Buried in the pages of loose hand-written documents that turned up in a second-hand bookshop in Macao, we find records kept by a local lineage, centring on their effort to lighten their tax burden.Footnote 1 This effort focused on, while not being limited to, negotiations with the land-tax registration system managed by the Xiangshan county 香山縣 yamen, under whose administration Macao fell during this period.
Much work has been done on the systems of registration and taxation in Qing China, on the laws that obliged land transactions to be reported to the government, and on how in certain cases these systems were abused.Footnote 2 There are, however, very few testimonies coming from the taxpayers' side that show how they contended with the system in paying land taxes and protecting their properties.
Through an analysis of this body of material from Macao, we will try to follow a rather complex tax dispute in nineteenth-century Guangdong, while reconstructing the property regime in place at that specific historic juncture. It becomes quickly apparent that we are dealing in a world where the effectiveness of the tax registers cannot be taken for granted, a world in which distribution and inheritance of land-tax duties do not automatically follow the distribution and inheritance of land. This naturally creates a major issue for the property regime itself, which has to be understood as part of a complex structure involving lineage, territory, government and local politics.
A SUMMARY OF THE TAX CASE, AS DESCRIBED IN THE GENEALOGY
The lineage in question is the Macao Zhao 趙 surname, who claimed descent from founding ancestor Zhao Yuanyan 趙元儼, a grandson of the second Song Emperor. Their genealogy records that they first came to Xiangshan county when twelfth-generation ancestor Zhao Youzhi 趙友直 was appointed magistrate there in 1368, and his son Zhao Jizhong 趙季忠 settled permanently.Footnote 3 The most illustrious of the descendants are Zhao Yuanlu 趙元輅 and his son Zhao Yunjing 趙允菁, juren degree holders of 1777 and 1801. Moreover, Yunjing's son Zhao Zongbing 趙宗屏 took part in the assassination of “Western chief Yamalesi 唖嗎叻肆”, who is likely to have been João Maria Ferreira do Amaral, the governor killed by local rebels in 1849.Footnote 4
The documentation includes a hand-written lineage genealogy as well as various loose papers relating to this effort, and it is the genealogy that contains a section discussing where the lineage members stand in relation to the land-tax burden. This section, the “Shuiwu jiyao” 税務紀要 (“Summary of Taxation Affairs”), recounts the process whereby the Zhaos tried to resolve this issue.Footnote 5 While certain points in the Zhaos' material can be checked against other local records, the ultimate authenticity of their claims concerning the tax burden cannot be known. The following will be an attempt to reconstruct certain social practices from this inevitably biased material.
The story is told by a lineage member named Zhao Zhongzhang 趙仲漳. While it is under his name that most of the records are made, he himself plays but a minor role in the accounts describing the lineage members' feats in dealing with various parties attempting to rid themselves of a tax burden.
The “Summary of Taxation Affairs” starts by stating the problem faced by the Macao Zhaos, using the terminology of the lijia 里甲 registration system, which had been functioning in the Pearl River Delta since the Ming dynasty.Footnote 6 The passage reads as follows:
This lineage had 420 mu of land registered under two hu 戶 (registered household) names, Zhao Chuying 趙儲英 and Zhao Yefu 趙業富. The registration was in the fourth jia 甲, third tu 圖, Gu du 谷都. However, none of this land was actually land of this lineage. The registered land had all been attributed (jihu 寄戶) to this lineage by [the actual holders] the Zhao surname of Bijiang 碧江 and the surnames of Guizhou 桂洲, Daliang 大良 and Macao.Footnote 7
The process of tax collection by yamen underlings created continual problems for the Zhaos. The genealogy claims that surcharges were illegally imposed, and that the collection created social disorder. Moreover, there was a sharp upturn in the intensity of tax-collecting activity from the first year of Xianfeng (1851–1852). This was a time of general instability in the area involving droughts, inflation and the unrest which was to develop into the Taiping rebellion.Footnote 8 For the Zhaos, facing tax collection under such urgent fiscal needs, “the disturbance created was greater than that from tigers and wolves”.Footnote 9
According to the Zhaos' claim, the tax liability causing the lineage such trouble was – at least in part – unjustly attributed to them. In order to rectify matters, the Zhaos set out to negotiate with the government. They sought out Lu Xiaolou 陸小樓, an individual teaching at a nearby institution,Footnote 10 who introduced the Zhaos to his brother Lu Biru 陸璧如, then working as a clerk in the grain-tax section of the yamen.Footnote 11
Having secured this contact with Lu Biru, the Zhaos gathered the funds to pay the expenses necessary for re-registration. The expenses eventually paid included both the standard charges for registration of land tax (calculated by acreage), and also what are described as gratuities paid to the head of each section in the county government. On the strength of this personal introduction, the Zhaos appointed member Zhao Zongmin 趙宗敏 to negotiate the affairs of re-registration.Footnote 12
Zongmin was accompanied by another lineage member Zhao Zhongzhang (the same man who recorded these events). On the 10th day of the 10th month, year 6 of the Xianfeng Emperor (7 November 1856), they met with Lu Biru at the county yamen, as well as with other members of the civil office section (lifang 吏房), the registration section (hufang 戶房) and the grain-tax section of the yamen. Zongmin negotiated with Biru and with those employed at different sections of the county government, and succeeded in having the registration altered:
Thus a zhao 爪 (a lower-level registered householdFootnote 13) under the name Zhao Bijiang 趙璧江 was opened in respect of [the land located at] Last jia, Third tu, Shun 順 du, and assigned to it was the tax liability of those in Bijiang, Guizhou and Daliang.Footnote 14
In addition to creating this new registered household under the name of Zhao Bijiang, Zongmin also succeeded in reassigning another part of the tax liability which had been “originally shouldered by the ancestors of the three surnames Zhong 鍾, Chen 陳 and Ye 葉” to a “zhao named Zhong Chen Ye 鍾陳葉 in the Last jia, First tu of the Pan 番 du”.Footnote 15
In this way part of the tax previously collected through the registered households of Zhao Chuying and Zhao Yefu was reassigned to newly created households under the names Zhao Bijiang and Zhong Chen Ye. Zhongzhang proudly reports that: “In this way, the hazards of the two hu of our lineage (Chuying and Yefu) which we had suffered for decades, were completely rectified”.Footnote 16
It was thus that the Macao Zhao lineage arrived at the arrangement described in the genealogy, that “the Macao branch is registered under the hu of Zhao Chuying, in the fourth jia, third tu, Gu du, Xiangshan county”.Footnote 17 Another document gives further details, saying that while the Zhaos previously had been paying taxes through the three registered households of Zhao Chuying, Zhao Yefu and Zhao Mianze 趙綿澤, Zongmin's efforts meant that all taxes would now be paid through the one registered household name Zhao Chuying, and the two zhao of Yefu and Mianze were to be expunged from the record (daoqu 倒去, ‘knocked over and done away with’).Footnote 18 They were thus able to establish a one-on-one correspondence between the lineage group and the registered household.
