The Price Data

During the Qing dynasty each provincial governor was required to submit to the throne a monthly report of grain prices in his province. This became a regular bureaucratic practice by the beginning of the Qianlong period in 1736. The Qing archives in Beijing and Taibei have a rather complete set of reports from Zhili for the eighteenth century and a more scattered sampling from the nineteenth century. I have collected approximately 609 of these monthly lists, including 233 monthly lists for 1738–64, 171 lists for 1765–95, and 205 lists for 1796–1910.^[4]

In the first subperiod, 1738–64, the lists give the low and high prices of seven types of grain from each prefecture (fu ) or independent department (zhilizhou ) in the province: rice (daomi ), high-grade millet (shang sumi ), ordinary millet (cisumi or zhongsumi ), white wheat (baimai ), red wheat (hongmai ), black beans (heidou ), and sorghum, or kaoliang (gaoliang ). After 1765 only five grains were reported: millet (sumi ), sorghum (gaoliang ), a type of panicum millet (nimi ), wheat (mai ), and black beans (heidou ).^[5]

Prices from seventeen prefectures or independent departments were reported by the governor-general of Zhili, although not all were reported in every period. Shuntian Prefecture (where Beijing was located) was not included until 1771. Chengde Prefecture was not included in the reports until

[3] The Qing figures are taken from Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, 1985), p. 322. The 1982 figure is reported in Judith Banister, China's Changing Population (Stanford, 1987), pp. 298–99, among other places.

[4] I am indebted to the staff of the Ming-Qing archives of the National Palace Museum in Taibei and the First Historical Archives in Beijing for allowing me access to these grain price lists.

[5] Sumi was Setaria italica , sometimes called foxtail millet, which was the most common type of millet grown in north China. Nimi was Panicum milaceum , sometimes called broomcorn millet. Heidou , lit. "black bean," was a type of soybean. See Francesca Bray, Agriculture , vol. 6, pt. 2 of Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), pp. 434–48.

1778. From 1736–68, the prices for Baoding Prefecture, the location of the provincial capital, were reported a month in advance of the other provinces.

These grain price reports were submitted monthly, according to the Chinese lunar calendar—with intercalary months ("leap months") added from time to time to make the lunar year catch up to the solar year. Since any given lunar month might lag behind its corresponding solar month by up to two months, solar months might be more appropriate to use in studying the agricultural cycle. In this study lunar-month prices have been used where aggregated data for year or multiyear periods would cancel out the variations in the months. However, where seasonality is an important concern, data are converted to correspond with the solar months.