LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA

*

AN INAUGURAL LECTURE

DELIVERED ON 28 NOVEMBER 1961

BY DENIS TWITCHETT Professor o f Chinese in the University i f London

SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES CG UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 3 3 0 .9 1962

'291082

LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER IN T ’ANG AND SUNG CHINA

AN INAUGURAL LECTURE

DELIVERED ON 28 NOVEMBER 1961

BY DENIS TWITCHETT Professor o f Chinese in the University o f London

SCHOOL OF

ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 1962 Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4 GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI IBADAN ACCRA

KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG

© Copyright by Denis Twitchett 1962

Distributed by Luzac & Co. 46 Great Russell Street, W. C. 1

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD BY VIVIAN RIDLER PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA

he t e a c h in g of C hinese in London dates back to T 1825, when Robert Morrison began to hold classes at the London Oriental Institution in Barrett’s Buildings in the City. This antedated the beginnings of Chinese instruction elsewhere in England by some decades, but was relatively late by European standards. In St. Petersburg Manchu had been taught since 1733 and Chinese since 1741, in France an academic tradition stemming from the Paris Jesuits was long established, and in Germany teaching was available both in Berlin and in Munich. Morrison’s classes were held in collaboration with the Indianist Gilchrist, who had for some years previously offered classes in Sanskrit and Bengali at the Oriental Institution in Leicester Square. They were a great success, and continued until Morrison returned to Canton in 1828. He himself was a considerable scholar, who produced a wide range of aca­ demic writings including a Chinese-English dictionary which remained unsurpassed in Europe until the eve of the twentieth century. He also helped to found the Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca, at which many of the early Protestant mis­ sionaries— including the greatest of them all, James Legge— were trained. Morrison also was not only the first person to teach Chinese in London, but had an indirect connexion with the founda­ tion of the Chair which I hold. During his lifetime he had accumulated a very considerable Chinese library, and upon his death in 1835 his friend and executor Sir George Staunton, to whom I shall revert in a moment, offered his books to University College on condition that a Professor of Chinese should be appointed for five years. The College— not without some reluctance— accepted this offer in 1837.1 The Rev. Samuel Kidd, a missionary who had been a teacher at the Anglo-Chinese College but had been forced by ill-health 4 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL to retire, was elected and appointed Professor at a salary of £60 per annum. The library duly passed to University College, and on the foundation of the School of Oriental Studies was transferred to this School to form the nucleus of our Chinese collection. Kidd’s first pupils registered in 1838-9. He had some ambi­ tion to establish the study of Chinese as a proper academic discipline rather than as a mere course of practical language training, but he was not himself a distinguished scholar. He compiled a catalogue of the Royal Asiatic Society’s collec­ tion of Chinese books2 which contains some highly eccentric entries, such as the great early romance San-kuo chih yen-i listed under 'statistical works’, the collection of supernatural tales Liao-chai chih-i compared with the Faerie Queene, and the great Chinese erotic masterpiece Chin p'ing mei as 'containing a description of Chinese manners and customs, especially with reference to courtship and marriage, the design of which is to promote virtue and discourage vice . . .’. He also wrote a sizeable volume which went to great lengths of ingenuity to prove the relationship of the Chinese language and culture with Ancient Egypt and with the 'common primordial lan­ guage of mankind’. In 1843, when the renewal of his appoint­ ment was under discussion, Kidd died, and his Chair was allowed to lapse. Shortly afterwards, in 1845, Sir George Staunton began an agitation for the endowment of a Chair at the rival Anglican foundation of King’s College. Staunton himself might well be termed the father of English sinology. When in 1792 the British Government determined to send an embassy to the Chinese court under Lord Macartney, the latter sent Sir George Staunton, father of the sinologue, to Naples to recruit Chinese interpreters from the College of the Propaganda Fidei. Sir George, a remarkable Anglo-Irishman who had been in turn physician, attorney, and an officer under the East India Company, had subjected his son to an extra­ ordinary course of education. In 1792 he was eleven years ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 5 old, already spoke fluently French, German, Latin, and Greek, was a regular attendant at the meetings of the Royal Society and at lectures on botany, chemistry, and mineralogy. He too was taken on the trip to Naples, and on the long homeward journey began the study of Chinese from one of the interpreters who proved, as he later said, ca very cross master5. Staunton accompanied the mission as a page to Lord Macartney, and acted as interpreter and copyist of documents, being the only member of the mission who knew Chinese. The story of how he attracted the attention of the aged Chien-lung emperor is well known. Later he received through his father’s interest an appoint­ ment as a writer and later as supercargo to the East India Company’s establishment at Canton, where he remained until 1816, rising eventually to be head of the Select Com­ mittee. Late in 1816 he was a member of Lord Amherst’s embassy to Peking, and on the termination of the embassy in 1817 retired from public life, having amassed a sizeable private fortune. He settled down as a country gentleman in Hampshire and embarked on a leisurely career as member of Parliament for a Cornish pocket borough. During his years of service in Canton he wrote a number of extremely valuable works on China, including a transla­ tion of the Ch’ing penal code which remains standard even today, a century and a half after its publication. On his return from the East he deliberately abandoned his own Chinese studies, though he kept up his interest in scholarly matters and became a founder-member of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1826, donating to the library his collection of Chinese books which included some rare items. His interest in Chinese affairs on the other hand was maintained, and in the 1830’s he spoke frequently in the House of Commons on Chinese matters. He also served as a member of the East India Committee of the House of Commons, strongly oppos­ ing the terms proposed for the ending of the company’s monopoly of the China trade. After the Reform Bill he and 6 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL Palmerston, a fellow Anglo-Irishman, sat as joint members for South Hampshire, and there is some evidence that he exerted considerable influence not only upon Palmerston’s China policy, but also upon Sir Henry Pottinger and Lord Aberdeen, all of whom approached him for advice during the Opium War. He was influential enough to be able successfully to raise the required endowment for the Chair at King’s College from a wide variety of sources. The Anglican clergy, who had high hopes of the new mission field opening up in China, subscribed liberally. Somewhat more cautious subscriptions came from people officially involved in Chinese relations and from the members of the various companies involved in the opium trade, who had more realistic hopes of profit from the newly opened ports. The total endowment was less, how­ ever, than Staunton had hoped for, and brought in to my predecessors— and continues to bring in to me— a total of £ 79 . 16s. 4d. per annum? The first professor, J. Fearon, was a retired interpreter from Canton, who had later become first Registrar-General of Hong Kong. At the end of 1846 Staunton was able to report that he already had two pupils. He had, however, few more, nor does he seem ever to have written anything. On the expiry of his appointment in 1851 he was not re-appointed, and in 1852 he was replaced by the Rev. James Summers, a retired missionary.4 Under Summers, Chinese teaching enjoyed a boom for a few years. In 1854, again through Staunton’s influence,5 the Foreign Secretary asked the College to nominate students as supernumerary Chinese interpreters for service in Hong Kong6 and within five years Summers had trained 21 men for such posts. In 1859 King’s College held out high hopes that student interpreters in even greater numbers would be needed following the establishment of an Ambassador to Peking.7 The establishment of the embassy, however, had the reverse ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 7 effect to that which had been expected. The first batch of trainees was taught by Summers at King’s, but since he himself spoke Cantonese and Shanghai dialect, they found themselves completely at a loss when they eventually reached Peking, and had to begin their studies all over again. In consequence the initial training of consular and foreign ser­ vice personnel in London was rapidly abandoned.8 Even more disastrous was Summer’s advice to the Foreign Office that men destined for service in Japan should first be sent to Peking to learn the correct pronunciation of the Chinese characters used for writing Japanese.9 Poetic justice overtook Summers in this respect, for in 1873 he accepted an appointment in Tokyo from the Japanese Government,10 and remained in Japan until his death in 1891. The great demand for Chinese linguists which followed the second Opium War, and the rapid expansion of Chinese trade led University College also to revive their lapsed Chair, and exactly a century ago they elected as Professor a Chinese scholar, Chee Yui-tang. Unfortunately I am able to discover no details about him, but this must surely have been by far the earliest appointment of a Chinese to a Western university post.11 His appointment, however, lasted only for one year, and the Chair again lapsed until 1873, when H. F. Holt, a retired consul, was appointed. He too held the Chair for only three years.12 In 1877 University College appointed its last professor, the Rev. Samuel Beal. Beal was a remarkable man. He had been a naval chaplain, and during his long service in the Far East and in India had become proficient not only in Chinese but also in Pali and Sanskrit. He pioneered the study of Chinese Buddhism in this country, acquired from Japan the first copy of the complete Chinese Tripitaka in England, and in 1878-9 delivered at University College a series of lectures on Chinese Buddhism which were quite remarkable for their day. He also produced a translation of Hsiian-tsang’s account of India which, although not at all satisfactory by modern scholarly standards, has been widely 8 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL employed in studies of early Indian history. Beal’s role in the teaching of the University cannot, however, have been very considerable, since he was concurrently rector of parishes in Northumberland.13 At King’s College, Summers was succeeded, when he left for Japan, by one of his pupils, Robert Kennaway Douglas, who had briefly served in the consular service at Tientsin. In 1865 he had retired and taken up a post in the library of the British Museum, where he built up a large Chinese collection. He retained both his museum post and the Chair at King’s College until his retirement in 1905. He was a scholar of very wide interests, though not of very good quality. He produced books on current Chinese political developments, on Chinese society, the history of Chinese sculpture, translations of Chinese fiction, and a series of catalogues of the British Museum collections— including a catalogue of Japanese books unusable because the titles are listed under their Chinese readings. He also played a promi­ nent part in the organization during the 1870’s and 1880’s of the International Congress of Orientalists. Most of his efforts were, however, directed to his work in the British Museum, rather than to his teaching, and his pupils were very few in number.14 During the 1880’s and 1890’s there was a steady growth in the demand for the practical teaching of modern Chinese. The Oxford Chair had been established in 1875 and filled by James Legge, the greatest of all the nineteenth-century British sinologues. But even he attracted very few pupils. In 1888 Sir Thomas Wade, the distinguished diplomat- scholar, was appointed to a new Chair at Cambridge, but here too students were a rarity, and Wade seems, from his inaugural lecture, positively to have discouraged them:15 T assume that my pupils, should I have any, will be intend­ ing missionaries or interpreters. . . . My advice to applicants in either category is that they should make their way to China with all speed. . . .’ ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 9 However, this widespread belief that Chinese was only to be learned on the spot in China— if indeed it was to be learned at all— was beginning to be shaken, especially after the foundation of the Seminar fur Orientalische Sprachen at Berlin in 1885, and the subsequent arrival in China of in­ creasing numbers of German traders trained in the language. In 1886 the Royal Asiatic Society set up a committee to discuss the teaching of oriental languages, which in 1887 reported in favour of the establishment in London of a language institute to be run in conjunction with a commercial intelli­ gence service under the auspices of the Imperial Institute.16 The teaching of oriental languages in London was rationalized by assigning all studies of Indian languages to University College, and all other languages to King’s. The University College Chair in Chinese was abolished, and its endowments transferred to King’s. This new cSchool of Modern Oriental Studies’ was founded in 1889, but proved to be a complete failure. The Imperial Institute was chronically short of money, and could do no more than provide a committee of management.17 In 1900, therefore, an outside body, the China Association, despairing of anything being done within the University, took a hand and decided to set up its own ‘School of Practical Chinese’, run by a retired consul with two Chinese assistants. In 1901 this School was formally adopted by the newly founded University of London.18 In 1904 the School was taken over by Sir W. C. Hillier, a distinguished consular officer, who had been a member of the first Chinese diplomatic mission to this country, and who was now appointed to a second Professorship at King’s. On Douglas’s retirement the two chairs were merged into a single one largely endowed by the China Association.19 This practical school flourished in the years preceding the First World War. From some fifteen students a year at the outset numbers rose rapidly until in 1914 the average intake was some forty per annum. Even after the foundation of the School of Oriental 10 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL Studies in 1917, the China Association continued for many years to subsidize the Chinese Chair.20 Hillier retired in 1908. Great difficulty was experienced in finding a successor, and for a while the School was taken over by his brother, an international banker who was also a competent Chinese scholar, although at this time he was blind. Various good scholars retired from the consular service were invited, but all refused. The next holders of the Chair were elderly and undistinguished ex-missionaries, the Rev. Professor G. Owen (1909-14), and the Rev. J. Percy Bruce (I925“ 31)- From 1914 the Chair remained vacant.203 Bruce was succeeded in 1932 by Sir Reginald Johnston, who had written a number of interesting books on contemporary China and had had the distinction of being tutor to the last Chinese Emperor. He seems, however, to have done little to improve Chinese studies in London. In 1939 he was succeeded by Professor Eve Edwards, who had been a lecturer at the School since returning in 1921 from Manchuria where she had been a schoolmistress, and whom many of my audience will have known well.21 From our present position it is tempting to dismiss our nineteenth-century predecessors as rank amateurs. Their achievements certainly did not measure up to those of the early Jesuit scholars. But the Jesuits in Peking were virtually full-time professional scholars, able, in the social milieu of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to mix with the top flight of Chinese learned men. They were, moreover, selected with the greatest care, and subjected to a most rigorous education before even reaching China. Our nineteenth-century scholars, on the other hand, were almost without exception part-time scholars, often holding responsible and time-consuming posts as officials or mis­ sionaries. Few of them were intellectually distinguished. Even allowing for the far more leisurely pace of life in the last century, they had comparatively little time for their studies. They rarely had access either to first-class Chinese ORDER IN T5ANG AND SUNG CHINA II scholars or to really good libraries. Those who entered aca­ demic life did so only after their retirement, and when they did the universities did little for them. Their salaries were pitiful, their colleagues generally scornful or at best sceptical. Save in Paris, where there was an unbroken line of academic study stretching back to the Paris Jesuits of the eighteenth century, the situation was much the same everywhere in Europe. Considering the difficulties under which they worked, men like Beal and Douglas were probably little worse than their contemporaries elsewhere, and it is remarkable that they achieved as much as they did. As we have seen, the establishment of the Seminar fur Orientalische Sprachen in Berlin in the 1880’s, and the work of the ficole des Langues Vivantes in Paris awoke informed opinion at the end of the nineteenth century to the need for improved facilities in London for the study of practical spoken Chinese, and some progress was made in this direction. How­ ever, in the last decade of the nineteenth century there was an even more striking revolution in the purely academic study of China. With the appearance of Chavannes, the father of modern western sinology, and the brilliant generation of Pelliot, Granet, Maspero, Duyvendak, and Otto Franke, Chinese studies on the Continent rapidly grew into a rigorous and scholarly discipline with its own high academic standards. At the same time, after the beginning of the Republic, in the new universities in China there arose a closely knit academic profession which, building upon the considerable achievements of Ch’ing historical and text-critical scholar­ ship, brought a new independence and breadth of outlook and more severe and consistent critical standards to bear upon the study of China’s own culture. Moreover, in the Japanese universities a generation of excellent young scholars who combined a classical education in Chinese studies with a rigorous training in the modern European disciplines of law, history, and economics, were breaking entirely new ground in the study of China’s history and institutions. 12 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL All these exciting new trends and developments passed English sinology by. The period between the wars was a low point in Chinese studies at the three universities, and the three men who made a noteworthy contribution to our field all stood outside academic life proper, Dr. Lionel Giles and Dr. Waley, both of whom were for a time in the British Museum, and Professor A. C. Moule who was a country clergyman until his appointment to the Cambridge Chair at a very advanced age in 1932. At London the high hopes raised by the foundation of this School came in the event to very little. Practical language instruction continued, although the numbers of students were smaller than in the period before 1914, but the School re­ mained completely out of touch with the rapid progress which academic sinology was making in Europe, and failed entirely to benefit from the opportunities which existed in the ig205s and i9305s for free and fruitful contacts with the Chinese learned world, which our American colleagues used to such good effect, effecting an alliance with the new Chinese scholarship which took them a stage beyond the achievements of academic sinology in Europe. It was only in the years immediately before the war that appointments were made which brought the most rigorous modern sinology to this country. In 1937 Oxford University appointed as Professor Ch’en Yin-k’o, one of the greatest of Chinese historians of our times. This appointment, unfortun­ ately for our studies, never took effect. At this School Professor Walter Simon arrived in 1938, and in 1939 Gustav Haloun was appointed to the Cambridge Chair. These two fine scholars, of both of whom I had the honour and good fortune to be a pupil, between them trained a new generation of professional scholars who are now beginning to play a full part in the international world of learning. Haloun introduced a most rigorous conception of textual criticism to the study of early classical texts, while Professor Simon has made, and continues to make, a contribution to ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 13 the study of the early stages of the Chinese language second only to that of Karlgren. Professor Simon, however, has done far more for British sinology than this. Shortly after his arrival in London, he and Professor Edwards were faced with the urgent need for Chinese linguists caused by the out­ break of the war with Japan. For a whole decade he devoted himself to the perfection of methods of teaching modern spoken Chinese, producing a whole new range of textbooks, and raising the study of the modern language into an aca­ demic discipline in its own right— a development which ended in 1946 with the institution by London University of an honours degree in modern Chinese, for the first time in this country. On his retirement in 1959, his department was the largest in Europe. He had built up at this School a good working library collection, and had trained literally hun­ dreds of students for government service and for academic careers. Simon and Haloun introduced into this country the highest contemporary standards of meticulous scholarship. But both remained engaged in fields of research which had been tradi­ tional in European sinology. Our predecessors, with a few notable exceptions, were trained by Chinese teachers, who taught them the basic classical curriculum designed to lead to the chin-shih degree. Most of them, as a result, continued to work upon the classical philosophers and upon the early period of history down to the Han, and in their turn trained their pupils in these fields. At the other extreme others— for the most part