The River, the Plain, and the State

by Ling Zhang

  Table 5. Quotas of Summer–Autumn Taxes in 1077 (Various Measurements)

  Summer TaxAutumn TaxSummer–Autumn Ratio

  National Total Quota 16,962,695 35,048,334 1:2

  Quota for Grain (hu, approximately 33.5 liters) 3,435,785 14,451,472 1:4.2

  Quota for Grass (bundle) n/a 16,754,844

  Note: Liang (1980: 289).

  Table 6. Quotas of Summer–Autumn Taxes for Hebei in 1080 (Various Measurements)

  Summer TaxAutumn TaxSummer–Autumn Ratio

  Hebei Total Quota 1,393,983 7,758,107 1:5.6

  Quota for Grain (hu) 278,797 3,180,824 1:11

  Quota for Grass (bundle) n/a 3,723,891

  Note: Liang (1980: 290).

  These numbers indicate that throughout the Song empire, farmers were supposed to hand over to the government far more millet and rice in the fall than winter wheat in the summer. The millet-wheat ratio was exceptionally high in Hebei during the late eleventh century. The tax payment made in winter wheat was merely a tiny fraction of the payment made in millet. In other words, of the entire amount of staple grain that the government obtained from Hebei within a year, 92 percent was millet. Indeed, tax quotas set by the government reflected the government's taxation preference; they did not strictly reflect actual farming practices and agricultural yields. It is possible that the government imposed a lower tax rate on summer crops and a higher tax rate on fall crops. However, we have no historical evidence to verify such a hypothesis. The previous chapters have suggested that since the 1040s, the Song state experienced serious financial stress; it had particular difficulties in gathering food to feed the growing number of military personnel in Hebei. After 1048, Hebei's military often faced food shortages. In that situation, it seems rather unlikely that the government would choose to levy less wheat if it could. If wheat production were substantial in Hebei, the government would most likely adjust the tax rate to raise its summer revenue in terms of wheat.

  These tax quotas and my analysis of the socio-economic conditions in the Northern Song period all together point to a rather minor status of winter wheat in Hebei's agricultural economy. Its production was proportionally insignificant; its contributions to feeding the population in Hebei and supplying revenue to the state were limited. In 1012, Emperor Zhenzong remarked: “Hedong [Shanxi] and Hebei would not work without millet.”43 The dominant status of millet in Hebei's agriculture and mass consumption remained strong throughout the Northern Song period.

  As winter wheat failed to take over agricultural practices and dramatically boost land productivity, Hebei's recovery and growth in agriculture based on traditional crop, millet, before the 1040s constituted more of a quantitative, accumulative growth, rather than the kind of qualitative, revolutionary growth that scholars have wished to see. After 1048, because the agricultural population and the arable land both shrank, Hebei's food production declined substantially, not only for winter wheat but for millet as well. Hebei's population and its gigantic military, had to turn to external sources for support. The final pages of this chapter will focus on the roles the imperial state played in feeding Hebei's hungry people.

  7.3 Paddy Rice: A Northern Dream of Southern Affluence

  As winter wheat failed to improve land productivity and Hebei's agriculture experienced a general decline, food shortages often troubled this region. To the imperial state, perhaps the most serious issue was that it could not obtain adequate food within Hebei to support the massive number of troops there. A significant portion of Hebei's military supplies had come from importation. But importation was not always stable, and heavy reliance on external support put Hebei in a vulnerable position. Had a famine broken out in southern parts of China and thereby reduced exports of grain to the north, Hebei's soldiers would have starved. Any setback in the transportation system either inside or outside Hebei – due to extreme weather, destruction of the canals, Yellow River floods, or broader social and political conditions – could cause shipping delays, reduce supplies, and lead to the exhaustion of Hebei's military granaries. Suffering hunger, soldiers would become resentful of their commanders and the government. As we have discussed in the previous chapters, on many occasions soldiers rose up in protest or even organized mutinies. An unruly military in the frontier province would certainly be Hebei's and the imperial state's worst nightmare.

