Three
The Qing State and the Gansu Grain Market, 1739–1864

Peter C. Perdue

Most Chinese celebrate the eighteenth-century Qing empire for two achievements: the expansion by conquest of China's territory to unprecedented size and the growth of its population to become the largest in the world. Two major institutions of the Qing state made these achievements possible: the military supply system and the granary and famine relief systems. Both of these institutions depended heavily on extensive private grain markets. New data from the price memorials in the Qing archives allow us to examine the degree of integration of these grain markets in Gansu Province in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholars have recognized that market exchange of basic commodities was spreading widely in the Chinese empire in the eighteenth century, especially in the densely populated rice paddy belts of the Lower, Middle, and Upper Yangzi, the Pearl River Basin in South China, and along the Grand Canal leading to the North. Nevertheless, few have yet studied the substantial progress of trade in the far northwestern periphery of Han China. I shall argue that Gansu had achieved a considerable degree of integration of its grain markets by the eighteenth century and that the Qing state, through its military-provisioning and granary systems, indirectly promoted this process of commercialization.^[1]

The impact of the military was much greater in Gansu than in Coastal, Central, South, and Southwest China, because of Gansu's strategic location on the supply route to the garrisons occupying Central Asia. Continual military demands placed great stress on a fragile agrarian regime. But the efficient transport system developed by Qing governors of the province for military

[1] I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of my research assistants, Jiang Xiaohong and Ren Jingzhen, in preparing the statistics for this paper. The M.I.T. Provost Fund and Metcalfe Fellowship supported the data collection and analysis.

supply and the injection of cash into the economy, combined with efforts to prevent military demands from excessively burdening the local population, stimulated market exchange. By linking Gansu to its neighbors, Shaanxi to the east and Sichuan to the south, the Qing could both maintain the local population and send support through the Gansu corridor to the large military establishment on the frontiers. A full analysis of the Northwest should include its core area in Shaanxi Province, but lacking the price data for Shaanxi at present, I shall only discuss Gansu itself.

Gansu's land area in the Qing was over 600,000 square kilometers, half again as large as California or Japan today. It was one of the largest provinces in the empire, smaller only than Yunnan and Sichuan among the 18 provinces of interior China. (During the Qing dynasty Gansu also included within its borders present-day Ningxia Autonomous Region and Xining Prefecture in present-day Qinghai.) Its population density, however, only 25 per square kilometer in 1957, makes it the most sparsely populated province of Han China.^[2]

Although the population was sparse, the cultivated acreage was also low, giving Gansu a ratio of cultivated land per capita close to the national average. In 1887 less than 3 percent of the total area of the province was cultivated land, the lowest in the empire next to Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi in the Southwest.^[3] Wheat and millet were the major crops in the province, with acreages of 16.4 million and 14.9 million mu respectively in 1931–37. Miscellaneous crops (field peas, broad beans, oats, buckwheat) accounted for 6.2 million mu , corn for 2.2 million mu , barley for 1.9 million mu , and sorghum for 1.1 million mu . Only very small amounts of rice were grown. This was a very stable mix of crops, typical of regions with very low rainfall, little irrigation, and frequent droughts.^[4]

Dwight H. Perkins estimates Gansu's grain yields as the lowest of the 18 provinces, an estimate confirmed by Governor Huang Tinggui, who complained in 1744 that harvests were poor in Gansu because the local people failed to use manure properly or to plow deeply.^[5] Private grain storage was so low, claimed Governor Wu Dashan, that the people obtained half of their

[2] Population figures for Gansu are highly suspect: if the population was only 12.8 million in 1957, it is hard to believe that it could have attained the official figure of 15.2 million given for 1787. On the other hand, the 1749 figure of 5.71 million is a clear underestimate. (Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China, 1368–1968 (Chicago, 1969), pp. 207–8; Yeh-chien Wang, Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750–1911 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 87; Qingchao wenxian tongkao (hereafter WXTK ) 36/5195, 37/5205-6.

[3] Perkins, Agricultural Development , pp. 223, 236; Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 124–25. The reported area was, of course, much less than the actual cultivated area, but the relative standing of the provinces is roughly accurate.

[4] Perkins, Agricultural Development , pp. 249–58.

[5] Ibid., p. 19; Zhupi zouzhe (hereafter ZPZZ ), tunken gengzuo 1744.3.25.

seed for planting each year from government granary loans.^[6] Within the province, the districts west of the Yellow River suffered colder weather and later harvests than those to the east. Not only frequent floods and droughts but also hail, wind, sandstorms, insect plagues, frost, and snow could easily ruin a crop.^[7]

Besides its low productivity, Gansu is noteworthy for its high percentage of tuntian , or former military garrison lands, most of which were cultivated by civilians in the Qing. Tuntian formed over 37 percent of the registered land area in 1753.^[8] By 1772, the Qing had assigned 27 percent of the registered population, or perhaps three million people, to cultivate these fields. The Qing rulers relied heavily on the agricultural output of Gansu to feed not just local military forces but also the armies stationed in Xinjiang.^[9]

The military presence both in Gansu and in Xinjiang strongly affected state demands on Gansu's resources. Regular garrisons in the northern, eastern, and southern military districts of Xinjiang numbered at least 25,000 men by the early nineteenth century. Including their dependents, this meant an army of at least 125,000 people to be supported by a combination of garrison lands, cash stipends, and grain shipments from the interior. Joseph Fletcher estimates that of the annual military pay in Xinjiang of 3 million taels in silver, Han China supplied 1.2 million taels.^[10] Gansu was not the only source of subventions for Xinjiang, but it was the route through which all cash, grain, horses, and clothing reached the frontier.