far less thoroughly trained academically, but often drawing upon valuable personal experience— wrote upon current events and recent history. In the intervening period of two millenia the only subject which was studied seriously was the history of China’s external relationships— foreign affairs, China’s barbarian neighbours, travel accounts, religious links with India and with the West. The internal development of China as an organic society was almost entirely neglected.22 A3 14 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL The new generation of Western sinologues who have grown up in America since 1930 and in Europe and this country since the war is chiefly concerned with the study of China for its own sake, and thus the emphasis in our studies has shifted to the internal development of Chinese society. Above all we are addressing ourselves to the urgent task of filling the great neglected void which stretches from the Han period to the nineteenth century. This problem is being approached in a wide variety of ways, through the study of literature, art, law, political philosophy, social and economic history. But in all these fields there is to be distinguished one common aim. We are all engaged in the rejection of a deeply rooted misconception about China’s past shared by Westerners and Chinese alike, though upon different grounds. This is the myth of 'unchanging China5, the 'cycle of Cathay5. There is of course undeniably remarkable continuity in Chinese history, which has enabled very great scholars to detect parallels between the feudal baronies of Chou China and twentieth-century Chinese society. This continuity is stressed by the Chinese histories and by the traditional poli­ tical theory in the light of which they were written, which rarely envisaged the possibility of radical political or social change, and always discussed the present and future in terms of the past on the assumption that the basic social fabric remained unchanging. Each new dynasty was assumed to pass through a cycle of prosperity and decline exactly like the last. Only a few months ago, for instance, a very distin­ guished Chinese scholar, well versed in modern Western sociological theory, published a most important study of the social implications of traditional Chinese law which assumes from the start that Chinese society was basically unchanging. And even more remarkable, an eminent European sinologue wrote a preface whole-heartedly endorsing this view.23 The repetitive and stereotyped dynastic pattern, which has produced the convenient divisions into which all our text­ books fall, was basically a short-term political phenomenon ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 15 which, by concentrating our attention upon court politics, serves to disguise the pattern of far-reaching long-term his­ torical changes which were taking place in society. Modern Chinese historians have, needless to say, been well aware of this. A great number of attempts have been made to detect a basic pattern underlying the dynastic progression, and any­ one who keeps abreast of current historical writing will probably experience the same sinking feeling as I do when­ ever I see the word 'periodization5 in the title of yet another article or book. But these attempts have in almost every instance been attempts not so much to detect an underlying pattern of historical progress peculiar to China, as to impose upon Chinese history— usually upon the most cursory evi­ dence— some ready-made universal pattern of human history. Since 1949, of course, the Marxist pattern has gone un­ challenged in China. Unfortunately, owing to the inherent problems of fitting China’s past into its very broad and in­ appropriate stages, all Chinese history from the Han until the nineteenth century has tended to be assigned to the 'feudal stage5 and simply dismissed as 'protracted stagna­ tion5 : the myth of unchanging China has thus forced itself in a new guise into the writings of the self-styled 'progressive5 historians.24 However, even in the writings of the Chinese Marxist historians, who are understandably reluctant to enter too deeply upon the study of their 'feudal5 past for fear of the possible political implications of what they might find there, some progress has been made in the detailed examination of institutions; and in the more scholarly of the contributions to the recent controversy over the 'buds of incipient capital­ ism5, and even more in the important work on agrarian trends and productivity which has gone quietly on outside the main current of politically charged historical writing, it is begin­ ning clearly to emerge that there was a far-reaching economic revolution during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In China, however, scant attention has been paid to the l6 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL earlier, and to my mind even more crucial, period between the T ’ang and the Sung. The vital importance of this period was first shown by the great Japanese historian Naito Tora- jird.25 Naito held that the early Sung period (tenth and eleventh centuries) was the beginning of the ‘modern5 period of Chinese history. It was characterized by the disappearance of the old ‘aristocracy, who had treated the ruling imperial house merely as the most powerful clan among their own group of social equals, and their replacement by a system in which the emperor occupied a position of far greater despotic power. The group through whom he ruled became much larger, more varied in its social range, and owed its position, through the examination system, directly to the throne and to the state rather than to their own social group. Although Naito drew attention to the social and economic changes which accompanied this development, his theory was in the main a political one.26 I propose now to examine some aspects of this crucial period from the standpoint of social and economic history, to show some of the directions in which our research is now tending to be concentrated, and also to show how our his­ torical studies on this period are coming to form a unified and coherent whole. The traditional view of the subject which I have chosen is simple and straightforward. During the centuries preceding the reunification of China by the Sui in 589, successive governments in northern China imposed, as a measure to encourage the resettlement of areas depopulated by barbarian invasions, a system known as the chun-fien, under which the state allocated lands to the peasants, who in return accepted various fiscal responsibilities.27 Con­ sideration of the different uses to which land was put, in particular the demands of sericulture for mulberries planted permanently, made it necessary to incorporate within the system two separate types of tenure, the one temporary— the lands being returned to the state when the holder reached ORDER IN T5ANG AND SUNG CHINA 17 the age of tax-exemption— the other hereditary.28 The system recognized the right of the holder to the possession of these lands, but incorporated various restrictions upon the total size of holdings and upon the disposal of lands granted under its rules which effectively obstructed the free mobility of landed property.29 Justification for such measures was found in the Confucian dogma that all land was the Emperor’s, and that the state should therefore reserve the right, if not to its disposal, at least to the supervision of its disposal. The Sui and the T ’ang inherited this system, and imposed it as a system of law over the whole Empire. But it is very doubtful how far it was actually enforced. In the south it was probably never implemented and everywhere it broke down completely after 756. On its disappearance there was a wide-scale development of great landed estates, and land began to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Where previously there had been comparatively few very large properties owned by the state, the aristocratic clans, and the Buddhist foundations, while the bulk of the population had been peasants farming on their own account, after this great numbers of people became tenants or labourers on the new estates, and the free peasantry declined relatively in numbers. Parallel to this reshaping of rural society, the period was also marked by a rapid growth of trade, the expansion of the urban population of the great cities, and a general im­ provement in the position of the merchant and artisan classes. Much of this growth took place in the cities of the Yangtse valley, and this area became increasingly the real centre of China’s economy.30 On the political level, the great Chinese historian Ch’en Yin-k’o has established that during the late seventh century the great aristocratic families of Kuan-chung, who had domi­ nated China and provided successive ruling dynasties over five centuries, were already being challenged by the emer­ gence of a class of professional career-bureaucrats recruited, as a deliberate policy of the T ’ang emperors who wished to l8 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL consolidate their power vis-a-vis the aristocracy, from a wider social range through the new examination system.31 This process resulted eventually in the emergence during the Sung of a new class of ‘scholar-gentry5, who provided the ruling class until the fall of the Empire. Ch’en Yin-k’o’s political studies have been based, for the most part, on detailed textual scholarship of the old-fashioned Chinese type, allied to immensely wide reading, a brilliant instinct for the evaluation of his sources, and an immediate grasp of the problems involved in the analysis of political factions and power groups. The basic research upon the social and economic aspects of the period, on the other hand, has developed out of another old-established discipline, the study of the comparative institutions of T ’ang China and of early Japan. These studies grew up in connexion with the renewed in­ terest in Confucianism and Confucian political theory in Tokugawa Japan, and in the immediate context of T ’ang studies may be said to begin with the attempt of Matsushita Kenrin, about 1740, to reconstruct the T ’ang administrative Statutes {ling). At the end of the nineteenth century the adop­ tion of a Western-style legal code in Japan, and the beginning of German-oriented legal education in the Imperial Uni­ versities, brought this old tradition into contact with current European work on the history of feudalism and medieval society. In the first decade of this century legal historians such as Miyazaki Michisaburo and Nakada Kaoru were able to look at the early institutions of Japan and their Chinese counterparts through the eyes of European historians like von Maurer, Meitzen, Maitland, and Vinogradoff. From these men stemmed a strong and lively tradition of legal-historical investigation of Chinese institutions which has had no parallel in China, and which has proved one of the most productive aspects of recent sinology. As early as 1906 Nakada, in a study of the Japanese shoen system, which presented many very interesting parallels with ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 19 the European manor, pointed out that the same term (read in Chinese as chuang-yiiari) occurred frequently in Chinese sources of the late T ’ang period, and suggested that this ‘system’ had arisen out of the decay of the chun-tfien land allocation system in China.32 Nakada did not, it seems, follow­ up this point, although he made an invaluable contribution to the textual investigation of the Chinese sources on the chun-fien system itself.33 But he clearly appreciated that in this respect the late T ’ang was a period of radical institutional change. The subject was not again taken up until 1917, when Kat5 Shigeshi, the father of modern studies in Chinese economic history, published a study which showed that the chuang- yiian, under a variety of other names, could be traced back through the country seats of the wealthy and powerful as far as the Later Han dynasty. He also demonstrated that their rapid expansion during the eighth and ninth centuries was the result, as Nakada had suggested, of the relaxation of the tenurial restrictions of the chiin-fien. With the ending of these restrictions such estates could be built up freely without fear of the legal consequences, and formed into units for large- scale agricultural production. On the other hand, Kato proved that the parallel with the Japanese shoen was largely illusory, and that in China the chuang-yuan was never institu­ tionalized. Its holder had no special form of title to his property, no fiscal privilege in respect of his holdings, and no special jurisdiction within his estates.34 Some years later, in 1928, Kato returned to this topic, and made a detailed study of the internal organization of these great estates, establishing the system by which bailiffs managed them on behalf of their absentee landlords, and attempting to clarify the relationship existing between the great land­ lords and the tenant farmers who worked their lands. He also suggested that these ‘manors’ often formed the nucleus for small market towns in later times, led to a considerable extension of the cultivated area, and helped to provide a 20 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL centre of rural economic stability in this very disturbed period.35 During the early ig305s Kato’s studies were translated into Chinese, and had great influence upon the group of young economic historians centring around T ’ao Hsi-sheng, who concentrated upon the neglected middle period of Chinese history between the Han and the Ming. They in turn made some further refinements of the economic aspects of this problem, but had hardly got into their stride when the Sino- Japanese war broke out, scattered them, and brought this aspect of historical research to a premature end. Quite independently of this Chinese and Japanese research, Stefan Balazs, a young pupil of Otto Franke, published in 1930-2 a brilliant discussion of T ’ang economic history,36 which was the first work by a Western sinologue which could stand in its own right as a piece of creative interpretative history in this field. Balazs, like Kat5 and the young Chinese economic historians, based his studies for the most part upon conventional materials from the standard historical sources, although Kato himself was also able to draw much important evidence from his encyclopaedic knowledge of Chinese poetry and belles-lettres. In the late ig20Js and i93o’s the whole field of land-tenure and related institutional subjects was further revolutionized by the new corpus of manuscript material discovered at Tun-huang. These docu­ ments drew the attention of economic historians back from the chuang-yiian of late T ’ang and Sung times to the early T ’ang and to the chun-tfien system. The Western public, largely as a result of Dr. Waley’s recent book, is now widely aware that the accidental dis­ covery at the turn of the century of the monastic library at Tun-huang has revealed a whole new genre of ‘popular’ literature deriving from the world of the ‘semi-literate’ which underlay the highly cultivated and sophisticated milieu of the literati. It is far less widely appreciated that the Tun- huang documents opened a similar window upon the local ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 21 institutions of T ’ang times, and have given us a remarkable insight into the functioning of society at its lowest levels, of which the official histories compiled by and for the central bureaucracy give only the rarest hints.37 Unfortunately, the bulk of the manuscripts were taken to Europe, and scattered in collections in London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and various places in the Far East. They were seen only by a few scholars with the skills necessary to make use of them, and their publication has been slow, patchy, and incomplete. Chinese scholars were quick to appreciate their importance, but for them— lacking a lively tradition of institutional studies— the administrative documents were overshadowed in importance by the new literary discoveries, for these coincided with the great in­ terest in old colloquial literature provoked by the movement to write in the spoken language. Other Chinese scholars gave their attention to the manuscripts of classical and Buddhist texts. Although both Lo Chen-yii and Wang Kuo-wei com­ mented upon certain of the administrative documents during the 1920’s, work upon the documents relating to land has been almost a monopoly of Japanese scholars.38 As I have mentioned, there already existed a flourishing school of Japanese legal historians, and these had a specialized know­ ledge of the T ’ang, since it was from T ’ang China that Japan had borrowed her own institutions wholesale in the seventh and eighth centuries. Thus when the first printed collections . of Tun-huang fragments were published in China, and when other pieces transcribed by Japanese visiting scholars in the Bibliotheque Nationale and the British Museum came to their attention, these scholars were quick to seize upon their importance. From 1927, when the young socio-economic historian Tamai Zehaku published his first article of the fragments of household registers and their bearing upon economic history and upon the chiin-tfien system,39 a steady stream of publications has continued which has entirely 22 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL revolutionized the picture of early T ’ang institutions currently accepted thirty years ago. The new evidence was attacked from two angles. Two young pupils of Nakada Kaoru, Takikawa Masajiro and Niida Noboru dealt with it as legal historians, discussing the manuscripts in the light of a very detailed knowledge of the contemporary printed sources and of early Japanese institu­ tions. On the other hand a group of young economic his­ torians, Tamai Zehaku, Hamaguchi Shigekuni, and Suzuki Shun, sought mainly to evaluate the new evidence in the light of social history. The results of this new phase of our studies were summed up in one of the great formative works of Chinese historio­ graphy, Niida Noboru’s Legal documents of the T'ang and Sung r periods*0 published in 1937. These studies gave a new im- / portance to the chiin-fien system. Whereas until this time it had been perfectly possible to reject the whole system as a utopian scheme like the ‘well-field5 system of ancient times, which had been one of the chief targets for the iconoclastic Chinese historians of the I9205s and i9305s, after the dis­ covery of the household and land registers which Niida and others had published, it was clear that although the alloca­ tion of land was made only on a very restricted scale and most families had far less than the lands to which they were legally entitled, the system of registration was still in full force, the entitlements to land under the system remained legally valid, the scheme still functioned as a system for defining different types of tenure, and the intimate inter­ connexion between land-allocation, registration of house­ holds, liability to labour services and taxation, was still preserved. In addition two or three small fragments of un­ known provenance suggested that the system of reallocation by the local authorities was still periodically carried out, showing that the system had not altogether deteriorated into a simple system for the distinction of differentiated tenures. During the war, and in the immediate post-war period ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 23 when Japanese historians, freed from the political restraints of the i93o’s, were involved in a mass flirtation with theo­ retical Marxism, little further progress was made in this field. But since 1954 there has been a revival of Tun-huang studies, which has produced results of even more striking significance. The stimulus for this new burst of activity came from the microfilming of the entire Stein collection of manuscripts in the British Museum, and of the collection remaining in Peking, many of which had escaped the notice of scholars, and from the rediscovery of the thousands of fragments re­ covered from the Central Asian deserts around Turfan by various expeditions organized between 1902 and 1914 by Count Otani. These precious documents had been mislaid, and came to light in a storehouse of the Honganji temple in Kyoto only in 1949. The economic and social documents among them have recently been published in two volumes of a series of studies entitled Monumenta Serindica (Saiiki bunka kenkyu). This work marks as great a step in the study of T ’ang land tenure and related problems as did Niida’s earlier volume.41 The Otani documents are for the most part small scraps of paper containing at most only a few lines, and often only a few words. They were mostly official documents which had been cut up to make grave-garments for burials, and present the same extreme difficulties of interpretation as do the smaller collections found in the same regions by Stein and von le Coq.42 Their major importance, from the point of view of land tenure, is that they have confirmed irrefutably \hat the reallocation of lands under the chun-tfien system was still widely enforced in the early decades of the eighth cen­ tury. They include lists of lands returned to the state, lists of persons entitled to grants of land, and lists of lands for re­ allocation with official notations showing the persons to whom they have been granted. That the chiin-tfien system was enforced, at least to a limited extent, is now unquestionable. Perhaps more important still, however, are the numerous 24 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL documents which deal with tenancy. Tenancy of official, monastic, and private lands is of course well attested from historical and legal sources. Although the great landed hold­ ings of the old-established aristocratic clans were probably farmed partly by slaves and semi-servile retainers [pu-cHii)^ most of their land was probably rented out to tenant farmers paying produce rents, usually a share of their grain crop. The Otani documents, coming as they do from a marginal region on the edge of the Central Asian desert, do not throw any light on such great private estates, but they include much material about the tenants of official lands and of monastic estates. The extent of tenancy which they reveal is remark­ able, although this may be related in some degree to the severe land-shortage in the Turfan oasis. Not only do we find tenant farmers working land for various government agencies and for monasteries. There were also slaves farming as tenants lands belonging to persons other than their owners, monastic communities acting as tenants of official lands, and even peasants farming as tenants the lands allocated to other persons under the chun-fien system, while renting out their own allocation to tenants of their own. This intense com­ plexity of tenancy may have been the result of attempts to rationalize the highly fragmented scattered holdings which seem to have resulted from the piecemeal distribution of land under the chiin-fien rules, and which had been further compli­ cated by purchase of