A strong country knows thirteen numbers: those of granaries and people within its borders, of able-bodied men and women, of old and weak people, of officials and servicemen, of sophists and useful people, and of horses, oxen, hay, and straw.
—The Book of Lord Shang, fourth century BCE
IN 221 BCE QIN’S last rival surrendered and its king declared himself the “First Emperor.” Qin had been large enough to be considered an empire for several decades by then, but this official declaration is still taken as the official founding of China’s imperial system. At the time of the announcement, Qin had conquered an area the size of Western Europe that included tens of millions of people and most of the good farmland in East Asia. Instead of giving his subjects a break from war, the king continued to conquer, sending armies south as far as the ocean and into the arid north, where they built the first “Great Wall of China.” Qin collapsed only fourteen years after declaring itself an empire, but its system was soon revived by the Han dynasty, which endured for four centuries (c. 200 BCE–200 CE) and made Qin’s centralized bureaucracy the standard model of political organization in China, which it remains to this day. Qin’s successors have played a key role in replacing natural ecosystems across East Asia with farmland.1
The goal of this chapter is to analyze the ecology of Qin’s political system at the pinnacle of its power, the reign of King Zheng/the First Emperor (r. 246–210 BCE). He is known around the world for the terracotta army that guards his tomb, but in East Asia he is famous as the founder of the Chinese imperial system and as the archetypal harsh ruler. This chapter is not about him but about how his empire worked. Just as animals obtain energy and materials by eating food, agrarian states fund themselves by extracting labor and agricultural products from the population. Since the keys to Qin’s power were its ability to mobilize resources and labor, its officials worked to build social organizations that could easily be controlled and taxed. They also encouraged people to clear more land for agriculture. Grain was too bulky to transport very far over land, so most of the state’s grain income was kept in granaries close to where it was grown from which local officials distributed it to feed laborers, officials, and livestock. If we think of this process in terms of energy, common people captured solar energy in the grain they grew, paid some of that grain to the state in tax, and then consumed the energy in it as they performed corvée or military labor for the state. Because the grain stayed in place, central government officials had to gather information about what resources were available to each government office across the empire and then decide how those offices should use them. The empire’s financial administration was the brain that controlled the metabolism of the state, and it had unprecedented power to shape environments across the subcontinent.
As in most of the pre-industrial world, ancient China’s agriculture produced relatively small amounts of surplus. Because each farmer could produce only a small amount of grain, the state could not afford to employ huge numbers of officials to collect it. They had to find a balance between small administrations that were cheap to run but did not collect enough income and large, expensive ones that collected more surplus but used most of it to fund their own operations. As discussed in previous chapters, it was probably the enormous expenses of warfare that pushed Qin and its rivals to improve their extractive capabilities. The expenses of war tend to force states to find ways to extract surpluses from every aspect of economic production from which they can profitably do so. The Qin state went beyond this, reorganizing, standardizing, and simplifying society for the purpose of making it easier to monitor and extract resources from. Officials discouraged people from itinerant or mobile subsistence strategies that could not be taxed. As discussed in the previous chapter, they organized the male population into a system of ranks based on military service and reorganized farmland to provide them with land as a reward for earning higher ranks. This, of course required a whole system of land-mapping and population registration.2
The state described in this chapter exercised a degree of bureaucratic control, at least in some of its territories, that was probably unprecedented in human history up to that time. It established standardized writing, weights, and measures that long outlasted it. It produced such enormous quantities of bureaucratic documents that even the tiny fraction that have survived provide us with far more information on how its government worked than we have on any previous East Asian state. Legal statutes written on wood and bamboo have been excavated (and stolen) from the tombs of Qin and Han officials in the central Yangzi valley, most famously those at Shuihudi and Zhangjiashan. Legal statutes were the rulebooks of local administrators across the empire, allowing us to see how the central government wanted officials to behave. The huge cache of routine administrative documents excavated from a well at Liye, in the mountains of western Hunan, allow us to see how the government actually worked—and did not work—in a remote corner of its empire. This chapter takes advantage of this rich body of data, as well as the two classic histories written by officials of the Han central government, Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shi ji) and Ban Gu’s Han History (Han shu), to analyze how the Qin state functioned. It also uses archaeological research on megaprojects like the Great Wall and the terracotta army, which demonstrate the enormous amount of human labor that Qin had at its disposal.3
The state’s supply of labor came primarily from the military and corvée service that most adult men had to serve. The state also had plenty of convict labor since most crimes were punished either with sentences of hard labor or with fines that most people had to pay off by working for the state. Access to such large amounts of labor allowed Qin to engage in a variety of massive labor projects, such as palaces, an empire-wide road system, the First Emperor’s famous mausoleum, and the Long Wall, the first “Great Wall of China.” Less dramatic but much more widespread corvée tasks involved routine maintenance of roads, bridges, field boundaries, walls, dikes, and buildings. These had substantial environmental impacts. Water control works reorganized local water systems to make them more productive. Roads and bridges enabled officials and merchants to extract resources from previously inaccessible areas and transport them farther than they could have before. They also enabled colonists to move into newly conquered regions.
While this chapter focuses on continuities over the thirty-six years of King Zheng’s reign, it should be emphasized that officials were constantly adapting to the difficulties posed by the rapid expansion of the empire. Qin’s intensive administration was designed within the capital region and its southern colonies. After Qin conquered its former enemies in the densely populated east, some officials recognized how difficult it would be to maintain control over them. They argued that Qin should copy the decentralized governance model of the Western Zhou and enfeoff trusted relatives in conquered regions. But the emperor opted to extend the existing system of intensive centralized governance over his entire domain, surely the wrong approach for administering huge territories that were home to millions of resentful people. Nonetheless, Qin’s model might have worked had it not been combined with never-ending wars and colossal vanity projects.
The biggest change to Qin’s fiscal system in these decades was the increasing use of markets. While Qin’s economy in earlier times had been strongly controlled by the state, its conquest of highly commercialized regions allowed officials to take advantage of the flexibility offered by commerce. Without markets, states could only collect taxes in kind and make subjects work for them. Markets make it easier for states to extract surpluses from the economy by facilitating exchange. The easier it was for government offices to convert commodities, coins, and labor into one another, the more flexibly they could extract resources from local economies. Buying and selling goods on local markets saved the expense of transporting goods over long distances and could even allow for profits to be made. While the Qin Empire’s economy was always based on grain and labor, the government increasingly took advantage of the portability of items such as coins, cloth, metals, and products made by its own craftsmen. These had the advantage of being durable and portable, so they could be carried to areas where the state needed other resources and exchanged for them. Qin even told local governments to take advantage of changing prices to increase their revenues. These reforms were still being worked out when Qin collapsed, and many of the same trends continued under the Han.4
Qin’s central government had varying degrees of control across the empire, which was administratively divided into the “old” and “new” territories. These are shown in map 11, though it should be emphasized that we do not know exactly which areas were included in the old and new territories. The old territories were roughly those that Qin controlled around 230 BCE before it began its final campaign to conquer its rivals. This area included much of the central Yellow River valley, Sichuan, and the Han River valley. The new territories included the North China Plain and the extensive areas south of the Yangzi valley. While most maps of the Qin Empire depict the south as solidly Qin territory, in fact Qin only had administrative control over a few areas south of the Yangzi River, most notably the lowlands of the central Yangzi valley that it had conquered from Chu. Across the vast regions south of the Yangzi—most of which were hilly and densely forested—Qin controlled nothing more than a scattered network of garrisons connected by river and land routes. In retrospect, Qin’s penetration of the far south was a key event in the Chinese colonization of what is now South China, but it was a minor concern of the Qin rulers.5
Map 11. The Qin Empire and its commanderies. The core of the empire was the “Old Territories,” which lay south of the Long Wall (dashed lines) and west of the dotted line. The location of the two southwesternmost commanderies is entirely a guess.