Given the heavy demands by the state on Gansu and its low level of agrarian output, it is not surprising that the tax accounts of the province were almost always in arrears. Even though its tax quota was only 250,000 taels in 1725, it still owed the central government an unpaid deficit of 290,000 taels.^[11] The tax reforms of the Yongzheng reign (1723–35) imposed on Gansu additional annual demands of over 75,000 taels to provide for the "nourishing-virtue" supplements to magistrates' salaries, for which the ordinary source used in other provinces—meltage fees on silver collection—was insufficient. Gansu used 20,000 taels from surplus collections on frontier trade duties and 11,900 taels in customary fees from the sale of merchant licenses, but still had to request a special transfer of surpluses from Shaanxi.^[12] Gansu's inability to

[6] ZPZZ, zhenji 1759.3.10, Wu Dashan.

[7] ZPZZ, tunken gengzuo , 1742.2.2, Huang Tinggui.

[8] Yeh-chien Wang, An Estimate of the Land-Tax Collection in China, 1753 and 1908 (Cambridge, 1973), table 24.

[9] Jiaqing chongxiu Daqing yitongzhi, juan 251–73. Although Xinjiang was not established as a province until 1884, for convenience I use this term to refer to Chinese Central Asia in the eighteenth century.

[10] Joseph Fletcher, "Ch'ing Inner Asia," in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China , vol. 10, Late Ch'ing, 1800–1911 , pt. 1 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 61.

[11] Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch'ing China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), p. 312n.13.

extract sufficient tax income from agriculture led it to rely on more imaginative and less orthodox methods, especially taxes and contributions by merchants for official degrees. The central government, primarily interested in grain supplies for the military, seems to have been slow to realize Gansu's limitations. The state lowered its demands for cash by decreasing the surcharge for salary supplements from 30 percent to 15 percent, but it maintained high demands for grain. Gansu's tax quota in cash in 1745, 299,000 taels, was the lowest in the empire except for Yunnan and Guizhou, but its quota in grain (508,000 shi ) was the sixth highest.^[13] In fact, Gansu paid less than its quota in grain and more in cash, relying on an annual income of 32,000 taels from the tea and horse trades.^[14]

Gansu, like the other peripheral western and southwestern provinces (Shaanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou) was on the whole a low-revenue, deficit tax collection area, heavily dependent on subsidies from interior provinces.^[15] Within the province, however, rates of collection varied widely. In 1908 the average collection per county (xian ) was 3,600 taels of silver and 5,300 shi of grain, but Zhangye (the Ganzhou prefectural capital) and Wuwei (the Liangzhou prefectural capital) paid the enormous sums of 101,800 and 94,400 taels respectively.^[16] Such regions relied heavily on merchant taxes, especially on salt shipments, to meet these demands.

Gansu, then, was one of the poorest of the Han-dominated regions of the empire, comparable in remoteness, sparseness of population, and low productivity to the recently settled Southwest. Unlike the Southwest, however, Gansu occupied a strategic military position guarding the corridor leading to Central Asia, where the Qing rulers conducted their most expansive military campaigns. Unlike the Southwest, too, it had no major mining resources, and its native non-Han peoples—Muslims, Tibetans, Mongols—were assimilated far less willingly to Chinese culture than the native peoples of the Southwest. Persistent tension, sometimes leading toward accommodation, sometimes toward violent revolt, characterized Gansu's social fabric throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[17] Economically, however, Gansu increased its ties to interior China from the eighteenth century on. Shaanxi merchants controlled much of the province's internal trade. Goods from Hebei, Shanxi, Sichuan, and Henan supplied the civilian and military needs of the population. Gansu merchants, in turn, sold furs as far south as Hunan.^[18] Private markets had much to do with drawing the regions together,

[12] Ibid., p. 140.

[13] Yeh-chien Wang, Estimate , tables 26, 27.

[14] Yeh-chien Wang, Land Taxation , p. 71; Yongzheng zhupi yuzhi (hereafter ZPYZ ) 4.4.92b–93 (Gansu governor's report of 1725).

[15] Yeh-chien Wang, Land Taxation , p. 101.

[16] Ibid., p. 59.

[17] Jonathan Lipman, "The Border World of Gansu" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1981).

[18] Ningxiang xianzhi , 1816/8/8.

but the institutions established by the Qing founders and perfected in the eighteenth century, interacting with the market economy, played an important role. The institution with the greatest influence on the agrarian sector was the national granary system.

Granary Reserves and Food Supply

The nationwide granary system of the Qing stored large amounts of grain for leveling annual price fluctuations. "Ever-normal granaries" (changpingcang ) in each county built up their reserves during the eighteenth century using funds and grain obtained from a combination of regular state revenues, contributions for degrees, and transfers from surplus provinces and areas along the Grand Canal.^[19] Local elites in many provinces also supplied and managed community granaries (shecang ) and charity granaries (yicang ). This extraordinary grain storage system, whose total reserves far surpassed the holdings of any other premodern state, did succeed for a while in amassing large amounts of grain and in using these reserves to level price fluctuations. Reserve holdings rose to a peak near the end of the eighteenth century, rising from 30 million to 45 million shi . This was a volume of 31 to 46 million hectoliters, equivalent to a weight of milled rice of 261 to 391 million metric tons.^[20] Along with this growth in holdings, however, appeared many signs of corrupt management, rotting of grain, and ineffective use of grain for price relief. Although the official level of grain stores dropped back to 30 million shi in the nineteenth century, the real level declined even more rapidly. Furthermore, granary reserves were increasingly diverted to other uses. By the mid-nineteenth century, the use of granary reserves for military supplies had become a very common cause of depletion of the system.

The system functioned well in the eighteenth century as long as officials maintained adequate supervision over granary accounts, took care to prevent spoilage by turning over the stocks, and used grain only for price leveling. Gansu is an example of a province where latent destructive forces of the granary system appeared very early. Supplying military demands, in particular, was explicitly recognized as one of the functions of Gansu reserves. This made it all the more difficult to maintain high levels of reserves, despite the very great demands placed on Gansu by the center.