It is important to note that the registered households (hu) mentioned in this passage do not correspond to any actual household or family (as opposed to a lineage, branch or territorial entity). The two registered names Zhao Chuying and Zhao Yefu cannot be found in the genealogy, either as the names of individuals, or of ancestral estates. Moreover, the names of the two new registered households created – Zhao Bijiang and Zhong Chen Ye – consist, respectively, of the surname attached to the name of the area where the surname groups live, and a combination of three surnames. In both these cases, it is immediately obvious that the name of the registered household does not correspond to an actual individual name.Footnote 19
Not only did the registered household not correspond to any existing individual or household, its registered acreage also did not correspond to any specific plot of land. This despite a precise reference to the “acreage” of such land, given as 420 mu. Footnote 20 The two Zhao surname groups living separately in Macao and Bijiang were in dispute over the tax liability of the registered households of Zhao Chuying and Zhao Yefu, and not over the ownership of any plot of land. Moreover, this document does not refer to any particular location of the land. This is in sharp contrast with documents drawn up between parties paying tax for land transactions: land deeds generally specify location, spelling out the borders of the property in question.Footnote 21
While such registered households did not correspond to a particular living household, and their land-tax liability was not tied to particular plots of land, the government clearly linked the registered household and its tax liability to specific groups of people. The Macao Zhaos' claim is that a certain portion of the tax burden of the original households of Zhao Chuying and Zhao Yefu should be linked with groups other than themselves, among them the Bijiang Zhaos. Such household names as Zhao Bijiang and Zhong Chen Ye appear to have been formulated with the main purpose of linking the registered households to these specific groups, be they lineage or territorial entities.
The “Summary of Taxation Affairs” ends by clarifying what payments were made, and how the new taxation arrangements would have to be maintained:
For the payment of taxes, re-registration, opening of the new hu, gratitude payments for those purposes and gratuities to the head of each department of the yamen, we spent a total of 200 taels … Lineage members should go to the civil office section and the grain-tax section of the county yamen at wintertime every year, write down and record the actual amount to be paid for the two registered households, and make sure that the hazard of new taxes being added to our burden does not happen. I earnestly hope that this matter is not neglected, and the hardships of our ancestors are not repeated.
What the term “two registered households” refers to is not made clear. It could be Zhao Chuying and Zhao Bijiang, meaning that the burden assigned to the latter should not be attributed to the former, or it could be Zhao Bijiang and Zhong Chen Ye, the newly created registered households which were to assume the payment that had been previously made by the Macao Zhaos.
Although the re-registration process as described in the above story appears fairly straightforward, actual events were in fact less simple. Evidence concerning the situation before and after the re-registration in late 1856 can be found in other parts of the Zhao lineage material.
NEGOTIATIONS AMONG LINEAGES: THE LETTER TO BIJIANG, 1852
According to the “Summary of Taxation Affairs”, while the intensification of the government's tax collection is said to have begun in 1850–1851, it was not until 1856 that the Zhaos succeeded in completing the re-registration. Prior to this, the Zhaos appear to have made other attempts, as is evident in the draft of a letter written under the name of the “Shu Liu Tang 漱六堂 of the Macao Branch”, addressed to fourteen members of the Bijiang Zhaos.
The letter is dated 17 September 1852, and the Bijiang Zhaos are referred to as a “related branch” (qinfang 親房). Indeed, the Bijiang Zhaos are acknowledged in the Macao Zhaos' genealogy as being co-descendants of the Song emperor Taizong, but it is also stated that from the thirteenth generation onwards, they followed a different pattern from the Macao Zhaos in naming their sons. This indicates – assuming that the twelfth-generation ancestor named all sons according to the same pattern – that the Bijiang Zhaos are, in Zhongzhang's formulation, descendants of a different twelfth-generation ancestor from the Macao Zhaos. For the Macao Zhaos, this twelfth-generation ancestor was Youzhi, a native of Zhejiang province, who first moved to Xiangshan county on being appointed magistrate there in Hongwu 19 (1386–1387). One possibility is that both the Macao Zhaos and the Bijiang Zhaos claimed descent from Youzhi, who, as a magistrate, provided a prestigious settlement legend, but that they each connected their respective lines of descent to Youzhi without much thought for cohesion with other genealogies, thus creating this discrepancy.Footnote 22
The existence of this draft shows that negotiation with the Bijiang Zhaos was at least considered a valid stratagem in the Macao Zhaos' attempt to evade their tax burden. The following three points can be made on its contents.
