and waters were free to all till the Chow Dynasty, and that their produce was then taxed to prevent too many of the people abandoning agriculture in favour of what might seem easier and more remunerative modes of life. The legislator wished to reduce "sport" to an orderly branch of industry, and it was always counted as an abuse and an indecorum if the Court amusements threatened to interfere with the humble trade of hunters and fowlers. By the time of Mencius, however, game preserving had already reached such a point that the slayer of a deer within the royal park was punished in the same way as one who had killed a man. Hence the magnitude of the royal park was a subject of popular discontent,1 though it was only half the size of that ungrudgingly enjoyed by King Wen, who allowed the grass-cutters and fuel-gatherers and the catchers of hares and pheasants to pursue their avocations freely within his enclosure.

2

Mencius helps to complete our view of the old market regulations by describing the various abuses which had come into play in his time, and the reforms which still did not seem hopelessly out of reach. After informing a king of Tse who is ambitious of empire that it is "like climbing a tree to look for fish" to expect to secure the empire for a small State by warlike preparations, he sums up the functions of the Imperial Government substantially as they are set forth in the Rites of Chow. A benevolent. government, he tells the king, "will cause all the officers in the empire to wish to stand in your majesty's court, and the farmers all to wish to plough in your majesty's fields, and the merchants, both travelling and stationary, all to wish to store their goods in your majesty's market places, and travelling strangers all to wish to make their tours on your majesty's roads, and all throughout the empire who feel aggrieved by their rulers to wish to come and complain to your majesty;" for the people turn to a benevolent rule as water flows down hill and wild beasts fly to the wilderness; they can no more be kept back from giving their allegiance than the rain ready to fall from bursting clouds.

One of the signs that foretold the ruin of Tse was that after the duke had tampered with the grain measures, or in other words, debased the local currency, a powerful family began to bid for popularity by taking the opposite course, lending according to their own (large) measures and accepting payment in the public measure which was deficient; and while the State was absorbing two-thirds of the people's wealth, leaving them only one-third for food and clothes, this family caused its wood, fish, salt, and frogs to be sold at the same rate in the market as at the water or the hills, i.e. at cost price: "Though such an one wished not to win them to himself, how could he help doing so?" asked the loyal minister of the doomed State.3

The service of the markets was considered to be in a sense a part of the public service. A dealer who succeeded in effecting a corner in cattle

1 Mencius, Works, i. ii. ii.

2 i. i. vii. § 18.

66

3 C. C., v. pt. ii. p. 589. The date of the record is 537 B.C.

in the State of Loo was treated as a criminal by Confucius, and was said to have secured immunity in his malpractices only by bribing the officers who should have denounced his guilt. Yet he is not accused of any action which would be considered dishonest or even discreditable in the mercantile world of the West. He had gradually bought up all the cattle of the neighbourhood, and all the available pasture land; whoever wanted to sell, he was in a position to buy, and by making advances to smaller dealers, when in difficulties, he had gradually also got them into his power; and all the shepherds and herdsmen of the district were in his employment. Meat was not generally in everyday use; but on certain festive occasions, even poor families were required by custom to provide it for their guests, so that the high price the monopolist was able to charge amounted to a considerable tax on the whole community. Confucius required him, as a condition of pardon, to give up the profitable industry and make restitution to the community he had plundered, of all his wealth beyond what was necessary for a decent maintenance. The cattle dealer consented, and the point of economic morality was settled once for all in Chinese opinion.1

A low rate of taxation never ceased to be regarded as an essential part of good government; the minister who increased the royal revenue by increased exactions from the people was denounced; and to combine low taxes with a sufficient revenue, it was necessary for the taxpayers to be numerous. Hence, with brief exceptions, the influence of the Government was steadily employed to perpetuate the conditions favourable not to the accumulation, but to the substantially equal distribution of wealth.

1 Pauthier, La Chine, i. p. 156. Mencius, ii. ii. xi. § 7.

CHAPTER IV.

THE RURAL ECONOMY OF THE CHOW.

LIKE the city of ancient Egypt and Babylonia, the ancient Chinese village consisted of clustered groups of houses. The traditions embodied in the Chow Li as to the size and grouping of the clusters are not quite clear or consistent, but the discrepancies may only reflect the different usages of the three first dynasties.

The institution of the tsing1 with its nine plots is regarded as the special creation of the men of Chow. The nine squares cover the area of a square Li, which contained 900 mow, or nine squares of 100 mow each, of which the central square (X) formed the public field,

vated in common for the benefit of the State. X

which was cultiThroughout the could not law

first three dynasties it was held that taxation fully exceed a tithe of the produce, and accordingly the area of the public field was reduced by deducting from it the ground required for the separate houses and gardens of the eight families, so that the public land was really 80 mow and the private 820, or rather more, instead of less, than ten times as much.

The imperial editors say that the character Li is used in three senses: it means-1, a group of 25 houses, i.e. the hamlet; 2, a length of 1,800 feet, of which the square forms a tsing; and 3, a habitation.

From this

it seems that the term tsing was sometimes used to describe the smallest, and sometimes the smallest but one, of the groups described in other passages of the Chow Li.3 The rural unit consists for administrative purposes of a group of five families, which is called a "neighbourhood." Each family was supposed to include three generations, and to consist normally of grandfather and grandmother, husband and wife, and three or four

1 Or group with a common well. In the seventeenth century the villages of a tribe in Crim Tartary are described as so many "wells," that being the meaning of the word used to designate these settlements. (Thévenot, Relations de Divers Voyages, vol. i. p. 14.) And the antiquity both of the thing and its representation is well shown by the characters brought together by Mr. Ball (P.S.B.A., 1893, p. 399) in discussing possible origins for the Phoenician letter teth. The linear Babylonian character which the later cuneiform reproduces unaltered, except in cution, evidently represents the well for irrigation in the vated enclosure. The early form of the Chinese character sentials of two Babylonian characters, that for pit, a well, and dib, tib =enclosure. The intellectual radical, so to there is any phonetic connection in this case

cal, whether

tu-1, pit, well, mechanical execentre of a culticombines the esalready given,

speak, is identi

or no.