Since other studies have described the general functioning of the granary

[19] This discussion relies on references provided in Pierre-Etienne Will and R. Bin Wong, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (Ann Arbor, 1991).

[20] The shi was a volume measure of grain, equivalent in the Qing dynasty to 2.94 U.S. bushels, or 103.5 liters. Its weight varied by type of grain, but one shi of milled rice, the most common granary holding in south China, roughly equaled 185 pounds, or 84.1 kilograms. See Han-sheng Chuan and Richard A. Kraus, Mid-Ch'ing Rice Markets and Trade: An Essay in Price History (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 79–98.

system, here I shall only discuss certain aspects of the system that are peculiar to Gansu. The Qing empire demanded extraordinarily high amounts of grain storage from this poor province. Nearly all grain stored in Gansu was either wheat or millet. The Yongzheng emperor (1723–1735) set no fixed quotas for Gansu granaries, but in 1735 Gansu reported reserves of 750,000 shi .^[21] In 1748, however, when the Qianlong emperor assigned new targets to all the provinces, he gave Gansu the very high total of 2.29 million shi .^[22] By 1763 it had actually achieved only 1.28 million shi . After 1748 the emperor allowed most provinces to reduce their target levels, but he increased Gansu's targets because frontier military garrisons needed provisions.^[23] By 1789, he had raised Gansu's target to 3.31 million shi , but it actually reported only 2.2 million shi (all figures here are given in Qing imperial units, or cangshi ). Gansu, a poor province whose population at best amounted to a mere 2 to 5 percent of the national total, was expected to store about 10 percent of the national aggregate in both 1748 and 1789. In fact, it accumulated stockpiles that accounted for 3.9 percent of national reserves in 1767 and 7.4 percent in 1789. This substantial rise in Gansu grain holdings raised it from thirteenth to fourth in size of holdings among the nineteen provinces storing grain.^[24]

The target figures for 1748 and 1789, however, did not genuinely represent the required amount of stored grain in each province. At best, they revealed the expected role of each province in the granary system. It is unlikely that any Qing official seriously believed that Gansu would be able to collect over 3 million shi in 1789. Gansu's "deficit" of 1.1 million shi in this year did not necessarily signify severe inadequacies in its granary administration, but only the great limitations on the province's ability to extract large amounts of grain from a poor population. Since the northwestern provinces always maintained above-average levels of per capita grain reserves, they may well have stored enough grain to carry out their primary function of price leveling.^[25]

Building up and maintaining such large reserves was always a difficult problem. Gansu had three important sources for grain besides the local agri-

[21] ZPYZ 53.44a, 45b.

[22] The grain measure used in Gansu, the jingshi , was equal to 0.7 cangshi , the standard granary measure used in the rest of the empire. Memorials in Gongzhongdang archive, Palace Museum, Taibei, Qianlong reign (hereafter GZD-QL ), 2.25, 1751/11/22. All the grain figures given here have been converted to cangshi . Prices, however, are given here in taels per jingshi . For comparison with other provinces, these prices should be raised by 14 percent.

[23] Daqing gaozong chunhuangdi shilu (Qianlong) (hereafter QSL-QL ), j.330.33-35 (1749/1/30).

[24] For 1748 figures, see Qingchao wenxian tongkao , 36.5195, 37.5205–5206, cited in Pierre-Etienne Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China , translated by Elborg Foster (Stanford, 1990), pp. 193, 196. For 1766 and 1789, see the tables in Will and Wong, Nourish the People .

[25] Maps in Will and Wong, Nourish the People .

cultural population: special allocations from the central government, transfers from Shaanxi, and merchant contributions for degrees. Central government officials, when they realized that especially large deficits and restocking problems plagued the Northwest, allocated large amounts of money to the region. They gave Gansu 3 million taels to restock its granaries in 1766, a year of good harvests, and 8,000 more taels in 1767.^[26] These large transfers, however, were extraordinary, one-time measures. Shaanxi, a much more productive province because of the fertile land along the Wei River, could also supplement Gansu's supply in good years. In 1756, a bumper crop year, the emperor allowed the Shaanxi governor to buy more grain than his normal quota and send it to Gansu.^[27] The governor could not, however, transfer grain regularly to Gansu, for fear of straining Shaanxi's supplies. Other Shaanxi governors blamed excess government demand from Gansu for driving up prices on the Wei River by causing competition between official and merchant purchasers.^[28] "Contributions" (juan )—fees paid by local merchants and others to obtain lower-level examination degrees, bypassing the first level of the examination system—became the most common regular source of grain for Gansu. From 1741 to 1745 Gansu reported collection of over 1 million shi of grain from contributions. On the other hand, this controversial policy did not always work. In 1747 Governor Huang Tinggui reported collection of only 43,900 shi from contributions, despite his exhortations.^[29] A 1766 edict prohibited reliance on merchant grain contributions, because officials feared embezzlement and the difficulty that grain purchases created for the local population.^[30] Gansu, however, soon resumed the practice, once local officials realized that the province had no other way to maintain its grain reserves.

Through merchant contributions for granary restocking, the Qing rulers used their monopoly authority over literati status to extract resources from the merchant community for the benefit of the rural population. The Qing state, in principle, derived most of its revenues from the land tax, levying very small taxes on internal trade. In practice, however, ties between the state and merchants were much closer than the formal fiscal structure suggests. For example, even though licensing fees for brokers in local markets formed a very small fraction of total revenue, the Qing rulers used these fees effectively to supervise local markets.^[31] The use of merchant contributions for

[26] Ibid., manuscript version, p. 72.

[27] GZD-QL 21/9/9.

[28] GZD-QL , Zhongyin, 1753/6/16, 1752/8/10, 1752/8/21; Yang Yingju 1763/6/11.

[29] ZPZZ, caizheng cangchu , 1747/4/11, cited in Will and Wong, Nourish the People , manuscript version, p. 84n.72.