  Well aware of the food shortage issue, some of Hebei's military commanders considered it an inevitable consequence of the construction of the frontier ponds, since the ponds occupied land and squeezed out agriculture. As much as they believed the existence of the ponds absolutely necessary, they also considered it critical to reduce the military's dependence on long-distance transportation. Facing this dilemma, military leaders suggested reviving agricultural self-sufficiency in northern Hebei by conducting military colonization. Given the fact that the landscape in northern Hebei had changed greatly and the environmental conditions no longer allowed traditional dry-land farming, they began to ponder the possibility of cultivating water-based crops such as paddy rice.

  Rice was not a complete stranger to Hebei. Back in the first, third, sixth, seventh, and early eighth centuries some military commanders and officials experimented with it in this region.44 But the earlier attempts were small-scale and short-lived. The unfavorable natural conditions in this part of China, such as the short growing season and inadequate water supplies, made planting rice costly and unproductive. In the Song period, it seemed that the manmade watery environment in northern Hebei provided at least the abundant water, if not other conditions, that paddy rice required.

  In the early 990s when the construction of the ponds commenced, Cangzhou's commander He Chengju decided to institute military colonization, in order for the soldiers to produce their own food.45 His advisor Huang Mao 黃懋 was a native of paddy rice country in southeast China. Knowing the advantage of the crop, namely its high yield, Huang recommended trying out rice cultivation in the marshlands around the ponds. In the first year of their experiment, the first frost arrived much earlier in Hebei than in traditional paddy rice areas in south China, so the crops were destroyed and the harvest was poor. Huang thereafter imported an early-ripening variety of rice from his native Fujian 福建 province.46 Thanks to its relatively short growing season, the new variety reportedly produced a bumper harvest, which silenced criticisms of rice cultivation within the government.

  From that time through the 1030s, the practice of rice cultivation by military colonies spread westward from northeastern Hebei to central Hebei, wherever the ponds could provide adequate irrigation. In 1034, the central government dispatched an official to Hebei, with the goal of “teaching the common people how to cultivate paddies” in Huaizhou 懷州, Weizhou, Cizhou 磁州, Xiangzhou, Xingzhou, Mingzhou, Zhenzhou, and Zhaozhou 趙州. The result of this government advocacy among the civilians, however, was unclear; no further reports about it appear in historical records.47 I suspect that production was not successful, because those prefectures were all located at the foot of the Taihang Mountains in western Hebei, where the rugged terrain made controlling water and supplying irrigation difficult. I also doubt that civilian farmers had equal access to the waters in the state-owned ponds.

  Among all the places that cultivated paddy rice, Baozhou was their center. In 1020 the military in that district opened more than 10,000 mu of paddies and produced 18,000–20,000 dan of both non-glutinous and glutinous rice, at a rate of 1.8–2 dan per mu.48 Its yield was five times higher than that in neighboring places in Hebei, for example, Shun'an and Qianning commanderies. Its total annual production weighed in at more than half of the entire amount that Hebei's military colonies harvested.49 Two factors might have contributed to the relatively high production in Baozhou. First, the prefecture was located at the western end of the chain of ponds; its terrain rose gradually and the accumulated water was perhaps able to drain off more easily than in other places to the east. It is likely that good drainage preserved soil fertility, which
advanced the growth of crops. Second, Baozhou planters seem to have invested more time and energy in their rice paddies than people in other places. As an official proudly claimed in 1020, Baozhou's successful production was only achieved because its soldiers worked harder and rested less than those in other places.50 At his suggestion, four out of every ten soldiers who were assigned to farm Hebei's military colonies were sent to Baozhou; their arrival made Baozhou the center of Hebei's military farming.

  Obviously, the large labor force was a key factor in Baozhou's high rice yield. However, given the enormous labor inputs, the land productivity seemed rather low. Even at its best, Baozhou's production was far lower than that in traditional rice producing areas in south China. At the time, the unit yield of rice in south China was about 3 dan per mu, 50–67 percent higher than Baozhou's level – by far the best in Hebei – and certainly much higher than the production level in colonies in other places in Hebei. This means that by 1020, Hebei's entire military rice cultivation was very limited, and its productivity was much lower than that in contemporary south China. Hebei's desire to achieve food self-sufficiency by experimenting with the southern crop seemed no more than a case of wishful thinking.

