was sharp and capable but was also a stern man who 119
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demanded much from himself and from his subordinates. Jin Chun, on the other hand, was earthy and buoyant but would not tolerate graft and corruption. The two of them mobilized some three hundred thousand workers and started their Herculean job as soon as the snow had melted away in March of 1411. They diverted water from the Wen River, dredged and widened the Union Link Channel, connected the channel with new sources of water in Shandong, and installed some thirty-eight floodgates to control the volume of water flowing into the canal. The entire project was completed in three hundred days; however, because the Wei River to the north flooded severely in 1412, Song Li was ordered to rehabilitate its waterway and so had his troops dig two new channels to divert the water. With the Wei River tamed and the Union Link Channel repaired, the northern end of the Grand Canal was finally opened.
Then, in order to maintain a steady flow of water in the upper part of the Yellow River, Jin Chun led another army of workers to repair an old waterway at Jialu, Henan. Yongle’s engineers also built four locks at Qingjiangpu, northwest of Huaian, to facilitate the sailing of grain boats from the canal into the Huai River.
In 1415, when these locks were opened, grain ships could then navigate the northern sections of the Grand Canal from Huaian all the way to East Gate Bridge in Tongzhou, a suburb of Beijing. In the same year Yongle had the metropolitan civil service examination held in Beijing and decided to cease transporting grain by the sea route.42
But the southern sections of the Grand Canal also needed to be rehabilitated—in particular, the section between Huaian and Yangzhou, a stretch of 197 kilometers of lowlands that was the area most vulnerable to flooding. To oversee the completion of this project, Yongle appointed Chen Xuan, an expert on hydraulic engineering and professional soldier who had surrendered the Yangzi defense fleet to Yongle in 1402. Near the end of the civil war, Chen had made his boats available to the then Prince of Yan for crossing the mighty Yangzi River. He subsequently won Yongle’s confidence by e¤ectively managing sea transport of grain to the north. At the time he was commissioned to rehabilitate the Grand Canal, he held the title of Earl Pingjiang—“Tamer of the River.”
All told, he accomplished some remarkable engineering feats, including the construction of forty-seven locks and three thousand flat-bottomed barges ( fangsha pingdi chuan) for shallow-water transport. Chen Xuan was to serve as the supreme commander of the Grand Canal system until his death in 1433, when he was posthumously promoted to the rank of marquis.43 Under Chen’s watch, the 1,789-kilometer Grand Canal, now extending from Hangzhou Bay northward to the outskirts of Beijing, became the newest military-operated system, as hundreds of thousands of o‹cers and soldiers manned several thou-120
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sand grain boats along the world’s longest manmade waterway. The Grand Canal was comparable in length to an interstate route from New York to Florida. It linked the Qiantang, Yangzi, Huai, Yellow, and Wei Rivers. It flowed through the provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei, and the city of Tianjin and provided a reliable conduit to Beijing. It had the capacity, during Yongle’s reign, to transport up to six million piculs of husked rice to the north every year.
In 1415 Yongle issued a set of grain transport laws for the administration of the Grand Canal. The laws required that the waterway be maintained by local corvée labor without any subsidies from the central government and that each lijia construct its own grain boat and haul tribute grain to a designated silo. The local guard units, from o‹cers to soldiers, were financially responsible for the tax grain in their custody and were expected to construct service craft and carry the grain in relay all the way to Beijing. Peasants first had to transport their tribute grain to a subprefecture silo for short-term storage. The grain was then hauled to the state’s main depository, called the Grand Granary (Taichang), at Huaian.
The battalion units stationed there hauled the freight to Xuzhou, where the Nanjing guard units continued the grain transport to Dezhou. From there guard units from Shandong and Henan took over and delivered the grain to the main northern reception point in Tongzhou. Yongle constructed a slew of huge granaries for storage along the way, including the “big five waterway granaries” at Huaian, Xuzhou, Linqing (first built by his father), Dezhou, and Tongzhou. Relay transport took place four times a year and was able to provide Beijing with more than five million piculs of grain annually.44 But Yongle also realized that, in order to make the system work, he had to rely upon the service of hundreds of thousands of canal troops ( caoding) plus an equal number of corvée laborers ( caofu).
As the historian Ray Huang has pointed out, the grain transport was a decen-tralized system, and Yongle’s government, in order to rein in costs, took no fiscal responsibility for the maintenance and operation of the Grand Canal.