It was the recently conquered North China Plain that kept Qin officials awake at night. The plain was the demographic, economic, and cultural center of the Chinese-speaking world and it had been governed by independent states for eight centuries. Its people had very strong regional identities and tended to consider Qin a powerful but backwards country, perhaps reminiscent of European stereotypes of Russia. Many strongly resented Qin’s occupation of their land and it is not surprising that the uprising that overthrew the empire began there. The emperor’s advisors argued that he should enfeoff his relatives and allies in these regions, but he rejected their advice, which was probably a fatal mistake. Enfeoffment was the strategy successfully adopted by the founder of the subsequent Han dynasty. He enfeoffed his relatives in these regions, and over the subsequent century the Han central government gradually conquered and subjugated them.6
Given that later Chinese empires contented themselves with considerably less local administration than Qin seems to have had, it is worth asking how effective Qin’s administration was. Late imperial Chinese empires (c. 1400–1900 CE) were rarely capable of maintaining accurate population or land records, and officials systematically enriched themselves from their posts. We can infer that corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence were also issues in Qin because many of its laws were written to prevent just these problems. Central officials were quite aware how easily lower-level officials could fake data and embezzle state assets. Despite these issues, the documents from Liye, Hunan, reveal that the state bureaucracy in distant peripheral regions was expected to function according to the same laws and practices as those in the core regions. Although it did not work particularly well in Liye, Qin would never have attempted to expand it so widely if it had not been effective in the capital region. It should also be emphasized that Liye was a military garrison, not a randomly selected village under Qin control. The Qin administration had very little presence across large areas that were nominally part of the empire.7
A key question in thinking about the ecological effects of a powerful state like Qin is this: How were land, labor, and resources used differently under a centralized state than they had been in earlier periods when there were weaker states, or no state at all? Without having to pay taxes or provide labor service, people could have produced less food to begin with. They could also have produced surpluses but used them to work on things they and their neighbors found useful rather than the projects of a distant central government. Or just relaxed and enjoyed themselves. Of course, governments did organize people’s labor to build useful infrastructure that small communities could never have achieved, among other benefits.
This chapter is divided into seven sections. The first section outlines the central government, especially its management of land and people. The second does the same for local administration. The third section explains the various kinds of taxes that were collected. The fourth discusses the system for state allocation of land, in which nonhereditary plots of land were granted to households based on their positions in the state system of ranks. The fifth section outlines the state’s use of human labor, while the sixth discusses horses, cattle, and other animals. The final section reviews how the state managed nonagricultural resources such as mines and forests.
In theory, the Qin state was an autocracy in which the supreme executive power of the ruler derived from his ancestors to whom he offered sacrifices. There was no notion of the state in a modern sense. The polity was the dynasty, and the cults of the soil, grain, and royal ancestors were its symbolic and spiritual heart. Sacrifices at the altars of these cults were considered essential for maintaining the dynasty. Although the king was understood to be operating within a cosmological system in which certain behaviors were proper—such as treating his subjects well—he was bound by no laws either celestial or terrestrial. This is a notable difference from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim kings, who were supposed to follow God’s law; from Medieval European kings bound in contractual relationships with their vassals; and from rulers whose power was constrained by bodies of landed elites such as senates, estates, or parliaments. Whereas the early Roman emperors had to pretend that they were not monarchs in order to avoid Julius Caesar’s fate of being assassinated by the oligarchy, Chinese emperors could call themselves gods. The term huangdi, conventionally translated “emperor,” literally means “majestic deity.”8
In practice, kings were constrained by the other powerful people who surrounded them, not least their mothers. As in courts everywhere, those with access to the ruler could wield significant power by virtue of their proximity to him. In China there is a long tradition of officials resenting the seemingly unearned power of these people. Powerful eunuchs and women were particularly resented and are usually portrayed negatively in histories and other writings. But we can be sure that such people could also be sources of good advice. The First Emperor was among the most powerful monarchs in Chinese history, but he had to work with his family members and high officials to exercise power. And, of course, the vast majority of decisions were made by officials who had achieved their positions by demonstrating competence.9
The bureaucracy constituted the core of the state and did most of the actual administering. Thankfully for historians, officials did a lot of writing. We have a lot more information on Qin’s administration than we have on that of any earlier Chinese state or on those of most other ancient states. Any analysis of the Qin and Han central governments begins with chapter 19 of the Han History, which lays out the offices of the Former Han central government. It states that the Han central government followed Qin’s organization without changing it and mentions which positions were inherited from Qin. Most were. That chapter was written three centuries after the fall of Qin, but we know it is fairly accurate because we can compare it with excavated documents and with the impressions on dried clay of the seals used by Qin officials to seal documents. Over three thousand such seal impressions were discovered in Qin palace sites. Hundreds of them were illegally excavated in the mid-1990s and sold on the antiquities market, after which archaeologists discovered the site and excavated many more. Luckily, some scientifically excavated fragments could be matched with looted ones to form wholes, and it is clear from the way they briefly flooded the market that they are genuine. The seal impressions not only confirm the general picture of the Qin government in the Han History; they also provide the titles of officials too menial to have been mentioned in that text.10
The top positions in the Qin government were two Chancellors, below which were the Imperial Counselor and the Supreme Commander. Each of these positions came with offices and staff. Qin copied the position of chancellor from other Zhou states but established two of them, the higher-ranking of whom was often a foreigner. Chancellors had overall responsibility for the government, as well as foreign affairs and general military matters. The Supreme Commander had direct control over military affairs. Chancellors often had enormous influence in shaping the Qin state. The most famous was Li Si, who held the position from 219 to 213 BCE after a stint as Minister of Trials. Imperial Counselors were in charge of supervising officials, maintaining official records, and transmitting important documents.11
These high-ranking officials get the most attention in many history books, but it was the ministries below them that constituted the main body of the central government. According to the Han History, there were Ministries of (1) Ceremonies, (2) the Palace, (3) the Palace Guards, (4) Transport, (5) Trials, (6) State Visits, (7) the Imperial Clan, (8) Finance, (9) the Lesser Treasury, and (10) the Capital. The Han History states that all of these were established by Qin, a claim proven in many cases by the discovery of impressions of their seals, or those of their subordinates, in the Qin palaces. The central government of the empire retained many characteristics of a regional state. Several of the ministries were concerned with affairs that did not extend far beyond the capital, while some departments that administered affairs across the empire occupied relatively obscure positions in the government structure.12
Before we get into the empire’s financial bureaucracy, it is worth mentioning ritual sacrifices, which consumed a lot of resources. Qin maintained the tombs of five centuries of royal ancestors and altars to many other deities. Most of these were maintained by the Ministry of Ceremonies, but various branches of government sacrificed animals and other things to ancestors, rivers, mountains, and celestial bodies. Royal tombs were located across the Guanzhong. The older ones were around the old capital of Yong in the west, while most of the newer ones were built to the east around Lintong, near where the First Emperor’s mausoleum was being built at this time. Some temples had entire villages dedicated to supporting them and providing the grain and livestock used in sacrifices to them. Sacrifices of livestock and grain were also performed to a variety of rivers and mountains several times through the year. Two jades presumably looted in the Guanzhong are inscribed with a prayer in which Qin royals promise to sacrifice cattle, pigs, sheep, and a chariot with horses to Mount Hua, supplicating the sacred mountain to cure their small child. And documents excavated at Liye reveal local officials making sacrifices to the god of agriculture.13