  The limited rice production by Hebei's military very likely persisted through the 1060s. During the 1070s and 1080s, Wang Anshi's reformist government sought to “enrich the state and strengthen the military.” This agenda, when applied to Hebei, targeted the issue of reducing Hebei's dependence on importation and generating food based on local resources. As Hebei's officials and officers actively performed a major reformist policy, the “Measure of seeking water benefits for arable fields,” and proceeded to construct more ponds and collect more water resources, they found the idea of rice cultivation attractive. In 1075, the court approved a proposal to revive the old irrigation system in Baozhou and enlarge its rice paddies.51 In order to do so, local officials used government fund to purchase dry land (ludi 陸地) from private landowners and turn it into water-covered paddy fields (shuitian 水田).52 This practice not only took place in Baozhou, but also spread to other places in Hebei. In Dingzhou in northwestern Hebei, for example, the prefect Xue Xiang 薛向 and the Fiscal Commissioner Shen Gua collaborated to construct an irrigation system and promote paddy rice production. Wu Chuhou 吳處厚 (1053–1089), a junior official who worked for Xue and Shen, wrote flatteringly about their accomplishment: the semi-arid, bleak land of northwestern Hebei was turned into a “watery land,” resembling the lower Yangtze valley where rice paddies offered their bounties.53

  The reformist efforts arguably increased Hebei's overall rice production. At the height of the state's promotion of rice cultivation, however, conflicts arose over the land and water resources. Planting rice required land and water, and so did maintaining the ponds. Since both resources were limited, would they best be used for the paddies or for the ponds? In the 1070s, for instance, the central government instructed some local officials to reclaim land from some ponds to create paddy fields. They did so by channeling the muddy water of the Yellow River into the ponds and causing the ponds to silt up.54 In 1077, two officials in Xiongzhou were punished for failing to balance the water supplies for both uses. They “discharged water [from somewhere else] into ponds without planning in advance to reserve water for the paddies.”55 Even in places where local officers and officials did not receive court instructions to expand paddies and were supposed to maintain the ponds, they sometimes were lured by agricultural profit and chose to illegally drain the ponds and plant rice there. Apparently, for a time, rice cultivation, which had originated in Hebei because of the ponds, had now begun to take precedence over the ponds, particularly in its claim over limited resources.

  As Nagase Mamoru has correctly pointed out, conflicts over the strategic function of the ponds and the agricultural values associated to them became increasingly evident.56 Over time, those conflicts tended to favor the ponds. At the imperial court, calls to restore and maintain the ponds never ceased in the reform era; they became even louder after the mid-1080s, when the conservatives came back to power. Those arguments echoed the court debates for whether or not to remove the Yellow River from Hebei, which we examined in Chapter 5. In the debates, Hebei's strategic concerns and the state's security needs rose above anything else – be it the stability and manageability of the river, the hardship of the people, or in this case, the development of rice production to satisfy military demands. As a result, after the mid-1080s, Hebei's rice cultivation fell by the wayside.

  Whether the fall of rice cultivation was due to the constraints of resources or to its failure in political competition, the key question is: did paddy rice become a major grain crop, even for just a while, in Hebei during the eleventh century, and thereby improve the life of Hebei's hunger-struck people? Unfortunately, not only was the production short-lived, but it was mainly conducted by government-organized corvée laborers and soldiers, specifically for the military colonies. Despite the government's temporary advocacy, there is little evidence in surviving records to indicate that Hebei's commoners became interested in planting paddy rice. The semi-arid climate in many parts of the Hebei plain made it very costly to manage artificial irrigation for the paddies. The ponds and its water resources were state property, which were not shared by commoners. For ordinary farmers, even if they appreciated that rice had a higher yield than millet or wheat, it would be too big a risk to turn their land into paddies and battle against the unfavorable weather conditions. Securing water supplies also necessitated too much of an investment.