[30] GZD-QL 13303; WXTK 37.5205, cited in Will and Wong, Nourish the People , manuscript version, p. 63n.23.

[31] Susan Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750–1950 (Stanford, 1987).

granary reserves shows that Qing officials not only accepted the presence of competitive markets but also recirculated commercial revenues back into agricultural subsidies. Price-leveling sales, loans to farmers, and relief distribution both stimulated agricultural production and facilitated the operations of the private grain market.

Allowing merchant contributions for granaries, however, led Gansu into one of the Qing dynasty's worst political scandals.^[32] Wang Danwang, taking over as provincial treasurer in 1774, illegally commuted contributions from grain into cash, siphoned a sizable fraction off into his own pockets, and wrote fraudulent reports to the central authorities about the actual reserves in Gansu. He demanded that subordinate officials submit false reports of disasters to obtain famine relief funds from the central government. Those officials who cooperated donated part of these fraudulently obtained funds to Wang himself and kept the rest as a reward for collusion. The vast dimensions of this scandal were only discovered in 1781, after Wang had left the province, taking several hundred donkey loads of loot with him.^[33] Grand Secretary Agui, sent to repress a Muslim rebellion there, exposed the huge deficits in granary accounts and set in motion an impeachment process that led to the execution of 56 officials and the banishment or flogging of more than 46. This scandal vividly illustrates the dangers of reliance on contributions and unorthodox methods to fill granary reserves. The early Qing suspicions of this method were justified: merchant contributions, in cash or grain, proved too tempting for wily and unscrupulous officials.^[34] Wang's scheme devastated Gansu's granary reserves from 1774 to 1781, but they recovered under close supervision in the following years. Whatever the bureaucratic repercussions of the scandal, the measurable effects on prices, grain supply, and the local economy were slight.

Memorial reports on actual granary reserves in Gansu, as opposed to official quotas, confirm the great difficulty of maintaining stable grain reserves in the province (see Figure 3.1). In the late fall of each year, after restocking from the fall harvest, every provincial governor reported the total reserves held in his granaries. As the graph shows, Gansu's annual holdings fluctuated greatly, more, in fact, than almost every other province in the empire.

[32] Sources are from Shangyudang, QSL-QL, GZD-QL , 1774–1781; Qinding Lanzhou jilue . A brief discussion is in Will and Wong, Nourish the People . The most complete discussion in English is now Muhammad Usiar Yang Huaizhong, "The Eighteenth Century Gansu Relief Fraud Scandal" (Paper presented to the conference "The Legacy of Islam in China: An International Symposium in Memory of Joseph F. Fletcher," Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., April, 1989).

[33] Shangyudang , 1781/7/12, p. 139.

[34] Officials, however, disagreed on whether grain or cash was easier to steal. For discussion, see R. Bin Wong and Peter C. Perdue, "Famine's Foes in Ch'ing China," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 43, no. 1 (June 1983):313–14.

Fig. 3.1.
Reported Grain Reserves in Gansu Province, 1740–1860 (millions of shi )
Note: "1748 Target" and "1789 Target" refer to quotas assigned to the province in these years. The bars give the actual holdings.
(See text.)

Although reserves built up over the long term, from the 1740s to their peak in the 1790s, the military campaigns of the 1750s and 1760s reduced granary holdings drastically by siphoning off much of the ever-normal granary reserves to feed the troops. By 1769 the granaries appear to have recovered their level of 1753, but Wang Danwang's reign of fraudulent reporting, beginning in 1774, makes the figures for the 1770s suspect. The exposure of the relief scandal revealed that in 1781 true reserves had dropped to less than 1.5 million shi . Gansu experienced a genuine recovery in the 1780s and 1790s, when its granary accounts were under close scrutiny. Figures for the nineteenth century, by contrast, show that Gansu's grain holdings plummeted to a stabler but much lower level.

Gansu's granary reserves follow, in exaggerated form, the pattern of the empire as a whole. Year-to-year fluctuations were higher in the eighteenth than in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century granary officials undertook sporadic, short-term rebuilding campaigns, as in Gansu during the 1830s, but these campaigns did not offset a longer-term trend toward declining reserves. The figures for the nineteenth century are also more suspect, because the institutional controls over corruption, spoilage, and false reporting were looser. Rather than interpreting this drop as evidence of general decline in Qing administration, we can also view it as a shift in Qing policies away from the difficult methods of reliance on storage in kind toward greater reliance on the private market. Gansu, in this sense, pioneered moves by the Qing state toward injection of money into the regional economy. Governor Nayancheng's campaign of 1810–11 to relieve a drought that struck 30 counties exhibited further moves toward money and away from grain. He distributed 571,900 taels of silver and only 95,600 shi of grain to feed over 2,777,000 people.^[35]

Any assessment of the Qing ever-normal granary system must distinguish between what the Qing officials expected it to do and how it really functioned. The Qing rulers designed the ever-normal granary system to serve only one goal: price leveling. In principle, each granary should have sustained itself. After an initial build-up period, during which reserves were increased through official purchases and grants, granary managers were expected to keep the granaries at a stable level without outside support. By selling at high prices in the spring and repurchasing at lower prices after the fall harvest, officials should have been able both to maintain reserves at constant levels and to use the profits to pay salaries and maintenance costs. Emperors frequently reminded local officials of their duties, required annual reports of them, and sometimes punished them for very small discrepancies in granary accounts. They expected regular and full restocking every fall. Of

[35] The principal source for this relief operation is Nayancheng, Zhenji (1813). Brief discussion given in Wong and Perdue, "Famine's Foes", pp. 304–9.

course, only perfect prediction of future market conditions could have maintained absolutely stable reserves, but regions with regular harvests could much more easily keep their granaries stocked than regions suffering from frequent, unpredictable disasters. Stability also required that grain stocks be used predominantly for price-leveling sales. If reserves were diverted to other uses, either as official levies or for sales below market prices, extra funds would be required to restock in the fall.

