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Downloaded from Brill.Com09/28/2021 05:03:40AM Via Free Access 556 Epilogue Epilogue One of the fundamental areas of historical inquiries is the study of the society and its economy. Revealing patterns of economic practices, regulations, poli- cies, and laws in the past offers both theoretical insights on human conduct and practical lessons on the underlying principles of our own socio-economic activities. This book is a study of the newly discovered, compiled, and published eco- nomic records of Western Xia. The archives that constitute the primary body of materials for this research project are 12th–13th century economic records pro- duced by the Tangut people, which have thus far never been the subject of any monographic study. These primary sources of great academic value proved a pleasant surprise, when first identified at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (IOM) in St. Petersburg. And it gives me great joy and satisfaction to share my findings on this rich cultural heritage of Western Xia with my colleagues in Tangut studies and allied fields. This book is the first focused study on the Tangut economy by way of a sys- tematic analysis of the social documents. It tries to present a new and deeper understanding of the Tangut economy and society, in the following ways: (A) Household registration, which certifies a natural person’s legal status as a civil subject, is an instrumental source of material to any socio-economic research. The corpus of Tangut household registers shows that Western Xia enjoyed an excellent system of household registration, which fea- tures diverse types of registers and accounts. The contents recorded in the registers and the shoushi self-reports are rich and informative. These demographic records furnish us with the necessary materials to conduct studies on the ratio and proportion of household types, ethnicities of local families, names and name-giving, the practices of inter-ethnic mar- riage at the basic and bottom levels of the society, and the customs of cross-cousin and polygamous marriages in the area of Khara-Khoto, all of which fill in the gaps and vacuum of our previous knowledge in the Tangut society. (B) The Tangut tax records reveal to us a fixed system of levying taxes in grains, based on the size of farmlands. In the agricultural areas of Western Xia, peasants paid land, labour, and hay/forage taxes. Receipts of grain taxes and additional bundles of hay taxes, as well as the poll tax, a form of tributum capitis levied on each ‘head’ of a liable subject, are some of the main attributes of the Tangut tax system. The so-called ‘water-tax’ is © Shi Jinbo and Li Hansong, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004461321_011 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Jinbo Shi - 9789004461321 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:03:40AM via free access 556 Epilogue a special levy on the use of water for the purpose of irrigation. Among these taxes, survived records of the poll tax and water tax count amongst the finest, rarest, and most valuable primary materials in Chinese history. (C) Financial and property accounts supply us with the names of the com- modities. Given our limited knowledge in the actual lives of the Tangut people, such as their quotidian uses and produces, the abundance of names and features of various goods recorded in these newly-discovered primary sources enlivens our imagination of the daily lives of the Tanguts, and delineates the social contexts of these materials. Some iconic prod- ucts, such as Fan cloth (made in Western Xia) and Han cloth (made in the Central Plains), are now well-known thanks to these accounts of grains and properties, which are undoubtedly amongst the best primary sources for social historians of Western Xia and of China. That both Fan and Han cloths are mentioned in these accounts shows that the Tanguts produced their own cloth even prior to their arrival in what were Han Chinese ter- ritories, and that even after their integration with local Chinese popula- tions, both types of cloth coexisted in households and co-circulated in markets, neither of which had entirely replaced the other. This has, on the one hand, shaken our prior assumptions about the absence of any native Tangut textile industry, and on the other, confirmed our intuition that the Tanguts absorbed Chinese technology in an era of inter-ethnic socio-economic exchanges. (D) Trade and transaction records not only reflect the status of medieval commerce in and beyond Tangut territories, but also provide us with the most critical sources on the commodity prices in Western Xia mar- kets. They reveal the production costs and market prices of a variety of goods, from livestock, silk to alcohol, that were continually made, sold and exchanged. Besides, there exist a number of transaction taxes, which were also an integral part of the