  The military-oriented cultivation failed to produce enough food even for the military population, contradicting its initial intention.57 In 1021, the overall production of Hebei's military colonies was 29,400 dan, including rice and other kinds of grain. This number grew very slowly in the following decades; in 1066 it reached a mere 35,468 dan.58 In contrast, Hebei's annual demand for military grain was immense, and it kept rising throughout the Song period. In 1034 the total number of all military items (grain, forage, cash, fabric, and other goods) was 10,200,000, regardless of their different unit measurements.59 Assuming one fourth of the number referred to grain required to feed Hebei's soldiers – that is, 2,550,000 dan of grain – the requirement was 86 times greater than the production from Hebei's military colonies in 1021 and 71 times greater than the production in 1034. In 1055, Xue Xiang, the Fiscal Commissioner, reported that Hebei's fourteen frontier prefectures required five million strings of cash every year to purchase 1.6 million dan of grain for military use.60 Assuming that this amount of grain was for one year's consumption, it was 54 times Hebei's colonial production in 1021 and 45 times the production in 1066. The gigantic consumption that Xue mentioned was only for the fourteen frontier districts. Counting all of Hebei's districts and their military demands, the figure for Hebei's entire military grain consumption would be much higher than 1.6 million dan. After Hebei's military expanded rapidly from the early 1040s, its total consumption must have gone far beyond the 1034 number of 2.55 million.

  Obviously, Hebei's rice production was far from adequate to feed Hebei's troops. It is no wonder that the ministers of the Military Colony at the imperial court complained: “Even with a good harvest its [rice's] output does not compensate for its expenses.”61 The compilers of the Standard History of the Song Dynasty made a perhaps more reasonable, but still damning, judgment: the true benefit of Hebei's paddy rice plantation lay not in agricultural gains but in “storing water to halt the Khitan cavalry.”62

  In southeast China, for example in the lower Yangzi valley, the early-ripening variety of rice shortened the growing season for each individual crop, accelerated the rotation among multiple rice crops on a unit of land, and thereby doubled or even tripled the annual output of the land. This technological innovation drastically boosted land productivity, improved the overall food supplies, and raised living standards among people in southeast China. Yet, when introduced into Hebei in the 990s, even with tremendous gov
ernment investments and manual care, this variety of rice failed to supplement millet and wheat to become another major crop. It did not boost Hebei's agricultural production, and therefore failed to reverse Hebei's reliance on importation. The dreams of Hebei's military leaders to achieve food self-sufficiency and of Wang Anshi's fellow reformists to “enrich the state” by promoting rice production on the northern land failed to come true. The “watery land” created by the environmental changes in Hebei, and the one in southeast China, produced very different economic stories.

  7.4 “The Root of All-Under-Heaven” – Swapping Core and Periphery

  At the beginning of 1125, shortly before Emperor Huizong's abdication and the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, Yuwen Cuizhong 宇文粹中 (?–1139) pleaded with Huizong to fix the dysfunctional state finances. Among various problems the state and the Song society faced, Yuwen pointed out that “Bandits and rebels are burgeoning in Shandong and Hebei. Hebei used to produce clothes and textiles for the whole of All-Under-Heaven, but its silk production and weaving have all been destroyed.”63 The decline of Hebei's economy and collapse of its society were the product of the hydraulic mode of consumption: the unceasing destructive episodes of the environmental drama and the heavy exploitation by the imperial state – in part to remedy the environmental problems – had exhausted Hebei's land and people.

  Yet, the suffering was not exclusive to Hebei itself. As Hebei's disaster and famine refugees flowed southward to Henan and then across all of north China, Hebei's environmental and socio-economic disease spread and magnified. Wherever refugees went, they demanded relief and supplies, unsettled the local society, triggered economic hardship, exposed latent social problems, and even instigated mass unrest. In the late eleventh century, rebellions in Shandong and Henan were often sponsored and aided by Hebei's outlaws. The geographical spread of Hebei's problems defied any administrative boundaries and refused to be confined by the state power. Hebei's chronic suffering affected the imperial state and its daily operation, too. As some leaders of the state saw it, the socio-economic degradation of Hebei – a strategically key frontier region that the state could not simply ignore or dismiss from its imperial system but had to protect and hold together – was like “a person with chronic disease.”64 This disease was a gangrenous one. After causing Hebei itself to decay, it spread to other parts of the imperial system, consumed its resources, and gradually wore the entire system down. What happened within Hebei were not only regional affairs signifying a regional history, but also the affairs organizing the empire and constituting the history of the imperial state.