The financial affairs of the empire were managed by the ministries of the Lesser Treasury and Finance. Qin’s Ministry of Finance seems to have been called neishi 內史, “interior scribe,” a title that dated back many centuries, though there is some confusion because later on in the Han government this term was used in the titles of two different offices. The Han neishi managed the capital’s markets, kitchens, granaries, and iron offices and also provided grain and livestock for imperial sacrifices. We therefore render it in English as “Metropolitan Superintendent.” The Han’s zhisu neishi 治粟內史 (literally, “interior scribe for managing grain”) managed the finances of the whole empire and can be rendered “Ministry of Finance.” Qin’s original neishi combined both of these functions, which makes sense since the metropolitan region originally comprised most of its territory. At some unknown time, the office must have been divided in two, with one branch focused on the capital and the other on the whole empire. In any case, the Han History’s description of the Han Ministry of Finance matches with what we know of Qin’s. It says that the ministry was in charge of grain and commodities in general and that “all of the offices of granaries and agriculture, and the chiefs and assistants of the sixty-five Offices of Waters in the commanderies and kingdoms are subordinate to it.” A later commentary specifies that the ministry was “in charge of coins, grain, precious metals, cloth and of all commodities and money.” The Han History also records that the ministry was in charge of the Great Granary and the Main Treasury. Qin’s Great Granary managed granaries and related things such as standardizing official measures to collect grain taxes. The Main Treasury was a warehouse or treasury that held items such as clothing and scrap metal.14
While the Ministry of Finance was in charge of the main sources of revenue, the Lesser Treasury collected income from other sources, such as forests, wetlands, and oceans. The ministry also collected income from Qin’s imperial parks, most notably the Shanglin, discussed in the previous chapter. The Shanglin probably included farms and orchards, which means that the Lesser Treasury may have directly managed agricultural production. The income provided by all of these sources could be substantial. Two centuries later, in the Han, the annual income of the Lesser Treasury was 8.3 billion coins, more than double the central government’s 4 billion. This is plausible because most income from grain and market taxes was scattered in granaries and warehouses across the empire and was not considered central government income. In the Han, the revenues of this department sometimes went directly to the emperor’s household, but there is no clear evidence that this separation existed in Qin. I suspect that the Qin emperor had such firm control over the state that there was no reason to specify which branches of government income belonged to his household. There was no division between the dynasty and the state.15
Because the empire was too large to move most resources very far, the only way the central government could control them was through an empire-wide communication system. Central officials needed to receive data on the people and resources under their control, to send orders to lower administrative levels, and to maintain internal communication with and between those lower levels. Local officials devoted a lot of time to collecting, processing, and transmitting data. This focus on information was not a reaction to the growth of the empire but had in fact been a core part of Qin’s system since Shang Yang’s reforms and was one of the main reasons the empire was able to expand as it did. The emphasis on knowledge is clear in this chapter’s epigraph, taken from the fourth chapter of the Book of Lord Shang. As Qin expanded, it had to improve its infrastructure for information-gathering. Its road network was built not only to move armies, but also to send important news via the empire-wide courier system which employed both horses and human runners. The central government kept careful track of the speeds at which people and goods moved along various travel routes.16
One way officials kept spatial information was with maps. A fragmentary edict or ordinance ordering local governments to make maps of the territory under their control was found at Liye. We know that people recognized the administrative value of mapping resources from a passage in the Offices of Zhou, which was probably written sometime around the third century BCE. It describes the duties of a central government official as “to make the maps of the state’s land and figures of its population in order to help the king pacify the kingdoms. Using maps of the land of the world, he knows the width and length of the territories of the nine regions and distinguishes the names and products of their mountains, forests, rivers, wetlands, hills, mounds, riverbanks, plains, plateaus and lowlands.” Qin probably had these kinds of maps, as we will discuss below.17
Sima Qian tells a story that encapsulates the power of centralized information. He tells how the leaders of the armies that looted Qin’s palaces mostly sought treasures, but Liu Bang’s advisor Xiao He instead took Qin’s documents and maps. These allowed them to “know about the narrow and blocked passes in the world, how many households and people there were, the strong and weak places, and the suffering of the people,” which helped them defeat their rivals and make Liu the first emperor of the Han dynasty. This shows the importance of data for governance and provides yet another example of the continuity between Qin and Han.18
The empire was divided into more than thirty commanderies (jun 郡) and hundreds of counties (xian 縣). Commanderies were mainly military units, though they were gradually taking on civilian administrative functions and would become key administrative units—essentially provinces—in the Han. Counties were the main units of civilian administration and were in charge of penal and corvée labor, finances, taxes, livestock, equipment, granaries, and courts. Counties were headed by Magistrates, under whom were Overseers of fields, granaries, stables, corrals, armories, crossbows, handcrafts, food preparation, and other things. Each county had a financial office, and most also included various Bureaus (cao 曹). The Liye documents mention Bureaus of trials, households, granaries, finance, vehicles, court officials, and the commandant (i.e., policing). Beneath these were offices (guan 官) of things such as fields and livestock.19
Counties were divided into multiple districts (xiang 鄉). Below them, at the bottom of the administrative hierarchy, were villages (li 里), whose citizens could become chiefs (dian 典) or elders (lao 老) and perform some official functions. We do not know how they were rewarded for their service. They could be punished if crimes were committed or if there were errors in population registration. They also seem to have been responsible for state-owned oxen. The state kept control over rural society by arranging families in groups of five families that were mutually responsible for each other’s crimes, as discussed in the previous chapter. The male head of one of those families was chosen as the head of each group of five.20
Commandants (wei 尉) were in charge of maintaining order and enforcing the commands of the Magistrate. Policing also seems to have been a main function of the guard posts (ting 亭) that were established throughout the empire and did things such as monitoring markets, manning postal stations, and catching thieves. Liu Bang, the man who founded the Han dynasty, began his career as the chief of a Qin guard post, perhaps something like a sheriff, and his duties included transporting convict laborers from his county to build the First Emperor’s mausoleum. There were also administrative units called dao 道 whose populations were non-Zhou ethnic groups. We know little about these but can assume that they were areas over which Qin had limited control.21
Counties had to send detailed records of their assets and financial activities to various parts of the central government, a system poorly adapted to an empire that spanned the subcontinent. Counties sent information on grain and hay taxes and on harvests to the Ministry of Finance. To the Great Granary they sent annual reports and registers of the people receiving rations. After they issued clothes to convict laborers they sent those that remained to the Main Treasury. They sent broken metal goods to the Main Treasury unless they were too far from the capital, in which case they sold the metal and reported the sales to the Ministry of Finance. Central government offices also established subordinate offices in the counties to take direct control of valuable materials like salt and iron. The government kept careful track of local resources to prevent local officials from neglecting or embezzling state assets. There were detailed regulations as to how officials should carry out inventories, which assigned responsibility and punishment for missing items. From the perspective of the central government, controlling its own officials was an essential precondition for controlling its subjects.22
The documents from Liye reveal what each bureau kept records of. Not only did officials make registers (i.e., lists) of their holdings; they also made registers of the registers. This seems like a parody of bureaucracy, but it gives historians an incredibly detailed picture of what each bureau was doing. The Bureau of Households kept registers of households (population records), conscript labor, equipment, taxes, debt pledges, lacquer, and the embankments and boundary markers around fields. The Bureau of Works kept registers of boats, tools, redemptions (punishments commuted to fines), fines, and debts. The Bureau of Granaries kept registers of grain, loans, livestock, animal feed, tools, coins, cattle, horses, and sheep, and of the Office of Fields. And just as county offices composed these registers based on information collected by districts, county officials also tallied up their figures and sent totals to relevant offices of the central government. The Qianling County Bureau of Finance submitted registers of the following things to the central government: lacquer, work done in workshops, bamboo, ponds, chestnut groves, mined iron, markets, convict laborers working in workshops who died or fled, cast metal, arrows, orchards, things lost to water or fire damage, and so on. The central government received an enormous amount of information on the assets of local governments across the empire.23