Despite these difficulties, many provinces did succeed in keeping reserve levels stable for considerable periods of time. This stability, however, reflected a variety of relationships between regional grain markets and official purchasing activity. In the Southwest, for example, extremely stable reserves reflected a very low rate of grain turnover in regions of relatively localized markets. In the Lower Yangzi, on the other hand, stability resulted from highly commercialized, well-integrated grain markets and low per capita reserve levels.

In this paper, I stress the very wide variability of Gansu's reserves and what it reveals about Gansu's grain market. Substantial diversion of grain for military use combined with frequent poor harvests produced widely varying annual reserve levels. Still, even though Gansu's granaries fell short of the ideal design of the Qing system, they had significant economic effects. In fact, high annual fluctuations could indicate that reserves were being used effectively to relieve harvest shortages. In a region of frequent disasters, the best way to use granaries would be to accept deficits in bad years and make them up in good years, balancing the reserves over a multiyear cycle. If we could be certain that most of Gansu's reserves were used in this manner, the fluctuation in reserves would indicate highly effective management.

They could, on the other hand, indicate widespread diversion and peculation. Some provinces reported the total amount of grain purchased and sold during the year, allowing us to calculate the turnover rate, equal to the total purchases and sales divided by the end-of-year stocks. Gansu, unfortunately, is not one of those provinces, so it is difficult to determine exactly how much grain was bought and sold on the market. A more detailed examination of famine relief distributions would help resolve this question. For now, we may say that price stability after the 1760s provides at least some evidence that granary reserves were used effectively during the late eighteenth century to relieve the impact of harvest disasters. Although Gansu did not meet its targets, its high per capita grain holdings meant that grain distributions did have a relatively strong effect on the local grain market.

Military Demands on the Grain Supply: the Campaigns of 1758–1761

The three great military campaigns of the early to middle years of the long Qianlong reign (1736–95) consolidated the Chinese hold on Central Asia,

eliminated the centuries-old Mongol military threat, and expanded China's territory to unprecedented size. Only enormous logistic support from the interior made these campaigns possible. All of China's northern and northwestern provinces—Zhili, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu—bore the brunt of supplying the troops on the frontier with animals, wagons, porters, food, straw, uniforms, and weapons, but Gansu suffered the most. During the campaign against the Eleuth Mongols, from 1758 to 1761, large numbers of soldiers marched through Gansu. Even though they carried part of their rations with them, their demands on local grain markets drove up prices to spectacular heights. Grain prices doubled or tripled, but the prices of other goods also increased. Officials in Gansu had to raise the price they paid for horses from 8 to 10 taels, for cattle from 4.4 to 8 taels, in order to meet the local market price.^[36]

Long pack trains marched through the province: 6,000 camels were sent from Zhili and Shanxi, many of which died of disease, requiring replacements; 12,000 horses were sent to Barkul (Balikun), of which the Eleuths stole 300.^[37] Neighboring provinces received allotments of 3 million taels for grain transport to Gansu, in addition to 3 million taels given to Governor Huang Tinggui for military supplies.^[38] The garrison in Hami, which increased from 10,000 to 20,000 in 1758, required at least 40,000 shi of grain per year.^[39] Surprisingly, only 20 percent of these supplies were in kind and 80 percent in cash.

The vast distances—850 kilometers in a straight line from Lanzhou to Anxi, 300 more kilometers from there to Hami—and the high cost of transport across the steppes made it impossible to provision the troops through military pack trains alone. Expansion of garrison lands in Hami and Turfan provided valuable supplements, but only enough for 9,000 men for seven months.^[40] Although Huang Tinggui instructed commanders to avoid purchases in Gansu by ordering soldiers to carry their own rations and even considered feeding the entire 20,000-man Hami garrison from Sichuan, he inevitably concluded that much of the grain had to be bought locally.^[41] Of necessity, the private grain market in Gansu supplied a large share of the rations for the troops fighting on the frontier. The increase in military demand, combined with the influx of silver from government purchases, drove up local prices relentlessly.

This campaign unfortunately coincided with several years of widespread drought throughout the Northwest. Ningxia, with its irrigated fields, did send Liangzhou and Ganzhou its surplus of 112,000 shi , which was soon

[36] QSL-QL 554.2b (1758/1).

[37] Ibid., 576.36a (1758/12), 554.21b (1758/1), 557.31b (1758/2), 556.15 (1758/2).

[38] Ibid., 512.25b (1756/5), 575.17b (1758/11).

[39] Ibid., 564.19a, 564.17 (1758/6).

[40] Ibid., 573.23a (1758/10).

[41] Ibid., 567.27a (1758/7), 565.13a (1758/6).

exhausted. Relief needs alone were estimated at 500,000 shi of grain and 300,000 taels of silver.^[42] Once again, the private grain market supplied much of the relief grain. In 1759 the emperor relaxed the usual rule of 50-50 distributions of relief in cash and kind to allow full cash relief where needed.^[43] Where prices were low, especially east of the Yellow River in the ninth and tenth months of the year, relief in silver allowed the poor to buy food. As winter shortages exhausted market supplies, relief shifted to grain alone.^[44] Besides direct distribution, the officials sold grain to reduce prices, but these sales only reduced prices by several tenths of a tael per shi .^[45] Sales of millet at 2.4 taels per shi did not prevent the price from rising to 3.5 taels in Lanzhou by the end of 1759. It peaked at 4.4 taels in mid-1760 before dropping in 1761. Refugees flocked to sheds built for them in the cities, and Shaanxi shipped in 1.02 million shi of grain simply to provide seed loans for spring planting.^[46] These are only a few signs of the major disaster inflicted on the province by the combination of the frontier military campaign and widespread drought.