land. It may also have been a localized phenomenon, at least in this extreme form. But it does prove that, in the middle T ’ang period at least, there can have been no question of any rigid distinction on the basis of per­ sonal legal status between free peasant and tenant (as has sometimes been claimed), since a single individual commonly worked his own land at the same time as cultivating land rented from a landlord. There are clear signs, even from the Tun-huang manu­ scripts themselves, that there was a strong tendency towards the consolidation of private rights in landed property, even ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 25 within the context of the chiin-fien system itself,43 and the j laws themselves contained various loopholes and anomalies which led to an ever-increasing proportion of land being held on an hereditary tenure. But the final breakdown of the chun- fieri system, and its abandonment even as a device for defining tenures, was the direct result of political events. In 756, the rebellion of the frontier Governor-General An Lu-shan broke out, and although it and its subsequent risings were eventually suppressed after seven years of bloody civil conflict, the T ’ang was no longer a strong centralized state. : The provinces grew in power at the expense of the ruling dynasty, which was no longer able to impose the rigid super­ vision of local affairs needed to keep the chiln-fien system, the registration system, and the old tax system in working order. In these circumstances the government abandoned all f attempts to impose controls upon the tenure and disposal of land, and although the chiin-fien rules remained in the Code for another 500 years, no attempt was ever made to enforce them, and the government tacitly admitted the rights of landholders to the free possession and disposal of their proper­ ties.44 There was always a market for vacant lands. Land was the safest if not the most profitable form of investment, and those who had newly acquired wealth or position hastened to buy lands and establish themselves as rural landlords. The new officials who from the late seventh century began to rise from comparatively humble origins to positions of great i power through the examination system in ever-increasing I numbers needed land to establish their family fortunes and j social position on a sound economic basis. Even under the chun-fien laws those who attained the highest ranks were legally entitled to buy quite large holdings. After the An Lu-shan rebellion the officials of the new provincial adminis­ trations, who had not had this right, and many of whom were soldiers of fortune from very lowly origins, were even more desperate to acquire landed property. Moreover, the 26 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL opportunities for personal enrichment were infinitely greater after the breakdown of central authority over finance and the abrogation of financial power by the provinces.45 With the upheaval of population which accompanied the civil wars of the mid-eighth century, large areas of land were left derelict and were taken over by powerful local men and , transformed into estates worked by refugee tenant-cultiva­ tors. A further vast quantity of land came upon the market when the majority of Buddhist monasteries were suppressed in 843-5.46 By the ninth century, the chuang-yuan, the great estate consisting usually of many fragmented holdings of land, built up piecemeal and managed by a bailiff who controlled the individual tenants for an absentee landlord, was a com­ mon feature of the Chinese rural economy. During the period of complete political chaos which lasted from 860-960, this development was further intensified, the old aristocracy disappeared entirely, and was replaced by a highly diversified ruling class holding office under the be­ wildering succession of military governors and petty kings who carved up China among themselves. All of these new officials were intent on accumulating estates, and now had unprece­ dented opportunities for doing so. The Sung emperors carried to its logical conclusion the movement started by their T ’ang predecessors to replace the old ruling class of aristocrats, most of whom had risen to office through hereditary privilege, by a professional bureau­ cracy recruited on their personal merit through the state examination system. By the eleventh century, the graduates no longer formed a sort of elite within the ruling class, a small closely knit coherent social group, as they had been in T ’ang times. They now began to provide the vast majority of the official cadre, and now only a small minority of officials gained employment through hereditary right and other irregular means.47 This new ruling class, although its actual composition varied in detail over the centuries, was essentially the same ORDER IN T5ANG AND SUNG CHINA 27 scholar-gentry which ruled China until the beginning of this century. Leaving aside the highly controversial question of whether they were primarily landowners who became offi­ cials, or whether they were primarily officials who invested the profits of office in land, there is no question that the scholar-gentry became large-scale landlords and formed the upper section of the landowning class. Land was essential for them, as it was their landed pos­ sessions which enabled them to stabilize their family finances, make provision for themselves and their dependants, and provide their families with the means of underwriting the long and arduous education by which their descendants in their turn might hope to rise to high office. The establishment of such economic stability on a long-term basis was no easy matter, since the lack of any system of primogeniture led to the rapid dissipation of even the largest properties among numerous heirs. From the eleventh century onwards various attempts were made to provide such long-term stability by the establishment of family trusts. These too took the form of investment in extensive landed properties. In spite of these measures, the actual membership of the scholar-official class was constantly changing as some families fell into compara­ tive obscurity and others rose to replace them, eager in their turn to establish their position as country gentlemen by the acquisition of land.48 The whole economic foundation of the life of this new official class was the great estate, the chuang-yiian. Sudo Yo- shiyuki, in a brilliant study of the connexions between high office and land-holding published in 1952,49 showed clearly that the great estate was most highly developed in precisely those regions— the modern provinces of Kiangsu, Anhwei, Chekiang, and later Fukien— from which the vast majority of doctoral candidates and high officials came.50 But the extensive development of these estates did not merely provide a stable source of income to support the new ruling class. It also led to the development of a new type 28 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL of relationship between landlord and cultivator, and thus to the emergence of a totally new class-structure in rural society. During the late T ’ang and the Five Dynasties period there seems to have been a sharp increase in the employment of personal dependants of a semi-servile status, especially among the military officials of the new provinces. Such personalized relationships took many forms, for instance the highly inti­ mate form of fictitious adoption, through which personal dependence was strengthened by the addition of ‘parental discipline5, but by far the most widespread and influential of these new relationships was the new status-relationship between landlord and tenants. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the tenant farmers (tien-hu) came to form a distinct personal status-category, with severe legal restrictions upon their personal liberty.51 This problem has been the major preoccupation of the greatest living economic historian of Sung times, Sudo Yoshiyuki, who has produced over the last thirty years a formidable corpus of detailed research which has thrown entirely new light upon the structure of Sung society. Sudo’s first work on the ‘tenant5 (tien-hu) class appeared as long ago as 1933, but his most important contributions have been published since 1949.52 His work, and the somewhat earlier study by Niida of the legal implications of the system of ‘tenancy5 on which he has worked, have been basic in the formulation of the theory, widely accepted in Japanese Marxist historical circles, that the period from about a .d . 800-1000 saw the transition of Chinese society from the stage of ‘slavery5 to that o f ‘feudalism5 or ‘medieval serfdom5. The chief argument for this has been the indisputable fact that the tenancy system in force upon many Sung estates presents some suggestive parallels with medieval villeinage. The tenant under the new system was not only obliged to pay rent, usually in the form of a fixed share of the crop, to his landlord, as his T ’ang predecessor had been, he also ORDER IN T5ANG AND SUNG CHINA 2 Q had to perform various labour dues, to render many customary gifts over and above the fixed rent, and to pay a sort of amercement before the marriage of his children. Most im­ portant of all, the 'tenant5 was prohibited from leaving the land which he cultivated, and if his landlord sold this land the 'tenant5 passed to the new owner as an integral part of the property. We need not take too seriously the few hotheads who have proclaimed that here we have feudalism in full force rearing its ugly head, and that here begins that 'feudalism5 which continued to characterize Chinese rural society down until 1840 or even until 1949. This argument does not hold water for a moment, since the highly restrictive tenancy contracts I have mentioned disappear in the early Ming, when a further major revolution in land tenure occurred.53 But the fact re­ mains that in southern and south-eastern China, the area where during the Southern Sung the system of great estates was most densely developed, many of the cultivators were in a position of legal subservience to their landlords, and even when the legal restrictions upon their freedom were removed during the Ming, they remained in very many cases in a position of economic dependence which continued to restrict severely their freedom of action. Moreover, it is surely signi­ ficant that the areas where the chuang-yiian and tenancy had been most common continued to be marked in Ming and Ch’ing times by an abnormally high incidence of servitude in various forms. The Sung system of tenancy, however, was not universal. A high proportion of independent free peasants— probably in excess of 60 per cent, of the total population— remained.54 Moreover, it was not simply a one-sided system of exploita­ tion of the peasantry. Many small farmers voluntarily became tenants because a powerful and rich landlord could shield them from the attentions of the tax-gatherers and also be­ cause the large chuang-yuan as an economic unit offered security and stability, and the possibility of surviving hard times, 30 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL which were impossible for a small man farming on his own account at bare subsistence level.55 Moreover, the ‘tenants5 themselves did not form a homo­ geneous group. Sudo himself has shown that many tenants continued to work land of their own side by side with the lands rented from their landlord, and there were an infinite number of fine shadings of social status between the free farmer who paid rent to work a piece of land belonging to a neighbouring landlord on the one hand, and the virtual serf without any personal possessions living in a settlement owned by the landlord and using the landlord’s implements on the other. It was, in addition, to the landlord’s own advantage not to treat his ‘tenants’ too harshly, and the family rules com­ piled in Sung times usually advise the family members on this subject. A body of loyal tenants was not merely a labour force used to provide the family income. In periods of unrest it also afforded protection both against bandits and against the subaltern officers of the local yamen, who frequently attempted to levy illegal impositions. In many cases we read of tenants being provided with weapons for this purpose.56 Nevertheless, it was as a labour force that the ‘tenants’ were primarily recruited, and it was as an economic unit that the chuang-yiian was managed. Already in the pre-T’ang period the monastic communities, who had great numbers of dependent families of a semi-servile status, had been able to use this large labour force, backed by their great reserves of wealth, in clearing and breaking in new lands for cultiva­ tion, in particular building up great estates from wooded hill-land which could hardly have been effectively cleared by single families of simple peasants.57 In the same way Sung landlords played a very large role in the reclamation of farm lands from river-bottoms, lake-beds, swamps, sandbanks and coastal flats. Reclamation works on the largest scale were mostly undertaken by government agencies, but landlords with a large labour force at their disposal also frequently ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 31 undertook the embanking and draining of such new lands (yu-fieri, &c.).58 The large scale of operations of the owners of chuang-yiian and their great reserves of wealth also enabled them to capitalize their operations on a scale far beyond the reach of the small individual farmer. The Sung, and in particular the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was a period of rapid improvement in agricultural techniques and of the invention of new implements.59 The great landlords of the lower Yangtse valley installed complex water-driven machinery for pumping irrigation water, for draining their fields, and for threshing and milling their grain. They also invested in the large variety of improved and complicated field implements which are described and illustrated in the rich literature on agricul­ tural techniques published during the late Sung and Yuan.60 The officials themselves also began actively to encourage increased rural productivity, and in the place of the con­ ventional Confucian homilies extolling the virtues of hard labour which they were accustomed to address to the people of their district, we find them instructing the farmers in the use of new techniques.61 Through the government agencies new early ripening varieties both of wheat and of rice were widely disseminated.62 The use of a wide range of manures, including lime, vast quantities of human waste from the ever­ growing cities, and manure crops grown to be ploughed in, became universal.63 The tenant farmers themselves played an important role in increasing productivity. Since their contracts normally defined the rent as a fixed proportion of their rice crop they commonly began to grow a double grain crop of autumn- sown wheat of an early-ripening variety followed by spring- sown rice. The wheat was grown purely as a cash-crop for sale in the cities of the lower Yangtse area, where a huge market in grain swiftly grew up. The cities also provided an insatiable market for every variety of vegetable and other food products raised specially for sale.64 32 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL The chuang-yiian were in fact an essential feature in the boom of agrarian productivity which, it is becoming increasingly evident, characterized the late Sung, at least in southern and central China. Without this great increase in produc­ tivity, it is difficult to imagine how the splendours of the capital at Hang-chou and of the other great cities, which so impressed Marco Polo,65 could have arisen, or how the state could have continued to provide the enormous sums which it spent upon defence during the wars with the Chin and later with the Mongols, even after the loss to the Chinese of all northern China during the twelfth century. These then are some of the directions in which research on the social and economic history of the T ’ang and Sung periods is moving. A comprehensible historical pattern is beginning to emerge in which political, intellectual, eco­ nomic, technological, and social history form parts of a reason­ able synthesis. But to the historians among you I would stress that we are still at a very primitive stage of our studies which, as a rough parallel, I would compare with the stage which English medieval history had reached in the time of Seebohm and the early writings of Vinogradoff. A vast amount re­ mains to be done, and there are still a great many important questions— particularly in the field of pure economic history — which we are not yet in a position to answer, even with guesswork. However, now, when our historical studies are just be­ ginning to reach a stage when they can become a meaning­ ful part of the experience available to historians in general, we are threatened by policies imposed from outside our pro­ fession for reasons of the purest political contingency, which urge us to concentrate our energies and those of our students upon various short-term expedients designed to boost the study of modern Chinese affairs. Nobody could be more aware than I am of the need for systematic research of high academic quality upon China’s recent past. However, those who urge us to make this radical ORDER IN T5ANG AND SUNG CHINA 33 re-orientation of our studies assume that the study of tradi­ tional China is already amply provided for in our universi­ ties. Far from this being the case, there are not more than a dozen adequately trained scholars working upon pre- twentieth-century Chinese history in the whole of Europe. I would like to take this opportunity of drawing the attention of my audience not only to the experience of American uni­ versities, which after a decade of over-concentration upon the modern scene are now beginning to realize that modern studies only become fully meaningful when pursued in his­ torical and cultural context, but also to the reactions pro­ voked in China itself when such a policy of concentration upon modern times was adopted as the cparty line5 in 1958. At that time several prominent Chinese historians faced the very real risk of charges of heresy to warn their colleagues that such a policy will strengthen the tendency of young scholars to become increasingly divorced from their own past, and cut off from the world of scholarship elsewhere. I would like to join my voice to theirs in a plea that our studies should be allowed to develop along their own natural lines, and that the study of modern and traditional China should continue side by side, since neither can be adequately under­ stood alone. British scholarship in the Chinese field is now an integral part of a world-wide effort to understand and to analyse Chinese culture and society. This effort is no longer, as it was forty years ago, a haphazard and random assemblage by antiquarians of fragments of knowledge about the past, with­ out direction or conscious motivation. It is a closely inte­ grated and cumulative pursuit of knowledge in a field which has the widest possible implications for comparative history, literature, philosophy, and for all of the social sciences. If we continue to pursue the study of both traditional and modern China as aspects of a single historical and cultural continuum and maintain the most rigorous standards of scholarly integrity, we have it within our power to make a 3 4 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL contribution of fundamental importance to world scholarship and to exert a powerful influence upon the direction and form which this contribution will take. Not only are we advised to concentrate all our energies on studies of modern China: at the same time we are also urged to reduce to the minimum the linguistic training given to historians and scholars from the other social sciences who wish to specialize in the Chinese field. The recent report of the Hay ter Sub-Committee of the University Grants Committee appears to consider that it is possible to train an historian to the level where he can proceed with independent research in one year. I hope that it is clear from the survey that I have given of one small field in Chinese history that the linguistic de­ mands of our subject are considerable. All future progress in Chinese studies depends upon adequate linguistic training. Literary texts of considerable intrinsic difficulty are the funda­ mental sources for any research, not only in history, but also in economic and social history, law, philosophy, religion, art, and literature. Even for work on the twentieth century, save for the last decade, a thorough grasp of both the classical and colloquial languages is essential. But the need for the specialist to be able to read and fully understand his primary sources is only the beginning. The Chinese and Japanese universities are very lively centres of research, producing annually a formidable mass of scholarship which fully mea­ sures up to Western academic standards. There can be no question that in the foreseeable future it will be our Chinese and Japanese colleagues who will set the pace, and if we are to contribute anything useful in the field we must keep abreast of what they write. This means that our students must be thoroughly familiar with both modern Chinese and Japanese.66 These are not counsels of perfection. They are the bare skills required in our field, as basic as is some knowledge of the rudiments of mathematics to the economist. Without such ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 35 thorough training people holding posts in Chinese history will be unable to keep up with developments in our studies, and will fail to measure up to the generally accepted inter­ national standards in our field. Our studies as a whole have but recently emerged from the amateur stage. The Hayter Sub-Committee’s preoccupa­ tion with short-term and fundamentally unacademic ex­ pedients threatens, if their outlook is widely adopted by British universities, to perpetuate the tradition that the field of modern Chinese studies at least is one for the amateur and the journalist rather than for the serious scholar. If Chinese studies are to be expanded in newly established centres, as we all hope will be the case, it is essential that they should be in the hands of properly trained specialists. The training of such specialists cannot be accomplished in a few months. It may indeed in some special fields take seven, eight, or even ten years before a man becomes fully productive. But, if the universities refuse to be stampeded into premature expan­ sion, and are willing to expend the time and money required to train thoroughly and methodically a new generation of really adequate scholars, the whole quality of Chinese studies in England could be transformed out of all recognition within a decade. This School will bear the heavy responsibility of provid­ ing language training for most of the specialists who will be needed. We must resolutely refuse to compromise our standards of scholarship, or to countenance the sort of aca­ demic half-measures which are being urged upon us.