economic lives of the Tangut people. (E) Each and single one of the contracts prior to the Yuan Dynasty is a gem. Amongst the Tangut social documents, the contracts are most numer- ous and diverse, numbering up to about 150 registers and more than 500 pieces, which altogether account for the largest portion of Tang and Song contracts (including the contracts excavated in the Dunhuang Grottoes) hitherto identified. Tangut contracts are wide-ranging, includ- ing transactions, pawns, loans, as well as employment and exchanges. As the vivid and illustrative saying goes, “The government has its laws, the people have their contracts.” Moreover, this corpus of materials adds a large number of important sources to the field of Chinese contract Jinbo Shi - 9789004461321 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:03:40AM via free access Epilogue 557 studies. In general, Tangut contracts represent an intermediary stage, in transition from Tang and Song to Yuan traditions. (F) The Tanguts resorted to block-printing receipts that were used on a large scale, at a high frequency, and in a fixed format. Then, they filled in required information in the empty spaces. Such are the cases in the receipts of grain tax and the additional bundles of hay taxes. In this way, the procedures of issuing these receipts became formalised, operation- alised, and greatly expedited, thus the chance of typological errors sig- nificantly reduced. To date, this is the earliest example of printed receipt in ancient and medieval economic history, a successful application of the block-printing technique to daily-used documents, and a major step forward in the both the history of printing, and the history of economic documents. Studying the Tangut economy with the aid of its economic records represents a new approach within the field of Tangutology. This method also extends to a comparative study of the Tangut household registers, accounts, and con- tracts with the law code of Western Xia, the Laws of Heavenly Prosperity. So far, studies show that the Laws of Heavenly Prosperity were thoroughly, if not perfectly implemented on the ground level of the Tangut society. Therefore, we are assured that this code of law is a reliable source of historical knowledge. Another important contribution of the social documents is to Tangut callig- raphy and paleography. Upon reading the cursive writings in these documents, I spent a total of 20 years perusing and probing the patterns of cursive strokes, both by comparison and in reference to the Tangut standard script. Up to now, the cursive script of the Tangut writing has been basically deciphered. Historians bury themselves in archives, not least to use primary historical sources to reconstruct the actual lives of peoples in the past. Indeed, the eco- nomic records of Western Xia now allow us to re-imagine the vivid scenes of social lives in the once prosperous city of Khara-Khoto. This book shows, for example, that around 800 years ago, not only Fan (Dangxiang-Tangut) and Han (Chinese), but also Qiangic (which to the Tanguts meant ‘Tibetan’), Huihu (medieval Uyghur), Khitan, and even Dashi (Arab) migrants resided on the banks of the Blackwater River. They cultivated and irrigated the fields, planted and harvested wheat, millet, barley, sorghum and beans, lived in houses and yards built on their lands, and raised horses, cows, camels, and sheep in a half-settled and half-pastoral life. Men and women dressed in different ethnic costumes come and go, converse and transact in all places. The commoners wore gowns made of Fan or Han cloths, while the wealthy embellished their dress with silk. Fields were farmed in large numbers, but also taxed by the local Jinbo Shi - 9789004461321 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:03:40AM via free access 558 Epilogue government: the ‘junior accounting magistrate’ waits at the gate of the grain storage site to receive the dues, a process overseen by a supervisory official standing by his side. Upon receiving the taxes, the official hands back receipts into the taxpayer’s hands. Besides, some peasants either bore the burden of taxes by their own labour, or paid the dear capitation taxes. For the farmers, diverting water to irrigate their field was also liable for taxation. After a good harvest, the peasants would have paid their taxes, carried grains on carriages, and transited across the busy roads. The common peasants could fill their stomachs when things went well, but would starve should a drought strike the town. In springtime, which must have followed a harsh winter but still antic- ipated the harvest season, the most impoverished of the peasants suffered a shortage of food, and had no recourse but to take grain loans at a high interest rate, which usually exceeded 50% of the principle loan, and in some extreme cases, as exorbitant as twice the sum due for repayment.
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