First, the Macao Zhaos had a certain familiarity with the Bijiang Zhaos as a lineage. They not only address fourteen individual lineage members by name, but also provide a specific and detailed list of their tax liabilities and their rightful payers. Their knowledge of the Bijiang Zhaos may have given them hope that they might agree to assume the tax liability, as they ask in the draft:
As far as we are concerned, none of [the land for which these taxes are being collected] is actually our lineage's land. The unpaid taxes are attributable to your lineage … We simply wish the following: that your members gather together at your ancestral hall at an early date, and decide how to divide the following tax liability among the households.Footnote 23
Secondly, the letter shows that while the Macao Zhaos initially tried to settle the dispute with the Bijiang Zhaos without direct recourse to the government, the authority of the government was never far from their minds. In addition to the fact that re-registration with the government is the vital issue here, the Macao Zhaos threaten to contact the government on their own:
If the tax is not paid, and the re-registration is not carried out, we will certainly take a petition to the county yamen, along with the necessary documentation, and ask that the re-registration be forced through. Please do not think it strange, when the disruption caused by the tax-collectors becomes incomparably more intense than usual!Footnote 24
However, fear of contacting the government was in fact a factor influencing the Macao Zhaos throughout the process: the disturbances caused by the tax collectors were what had prompted them to take action in the first place, and later in 1856 the Macao Zhaos would be extremely cautious in taking the initiative for re-registering at the yamen.
Thirdly, while we have little information concerning the internal structure of the Macao Zhaos, this letter reflects how segmentation within the lineage was related to members of particular branches taking charge of affairs concerning taxation. The letter was intended to be signed by both the individual writing the letter and the name of a lineage branch (tang 堂), the Shu Liu Tang. The Shu Liu Tang encompassed the direct descendants of the eight sons of the twenty-fourth-generation ancestor Tongyi 同義, each of the eight sons being the founder of a lineage branch. The branches are numbered in accordance with the order of birth of these eight founding brothers.Footnote 25 In 1840, land for the Shu Liu Tang ancestral hall (zuci 祖祠) was purchased by Zhao Zongbing. The deed of purchase, in which land is bought from the Lu surname, is reproduced in the genealogy.Footnote 26 It is stated in that deed that the Zhaos are to build an ancestral hall on that land, and the funds raised for the building of the ancestral hall are also recorded.Footnote 27 The subscription for these funds was uneven across the eight branches. Only the first, second, fifth and seventh branches made contributions, and the genealogy highlights their involvement. Zongbing, who in his genealogy biography is said to have been instrumental in building the ancestral hall, and who is mentioned in the letter as the one who took charge of dealing with external parties, is from the second branch of the Shu Liu Tang.Footnote 28 Zongmin, who was assigned the task of negotiating with the government in 1856, is from the first branch. Zhongzhang, who then accompanied Zongmin to the county capital and is the writer of most of these documents, is also from the second branch.
Through recounting the deeds of these individual members in times of crisis, the records have the effect of promoting the superiority of particular branches within the Macao Zhaos, without necessarily involving more common property saved for these branches. This draft of a letter to the Bijiang Zhaos, signed with the tang name, can also be understood in that context.
We do not know what followed from the writing of this draft, not even whether the drafted letter was actually sent or not. Either way, the re-registration requested in this draft did not take place. The Macao Zhaos would however continue their effort to negotiate with Bijiang, as can be seen in another document in the Macao Zhaos' material.
NEGOTIATIONS INVOLVING BOTH OFFICIAL AND NON-OFFICIAL LEVELS: REPORT TO LINEAGE MEMBERS, 1856 (“SHEET A”)
Another document, from which we learn of a visit by Zhao Zongmin to Bijiang, is formulated as a report to two lineage members.Footnote 29 The report describes, in greater detail than the “Summary of Taxation Affairs”, the process whereby the Macao Zhaos' efforts led to eventual re-registration. According to this report, the registration process as described above only took place after Zongmin had first made preliminary visits to the county capital and to Bijiang.
On his preliminary visit to the yamen, Zongmin and the tax clerk Lu Biru agreed on the paperwork necessary for re-registration. As we have seen, this entailed the establishment of two new registered households Zhao Bijiang and Zhong Chen Ye; the re-registration under these households of the tax “wrongfully” attributed to the Macao Zhaos; and the reorganization of the Macao Zhaos' (legitimate) tax burden under the registered household Zhao Chuying.
While Lu Biru agreed to arrange the necessary paperwork, he also made clear that normal practice in changing the tax register was for the yamen to ascertain that the newly appointed taxpayers consented to payment. In waiving this procedure, he was doing the Macao Zhaos a rather unusual favour. Moreover, the Macao Zhaos themselves did not think it sufficient only to have the paperwork done at the yamen in order to free themselves of this tax burden. They were certainly going to considerable lengths to accomplish the official re-registration, but still felt it necessary to go to Bijiang and talk with the Bijiang Zhaos. This perception on their part implies that the efficacy of a land taxation arrangement rested neither solely on governmental power nor solely on private (minjian 民間) relationships, but on a combination of both.Footnote 30
With the government having no notion of the actual land for which tax was paid, the Macao Zhaos' aim was to establish an understanding both at the yamen and with the Bijiang Zhaos. According to this understanding, the yamen would approach Bijiang rather than Macao for a certain proportion of the land tax, and the Bijiang Zhaos would comply. It was in order to secure this compliance that the Macao Zhaos went to negotiate directly with the Bijiang Zhaos. While it is open to question whether there was any genuine foundation to the Macao Zhaos' claim that this tax should be paid by the Bijiang Zhaos,Footnote 31 our account states that it was agreed that the Bijiang Zhaos would register for and pay the taxes by the end of the ninth month, that is, by 28 October 1856.Footnote 32
It was after this, partly with the aim of ascertaining whether the Bijiang Zhaos had kept their word and complied with the re-registration, that Zongmin went to the capital on 7 November, as described earlier in this paper. Zongmin went to the grain-tax section of the yamen, but:
No re-registration had been made [despite the promise that it would be done by the end of the ninth month]. All that had been done was the payment of forty to fifty taels as tax, but it was not understood [at the yamen] that this silver had been paid as tax for the two registered households of Chuying and Yefu.Footnote 33
The Bijiang Zhaos might well have gone to the yamen to make the tax payment, but according to our account neither re-registration nor payment is designated as being for the registered households in question. However, after Zongmin's negotiation with Lu Biru, it was agreed that this payment would be recognized as such, and that:
We will put the past shortfall into the other [newly created] registered household [that is, Zhao Bijiang], and make the Bijiang Zhaos pay it on appropriate occasions. We will thus free you [the Macao Zhaos] from the suffering and trouble.Footnote 34
Thus, the re-registration was to be carried out, even though gaining the consent of the Bijiang Zhaos had not necessarily succeeded. The report, moreover, gives us details of contact with the various departments of the county government. An introduction to the tax clerk Lu Biru through Lu Xiaolou was seen as indispensable, and it was also necessary to form personal links with members of three separate sections of the yamen. The importance of obtaining the consent of these three departments is explicitly stated in the document. It also gives the names of individuals to be approached, and how contact with these people had been made possible.Footnote 35
This document (“Sheet A”) is dated 7 December 1856, thirty days after the re-registration at the yamen. Lu Biru told Zongmin and Zhongzhang that after their visit on 7 November, they should leave the matter with him and return to Macao, waiting for the tax-registration document and the receipt (youchuan 油串) for what had been paid. Zongmin and Zhongzhang thus returned to Macao on 13 November. As of the date “Sheet A” was written (7 December), however, neither had the registration document been made out, nor had the receipt arrived.