NOTES 1. Minutes of University College Council, 15 and 22 April 1837; H. Hale Bellot, University College, London, i 8 s 6 - i g 2 6 i p. 119. I am much indebted to the Secretary, University College, for his kind­ ness in having transcribed for me the relevant passages from the Council’s Minutes. 36 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL

2. Samuel Kidd, Catalogue of the Chinese Library of the Royal Asiatic Society, London (John W. Parker), 1838, p. 58. 3. For the details of Staunton’s career, see his very interesting auto­ biographical sketch Memoirs of the Chief Incidents of the Public Life of Sir George Thomas Staunton, B art, printed for private circulation (London, 1856). On the endowment of the K ing’s College Chair, see Appendix II, pp. 206-12. A subscription list is printed on pp. 210-12. 4. King's College, Annual Report, 1847, pp. 13-14, Appendix A, pp. 15- 16; ibid., 1852, p. 23; ibid., 1853, p. 35. 5. King's College, Annual Report, 1854, P- 38; Hearnshaw, History o f King's College (London, 1929), p. 250. 6. King's College, Annual Report, 1854, p. 38. 7. King's College, Annual Report, 1859, PP- 37_38- 8. Report of the Committee appointed by the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury to consider the Organization of Oriental Studies in London, H .M .S.O ., 1909 (Cmd. 4560), Minutes of Evidence, No. 1995, P- 74) evidence of Sir Ernest Satow. (This report is here­ after referred to as the Reay Report.) 9. Satow, Diplomat in Japan , p. 4. 10. J.R.A.S., 1873. 11. Information supplied by the Secretary, University College, in a personal communication, 10 November 1961. 12. University College, London, Annual Report, 1873, p. 14. 13. See Beal’s obituary in J.R.A.S. (n .s.), xxi, 1889. Concurrently with Beal, University College also appointed from 1884-8 A. Ter- rien de Lacouperie as Professor of Indo-Chinese Philology. 14. On Douglas, see his obituary notice in J.R.A.S., 1913, pp. 1095-9, and the notice by Cordier in T 'ou n g Pao, xiii, p. 287. The former includes a complete bibliography. 15. See J.R.A.S. (n .s.), xx, 1888. Wade’s inaugural lecture, delivered on 13 M ay 1888, seems never to have been published in full. 16. On this agitation see J.R.A.S. (n .s.), xviii, 1886, Annual Report for 1886, pp. iv-v; Reay Report, Appendix Illb, xxi, pp. 153-6; T h e Tim es, 27 Sept. 1909. 17. See Imperial Institute Tear Book, 1 (1892), pp. 777, 785, 794, Reay Report, pp. 153-6. From the latter it would seem that the failure of this reorganization was one of the reasons why the Commis­ sioners under the University of London Act 1898 refused to create a Faculty of Oriental Languages, History, and Archaeology in the newly reconstituted University, as had been requested by the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society and other bodies. 18. China Association Annual Report, 1903, Appendix, letter from George Brown, Director of the School, dated 23 December 1902. In my researches into the China Association’s School of Practical Chinese I am greatly indebted to the helpful co-operation of Mr. H. Collar, who went to great pains in locating old minutes and correspondence. ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 37