The taxpayers could either pay their share of tribute grain or haul the grain personally, by becoming corvée laborers, to the government-designated silos and have their taxes reduced or even exempted. (Transportation costs were collected from taxpayers on a prorated basis.) The military personnel who guarded the Grand Canal and operated the grain boats as canal troops drew their salaries and rations from the districts that furnished the tribute grain. By the mid-fifteenth century, the transportation corps had a total of 121,500 o‹cers and troops who operated some 11,775 tribute boats along the canal.45
In addition to the tribute grain, the Grand Canal and its network of rivers and lakes brought salt and salt-related revenues to north China. Next to land 121
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taxes, the salt monopoly became the most reliable source of state income during the Ming. When Yongle ascended the throne, China annually refined over 2.5 million yin (approximately six hundred thousand metric tons) from its six salt-producing regions—Lianghuai, in what is now Jiangsu; Liangzhe, from Chongming Island at the mouth in the Yangzi River to the southern Zhejiang coast; Changlu, in the Northern Metropolitan Area; Hedong, Shanxi; Shandong; and Fujian. The Liangzhe region alone had thirty-five salt farms and could produce up to 222,300 yin (approximately 53,760 metric tons) of salt per year. The government hired salt rakers ( yanding) to work in the pits and, after paying salaries to the workers, sold the yin (lit., “permit to transport salt”) to the licensed merchants. One yin would permit a merchant to purchase about 242 kilograms of salt. The salt merchants then paid a tax (in cash) of one twentieth of the price at which they bought the salt. They later sold the merchandise on the market. Yongle generally received approximately one million taels of silver per year from the salt revenues, which he used to maintain his troops, provide relief for drought or famine victims, and purchase horses, metal, cloth, and paper for printing paper money. He also exchanged salt revenues for rice. Since he needed to bring five to six million piculs of southern grain to Beijing each year, he required that salt merchants bring rice, instead of cash, to Beijing to exchange for permits to transport and sell salt. Consequently, Ming merchants found the Grand Canal indispensable to their livelihood.46
In addition to grain and salt, southern delicacies and products also relied upon the Grand Canal to find their way to the north. They included brocade, mirrors, and seafood from Yangzhou; satin from Zhenjiang; damask silk from Changzhou; glutinous rice from Suzhou; and gauze from Zhejiang. It was also through this main artery that the Beijing nouveau riche received the delicate porcelain, fine wines, fancy tea sets, and expensive papers and brushes that were totems of Yongle’s newly emerging Mandarins. And cotton and wool, coal, flour, precious stones, dried meats, and other products from north China could easily find their way to the markets in the south, creating new opportunities for trade and business. Along the waterway, canal ports such as Dezhou, Linqing, Dongzhang, Jining, Huaining, and Yangzhou thrived and became urbanized.
Privately owned ferryboats, inns, restaurants, pawnshops, brothels, and the l
ike were set up to serve o‹cials, businessmen, and tourists who traveled along the waterway.
Yongle did not realize that he was preparing the conditions for a fledgling capitalist economy like those developing in Italy and the Low Countries of Europe at the time. Nor had Keynesian economic theory even been invented.
There was an overall lack of central planning, and Yongle’s o‹cials were often 122
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handicapped because they could not accurately estimate future budgets. Yongle followed a basic Confucian “ever-normal granary” economic policy, which entailed the government purchase of grain, when prices were low, at a higher-than-market price to profit the peasants. When prices were high, the government grain was sold at a lower price to benefit consumers.47 We do not have complete data on trade policy, taxation, annual government outlays, mone-tary policy, capital flows and investment, banking, wage and price controls, property rights, regulations, and black-market activity—the ten categories now used to measure the economic freedom and health of a nation—during Yongle’s reign. An o‹cial record, however, includes the following report on economic conditions in early fifteenth-century China: During Yongle’s reign, after [China] took possession of Annam, people could pay rents and taxes with silk fabric, oil paint, wood, blue jade, fans, and the like. The Li people in Qiongzhou [Guangdong] and the Yao people in Zhaoqing [Guangdong], were now paying taxes like the rest of the empire. The empire’s grain taxes totaled more than thirty million piculs, and taxes in silks and paper money exceeded twenty million. At that time, the empire within the four corners was rich and prosperous, and the government enjoyed abundant and surplus revenues. In addition to the several million piculs of grain that were transported to the capital, granaries of local governments were all filled to capacity, and the surplus grain became so ripe and spoiled that it was not edible. During lean years, o‹cials sent relief to the people first and inquired about the causes of their problems later. The government took in some three hundred thousand taels of silver every year; however, people were not allowed to use silver for business transactions.48
Some of these monies probably came from Yongle’s foreign trade and tribute. At the very outset of his reign, as China recoiled from the pangs of economic meltdown, the temptation to tap overseas resources was irresistible.
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