REGISTRATION OF TAX: THE “BOOKLET OF TAX AND LAND”
One of the arguments put forward by Katayama Tsuyoshi on the lijia system was that while the yamen had information on the registered households, it had no notion as to who the taxpayers (ding 丁) for these households actually were. A document in the Macao collection bearing on this point is a five-page booklet titled the “Booklet of Tax and Land” (Shui mu ce 税畝册). Although it is unclear whether this is the same document as the “registration document” referred to in “Sheet A”,Footnote 36 this booklet, meant for official recognition – the space for an official seal is specified though not actually stamped – lists the actual taxpayers (ding) for a particular registered household. The document is titled “New registered household of Zhao Bijiang, in the Last jia, Third tu, Shun du”,Footnote 37 referring to the newly created registered household in the process of re-registration in November 1856. While the names of the actual taxpayers are listed in the “Booklet of Tax and Land”,Footnote 38 the exact amount of tax for which each was liable is not specified. The taxpayers are divided into three groups, and the total amount of tax payable by each group is given, alongside the name of the old registered household under which that specific tax was formerly registered, a name which would have remained unchanged over many generations. The first of these three groups consists solely of the name of Zhao Gao Zhai 趙誥宅 (‘House of Zhao Gao’), and the tax to be paid under this name is said to be that originally registered as the upper category tax payable by the same taxpayer under the old registered household name Zhao Yefu. The second group consists of thirteen names from the Bijiang ZhaosFootnote 39 and those of the Huang 黃 and Hu 胡 surnames. The tax to be paid by this group is described as the “upper-category tax and lower-category tax, payable under the registered household Zhao Yefu”. In the third group, it is specified that taxpayers with the surnames of Chen, Ye and Luo would pay such taxes as those previously registered under the old registered household of Zhao Chuying.
Given that a registered household corresponded to a group with a wider membership than actual households, the runners' knowledge of these parties would either take the form of directly knowing all the actual taxpayers comprising that group, or of knowing a limited number of parties who were in charge of organizing the payment. While the “Booklet of Tax and Land” contains a list of these actual taxpayers, the taxpayers are divided into three groups, each of which was to pay a lump sum, and the division of the burden among the actual taxpayers within that group is not specified. Thus it would not have been possible for the yamen runners to approach every actual taxpayer directly and demand the tax due from them.
The existence of this “Booklet of Tax and Land” in the lineage records – taking the form of a copy of an official document – does not by itself prove that there was an “original” of this document made and kept at the yamen.Footnote 40 However, the existence of such a formula as that found in this document, in which the actual taxpayers are listed and there is space designated for an official stamp to be affixed, does mean that the Macao Zhaos thought it conceivable for the yamen to have certain knowledge of the actual taxpayer, and not only at the parent-level registered household (zonghu 總戶) level. If such a document indeed was used at the yamen, this would directly contradict Katayama's observation that the yamen would not collect tax directly from the lower-level registered households, and would not have any knowledge of the actual taxpayers shouldering the tax due from those households.Footnote 41
However, the most striking feature of this booklet is that while it is called the “Booklet of Tax and Land”, there is no mention of the actual plots of land for which the tax is being paid. This total absence of concern over the actual land is shared across other parts of the Macao Zhaos' records. As we saw in the “Summary of Taxation Affairs” in the genealogy, the Macao Zhaos complain that a part of their tax burden had been attributed to them wrongfully, but never say what land that tax burden is for. The letter to Bijiang cites the people by whom the tax should be paid, but makes no mention of the land for which it is paid. In other words, the two Zhao lineages are in dispute over land tax, but not actual landholding.
The “Booklet” is a document on which it was intended for an official stamp to be placed. The fact that such a document cited a group of taxpayers and not any specific plot of land implies the following. The collection of land tax in Xiangshan county did not rely on a grasp of actual arrangements concerning the holding of land. Rather, it relied on knowing which people to go to for a certain tax liability, and this made it possible for a particular liability to be shifted from one group to another without any actual land transaction among the parties.
As is well known, the Qing inherited the fish-scale register (yulin tuce 魚鱗圖册) from the Ming, which clarified such data as the shape, place-name, holder, borders, measurements and area of each plot of land from which land taxwas to be collected.Footnote 42 However, it is also well known that by the late Qing, government land records did not reflect actual landholding arrangements,Footnote 43 and the various historical conditions that led to this situation have been looked into.Footnote 44 What we see here in the Macao Zhaos' case is a situation where the yamen is no longer concerned with actual landholding arrangements for the sake of land taxation. It is more interested in which person or group of people it could go to in order to secure the payment of a certain portion of the land tax.