19. Reay Report, Appendix V, pp. 65-67, China Association Annual Report, 1904-5, Appendix, p. 103, memorandum from Sir Walter Caine Hillier. 20. See the annual reports of the Committee of Management of the China Association’s Incorporated School of Chinese, appended to the association’s annual report from 1910 onwards. On the long agitation for the foundation of the School of Oriental Studies— in which the urgent need for instruction in Chinese was a most important factor— see the Reay Report, the Lords debate upon it in The Tim es, 28 September 1909, and the leading article upon it entitled ‘A Chapter of National Inefficiency’. See also Sir P. J. Hartog’s long article in vol. i of B.S.O.A.S. 20a. After Owen’s retirement in 1914, Chinese teaching was in charge of a lecturer, the Rev. S. B. Drake. From 1920-4 he was succeeded by a Reader in Chinese, Rev. Dr. Hopkyn Rees. See Seriate M inutes, 1920, No. 4334, 1925, No. 2929. 21. See the obituary notice by W. Simon in B.S.O.A.S . xxi. i (1958), pp. 220-4. 22. The best summary of these developments is given in A. F. Wright, ‘The Study of Chinese Civilization’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxi. 2, pp. 233-55. 23. See Ch’ii T ’ung-tsu, Law and Society in traditional China, La Haye, 1961. 24. See A. Feuerwerker, ‘China’s History in Marxian Dress, Journal of the American Historical Society, Ixvi. 2 (1961), pp. 323-53, and ‘Rewriting Chinese History: Interpreting the Past in the People’s Republic of China’, University o f Toronto Quarterly, xxx. 3 (1961), p p . 273-85. 25. For a general summary of Naito’s views, see Hisayuki Miyakawa, ‘An Outline of the Naito Hypothesis and its Effects on Japanese Studies of China’, Far Eastern Quarterly, xiv. 4 (August 1955), PP- 533~5 2- 26. A further important critique of Naito, in E. G. Pulleyblank, Chinese History and World History (Cambridge, 1955), p. 18, shows how this theory resulted to some extent from misleading analogies with the replacement of feudalism by absolute monarchies in Europe. This basic criticism, however, is more justified with a view to the earlier formulation of the theory in the Shina Ron of 1912. His lectures at Kyoto in 1921-5, posthumously published by his son in the volume Chugoku kinsei shi, Kyoto, 1947, gives a much broader and more fully integrated view of the problem. 27. On this system in general see Maspero, ‘Les Regimes fonciers en Chine, des origines aux temps modernes’, in the Recueil de la Societe Jean Bodin, tome 2 (1937). Maspero’s view of the reasons for the imposition of the system is, however, quite different from that of most Chinese and Japanese scholars, and is almost certainly erroneous. See also Sogabe Shizuo, Kinden-ho to sono zeiyaku-seido 38 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL (Tokyo, 1953), and the classical description in Tamai Zehaku, ‘To-jidai no tochi-mondai kanken’, Shigaku zasshi, xxxm , viii, ix, x (1922). 28. On this point see D. Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T ’ang Dynasty (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 2-3. 29. See F. Schurmann, ‘Traditional Property Concepts in China’, Far Eastern Quarterly, xv, pp. 507-16. 30. See, for a succinct description of this, E. A. Kracke, ‘Sung Society: change within tradition’, Far Eastern Quarterly, xiv, pp. 479-88. 31. C h’en Yin-k’o, Sui T 3ang chih-tu yuan-yuan lueh-lun kao, Chungking 1944, and T ’ang-tai cheng-chih shih shu-lun kao, Chungking 1944. 32. Nakada Kaoru, ‘Nihon shoen no keito’, Kokka gakkai zasshi, xx. i (1906). 33. Nakada Kaoru, ‘Toryo to Nihon-ryo to no hikaku kenkyu’, Hdseishi ronshu, vol. i, pp. 677 ff. 34. Kato Shigeshi, ‘To no shoen no seishitsu oyobi sono yurai ni