The state’s most important assets were its human subjects, and it kept careful track of them. The household records were quite detailed. For each household they list the status, rank, and name of each person, beginning with the (usually male) head of household followed by other adult males, their wives, other adults (parents, concubines, or slaves), and children, including whose children they were. They also record which men were the heads of their five-household units. Women could be heads of families, presumably when their husbands or fathers died. Recording the names and ages of children made it easier to keep track of where future taxpayers, laborers, and soldiers were to be found when they came of age.24
In addition to recording its assets and its population, the bureaucracy was especially concerned with the state of harvests. The Zhangjiashan laws stipulated that by the fifth month information on how many fields had been cleared, along with the number of associated households, should be sent to the Commandery Governor. As will be discussed in more detail below, statutes required local officials to report the state of crops in considerable detail, most notably damage to crops, as quickly as possible after they occurred. These estimates were probably important for planning the season’s warfare and public works, in addition to the main purpose of adjusting taxation rates.25
Qin maintained a remarkable degree of control over land and people. Agrarian empires have historically tended to maintain existing structures of resource extraction in the places they conquer. Not only was this usually less expensive than developing new administrative structures, but it also tended to leave some surpluses for local elites, giving them a reason to accept their new overlords. Very few premodern empires attempted to create a uniform administration across their domains. Similarly, few premodern states could support a bureaucracy large enough to keep track of individual taxpayers. Most delegated the actual work of collecting taxes to people who were not salaried officials. For example, early modern European states often auctioned off the rights to collect taxes from each part of their domains to tax farmers. China’s Ming and Qing Empires (1368–1911) also lacked direct taxation. But they were as large as most contemporary European states combined, so their level of centralization is still impressive. But the Qin Empire was even more centralized than most of its successors. Its officials collected taxes directly from farmers. Qin’s collapse suggests that such an intensive form of governance was simply too expensive to be supported by the small surpluses of its agrarian economy.26
Granaries played a central role in Qin’s system. As discussed in previous chapters, grain can be produced in large quantities, dried, and stored for several years. Its domestication allowed humans to grow in population and develop much more complex societies. Granaries stored the energy extracted from the population at harvest time and then fed laborers as they carried out the projects of the empire. Millets were the key crops across much of Qin’s domain, but people also grew rice, wheat, barley, and beans. Some areas paid taxes in hemp, which was the main fiber used for making clothes, others in silk cocoons. Many areas also contributed their own specialty products, of which there were probably hundreds of different kinds.27
There were two basic taxes on farming families in Qin. The first was the land tax (zu 租), paid according to the area planted. The second was a household levy (hu fu 戸賦) collected from each household, which included a tax on hay and straw. Qin also levied taxes on commerce. In contrast to most later dynasties, which charged farmers the same tax rate every year, Qin ambitiously adjusted the quotas every year to maximize yields. The extent of information required for this kind of taxation is suggested by early Han statutes, which record that districts had to send the following five documents up to the county office every year: (1) residence, yard, and household registers; (2) detailed annual registers; (3) adjacent field registers; (4) combined field registers; and (5) land tax registers.28 We do not know exactly what each of these was or if all of these document types originated with Qin, though I expect that they did. They make clear that the government intended to record every plot of taxable land, its estimated production, and how much it should contribute in taxes. District officials sent this information up to the county office, and it was used to decide on the year’s required taxes. Village officials were informed of the year’s tax quotas and were charged with preventing tax fraud and probably other aspects of the taxation process. We do not know if taxpayers had to deliver their taxes to the district granaries or to local leaders like the village head.29
Local officials had to inform administrators at higher levels about the state of crops:
Whenever the rain waters it and the grain ripens, a written report is to be made immediately on the favored crop and the grain in ear, as well as the area of cultivated fields and land without crops. If it rains when the crop is already fully grown, the quantity of rain and the area affected are to be reported in writing. Likewise, in cases of drought and violent wind or rain, floods, hordes of grasshoppers or other creatures which damage the crops, the area concerned is always to be reported immediately in writing. Counties near the capital shall have light-footed runners deliver the letter, while distant counties have the courier service deliver it.
The purpose of this was to help officials decide how much tax they could collect from each region. This was a flexible system because it took poor harvests into consideration but also an aggressive one because it collected a high percentage of the yield, in contrast to having fixed taxation rates, which have to be set relatively low to be practical every year.30
Each crop was taxed at a different rate, and there were established rates that allowed officials to convert each type and grade of grain or beans into one another or into other commodities such as coins and cloth. This not only facilitated the administration of the empire but also allowed local officials to take advantage of the differences between official rates and local prices. Maxim Korolkov has argued that Qin’s command economy played a central role in the empire’s economy, at least that of the areas firmly under Qin’s control. Not only did Qin’s coins help monetize the economy; its system for calculating the exchange rates between commodities and labor also greatly facilitated exchanges of goods and the commodification of labor. Qin’s innovations probably continued to facilitate commercialization long after its fall.31
The main goal of the hay and straw tax was presumably to provision the horses and oxen of governments and armies. It was collected based on the amount of land granted to a farmer regardless of whether he cultivated it or not. Officials could require payment in coins if they did not need hay. This was the earliest taxation in coin in imperial China and would have forced farmers to participate in the cash economy. Records of other levies, such as those on feathers (used for arrows) and silkworm cocoons (the raw material of silk) at Liye, may have been a form of household levy or separate tax.32
Various taxes were collected in markets and on the movement of goods. For example, a problem in an excavated mathematical text reveals that there were taxes on transporting furs: “A fox, raccoon-dog, and hound go out through a tollhouse, and together pay 111 coins in tax. The hound says to the raccoon-dog, and the raccoon-dog says to the fox: ‘since your fur is worth twice as much as mine, then the tax you pay should be twice as much!’ How much should each one pay?” This is a joke, of course, referring to the tax on the pelts of dead animals. The same texts also refer to a tax on doctors, which means that there were probably taxes on a variety of nonagricultural workers. Nonetheless, it was agricultural taxes that provided the state’s main income, so it was particularly concerned with farmland.33
Since photosynthesis was the source of all energy, political power was based on controlling the land that plants grew on and the people who cultivated them. A lot of land barely produced enough to keep its inhabitants alive, let alone produce a taxable harvest. Because of this, administrators focused on good farmland and worked to ensure that it was farmed well enough to produce surpluses. This is one reason the state took direct control of good land and awarded it to farmers based on their rank, as discussed in the previous chapter. It ensured that farming families had enough land to produce a surplus and that they paid their taxes. It also aimed to prevent other elites from collecting those surpluses, surely one reason elite writers throughout Chinese history have considered Qin’s system so odious and why communist leader Mao Zedong did not. As Qin expanded, it took control of fertile land in strategically important areas in order to produce resources to fund state activities in those areas and facilitate further expansion. We can be sure that there were various other systems of land control, ownership, and management in areas conquered by Qin, perhaps even within Qin’s core territory. But they were not a main concern of the state and are not recorded in our sources.