In the short term, the campaigns of 1758–61 inflicted great suffering on Gansu's people, but in the long term they may have promoted Gansu's integration into the rest of the empire. Military salaries and relief allocations in cash poured large amounts of silver into the local economy. Despite its remoteness from both the copper mines of the Southwest and the silver imports on the coast, in 1761 Gansu's silver-copper ratio of 890 cash per tael was comparable with the ratio in the rest of the country.^[47] Gansu officials set up government moneychanging bureaus in 1761 to help currency exchange, and they tried to standardize currency within the province.^[48] We need more data on currency flows to confirm this hypothesis, but these military campaigns may well have contributed decisively to the monetization of the Northwest's economy.

The defeat of the Eleuths obviated the need for additional great military expeditions and brought relative peace to the Northwest. Of course, local unrest did not disappear. Tensions between Chinese Muslims and Han Chinese broke out in a short-lived revolt in 1781, but this had no effect on

[42] Ibid., 565.20b (1758/6); ZPZZ, zhenji , 1759/6/3, Yang Yingju.

[43] QSL-QL 567.12b (1758/7), 581.2a (1759/2).

[44] ZPZZ, zhenji , 1758/10/17, Huang Tinggui.

[45] QSL-QL 578.2a (1759/1).

[46] ZPZZ, zhenji , 1760/9/9, Wu Dashan.

[47] Hans-Ulrich Vogel, "Chinese Central Monetary Policy and Yunnan Copper Mining in the Early Qing (1644–1800)" (Ph.D. diss., University of Zurich, 1983); Hans-Ulrich Vogel, "Chinese Central Monetary Policy, 1644–1800," Late Imperial China 8, no.2 (December 1987): 27; Chen Chao-nan, Yongzheng Qianlong nianjian de yinqian bijia biandong (1723–1795) (Taibei, 1966).

[48] Proposals to standardize currency and increase the copper supply are in Gongzhongdang Yongzhengchao zouzhe (Taibei, 1977–79), vol. 5, p. 230 (1725/10/1); vol. 11, p. 782 (1728/11/16); QSL-QL 580.13a (1759/2).

price levels. Whatever the underlying ethnic tensions in the region, Gansu's markets functioned much more stably after 1761 than they had before.

Major Qing institutions affected the grain supply in Gansu, then. In feeding armies, collecting taxes, and stocking granaries, the Qing officials had to adapt to the limitations of agricultural output in a poor peripheral province. At the same time, they stimulated market exchange by injecting cash into the economy through grain purchases and soldiers' salaries. The collection of taxes in cash also stimulated market exchange by forcing peasants to sell their surplus crops for cash.^[49] The eighteenth-century conquests in Central Asia not only brought vast new territories under Chinese control; they also contributed to knitting together the interior regions of China by linking internal markets to the military supply route. The analysis of price data that follows examines the extent to which Gansu's prefectures were linked together by a system of grain markets extending from the core regions of the Southeast through the corridor into Central Asia.

Price Data and Market Integration

The 351 Gansu price memorials available to me cover the years 1739 to 1864. The eighteenth century is much more fully covered than the nineteenth: there are at least some data for 38 of the years 1739–99 but for only 21 of the years 1800–64. Monthly coverage is also much fuller for the eighteenth century than for the nineteenth. Some of the reports from the nineteenth century are too suspiciously constant, giving the same price three or four months in a row. My suspicions about some of the nineteenth-century data make me reluctant to draw conclusions about differences between the two centuries until more information becomes available. The Gansu price memorials report high and low prices for five major crops: millet (two varieties), wheat, beans, and barley. Here we shall analyze only the data for the primary millet crop (sumi ). The reports cover the 13 prefectural divisions of Gansu Province, plus Hami, located in Xinjiang, and, for some years, the Jingni garrison, 100 kilometers northwest of Anxi.

Although the memorials report the highest and lowest prices within each prefecture every month, they do not tell us the locations of each high and low price. The yearly average curves of high prices and low prices within each prefecture parallel each other quite closely, but the high prices in Gongchang, for example, show occasional sharp peaks not found in the low prices (Figure 3.2). The most likely explanation for this pattern is that low prices

[49] Compare with similar processes in England and France described by Rudolf Braun, "Taxation, Sociopolitical Structure, and State-Building: Great Britain and Brandenburg-Prussia," p. 318, and Charles Tilly, "Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe," pp. 380–455, both in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975).

Fig. 3.2
Millet Prices in Gansu Province and Gongchang Prefecture, 1739–1864 (adjusted annual
averages, in taels per shi )

represent the stabler patterns found in prefectural and county capitals, which were more commercialized than remote parts of the prefecture, where sporadic periods of dearth caused the sharp peaks in the series of high prices. The limited amplitude of seasonal variation in low prices compared to high prices supports our interpretation of low prices as coming from commercialized capitals (see Figure 3.3). For these reasons, analysis of the correlation between low prices is the most appropriate way, I believe, to measure market integration in this region.

Figure 3.2 shows the trends of the adjusted annual averages of millet prices for the province and one prefecture. (On the adjustment of data here and in other figures, tables, and the map, see the appendix at the end of this chapter.) As Map 3.1 demonstrates, there was a clear gradient of average prices across the province, because high transport costs raised price levels as one moved from east to west. Millet in Hami, where the mean of annual prices averaged 2.40 taels per shi , cost nearly twice as much as in Lanzhou, and Anxi, at 1.50 to 2.19 taels, was over 40 percent higher than Lanzhou. Low-price prefectures included Qinzhou and Jiezhou, Qingyang, and Pingliang, in the eastern end of the province, with access to Sichuan and Shaanxi supplies and the irrigated fields of Ningxia.

Several factors combined to produce the variation in grain prices among prefectures. Long-term changes in the balance of population and agricultural production, or changes in monetary supply, affected the long-term trend of prices. The cropping cycles of each region determined seasonal fluctuations from month to month. The impact of the major drought and military campaigns of 1758–61 produced drastic price changes, which swamped the impact of seasonal and annual trends. I used a multiple regression equation to analyze the relative effect, on average, of these three factors on the price for any given month.