These documents, in connection with property holding and lineage organization, suggest the following. In the first instance, the holding of each plot of land was secured not by the government keeping track of the rightful owner of each plot, but by an understanding, often underwritten by a land deed, between the parties with interests in the landholding arrangements of a particular area. However, the holding of a plot of land could be strengthened by the prospect that if a dispute arose, a deed concerning that land would be recognized by the government, and such a prospect would be enhanced if there were a clause concerning the tax being paid on that land.Footnote 45
Thus, the deed for the purchase of land for the Shu Liu Tang ancestral hall contains the following data. The exact location of the plot of land with details on its borders and measurements is given, and also the tax burden of 1.886 mu “upper tax” (the tax rate differed according to the quality of land, “upper tax” being charged for superior land). Moreover, the registered household through which this tax was being paid by the vendor (Lu Baoshan zhao 陸保善爪, in the eighth jia, third tu, Gong 恭 du) is given, alongside the statement that Zhao Zongbin, the purchaser, would re-register the tax burden. A note at the end of the deed states that the tax burden mentioned here was to be paid through the registered household of Zhao Mianze, one of the Macao Zhaos' registered household names mentioned in “Sheet A”.Footnote 46
While the efficacy of such a sale among the parties concerned would be guaranteed by the deed made out by the vendor and through the use of agents or brokers (‘middlemen’, zhongren 中人), the yamen would record that 1.886 mu worth of the tax burden of the registered household Lu Jishan was shifted to the household of Zhao Mianze. The deed stated that the purchaser would carry out the re-registration, and if this was carried out the government would know, by implication, that this purchaser was willing to assume this tax liability. The yamen runners could thus go to the purchaser (or whomever they went to in collecting tax for the registered household under which this tax burden was newly placed), secure in the knowledge that there was a consensus between the vendor and the purchaser that the tax would be paid by those re-registering.
In the case of the Macao Zhaos, the re-registration was not carried out by those newly shouldering the tax liability, but by those trying to rid themselves of that burden. In other words, such a consensus as that implied in the deed of purchase cited above could not be assumed in this case. Indeed, the records show that this was one of the factors behind the situation that while the Macao Zhaos successfully changed the tax register at the yamen, their efforts did not achieve the desired end: that is, the tax burden attributed to the Macao Zhaos was not actually removed in accordance with the register.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE RE-REGISTRATION OF 1856: THE LETTER FROM LU BIRU, 1859
The situation three years after the re-registration process of 1856 can be seen from the following copy of a letter from Lu Biru, who by this time had been transferred to the military section of the yamen.Footnote 47 The letter itself is addressed to his brother Lu Xiaolou, who had originally introduced the Macao Zhaos to Biru. However, Lu Biru asks the recipient to pass the contents on to the Macao Zhaos. This copy would have been made at some point during this process of communication.
To third brother Xiaolou. Greetings [as if we meet]. I read your letter from the beginning of the month. [The letter] mentioned in detail the matter related to tax. I have understood it all … it is absolutely necessary to ask him (referend unspecified) why the mistake of continuing to collect taxes in accordance with the old registered household has been continuously made during the last two years.Footnote 48
The letter, being in reply to another letter on the land tax, is part of an ongoing consultation on how to deal with these matters. The starting point is that the re-registration and its paperwork completed in 1856 (and described in detail in the “Summary of Taxation Affairs”) did not bring about the desired changes in actual land-tax collection. Lacking other parts of the correspondence, it is difficult to understand the implications of Biru's advice in full. However, parts of the background can be reconstructed.
The basic structure of Biru's advice is: that a petition should be filed and the paperwork should be done, although this will by no means be decisive. Moreover, the tax-collecting runners liangchai 糧差 should not be approached at this point.
I fear that the runner (chai 差) in question would go to that place, and be completely unable [to collect the necessary tax]. It would also be difficult [for him] to know the names of the land from which tax should be collected, and inconvenient to identify such land. [Rather,] it is necessary to have someone go to their place to decide matters, see how he answers, and then we can think of a way to proceed.Footnote 49
Here, one can see some of the tensions between the different groups involved in the process of land-tax collection. Among these groups, there are firstly the yamen clerks. Biru himself is of this group, although at this point he is no longer attached to the relevant department. The clerks would be in charge of the paperwork involved in registration, and it was through negotiation at this level that the Zhaos had completed re-registration in 1856.
Secondly, there are the yamen runners, including the tax-collecting runner (liangchai), who are in charge of actual tax collection. One problem here is that the clerks are not in full control of the runners. The runners do not unconditionally follow the registration documents, and in this case the change in registration (made in 1856) did not alter actual practice.
The third group are the parties actually shouldering the tax liability (who, institutionally, are stratified into different levels of tujia 圖甲, parent-level registered household zonghu, offspring-level registered household zihu 子戶, and actual taxpayer. If these people were willing to pay, the runners would be only too happy to collect from them. Lu Biru's advice indicates that land-tax collection relied on a certain consensus (or balance of power) between all three of these groups, and to get the machinery working in a particular way, it was often not enough to deal with just one of them.
While Biru advises the Macao Zhaos to negotiate initially with an unnamed person (who appears to be a clerk),Footnote 50 he also advises them to negotiate directly with the Bijiang Zhaos so that they (the Bijiang Zhaos) will accept the tax liability. In doing so, Biru outlines the standard procedure for changing the tax register and opening a new registered household. Here, the application for creating a new registered household would normally be made by the party who is to shoulder the tax liability through this newly created household.Footnote 51 However, in this instance it had been the Macao Zhaos trying to rid themselves of the tax liability who had applied for the creation of the new household, and this made their case particularly difficult.
Moreover, Biru also has information on the reaction of the Bijiang Zhaos.