By the Warring States period there were many millions of people in the Yellow River valley lowlands. Nonetheless, one of the main concerns of rulers and political theorists was how to increase their populations, which shows that there was still plenty of unfarmed arable land around. The Book of Lord Shang provides the following instructions to a ruler seeking to strengthen his state: “If the population exceeds the territory, devote yourself to opening up new land; if the territory exceeds the population, devote yourself to calling in colonists. By opening up new land, one achieves growth. If the population exceeds the territory, then the achievements of the state will be few and the military strength small; if the territory exceeds the population, then the resources of mountains and moors will not be utilized.” The more farmers, the more taxpayers and soldiers.34
As noted above, early Han statutes make clear that local governments kept detailed records of individual landholdings. But Qin conquered so much land that it could not survey it. Its solution was to require people to report their landholdings to local governments, which is presumably how they made the land records discussed above. We now have a few records from Liye of how this worked. A widow petitioned to have a tract of land that was registered as “cleared grassy fields” instead registered as a mulberry orchard. Another man registered six mu of grassy fields. This is some of the clearest evidence that land could be privately owned, but there is no evidence from Qin documents that people could buy or sell it. Landowners had an incentive to register their land and pay taxes on it, because it gave them legal recognition of ownership. If they did not register it, the state encouraged others to denounce them, in which case the informers received the land themselves while the offenders lost their property and were sentenced to hard labor.35
We know little about private land, but we have good records of Qin’s system of awarding land to rank-holders. The system had several benefits to the state. It created strong incentives for men to fight. It made it easier to collect taxes from commoners and to get them to do labor service. It gave commoners an avenue for advancing in life while reducing the power of aristocratic lineages that were potential rivals for agricultural surpluses. In order to do this, the system established the nuclear family as the standard landholding and tax-paying unit. This system was probably concentrated in areas of high-quality farmland and in regions of strategic military importance. It is difficult to believe that Qin was ever able to reward every man the amount of land he was entitled by his rank, a system that resembles twentieth-century authoritarian planned economies in its degree of state control. In later periods, such systems often existed in law books but not in reality. But Qin had the reputation of being a state whose “ordinances are strict and policies are carried out,” and it seems that this system actually worked in core regions under state control. Moreover, Qin was constantly conquering new areas and probably had plenty of land to distribute. Officials also used convict labor to directly farm some land.36
The legal statutes excavated at Zhangjiashan date to the early Han but are clearly Qin laws, even if the Han changed some of the details. Men were granted both farmland and residential plots. The agricultural plots granted to people without rank were one qing (45,700 square meters; 11.3 acres), while those in the higher ranks, who were usually high officials, were given up to ninety-five qing (4.3 square kilometers; 1,073 acres). These laws were designed not only to reward rank-holders but probably also to limit the landholdings of the powerful. A law stipulating that those of high ranks did not pay taxes on land that they worked themselves seems to indicate that their tenants were required to pay taxes to the state. These were not fiefs from which grantees received the tax revenue for themselves, as they had been in earlier centuries. In later periods of Chinese history, aristocratic estates often managed to prevent the government from collecting taxes from their tenants, building up their own power and depriving the state of substantial tax revenue.37
Ranks were not hereditary. When the head of a household died, the eldest son became the new household head, and unless he had managed to attain a rank equal to or higher than his father, he would lose some land and be forced to choose which part of his father’s land he would inherit. If sons other than the eldest had formed separate households, they could choose land from what remained. If there were no sons, a widow or daughter could inherit without losing rank. This may seem progressive but probably reflects the fact that women could not hold rank independent of male relatives. Slaves could also be freed to inherit the land. The higher a man’s rank, the more points of rank his sons would lose upon his death, which meant that the children of high-ranking officials could not inherit their fathers’ massive estates. This aimed to prevent the families of high-ranking officials from becoming a hereditary elite, one of many ideas from Shang Yang’s school that remains relevant in the modern world.38
A farmer in modern China would be surprised that the minimum land grant in ancient times was eleven acres (one qing). According to studies carried out in the North China Plain in the mid-twentieth century, no more than 3 percent of the population owned this much land, while two-thirds owned less than two acres. Of course, agricultural productivity was much higher in the 1940s. According to a rhetorical passage in the Han History, written in the first century CE, each mu of land produced 1.5 shi 石 (45 kilograms) of grain, which means that a qing could produce 150 shi of unhusked grain per year. The passage states that a family of five would eat 90 of these 150 shi themselves, spend 50 on clothing, pay 15 in taxes, and donate 10 to the local altars, leaving a deficit of 15 shi even in years without funerals and extra taxes. This was a passage written to emphasize people’s poverty, so it cannot be considered a statement of fact, but it gives us a useful idea of how commoners might have spent their income. It also reveals that one qing was considered a standard plot size for centuries.39
Given the centrality of the individual landholding taxpayer to Qin’s system, it is worth noting Keith Hopkins’s argument that it was precisely the monopolization of land by aristocrats and the efficiency of their large estates that increased agricultural productivity in the Roman Empire. In other words, Qin’s success in maintaining the predominance of smallholder farming may have prevented economies of scale and the division of labor that would have resulted from the formation of larger estates under the control of local elites. It therefore reduced agricultural surpluses. The fact that large plots of land granted to high-ranking men were not inherited by their sons would have had the same effect, discouraging them from establishing complex production systems. This contrasts with later periods, when central governments were weak and powerful families built large hereditary estates, such as the period between roughly 0 and 600 CE, which is often cited as the high point of agriculture in North China. Qin’s system of lending tools and oxen to farmers was a way to mitigate this.40
Those of us accustomed to liberal capitalism and its reverence for private property are unlikely to think highly of a system in which the state constantly redistributes land based on military service. But it is important to note that this system was intended to replace privilege with meritocracy, providing a way for common farmers to gain wealth and social status. And even if it was not as productive as the Roman economy, at least it was not powered by slavery (only a small fraction of Qin’s population was enslaved). We have virtually no information on how the common people felt about the Qin state, but I suspect that the meritocratic aspects of the system may have given considerable popular legitimacy to the Qin state. At the very least, it would have created a substantial class of people who had benefitted from the system and were invested in its success.
From an environmental standpoint, the establishment of nonhereditary field systems may have reduced the connection of farmers to the land, diminishing their incentive to care for the soil. However, family members and slaves were allowed to inherit whatever portion of the land their rank entitled them to, so the system did not entirely separate people from their connection to the land. As shown in the previous chapter, satellite imagery suggests that large areas of the Guanzhong were reorganized to create standard field sizes, a classic example of a state reorganizing the environment to make it easier to administer. This system of state redistribution broke down as soon as there was a lack of available land in the Han and was revived by later dynasties, but never lasted very long. The field layout, on the other hand, has often survived to the present day.41
The collapse of the Qin Empire was traditionally attributed to its overexploitation of people’s labor. Evidence from excavated texts and infrastructure projects does little to dispel that impression. The power of the Qin Empire was based on its control over the labor of millions of people: it required most adult males to serve in the military and do regular labor service, and it also employed armies of convicts. These were the imperial beasts of burden. In 1860 a British officer in China wrote, “A single coolie was actually of more general value than any three baggage animals; they were easily fed, and when properly treated, most manageable.” This equation of human laborers with livestock is also clear in Qin texts, which often list humans and animals together. The ability of China’s early empires to make people work without pay stands in contrast to that of later Chinese empires, which usually paid people for their labor, though the tradition of unpaid labor was briefly revived after 1949. Qin also forced hundreds of thousands of conquered people, perhaps more, to move into regions that it wanted to become more productive.42
Qin had far more control over how surplus food and labor were used throughout its domain than had earlier Chinese states. Granaries played a central role in this system because grain was collected in them and distributed from them. Granary officials also lent seed grain to farmers in the planting season. As in the other warring states, Qin’s rulers also wanted to increase their populations and would have used granaries to feed people in times of famine, though we have little evidence of this before the Han. We can guess at the important place of granaries in people’s lives by the fact that they wanted to own them in the afterlife and often buried their dead with ceramic granaries (fig. 10).43
Given that the grain tax was the main source of state income and grain was required to feed statute laborers, convicts, officials, and soldiers, there must have been state granaries in most towns of any size. Some of them were enormous. During the wars that followed the fall of Qin, crucial battles were fought for the control of the Ao granary in the central Yellow River region, which suggests how much grain it must have held. The laws from Shuihudi state that 100,000 shi made one “pile” (a unit of storage) at Xianyang, while at the second capital at Yueyang one pile was 20,000 shi, and one pile was 10,000 shi elsewhere. The piles were put in separate rooms in granaries that could be sealed in order to ensure that officials were accountable for their contents. All inputs and outputs of grain were to be recorded in the granary register. Since the proper rations for each category of person and animal was fixed by law, an official was responsible for ensuring that the amount of grain entered into the granary matched the quantity of rations dispensed from it. This was possible only due to the standardization of measures across the empire.44
Figure 10. Miniature pottery granary excavated at the First Emperor’s mausoleum.
