our data comes not from the immediate first wave of migrants, which was in 1850
to 1830, but from annual population registers which began in the 1870s and
the quadrennial land registers which also begin around the same time.
Now the Qing state moved the population to Shuangcheng, because of a because of a
very well-known fiscal crisis, that the state faced in the early 19th and
throughout the 19th century. Which was that the state, as the
population was growing, as the population of the dependent population on the state
was growing, the state did not have a growth in income from taxation to match
the growth of dependent populations. What the state did have was it had wealth
in terms of unsettled land in northeast China.
And the state therefore decided to move some of this dependent population from
the state capital in Beijing from Rehe which was near Beijing where the state
had it's Summer Palace. and to move to support these metropolitan
bannermen the state also created a group of what we'd called rural bannerman,
[FOREIGN]. Where they relocated from elsewhere in
Northeast China either directly south of Shuangcheng in Jilin or you go further
south in Liaoning province. And it gave, it created two categories of
bannermen, one which are metropolitan bannermen from the capitals, the other
rural bannermen from northeastern provinces.
And for metropolitan bannermen, it gave them 64 hectares of land per household,
for rural bannermen it gave them half, 34 hectares of land per household.
This is at a time that most Chinese households had less than one hectare.
So in other words, one one population receives 60 times the per capita
distribution of land in China, the other receive 30 times.
So, by any definition, relatively well off.
What you see here is the location of Shuangcheng, the red dot, the location of
the origins of the Metropolitan bannermen who came from Beijing and Rehe, and the
origins of the rural bannermen who came nearby Shuangcheng but also further south
of Liaoning. they settled in a 120 Banner Villages in
Shuangcheng, which are shown on this map which are located like many sort of many
property development sort of schemes. Well, so locate it in a kind of
Descartian sort of a set of vertical and horizontal lines.
these 120 villages persist today as the most important so-called administrative
villages of Shuangcheng County being in charge of some approximately 5, 600
natural villages in the county overall. Now, we have two sets of data that make
up this big social science data set that illuminates our the big data discoveries
in Week 3. the first are government population
registers they are comprised annually. There are all together 260 coded and
linked registers, that make up this data set for Shuangcheng and they provide 1.3
million observations of 100,000 linked individual histories.
So in other words, we can find your entry in 1866, in 1867, in 1868, perhaps you
got married in 1869, perhaps you had children in 1871, perhaps you died in
1910. And we link all these observations
together so that we can create life histories, and so, we can study any year
between 1866 and 1912 and study to what extent the patterns we find in that year
are a product of the patterns before of the linked data that we have beginning in
1866. So what you have here is an example of
what these registers look like they as you see, they record the banner
affiliation, the place of origin, the ethnicity, the village, the surname, the
occupation, the age, household headship, other household members, any vital
events. they're quite detailed, and although
they're written in hand, they're in a very clear penmanship that's actually
much easier to read. The many ah, [COUGH] Chinese, the much
Chinese handwriting even today. These data are kept annually and they're
kept because, when the state first tried to settle populations in Northeast China,
what it discovered was, was that many people volunteered to move to the
Northeast so they could get these large land endowments.
Once they got them, they would sell the land, and they would move back to
Beijing. So as a result, to make sure that the
population, settlement population was actually still remaining in Shuangcheng
the state decided to do it, registers every year to ascertain whether people
were really there and to also compile land registers.
To make sure that not only were the people still there in Shuangcheng, but
the land that had been assigned them was still farmed by them.
So in addition to the 100,000 individuals, which you can trace over
time, we also have almost 20,000 physical plots, and 23 coded land registers from
1870, '76, '87, '89. 1906, we have partial registers in
between and we can link most of these plots to the land owner in the household
register and it's this data set which allows us to understand, examine the
distribution of wealth in Shuangcheng. Now, this is only a micro study, but it
is a very telling micro-study and it is the first such micro-study for Chinese
history and therefore extremely important.