[A clerk] wrote to me and said: “I have now received a letter from Bijiang which says ‘Do not also attribute the tax burden of the people of Guizhou and Daliang to us…’” This was their only misgiving, that a tax burden such as that of Guizhou was assessed on them. First, when I spoke with Sixth Brother in the past, I said, “As the people of Bijiang have misgivings, go and inform those in Guizhou and Daliang. Open another separate zhao [for the taxes of the people of Guizhou and Daliang], and it will cost you only some ten-odd taels.” … [However, under the circumstances,] because of the fear that it would be wrong to go to Bijiang to collect the taxes, the tax-collecting runner (liangchai) in question would certainly trace me [us] and come to my [our] place instead. Is this not simply a return of the trouble we previously suffered?Footnote 52
The above clarifies the circumstances which prevented the tax-collection practices from changing. On one hand, the Bijiang Zhaos were not satisfied with the new registered household. On the other hand, it was seen that under these circumstances the runners responsible for the actual collection of these taxes would not charge the Bijiang Zhaos with the payment, even though the newly registered household had assigned the liability to them.
On the Bijiang Zhaos' part, although they were willing to assume part of the tax liability which the Macao Zhaos attempted to remove from themselves, they were not prepared to pay taxes which they thought should properly be assessed on the Daliang and Guizhou surnames. Indeed, the actual taxpayers listed in the “Booklet of Tax and Land” for the lower-level household under the name Zhao Bijiang do, in fact, include those with surnames from Daliang and Guizhou.Footnote 53
The very name of the newly registered household, Zhao Bijiang, immediately suggests a correspondence with the Bijiang Zhaos, and two of the three groups of taxpayers entered in the “Booklet of Tax and Land” consisted of the same Bijiang Zhaos that the Macao Zhaos had addressed in their letter of 1852. However, there was a third group of taxpayers in the same document, not of the Zhao surname, corresponding to the surnames from Daliang and Guizhou. This clearly created a problem in the functioning of the registered household. In other words, a correspondence between such a social group as the Bijiang Zhao lineage on one hand and the registered household Zhao Bijiang on the other was a necessary precondition for the household to function as a taxation unit.
Biru's concern is that the runners would find it difficult to collect taxes from the Bijiang Zhaos under such circumstances, and would then investigate how the registered household came to be formed in the first place. Such an investigation would reveal the fact that the rules concerning re-registration in the county had not been strictly adhered to, and this could compromise not only the Macao Zhaos, but Biru and other clerks as well.
Having outlined such considerations, the practical advice given by Biru is to approach the Bijiang Zhaos directly.
When I look at this matter, it seems that it is absolutely necessary to have a [mature] person to visit Bijiang himself, to reason with them. If they have misgivings about having [the taxes of] Guizhou and Daliang within their tax burden, then investigate and clarify the real situation, notify each person and open a separate lower-level household 爪 for [the tax of] Guizhou and Daliang. The people of Bijiang and those of Guizhou and Daliang can each pay their own taxes: this would not be impossible. If we establish another new lower-level household, it will be different from the previous occasion, as on the previous occasion there was no [earlier] record on file. However, since the [existing] lower-level household [record] of Bijiang has already clarified how much tax is due for that lower-level household, it is possible to establish [another new household] in accordance with this. The fee to pay to the [taxation] section in this case would not be more than perhaps just three or five yuan.Footnote 54
According to Biru, the difficulties are not insurmountable as far as the paperwork is concerned. While the situation is not easy, the opening of another separate registered household for the Daliang and Guizhou surnames would not cost too much, and trouble could be avoided by the payment of modest extra fees.Footnote 55
However, Biru is even more emphatic that the Macao Zhaos should negotiate directly with the Bijiang Zhaos. Regardless of how the paperwork is arranged, the practice of tax collection ultimately must, in this case, rest on a consensus among the taxpayers as to who shoulders what part of the liability.
While it is still not known whether the Macao Zhaos' claim had any legitimacy, this letter shows a complex web of human relationships inside and outside the government. Taxation matters seem to rest ultimately on these relationships rather than on the strict application of rules and regulations. Such relationships included: those between the clerks in charge of the paperwork and the runners actually collecting the taxes; the interaction between these runners and the taxpayer; the negotiations and consensus between different taxpayers; and the more general understanding of the state's legitimacy among the populace. The importance of such different relationships was well understood by the Macao Zhaos, as is implied by their multi-layered approach to the situation. The Macao Zhaos continue to negotiate with the Bijiang Zhaos after the paperwork was done, and they have recorded the particular individuals to approach in each department in preparation for future contact.
Little can be known of the situation after 1859. From the content of Biru's letter, we know that despite the Macao Zhaos' re-registration in 1856, the tax collectors kept coming to the Macao Zhaos for the tax liability in question. Moreover, judging from the letter, the Zhaos were still faced with a number of difficult tasks, and the prospects were not necessarily good.
THE TUJIA SYSTEM AND LAND TAXATION IN THE PEARL RIVER DELTA
Our records end here, and no further trace of the case can be found either in the Zhaos' material or in the official records. We will now try to place the findings of this case in the context of scholarly knowledge on tax registration, social organization and property in the late Qing.
By the latter half of the Ming, the lijia system had become defunct as a population register.Footnote 56 Moreover, while the Qing regime introduced a number of measures to rationalize taxation, it did not conduct its own cadastral surveys that would update the landholding records.Footnote 57 Thus there arose a great discrepancy between registered landholding on the one hand, and the actual landholding arrangements agreed between various parties on the other. Despite its organized records of registered households (hu) and their land-tax burdens, the late Qing tujia system in the Pearl River Delta could not avoid this discrepancy. Previous scholarship has found that while the system operated on the basis of registered households owing land tax, these registered households did not correspond to actual households, but were rather connected to certain groups, such as lineages and branches within lineages.Footnote 58
In the case of the Macao Zhaos, not only did the registered households not correspond to actual households, the registered acreage (which determined the tax liability for each registered household) did not necessarily correspond to any actual plots of land held by the parties comprising that registered household. In other words, the yamen would collect land tax through registered households without knowing the actual property for which the tax was being paid. Under such circumstances, the fish-scale registers (yulin tuce) that the Qing had inherited from the Ming – containing information on the shape, place-name, holder, borders, measurements and area of each plot of landFootnote 59 – were long defunct, and did not fulfil their original function. Land taxation in this case would have had to work on a different basis from that of knowing the terrain and being able to identify the actual holder of each plot of taxable land.