The “Statutes on Granaries” are mostly concerned with how much grain should be distributed to different categories of workers and livestock. The following example gives an idea of the detail involved, specifying how much grain should be given to bond servants, wall builders, and grain pounders, three categories of convicts: “A male bond servant receives a ration of two bushels of grain per month, a bond-woman one and a half bushels. No rations are given to those not engaged in work. Working non-adult wall builders and bond servants receive one and a half bushels of grain per month; those not yet able to work receive one bushel of grain per month. Working non-adult bond-women and grain-pounders get one bushel and two and a half dou per month; those not yet able to work get one bushel of grain per month.” This is just an example of the distinctions made between different categories and different ages of workers. There were also rules for feeding different kinds of livestock as well as different ranks of officials and so on. In the cases of both humans and horses, extra grain was issued for particularly hard work. Local governments spent most of their income on various kinds of work projects. Of course, these granaries were also used to feed officials, as well as armies on the move, which surely required careful planning of granary stocks before campaigns. And the granaries of the capital would have issued grain to huge numbers of laborers, soldiers, livestock, and officials. As discussed in the previous chapter, the capital had a whole bureaucracy for supplying it with food.45
Men were supposed to register once they turned eighteen and were legally required to do a month of corvée labor per year, which could be extended, but was not required every year. It was illegal in Qin for officials to conscript more than one male from a household in a given year. Corvée projects included digging ditches, canals, and irrigation works; building roads, dikes, walls, and buildings; as well as doing routine maintenance or emergency repairs on all of the above. Apart from a few records of laborers working for the office of fields at Liye, there is no evidence that Qin employed corvée laborers to do farm work, though it would not be surprising if they did, since this was done in the Han. Just as the state had detailed systems for converting different commodities into one another, it also had a system for standardizing human labor. This system graded different types of laborers and different types of work and equated units of labor to specific quantities of grain, coins, or cloth. This system allowed the administration to treat workers as interchangeable units, giving it great flexibility in how it exploited their labor.46
The fact that adult males left to do their corvée labor service during the agricultural off-season left more work for those who remained at home. The more men were called to work on Qin’s imperial projects, such as wars of conquest, mausoleums, palaces, and the Great Wall, the more women, children, and elderly people had to do the fundamental labor upon which the whole economy was based. Not only did this cause stress and resentment, but the fact that it was so common for workers to be injured or killed while working for Qin surely also made it easier for commoners to decide to risk their lives in the uprisings that overthrew the empire.
While the Qin state enjoyed the occasional labor of most adult males, it also had the year-round labor of many convicts. Many crimes were punished with sentences of hard labor, which ranged in both duration and intensity. Moreover, central government officials seem to have realized that they gained little from cutting off people’s body parts and increasingly commuted the old mutilating punishments to fines. People who could not pay these fines had to work them off by laboring for the state at very low wages. The fines for redeeming various crimes ranged from five thousand coins for cutting off a nose to twenty-five thousand for a death sentence, but each day of work counted for only eight coins. Although this would have amounted to a life sentence for many, it was still far better than convict status. Convicts were prisoners whom the state could send where it liked, while those working off debt could get twenty days off to return home, which suggests that they did their labor near home.47
The most important direct environmental effects of the empire were probably its local infrastructure projects. Much of the labor available to the state was used at the local level to carry out routine construction and maintenance of roads, bridges, walls, dikes, dams, and canals. For example, the Qin “Statute on Agriculture” from 309 BCE, discussed in the previous chapter, reads: “In the eighth month repair the marker mounds and partitions, fix the boundaries and field-limits, and cut the tall plants on the paths and lanes. In the ninth month do a great clearing of roads and dangerous sloping passages. In the tenth month, build bridges, repair dikes and dams, and ensure the smooth flow of water through fords and ditches.” The autumn was the time for repairs because it followed the rainy season. The eighth month’s duties concern the maintenance of the system of standard fields, paths, and lanes of the official field system. Roads and waterways were maintained in the next two months. The subsequent passage commands that roads be repaired whenever necessary, and the same was done with walls when necessary. These statutes were incorporated into early Han law.48
The improvement of transportation networks usually has substantial environmental effects, especially on areas that were previously inaccessible. Improved road networks shrink space, allowing the movement of commodities and people at lower cost over longer distances. Large bridges are precisely the kind of infrastructure that states can build and smaller-level societies cannot. This is also true of canals, of which Qin conquered several and built at least one. The Honggou and Luyangguan Canals linked the Yangzi and Yellow River systems, facilitating the north-south movement of goods. In the south, Qin had the Ling Canal built to connect the Xiang River, a tributary of the Yangzi, to a tributary of the Pearl River system. These canals made it possible, at least in theory, to navigate a boat on inland waterways all the way from the Yellow River to the ocean at Guangzhou.49
Maintaining canals was just one of the routine infrastructure works related to water. Qin built and maintained irrigation systems to provide water to farmland and constructed dikes to keep water out of low-lying land. In addition to the routine annual works mentioned in the passage above, the early Han statutes from Zhangjiashan refer to annual chores of dredging artificial ponds and managing ditches and canals. Small-scale irrigation was probably in widespread use at this time, and it is clear that Qin and other early states built and maintained many smaller-scale water control works that are rarely mentioned in early texts. The Han Empire had Offices of Waters in various branches of government that managed canals, dikes, sluice gates, and bridges. The Han-era Ministry of Finance was responsible for the Offices of Waters throughout the empire, which suggests that they collected taxes on fish and other products of lakes, rivers, and wetlands. Qin would also have had officials with expertise in water control, but we do not know if it had its own Offices of Waters. Qin’s water projects not only altered the hydrology of the landscape; they also helped establish a culture of water control that has remained important in Chinese political culture ever since.50
While the small-scale works probably had a much greater environmental impact, megaprojects were more complicated because they required that huge numbers of laborers be concentrated together. These projects, like the Zheng Guo Canal we discussed in the previous chapter, are classic examples of environmental transformations that could be achieved only by a powerful state. The most infamous megaprojects were the huge palaces and the First Emperor’s mausoleum, all of which were built in the Guanzhong and were intended to impress the beholder. The foundations of the unfinished Epang Palace are still enormous, even though nothing remains but dirt. The First Emperor’s tomb is large enough to be mistaken for a natural hill (fig. 11). It is just one part of the mausoleum complex that measures fifty square kilometers and also includes the six thousand warriors and five hundred horses of the life-sized terracotta army. It is easily the largest tomb ever built in East Asia and is “probably the largest burial complex of a single ruler ever to have been constructed anywhere in the world.” Sima Qian states that Qin assigned seven hundred thousand convicts to build these palaces and his mausoleum. He also writes that the Qin First Emperor moved the ruling families of the kingdoms he conquered into the capital region and built palaces for them.51
Figure 11. The Qin First Emperor’s tomb mound.
After Qin conquered all the other Zhou states, it continued its aggression by attacking the pastoral peoples in the Ordos region to the north and then building a wall across the northern edges of its domain to delineate territory and defend itself from revenge attacks. This was the first “Great Wall,” and although it included sections that already existed, much of it was new and was built remarkably quickly. The extension of a wall across the ecotone dividing the cold, arid interior from the wetter areas to the south must have been a disaster for wild animals such as gazelles, aurochs, deer, and horses, for whom the ability to move in search of grazing land and away from deep snow could mean the difference between life and death. This is one of the earliest examples of the division of animals’ ranges by large-scale anthropogenic structures that now plague many species.52
Those who had lived through the fall of Qin believed that these megaprojects had been a major cause of the uprisings that toppled Qin because they turned the people against the state. This view has been questioned by Western scholars, who suspected that this depiction of Qin brutality was merely Han dynasty propaganda or that the accounts of the First Emperor were actually veiled critiques of later rulers. However, the more evidence we have on Qin, the more the traditional view seems correct. For example, research on Qin’s Straight Road has shown that it was vastly larger than was needed for transportation. Archaeology seems to verify Sima Qian’s description: “In my travels I saw the Long Wall and fortifications that Meng Tian built for Qin, cutting through mountains and filling up valleys to open up the Straight Road. He indeed treated the people’s labor lightly.”53
Historians traditionally analyzed human societies as though they were composed only of people, but it has recently become apparent that we have always lived in communities composed of many species. Our bodies contain huge numbers of archaea, bacteria, fungi, and viruses, and most human communities also include arthropods such as lice, dust mites, fleas, and agricultural pests. Agricultural communities are often home to animals such as sparrows, pigeons, mice, rats, and many other beneficiaries of the concentrated energy of farm fields. One reason people keep dogs and cats it to fight off these animals. Our relationships with other species range from those of mutual benefit to those in which one side is parasitic to the other. The few species that people keep on purpose tend to occupy a central place in their diets, economies, and social lives. Only a few of the many species in agricultural communities were of interest to the state. The most important were horses and cattle.