The equation at the foot of Table 3.1 describes the monthly price as a function of a constant, the annual trend, seasonal variation due to monthly fluctuations, the disaster years of 1759–60, and an error term indicating random variation. A dummy variable (Y ), whose value is 1 for the major drought years and 0 for all other years, measures how widely prices in these two years diverged from the long-term trend. The value of the coefficient (T) of this dummy variable given in the table shows that the combined stress of widespread drought and military campaigns in 1759 and 1760 raised the average high price by 2.10 taels, or 135 percent of the average price for the period. Prices more than doubled during these two years in nearly all prefectures, notably excepting Qinzhou and Jiezhou, in the southeast. The coefficients for both high and low prices of the dummy variable for disaster influence in Qinzhou range from 0.42 to 1.08, much less than the effect on the average of prices for the province. Jiezhou's disaster coefficient ranges from 0.22 to –0.04, showing that this prefecture, which belongs to the Sichuan

Map 3.1
Correlations and Variation of Low Millet Prices in Gansu Province, 1739–1864.

Note: Bivariate correlations of differences in adjusted annual averages are indicated by solid and dashed lines; solid lines represent r greater
than 0.8, while broken lines represent r greater than 0.7 and less than 0.8. Means of high and low prices are shown for each prefecture
(high prices first) in taels per shi .

watershed, was completely unaffected by the drought in Gansu. Drought and disaster hit hardest at the core prefecture of Lanzhou (G = 2.82) along with Liangzhou (G = 3.64) and Anxi (G = 2.55) on the corridor leading to Central Asia.

If we exclude the effect of these two disaster years, prices hardly rose at all over the long term. The value of a , the coefficient of the variable T for the year, gives the annual trend for each prefecture excluding the effect of the disaster years. This coefficient is negative for both high and low prices in Anxi, Ganzhou, Hami, Suzhou, and Xining and only slightly positive for the rest. (Jingni, the one exception, only provides data for a limited time period.) The ratio of a to K , the constant term, for the average for all low prices in the province, yields a long-term annual rate of increase of less than 0.1 percent per year. Gansu did not share in the rise of prices from 1780 to 1830 described by Yeh-chien Wang and Kuo-shu Hwang for the rest of the empire.^[50] Its prices followed a different rhythm, determined more by military operations than by flows of silver. The high annual fluctuations up to 1762 contrast markedly with great stability after the 1770s. The price data confirm that once the early Qianlong campaigns had brought peace to the turbulent Northwest, Gansu's grain markets proved comparatively immune to sporadic attacks of rebellion, famine, and drought.

Seasonal variation from month to month was also remarkably low. Each month in the equation, except for the first month, is represented by a dummy variable, whose value is 1 for the price in that month and 0 for all other months. For example, the value of M2 is 1 for February prices and 0 for all other prices, the value of M3 is 1 for March prices and 0 for all other prices, and so forth. The coefficients of these variables indicate how much, on average, each month contributed to a change in price from the first month of the year (see Table 3.1). Month-to-month variation rarely exceeds 10 percent of the average price in each prefecture. The especially small variation of the low prices implies that grain storage in the commercialized capital cities damped out nearly all monthly fluctuations.

The monthly variations suggest that most prefectures had two major annual harvests, with a spring crop bringing low prices in April, May, or June (sometimes February or March), while the main fall crop forced prices to their low point in October (see Figure 3.3). The shapes of the curves, however, are not uniform over the region, because cropping regimes varied widely. Gansu's mix of crops and weather differed markedly from the much more uniform seasonal patterns of a rice paddy region like Hunan (see the chapter by Wong and Perdue in this volume). In Ganzhou, Suzhou, and Anxi, at the western end of the province, the fall harvest came in later than

[50] Hwang Kuo-shu and Wang Yeh-chien, "Qingdai liangjia di changji biandong, 1763–1910," Jingji lunwen 9, no. 1 (1981).

(Table continued on next page)

(Table continued from previous page)

Fig. 3.3.
Seasonal Variation in Millet Prices in Gansu Province and Gongchang Prefecture, 1739–1864
(difference from January price, in taels per shi )

elsewhere and did not produce its full effect until November and December, while the spring crop seems to have arrived as early as March. Jiezhou, Jingzhou, and Qinzhou, on Gansu's eastern periphery, had much lower variation than other prefectures and do not demonstrate the effect of double-cropping at all.

Clearly a combination of government price-leveling policies and private storage contributed to the low level of variability. Although officials thought that private storage in Gansu was too low, we cannot easily distinguish the relative contributions of private and government grain storage to price leveling. Unlike in some other provinces, grain memorials in Gansu do not report actual disbursements of grain year by year. Still, Gansu's storage costs may have been lower than other provinces' costs because there was little danger of grain rotting in the dry, cold climate.

The price data also allow us to assess the degree to which Gansu's grain markets were interconnected. Computing bivariate correlation coefficients (Pearson's r ) between price series of different regions is a common method of analyzing the degree of regional market integration.^[51] The possible values of this coefficient range from +1.0 to -1.0. Positive values mean some degree of synchronization between two given price series. Map 3.1 and Table 3.2 display the results of these calculations for the millet price reports from Gansu. The map uses solid lines to show correlations of greater than 0.8 and broken lines to show correlations of between 0.7 and 0.8. It uses prefectural reports of low millet prices to portray the correlations between the price differences of consecutive years from 1739 to 1864. Price differences are used to eliminate partially the influence of the annual trend: that is, the series consists of the price for 1739 subtracted from the price of 1740, the price for 1740 subtracted from the price of 1741, and so forth. (The annual average was derived from the months for which data were available after adjusting for seasonal variation. See the appendix.) Maps of correlations of monthly prices, which show short-term influences, display a similar pattern.^[52]

The severe disaster years of 1759–60, however, did strongly affect all the prefectures of the province, except for Jiezhou. Removing these years from

[51] See, for example, William O. Jones, Marketing Staple Food Crops in Tropical Africa (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972).