Tax collection in the Qing could be undertaken directly by yamen runners (referred to in this case as tu runners, tuchai 圖差, or tax-collecting runners, liangchai), or farmed out through contractual relationships to certain parties.Footnote 60 Moreover, organization of payment on the part of the taxpayers was also a factor in the process, and some of this organizational work would be undertaken by those holding such offices as those called the yinding 殷丁. Based on this type of organization among taxpayers, in some cases the taxpayers themselves would bring the tax to the yamen and pay. Our material suggests that in Xiangshan county, a combination of these forms was in place.
The limitations of the yamen's knowledge of actual taxpayers necessitated such practices as the reliance on tax farmers (such as the one referred to as the “contracted friend of the land-revenue department” in our case) or organization among the taxpayers themselves (in some cases led by taxpayers with such titles as yinding)Footnote 61 for the collection of taxes. In the case of the Macao Zhaos, such organization among taxpayers took place in the lineage context: the Macao Zhaos made a concerted effort to establish a one-on-one correspondence between the registered household Zhao Chuying and the Macao Zhao lineage. It was this correspondence, between groups in which tax payment could be organized, and specific tax responsibilities attached to the registered households, on which the Macao Zhaos and yamen clerks such as Lu Biru tried to establish an order according to which tax collection could be made. Moreover, it was the failure to make the registered household Zhao Bijiang correspond completely with the actual social group of the Bijiang Zhaos that led to the malfunctioning of that registered household, rendering it impossible for the re-registration to take effect. Another point that can be made is that these social groups were not limited to lineages, as the case of the registered household Zhong Chen Ye indicates. This is to be expected, given that local society was formed not just through lineage but also through territorial relationships focusing on popular religion.Footnote 62
In analysing the registered household in the tujia system of the Pearl River Delta, Katayama Tsuyoshi argued that the jia in the tujia system corresponded to a whole lineage, and was organized on the basis of dominance in the lineage context. There was one upper-level registered household (zonghu) per jia, and it was only at this level that direct payment to the yamen was made. “The tujia system was not just a machinery for the collection and the payment of tax, but also had the strong characteristic of an appliance which supplemented the dominance of its members by the descent-group organisation”.Footnote 63
Liu Zhiwei, however, criticizes the over-simplicity of such a picture. He is more cautious in establishing a relationship between the tujia and the complex social structure of lineages. He argues that social organization at the grassroots level could take diverse forms, and that the descent-group is not the only form of such organization. He cites examples where the tax for one registered household is paid by a group of parties consisting of more than one surname, and those where the tax for more than one registered household is paid by one lineage. He also challenges Katayama's reconstruction of a hierarchical structure of the hu with only the zonghu-level registered household having direct contact with the government, and cites examples of the lower zihu- or the zhao-level households directly paying tax at the yamen.Footnote 64
The findings of this paper would confirm Liu Zhiwei's account of this complexity. The relationship between the various registered households dealt with in this case and actual lineages and territorial groups was not so simple as a one-on-one correspondence between upper-level registered households and lineages. Neither was direct contact between the government's collection process and the taxpayers limited to this level.
Thus in the context of our knowledge on the relationships between tax registers and the organization of local society, the contribution of this case would be to provide a concrete example of how registers of offspring-level households could be manipulated to correspond to different types of social groups, and in particular how the taxpayers themselves perceived and grappled with the system. More importantly, however, the following points can be made with regard to the social dynamics of registration, tax collection and property rights.
CONCLUSION: REGISTRATION, TAXATION AND LAND RIGHTS
Because the land-tax burden assigned to each registered household (which was specified in land acreage) did not have any counterpart (that is, actual specific plots of land of that acreage) in reality, tax collection could not base itself on knowledge of the terrain and identification of the taxpayer for each plot of taxable land. Rather, it had to rely firstly on knowledge of the parties that could be held responsible for each registered household. Given that the actual holder of each plot of land could not be directly known to the yamen, this knowledge took the form of knowing the groups within which the taxpayers could organize payment.
Another point that clearly emerges in relation to these circumstances is that a correspondence with social groups (formed through kinship and territorial relations) was not sufficient for a registered household to be able to function as a taxation unit. Compliance on the part of the taxpayers was also a factor that came into consideration, as is clear from the attitude taken toward the Bijiang Zhaos, on the part of the Macao Zhaos and Lu Biru.
This situation, whereby compliance of the taxpayer was desired – and in some cases needed – for a particular taxation arrangement to function, had its roots in the very structure of how registration and taxation worked. Since cadastral records of each and every plot of land were no longer made, and it was no longer possible to base the land tax on actual landholding, tax liabilities had to become independent objects of transfer, not necessarily attached to any piece of specific land. In a land sale, if the tax liability was also to be transferred, it had to be independently specified. This can be seen in the case of the Shu Liu Tang's acquisition of land from the Lu surname in 1840. This meant that if such a transfer of the tax liability was not specifically made in a land transaction, the tax liability would stay with a particular taxpayer, eventually to be passed on to his descendants, or in some cases assumed by a tang on a more permanent basis.Footnote 65
In any case, because the tax liability was not automatically attached to the land, tax collection had to be based on the understanding of existing groups of people tied down to a registered household in the yamen's records. In order to rid oneself of such a liability, it was desirable to assign it to an external party in such a way that a new understanding was created between the relevant parties (the taxpayer, the yamen, and in some cases the tax farmer), so that taxation could proceed in accordance with this understanding. It was this understanding that the Macao Zhaos failed to secure in the course of their actions.Footnote 66
Finally, an important corollary of the separation of land rights and land-tax liabilities was that information on the demarcation of land rights rested solely with the private parties. If the state tried to enforce such rights, they could only rely on evidence regarding agreements among the parties, with no reliable register of their own. Even when they reached a judgement in the process, the enforcement of this judgement would again have to rely on cooperation by the parties.Footnote 67 Thus land rights in this property regime were secured in the first instance by agreement among private parties, be it through communal understanding or written land deeds. Moreover, the enforcement of these land rights had to be realized through the organization of these private parties, and the state's role could only be secondary.