There was a general trend in the lowlands of North China toward increasing population density, which reduced people’s ability to keep livestock and to eat meat. Grazers such as cattle, sheep, and horses require open land for food, so they tended to get crowded out over time. In contrast, dogs, chickens, and pigs could live in villages by foraging for their own food and eating human rubbish, so they tended to become the main domesticated animals. We know that some granary officials raised pigs and chickens because of a statute specifying that granaries could keep funds raised when its employees sold them. But the state does not seem to have found a way to tax these animals, which remained outside of the political economy. An instructional legal text unearthed at Shuihudi includes a variety of examples about the theft of cattle and sheep or goats (both yang 羊), which suggests that this was not uncommon. There is only one record of horse theft.54
In the arid North, pastoralists kept large herds of sheep, cattle, and horses, and Qin probably found ways to tax them. Sima Qian cited the herds of northern pastoralists as among the riches of the Han Empire and described parts of modern Shanxi and Hebei as particularly rich in horses, cattle, and sheep. Qin territory included large areas of the Loess Plateau that were ideal for herding, and we can assume that people there paid taxes or tribute in livestock. The tombs of people presumed to have been nomadic pastoralists have also been discovered in that region, and these people may well have been Qin subjects who provided the empire with livestock and possibly served in its armies. However, most of our evidence concerns oxen and horses owned by government offices across the empire.55
Cattle were kept for plowing and pulling carts, while horses seem to have been used mainly for nonagricultural work such as pulling vehicles and carrying messengers. An official of a rival state cited the availability of oxen as one of the things that made Qin powerful. Various types of officials were granted cattle and carriages, which explains why taking care of cattle seems to have been a common responsibility of local officials. Statute laborers had to build and repair the walls of the state-owned horse and cattle parks. The straw and hay tax mentioned above probably provided for the horses and oxen of the military and government offices. Government offices provided hay and even grain to carriage horses and draft oxen based on their ages and what kinds of work they did. Hay and straw were enough for most livestock, but horses of the courier service and others doing hard work were also fed grain and beans, and cows were given grain rations for fifteen days after giving birth.56
According to the “Statutes on Stables and Parks,” oxen were evaluated four times a year. If they had lost girth, those responsible were punished. If they were healthy, the overseer of fields was awarded a jar of wine and a bundle of dried meat, and the corral keepers and cattle men were also rewarded. Officials were fined if too few of their cows and sheep or goats gave birth. They were allowed to lend their cattle and vehicles out to people for their private use, but the lender was responsible for their condition when they were returned. We have no idea how widespread this was. Government officials were also permitted to use state cattle and carts to transport monthly rations for themselves and their livestock, a rule that may have been intended to clarify that they should not use them for other purposes.57
In contrast to valuable but unexciting cattle, horses were symbols of wealth and power, the tanks and sports cars of the premodern world. As described in the previous chapter, Qin’s horses were a source of its strength throughout its history. Because they were essential for warfare and transportation, various branches of government raised them. The Ministry of Transport required many horses and must have had plenty of stables. It must also have managed large areas of pasture for breeding and feeding horses, much of it presumably in the Loess Plateau to the north and northwest of the Guanzhong. There were strict controls on the movement of horses into and out of the capital region. Impressions of the seals of Qin officials discovered in Qin palaces included those of various officials with duties related to horses and stables. The Han History lists some of these as officials who worked with the horses of the Ministries of the Palace Guards and Transport. Early Han statutes list the Office of Cavalry and Chariots at the same rank as ministers, something they may have inherited from Qin. Horses were important.58
The “Statutes on Stables and Parks” lay out the standards for accepting new horses, but we do not know where these horses came from. A county’s Controller of Horses as well as the Magistrate and his assistant were all fined if they sent horses that were unacceptable for military use, and we can surmise that certain counties specialized in raising horses for the state. Northern pastoralists may also have been taxed in horses, and perhaps also sold them to the state. There were also laws on the evaluation of horses that were already in use. The officials fined for unacceptable horses were the Overseers of Stables and Corrals. We can be sure that horses and oxen were also used in state-owned workshops and for extracting resources such as timber and metals.59
As described in chapter 3, the Warring States period saw rival powers build up their strength by taking control of forests, wetlands, and mines and appointing officials to manage and tax them. At that time, the smaller states in the middle Yellow River valley had an advantage in their dense populations, from which they were able to mobilize a lot of grain and labor, but they did not necessarily have many other resources. Larger states like Qin and Chu may not have had such dense populations to draw on, but they had more forests and minerals. Qin officials focused their attention on land and people not only because they were at the core of political power but also because they did not lack other resources. Qin controlled extensive mountainous regions and directly operated mining, logging, and salt production operations.
Discourses of resource scarcity in this period were often connected to governance. Our earliest written evidence of the overexploitation of resources in China comes from the arguments of Warring States philosophers on the need for the protection of wild resources. This is interesting both because it is a clear example of the positive benefit of a strong state and because these ideas were originally proposed by philosophers as something that a good state should do. This moral argument reminds us that state regulation was both a way of controlling and extracting valuable resources and a way of conserving them for the long-term benefit of the state and its subjects, early examples of environmental protection legislation.60
Early Chinese texts contain many references to officials who managed and collected taxes on forests and wetlands. The utopian Offices of Zhou describes officers in charge of mountains, forests, rivers, and wetlands who were responsible for regulating hunting and fishing and providing animals and fish for sacrifices. Likewise, the Annals of Lü Buwei record that in the spring “the foresters enter the mountains and make a tour of inspection to see that the trees have not been felled or trimmed.” Xunzi explains that “the duties of the master of forests and game are to prepare rules for burning, to care for the resources of the mountain forests, the lakes, and the marshes, such as the grasses and the trees, the fish and the turtles, and the hundred other edibles, opening and closing them according to the season so the state will have enough to satisfy its needs and raw materials and resources will not be depleted.” Qin’s Chancellor Li Si was probably quite familiar with these arguments, having studied with Xunzi, and we can be sure that Qin had these kinds of officials.61
Qin eventually enacted a statute to preserve natural resources that was clearly influenced by earlier arguments about preserving resources:
In the second month of spring one should not venture to cut timber in mountain forests or dike water courses. Except in the months of summer one should not venture to burn weeds to make ashes, to collect [indigo], young animals, eggs or fledglings. One should not . . . poison fish or tortoises or arrange pitfalls and nets. By the seventh month these prohibitions are lifted. . . . In settlements close to corrals and other forbidden parks, in the season of young animals one should not venture to take dogs to go hunting.
