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.