A larger question is to what extent we can generalize our findings on the Macao Zhaos to the rest of Qing China. On one hand, their material provides scholarship with possibly the richest case to date on actual practices concerning Qing land registration and taxation, seen from the viewpoint of the taxpayer. On the other hand, the circumstances specific to Xiangshan in the 1850s need to be carefully weighed, and even so, there always remains the possibility that this single case only represents an exception even within this one area.
The internal evidence suggests that while the Zhaos did not follow standard procedures to the letter, they worked within the basic framework of the institutions as they functioned in Xiangshan at the time. As Lu Biru outlines the regular practice in his letter, registration for tax had to be made in such a way as to ensure that the taxpayer agreed to pay. Both David Faure and Michael Szonyi have shown how lineages would have an interest in securing the legitimacy of a registered taxpayer,Footnote 68 and we see the Macao Zhaos also stating in their genealogy their status as a registered taxpayer through the household of Zhao Chuying.
Moreover, the Zhaos' material includes a printed book that the Zhaos kept with their papers on tax matters, providing insight as to how the lineage made a connection between their case and the wider situation. The book does not have a title, and appears to be from 1843 or 1844. It opens with the statement:
Land taxation is an important factor in the administration. In our county, the yamen underlings of the tu take over the duties of the li heads. Moreover, under the pretext of helping in their work, they extort large sums of silver. They thus create serious trouble in the whole of our county.Footnote 69
The lijia system charges the li heads (who are themselves among the taxpayers) to collect taxes from the taxpaying households. The situation in Xiangshan is that the yamen runners come directly to the local area and collect taxes, extorting fees and causing unrest in the process. The book primarily addresses this extortion, and reproduces petitions, commentaries and magistrates' notices concerning this problem. The Zhaos have written in the margins of this book stating that these were problems familiar to them, and one such entry shows that the Zhaos found particularly pertinent a case where an unjust tax burden was inherited from the ancestors, and the descendants were unable to react appropriately, not knowing how the burden came about in the first place.Footnote 70
The Zhaos thus perceived their case as part of a larger social problem in Xiangshan, and features of this problem were closely connected to the dysfunction of the lijia system, where tax collection was made on registers that could not be checked against the realities of landholding, making it vulnerable to exploitation.
Xiangshan was one of a handful of Pearl River Delta counties where the lijia system survived into the late Qing, in the form of the tujia. This survival itself was an anomaly, given that the lijia system as a whole was largely defunct by the late Ming. Moreover, this Qing system operated within a taxation apparatus that had undergone significant changes since the Ming, with the combination of the head tax and registered land tax under the Emperor Kangxi. In these Pearl River Delta counties, the phenomenon of “old” registered households, with household names remaining unchanged over generations, was common throughout the Qing period.Footnote 71 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, tax collection through this system was perceived to be problematic and open to abuse, necessitating efforts to reform the operation of the tujia.Footnote 72 The situation described in the abovementioned 1843–1844 printed volume on tax collection in Xiangshan was thus in line with a wider trend in the area.
The survival of the tujia system in these counties may well have been related to how household registration was integrally linked to lineage building and social structuring, which in turn hinged on land reclamation that went on throughout the Ming and Qing.Footnote 73 While we are finding out how there were local variations in this relationship between the registered household and local social organization,Footnote 74 one result we see in Xiangshan is that the government's land-tax registers and its organization into such units as tu and jia continued to function, though they did not reflect the realities of landholding.
It is thus tempting to make the argument that if even in a county like Xiangshan the government had no notion of actual landholding, in other counties it would be even less likely for individual holdings of land to have been recognized directly by the government. A widely read textbook for local government advisers written in the Qianlong period noted that under each registered household name there was just an acreage and a due amount of silver, and that it was not possible even to know in which village the land was.Footnote 75 Regarding this point, one could point to Qingxian 青縣, a county in Zhili Province close to Tianjin, from which an extremely rare form of documentation survives, titled the Qingxian Cuntu. This record, compiled between 1875 and 1880,Footnote 76 reproduces maps of every village in the county, alongside such information as land acreage, tax liabilities, village leadership, schools and religious institutions in each village. What is striking is that these maps, which are the most detailed village maps made by the Qing government, give no indication of individual plots of land, let alone information on which land belongs to whom. Thus in order to collect the tax from these villages based on such documentation as the Qingxian cuntu, the yamen could not go directly to the owners of each plot of land to demand payment. What they could do, however, is to identify the leaders of each village, and ask for payment of the total land tax due from the village, this amount also being recorded in the cuntu. This form of payment would in turn have to rely on local consensus to distribute the tax burden among the holders of land, much as had to be done in Xiangshan.Footnote 77
Finally, the absence of landholding records and the problems this posed in tax collection was sharply brought to attention in the nearby New Territories of Hong Kong, when it became part of the colony a few decades after the Macao Zhaos' case. Stewart Lockhart, in a proposal for the creation of a new post of Land Officer, observed in 1898 that “Land is held in small allotments, and in many cases the amount of land mentioned in the lease is not in agreement with the actual holding, and a good deal of land is held without any proper title”.Footnote 78 Moreover, in 1901 H. H. J. Gompertz reported that “Many large tracts of land are now claimed by persons who have never paid crown rent, never reported their occupation, never had their holdings recognised by the Chinese government”.Footnote 79
It was precisely this divorce between tax registration and private landholding that was later rectified in the New Territories. While it has long been known that this brought about a drastic change in the social arrangements,Footnote 80 it is the analysis of such material as that of the Macao Zhaos that allows us to gain real insight on how the Qing system might have operated.