This reveals that Qin had officials in charge of managing forests and wetlands whose biggest issues were fires, illegal tree felling, and the indiscriminate exploitation of wild animal populations. Firewood collection and charcoal production surely had a significant impact on forests. It is unclear how successful Qin was at implementing its forest and wetland protection laws. I suspect that these laws were enforced in the forests and wetlands in the core regions of Qin power but had little influence in most parts of the empire. The forbidden parks referred to in the last sentence were imperial parks, and fragmentary statutes have been excavated from other tombs that concern their regulation.62
Industries like ceramic and metal production burned a lot of wood. As we discussed in the previous chapter, Qin’s capital at Xianyang had workshops. The state must have operated others around the empire, especially for producing military equipment. Given that private merchants also operated kilns and forges and dealt in forest products like timber and bamboo, we can be sure that state regulations were also aimed at managing commercial use. Unfortunately, we have little written information on the production of ceramics and metals in Qin. Excavated texts discuss coinage and metal goods but very rarely mention mining or smelting. Metals were strategically important to the state because they were needed for the military. The main metals in this period were bronze (an alloy of copper, tin, and lead) and iron or steel. Metalsmiths at this time were skilled with both bronze and iron, but many key innovations in iron production occurred only in the Han period, so bronze remained a key metal. We do not know where Qin obtained most of its metals. There were sources of copper, tin, and lead in the north, but much more in the south, and Qin’s conquest of Chu territory in the middle Yangzi probably gave it control over copper mines. Qin also had private entrepreneurs produce metals in conquered territories such as Sichuan, and it had mines worked by convict and corvée laborers.63
Iron ore is so widespread that the limitation on premodern iron production was the large amount of wood required to smelt it. By the third century BCE, the iron works in the various Zhou kingdoms were among the most advanced in the world in terms of technology and organization, and it was in that period that iron tools began to be widely available. These were mostly metal tips or blades that were mounted on the ends of wooden tools such as picks, plows, spades, hoes, rakes, and harvesting knives. Although iron tools dating to the Warring States period have been excavated across North China, few iron workshops have been found, while almost sixty such facilities from the Han have been excavated, which suggests that the large-scale production of metal farm implements began after the fall of Qin. One could argue that it was only then that China’s Bronze Age ended. Although state control of salt and iron has traditionally been considered an innovation of the Han dynasty, excavated documents and seal impressions reveal that it originated with Qin. Salt was evaporated from salt water in several places. One of these was along the coast, another was a large salt lake in southern Shanxi, and it was also produced from underground brine in Sichuan.64
Wood was not only the main source of fuel but also the main material for making daily-use goods from hoes to wagons to buildings. It was therefore even more important to the Qin state than metal, though easier to obtain. The mountains to the south and west of the Guanzhong were forested, so we can be sure that Qin people had always cut timber there. As Qin expanded south of the Qinling, it found itself in areas with abundant forests. However, wood from the mountains was far too expensive to transport north except for the high-quality timber used to build Qin palaces. A recently discovered statute reveals that Qin used convict laborers to log the forests of the upper Han River valley. It is not surprising that Qin managed such operations directly, but this is the first clear evidence of it.65
The most interesting evidence of Qin’s logging comes from maps drawn on wood that were excavated from a tomb at Fangmatan, Gansu, in the mountains of the upper Wei River valley (fig. 12). These maps seem to have been made by the state to survey forest resources in the early–middle third century BCE. Appropriately enough, they were discovered at a modern logging station in a mountainous and forested region of Gansu that has been logged on and off for over two millennia. Because it is upstream of the Guanzhong, logs could be floated down the Wei River into the Qin capital region, making it a more practical source of timber than the high Qinling Mountains south of the capital, though these were probably also logged. We know from at least two early texts that floating logs downstream from the mountains was a common practice. The fact that the logging frontier had arrived in this relatively remote area suggests that the good timber had already been cut in more accessible regions. Forests closer to settlements were also less likely to produce good timber because people cut trees for firewood before they grew large, and browsing livestock prevented forest regrowth.66
Figure 12. A map on pine wood excavated from a tomb at Fangmatan, Gansu. Most of the lines depict waterways. The straighter line running down the middle probably depicts a road, and the two black marks indicate a mountain pass.
The maps are structured around the network of waterways. Given the mountainous terrain of the region, the mapped waterways also provide a general idea of the layout of the mountain ridges. The maps include the names of larger towns and villages, streams and gullies, and mountain passes; various descriptions of stands of trees and distances to reach them. One of them depicts a road. There are several mentions of pine, one of paulownia, and also a place called “poplar gorge,” but several other wood-related words are either unknown or ambiguous. For example, one reads, “large pine poles” (da song kan 大松刊) and two or three others have variations on the phrase “pine poles for 20 li” (a li was roughly five hundred meters). But the word kan 刊, which seems to be a noun and probably means “poles” or “tree trunks” (gan 竿), could also mean “cut down.” So these maps could have recorded timber already cut or timber yet to be cut. In any case, we can be sure that Qin used a lot of timber, and there is nothing surprising about either the scale of the logging done or the location of these operations upstream from the Guanzhong.67
Scholars generally assume that the Fangmatan maps were produced by and for the state since maps were commonly used by administrators in the period and were associated with political power, so it is unlikely that anyone outside of government service would have been allowed to produce such maps. I would guess that Qin had offices devoted specifically to logging this region and providing timber to the state. It is equally likely that these were private logging operations that officials monitored and taxed. As noted above, states in this period kept maps and other records of resources, of which forests with quality timber would have been among the most valuable. We can be sure that these maps are a chance discovery of a resource extraction operation that probably had parallels throughout the empire, and we can hope that more such documents will come to light and tell us more about the state management of forests and wetlands.
After the First Emperor died in 210 BCE, palace insiders enthroned a prince whom they knew they could manipulate, and a few years later an uprising toppled the dynasty. It arose in Chu territory, was mostly led by Chu men, and after a few years of large-scale war saw the rise of the Han dynasty, which was in many ways a rebirth of Qin with an aristocracy from Chu. Its patriarch, Liu Bang, had formerly worked for Qin, and when he founded his own empire, he largely rebuilt its administration. He did not return to the east but rather established his capital in Qin’s royal palace area south of the Wei River. The capital was called Chang’an, “long-lasting peace,” and the four centuries of the Han Empire were indeed relatively peaceful for the people of its core regions, especially when compared with preceding centuries. The Han abandoned some aspects of Qin’s system, especially its tight control over land and human labor, but kept many of its administrative structures and practices. Since Qin had been the closest of the Zhou kingdoms to Inner Asia for many centuries and the people of Shaanxi continued to be called “Qin” people long after the fall of the Qin Empire, Inner Asians used that word to refer to China. From their languages it spread across Eurasia and eventually became the standard word for China across much the world.
The traditional explanation of Qin’s collapse is that its heavy taxation and labor requirements caused dissatisfaction so profound that the people were easily convinced to rebel. The Qin Empire was formed through constant warfare, but when peace arrived it did not reduce the empire’s extraction efforts but remained a war economy. People across the subcontinent had feared Qin for generations but could have accustomed themselves to Qin rule if it had brought peace and prosperity instead of continued exploitation. By continuing to use people’s labor to conquer land and build megaprojects, Qin made clear that its empire would not end war and make life better, and thus prompted its people to revolt. The contrast with the Roman Empire, which reduced taxes in some conquered regions, supports this argument.68
Although some scholars have questioned the idea that Qin exploited its subjects to the point of rebellion, I see no reason to doubt it. It is quite possible that the uprisings that overthrew the empire would have failed if a competent ruler had sat on the throne. Nonetheless, the fact that a seemingly all-powerful empire that had recently defeated several mighty rivals was overthrown by rebels tells us a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the empire. Given the ecological focus of this chapter, I must emphasize that Qin’s collapse was not due to overexploitation of the environment but was due only to its harsh treatment of its people. Qin tried to build a political system that required too much of the economy’s surpluses. The more resources that were devoted to expanding the size of the bureaucracy to improve taxation, the more of the surplus was used just to collect it. This is why most premodern states maintained a low level of extraction and a relatively small state structure instead of trying to collect as much as they could. Qin’s collapse proves the wisdom of this strategy.69
But Qin did not really fail. Its political system was quickly resurrected and allowed the Chinese-speaking peoples to conquer and colonize much of the subcontinent. By providing a stable, long-lasting structure promoting the expansion of agriculture and the increase of population, it played an enormous role in the replacement of most natural ecosystems of lowland East Asia with farms. This history will be explored in chapter 6.