2 Chinese Classics, ii. p. 7. Giles' Chinese Dictionary, p. 707. Tcheou-li, i. 393.

3 i. 337 ff.

children, making seven or eight persons in all, the husband being the grandfather's eldest son.

The dwellings of the neighbourhood are enclosed by a single wall, and the residents are bound to mutual aid and support; but an average group of forty persons of all ages is manifestly too small to constitute a village, and probably rather represents the family community. The present Chinese average is five persons to a family, counting parents and children only; but if the family or household here includes three generations, the family group would certainly include the families of younger sons, and thus the numbers of the "neighbourhood" would easily be made up. The elder of the group was responsible for its internal government, and ranked as a graduate of the lowest class.

The counterpart of this community is the "hamlet" of five neighbourhoods, including twenty-five families of perhaps about 200 souls. It appears incidentally from one of the amatory poems of the Shi-King that this larger group is the one within which public opinion and "the talk of people" makes itself felt as a social force. A prudent young lady, while avowing her love for a certain Mr. Chung, begs him not to leap into her hamlet, breaking the willow trees which grow by its encompassing ditches, for she fears her parents and their words; she begs him not to leap over the wall which encloses the dwellings of the neighbourhood, and break the mulberry trees which it cultivates in common, for she fears the talk of her "brothers"—a word often used interchangeably for relatives of the same surname, or with a common ancestor, in fact the clan or cousinhood ;— lastly, she begs him not to leap into her garden and break the sandalwood trees, which are the private property of the family, for she dreads the talk of the village. That is to say, the opinion of the household, the family group, and the village are respectively invoked to condemn the lover's intrusion within the three sets of boundaries, in the inverse order of privacy.1 In the Analects we have an appeal to the same tribunals, for "he whom the circle of his relatives pronounces to be filial and whom his fellow-villagers and neighbours pronounce to be fraternal "2 is judged to be only one degree inferior to a worthy officer.

The village system in one form or another is practically of world-wide extension, but in connection with the hypothesis which brings the Chinese from the highlands west of Central Asia, it is interesting to note the resemblance between these clusters of associated households in China and Wood's description of the communities he found living in the valleys of Badakshan. It is customary, he tells us, "for relations to live in the same hamlet, often to the number of six or seven families" (by which no doubt he understands the natural household of parents and children).

C. C., vol. iv. pt. 1. Shi-King, p. 125.

2 xiii. 20. The "circle of relatives" is still a reality in China; and when "branch families" were one of the strongholds of the feudal system, no doubt the political importance of remote degrees of relationship caused the records of them to be kept. But it is also possible that the local organizations started from the natural ramifications of the family. Cf. Appendix L.

"An outer wall surrounds this little knot of friends, within which each family has its separate dwelling-house, stable and cattle shed; and a number of such hamlets forms a kishlak or village."1 The kishlak thus answers exactly to the group of neighbourhoods forming the Chinese hamlet. Two independent authorities, midway in time between Wood and the Chinese Book of Odes, note a similar trait in the adjacent kingdoms of Yarkand and Khotan, where Fa-hian (400 A.D.) and Hiouen-thsang (630 A.D.) speak in almost identical terms of the people "building their houses in clusters." 2

The functions of the village headman who presides over the twenty-five families of a hamlet, are to keep an account of the numbers of the community, to apportion the taxes both in produce and labour, and to preside over the work of seed-time and harvest, for the hamlet is the unit in the system of common cultivation or "mutual aid," always referred to as an essential feature of the Chow regime. Four of these communities form a Hundred, or, as M. Biot calls it, a commune, which is presided over by a graduate of the first rank. He revises the decisions of the local headmen, and is responsible for the military levies which are proportioned to the agricultural divisions. Five hundreds form a shire, or a department, and two further multiplications by five bring us to the largest administrative districts, the county and the province.

The solidarity of the hundred extends to the sharing of funeral expenses, the childless and destitute being interred by their fellow-villagers. The expenses of religious ceremonies are borne jointly by the county; living merit is rewarded by honours extending over the whole province, and the list of persons of special capacity handed in triennially by the governor of the province is preserved in duplicate by the Recorder of the Interior.

This system is evidently theoretical, and the empire can never have been mapped out into equal areas counted either by fives or nines. But Mencius mentions a tradition that "the 50 mow allotment of Hia, the 70 of Yin, and the 100 of Chow were actually of the same dimensions." And in another section of the Chow Li 5 the divisions after the tsing proceed by fours, giving groups of 36, 144, and 576 families, which answer roughly to the 25, 100, and 500 families contemplated by the grouping in hundreds and shires. So that it is possible that the real usage varied less than the descriptions of it. Mencius certainly had no access to the official book of the Rites of Chow, and so can have known only what tradition and surviving custom still preserved of them. But he is perhaps all the more valuable as an authority on that account, and his comment on a proverbial phrase in honour of the kings Wen and Wu shows that tradition had got a firm grasp of the number five.

1A Journey to the Sources of the Oxus. Capt. John Wood. 2nd ed., 1872, p. 174. Travels of Fa-hian and Sung-Yun, Buddhist Pilgrims from China to India (400 A.D. and 518 A.D.). Tr. from the Chinese by Samuel Beal, 1869, p. 8.

3 Tcheou-li, i. p. 354.

4 Life and Works of Mencius. By James Legge, D.D., 1875, p. 201.

i. p. 226.