[52] Barbara Harris has recently criticized the use of bivariate correlation coefficients to measure market integration. Recently, Martin Ravallion and Paul J. Heytens have developed more sophisticated statistical techniques to compensate for the influence of common trends and to measure more precisely the integrating effect of market exchange. Right now, missing data in the Chinese price series limit the usefulness of these techniques, but I intend to apply them to the Chinese data after obtaining more data from the archives. See Barbara Harris, "There is Method in My Madness: Or Is It Vice Versa? Measuring Agricultural Market Performance," Food Research Institute Studies 17, no. 2 (1979); Martin Ravallion, Markets and Famines (New York, 1987); Paul J. Heytens, "Testing Market Integration," Food Research Institute Studies 20, no. 1 (1986).

the data sharply reduces the strength of interprefectural correlations, so that few coefficients exceed 0.8. At a weaker level, however, the same patterns remain. Coefficients at the level of 0.6 are still statistically significant, and they demonstrate the existence of the same network of exchange relationships.

The correlation coefficients indicate that a web of market relationships tied together the core triangle of prefectural capitals, Lanzhou, Gongchang, and Pingliang. Demands by these prefectures on the surplus production of the irrigated fields of Ningxia, to the north, tied Ningxia's prices to each. Weaker links connected Qingyang, Qinzhou, Xining, and Liangzhou to one or more of the core prefectures. A chain of trading posts linked Ganzhou, Suzhou, and Anxi to each other along the old Silk Road extending into the steppe.^[53] Hami, in Xinjiang, was only weakly linked, if at all, to the Gansu markets. (Map 3.1 exaggerates its links to Liangzhou and Suzhou, probably because all of the data come from the nineteenth century.) Much of the grain supply for the Hami garrison came from tuntian lands in Central Asia, but a substantial portion of its supplies came through the corridor via Anxi. Conspicuously omitted from this network is Jiezhou, in the far south. Jiezhou lies on the upper reaches of the Jialing River, one of the major tributaries of the Yangzi flowing into the Sichuan Basin. If G. William Skinner is right to stress the importance of physiographic boundaries over administrative boundaries in defining economic macroregions, Jiezhou's markets should have little connection with the rest of Gansu but be linked by river transport to the Sichuan Basin. Jiezhou's isolation from the rest of Gansu confirms Skinner's theory of macroregions, attests to the overwhelming influence of river transport routes in determining Chinese grain flows, and shows that price correlations accurately define the boundaries of macroregions.^[54]

Did market integration increase in Gansu from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century? An examination of graphs of average annual prices of millet from 1739 to 1864, smoothing out year-to-year fluctuations by five-year moving averages, seems to reveal some convergence between the price series of different prefectures. As expected, Hami and Jiezhou, which belong to different marketing systems, do not conform. More precisely, when we calculate the coefficient of variation (standard deviation divided by the mean) annually for 11 prefectures (excluding Jiezhou, Jingzhou, Jingni, and Hami), we find that this coefficient declines from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century (see Table 3.3). The rapid drop in the coefficient after

[53] Gansu had 331 government post stations, more than any other province, stationed twenty-five miles apart along the major roads. Kono Michihiro, "Shindai no baekiro," Jinbun chiri 2, no. 1 (1950): 13–24, cited in Gilbert Rozman, Urban Networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, 1973), p. 94.

[54] Skinner puts Jiezhou prefecture in the Upper Yangtze macroregion, with Sichuan. G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977), map 2, p. 214.

1762 supports our argument that the end of the famine and military campaign led to greater economic integration. The figure remains fairly stable for the rest of the eighteenth century but declines to a lower level from 1816 to 1850. We can tentatively conclude that the process of economic integration, although initiated by military conquest, continued under its own steam through the late eighteenth and at least into the first half of the nineteenth century.

The study of Gansu's grain markets has just begun. The archives contain much more price data; gazetteers hold information on market structure and grain flows; the markets of other major crops await analysis. Nevertheless, the information available now shows that even in the remote Northwest, Qing officials—generals, governors, and granary managers—conducted a

fascinating and intricate dance with private traders—grain merchants, peasant producers, and money changers—all participating in a flourishing market economy.

Appendix: Adjustment of Data

The price memorials report the monthly high and low prices for each prefecture according to the Chinese lunar calendar. To estimate correctly the monthly variation, we first converted lunar to solar months by using a simple formula that computed each solar month's price as a weighted average of the prices in the lunar months it overlapped. For example, solar month 3 in 1739 had 9 days in lunar month 1 and 22 days in lunar month 2. The price for solar month 3 is [(9 * Price in lunar month 1) + (22 * Price in lunar month 2)] / 31.^[55]

The regression equation in Table 3.1 computes each solar monthly price as a function of the year, of 11 dummy variables for the months (excluding the first month), and of a dummy variable whose value is 1 for the years 1759 to 1760. The coefficients of the 11 monthly dummy variables indicate the amount by which the price for a given month changes in relation to the first month of the solar year. Figure 3.3 displays these coefficients graphically. Subtracting these coefficients from the monthly prices for each prefecture and then averaging the months of each year for which data are available yields the seasonally adjusted annual averages displayed in Figure 3.2. These adjusted annual averages are the source for the computation of correlation coefficients in Table 3.2 and Map 3.1. To test whether the choice of base month affects the calculation of correlation coefficients, we also adjusted the monthly data using regression coefficients based on the tenth month of the year. This alternate procedure yielded few significant differences from the results discussed in the paper.

[55] The source for conversion of solar to lunar months is Zheng Hesheng, Jinshi Zhongshi shiri duizhaobiao (Taibei, 1978).