tsuite’, Tdyd gakuhd, v i i . iii (1917), reprinted in Shina keizaishi kosho (Tokyo, 1952), pp. 208-30. 35. Kato Shigeshi, ‘To So jidai no shoen no soshiki narabi ni sono shuraku toshite no hattatsu ni tsuite’, Kano Kydju kanreki kinen Shinagaku ronso (Tokyo, 1928), reprinted in Shina keizaishi koshb (Tokyo, 1952), pp. 231-60. 36. S. Balazs, ‘Beitrage zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der T ’ang-Zeit’, Mitteilungen des Seminars fur Orientalische Sbrachen zu Berlin , xxxiv (1931). PP- 1-92, XXXV (1932), pp. 1-73, xxxvi (1933), pp. 1-62. 37. A very general popular account of the discoveries is given in L. Giles, Six centuries at Tunhuang (London, 1943). 38. For a specialized bibliography of Japanese works on the Tun-huang M SS., see Tonko bunken kenkyu rombun mokuroku (Tokyo, Toyo bunko, i959)- 39. Tamai Zehaku, ‘Tonko koseki-zankan ni tsuite’, Toyo gakuho, xvi. ii (1927). 40. Niida Noboru, T o So horitsu bunsho no kenkyu (Tokyo, 1937). 41. Saiiki bunka kenkyukai; Tonko Torohan shakai-keizai shiryo (vol. i, Kyoto, 1959; vol. ii, Kyoto, i960) forming vols. ii and iii of Saiiki bunka kenkyu, English title, Monumenta Serindica. 42. H. Maspero, Les Documents chinois de la troisieme expedition de Sir Aurel Stein en Asie Centrale (London, 1953). 43. See Niida Noboru, T o So horitsu bunsho no kenkyu, pp. 774 ff. 44. The article of Schurmann cited in note 29 above makes this point forcibly. 45. See, on the financial situation in this period, D. Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T 3ang Dynasty, and Hino Kaisaburo, Shina chusei no gumbatsu (Tokyo, 1942). 46. See D. Twitchett, ‘Monastic Estates in T ’ang China’, A sia M a jo r ( N .S .), v. ii (1956), pp. 123-46. 47. See E. A. Kracke, ‘Family vs. Merit in Chinese Civil Service ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 39

Examinations under the Empire’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies x. ii (1947), pp. 103-23, and Civil Service in Early Sung China (Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1953). 48. On the mobility of this ruling class see Ho Ping-ti, ‘Aspects of Social Mobility in China 1368-1911 ’ in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1. iv (1959), pp. 330-59. On attempts to stabilize clan and family property, see Shimizu Morimitsu, Chugoku zokusan-seido kd (Tokyo, 1949), and for a case-history, D. Twitchett, ‘The Fan Clan’s charitable Estate, 1050-1760’, in Nivison and Wright (ed.), Confucianism in Action (Stanford, Cal., 1959). 49. Sudo Yoshiyuki, Sodai kanryosei to dai-tochi shoyu (Tokyo, 1950), part of series Shakai kosei-shi taikei, series 2: 8. 50. On the local provenance of doctoral candidates, see E. A. Kracke, ‘Region, Family, and Individual in the Chinese Examination System’, in Fairbank (ed.), Chinese Thought and Institutions (Chicago, 1957)- 51. The legal restrictions on the tenant (tien-hu) are discussed byN iida Noboru, Shina mibun-ho shi (Tokyo, 1942), and Chugoku hoseishi (Tokyo, 1952). 52. The most important of his articles are collected in Chugoku tochi- seido shi kenkyu (Tokyo, 1955). Sudo’s views are not universally accepted. Miyazaki Ichisada in particular interprets the new form of tenancy as being essentially a free contract between the two parties. A long section of Sudo’s book is devoted to a refuta­ tion of this view. 53. On this see Niida Noboru, Chugoku hoseishi kenkyu, tochi ho torihiki ho (Tokyo, i960), pp. 164-215. 54. See Kato Shigeshi, ‘Sodai no shukaku-ko tokei’, Shigaku, xn. iii (1933)j reprinted in Shina keizaishi kosho, vol. ii (Tokyo, 1953), pp. 338-70. Kato takes too simple a view of the population statistics, however, and Sudo mentions several further factors which need to be taken into account before we can estimate the actual extent of tenancy. 55. See Sudo Yoshiyuki, ‘Sodai no kimei-kisan to Gendai Kanjin no token’, Toyobunka kenkyujo kiyo, ix (1956), pp. 65-126. 56. See, for example, the twelfth-century Tixan-shih shih-fan. 57. See J. Gernet, Les Aspects economiques du bouddhisme dans la societe chinoise du ve au xe siecle (Saigon, 1956). 58. On the reclamation of land during this period see Tamai Zehaku, ‘Sodai suiriden no ichi toku isho’, Keijo Teikoku Daigaku Bungaku- kai ronsan, vii, ‘Shigaku ronso’ (1937, Seoul); Sudo Yoshiyuki, ‘Sodai no uden to shoensei: toku ni Konan Toro ni tsuite’, Toyo- bunka kenkyujo kiyo, x, pp. 229-300 (1956); Miao Ch’i-yu, ‘Wu- Yiieh Ch’ien-shih tsai T ’ai-hu chi-ch’ii ti yii-t’ien chih-tu ho shui-li hsi-t’ung’, Nung-shihyen-chiu chi-Ean , ii (i960), pp. 139-58. 59. There is a large secondary literature on this subject. Otto Franke as long ago as 1913 produced a very important study of agrarian 4 0 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER

history, Ackerbau und Seidengewinnung in China (Hamburg, 1913). The most up-to-date summary of technique is in Sudd Yoshiyuki, ‘Nan-So inasaku no chi-iku sei5, Shigaku zasshi, lxx . vi (1961), PP- 1- 5 3 ; 60. On this literature, see Sudo Yoshiyuki ‘Nan-So no Nosho to sono seikaku5, Toydbunka kenkyujo kiyo, xiv (1958), pp. 133-204. 61. Sudo ‘Nan-So inasaku no chi-iku sei5. 62. Kato Shigeshi, ‘Shina ni okeru inasaku toku ni sono hinshu no hattatsu ni tsuite5, Toyd gakuho, xxxi. i (1947), and ‘Shina ni okeru senjo-to saibai no hattatsu ni tsuite5, Shigaku, xvm. ii-iii (1939). 63. Sudd ‘Nan-So inasaku no chi-iku sei5. 64. Sudd Yoshiyuki, ‘Nan-So ni okeru bakusaku no shorei to nimo- saku: Dengosei to kanren sasete5, Nihon gakushiin kiyo, xiii (1955), pp. 205-47, xiv (1956), pp. 1-25. Shiba Yoshinobu, ‘Nan-So kome ichiba no bunseki5, Tdyo gakuho, xxxix (1956), pp. 258-93. 65. On the cities of the period, in particular on Hang-chou, see A. C. Moule, Quinsai with other notes on Marco Polo (Cambridge, 1957), and J. Gernet, La Vie quotidienne en Chine a la veille de l'invasion mongole, 1 2 5 0 - 1 2 7 6 (Paris, 1959). 66. There is a real danger that a situation could arise similar to that which confronted Chinese historians in the late thirties, and which continues to face them today, that of a gulf between the textual scholars engaged in limited factual research who lacked any general standards of relevance on the one hand, and the interpreters and synthesists without free command of their textual data on the other. On this situation, see A. F. Wright, ‘The Study of Chinese Civiliza­ tion5, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxi. 2, pp. 252-3.