introduction
Zhang Jiaju once said: "The re-establishment of the unified empire of the centralization of power and dictatorship in the two Song Dynasties constitutes an era of high development of China's feudal economy, and it is also an era when China's economic center of gravity completes its southward shift." In China's feudal social and economic history, the economic development of the Song Dynasty was quite eye-catching.
In 960, Zhao Kuangyin, the ancestor of the Song Dynasty, ascended the throne in Kaifeng and established the Song Dynasty. The establishment of the Song Dynasty put an end to the chaotic division since the end of the Tang Dynasty, and a unified feudal regime was established nationwide, and a new period of economic development began.
Fu Zhufu summarized the social and economic development of this period as a "comprehensive leap forward." The Japanese scholar Spo Yoshinobu made "the prosperity of commerce" its symbol. Agriculture was the decisive production sector of ancient society, and the development of agriculture should be the main driving force for the great economic development of the Song Dynasty, so it is necessary to briefly describe the main characteristics of the agricultural development of the Song Dynasty.
First, the general trend of agricultural development in the Northern Song Dynasty
Grain production has increased significantly, according to the grain yield per mu, the Song Renzong had reached two or three stones, the Southern Song Dynasty had reached three or four stones, and the middle and late Southern Song Dynasty was five or six stones. Compared with the previous generation, the yield per mu in the most developed agricultural areas of the Song Dynasty was about four times that of the Warring States Period and more than twice that of the Tang Dynasty. During the Tang and Song dynasties, the "basic economic zones" that supported China's feudal politics were transferred to the south. The fiscal revenue of the two generations depends on the "basic economic zone" of the south to be provided by water transportation. This can be seen from the following account:
The Fifth Qi of the Tang Dynasty said: "The urgency of Fang Jin lies in the soldiers, the strength and weakness of the soldiers are in the endowment, and the endowment is mostly in Jianghuai." Xiao Yingshi, who was at the same time as the Fifth Qi, also said that "the food of the soldiers is in the southeast", and Han Yu even said that "the world is endowed and the south of the Jiangnan is nineteen". Du Mu, on the other hand, regarded Jianghuai as the place where the "national destiny" lay. This was still the case during the Northern Song Dynasty. Fan Zuyu said that "the country is fundamental, and it is up to the southeast."
Only the east-west second road in Jiangnan can bear the burden of "half the world entering". Therefore, through the transportation quantity of grain in two generations, it is possible to compare the general situation of agricultural output in the Tang and Song dynasties.
According to Shi Nianhai's research, Pei Yaoqing presided over the trough transportation at the beginning of the new century, and transported seven million stones of rice to Guanzhong in three years. Pei Hou Wei Jian ruled the Cao Affair, transporting rice to Guanzhong in a year up to 4 million stones, which was only seen by Li Tang's generation. However, the source of rice grain at this time, both in the lower reaches of the Yellow River in Shandong, was not limited to Jiangzhun. After the middle of the Tang Dynasty, the Central Plains were broken, and the southeast was the main source of rice grain. At this time, Liu Yan transported 1.1 million stones of rice to Chang'an every year. Later, Li Bi and Pei Xiu reached the number of 1.3 million stones and 1.2 million stones of rice respectively.
Shi Nianhai concluded: "More than a million stones is a relatively normal number." According to the "History of Song", "In the second year of Pingping, Caosu to Jingshi, the Bian River was 5.755 million stones, the Huimin River was 267,000 stones, and the Guangji River was 740,000 stones. "The total of the three is 6,762,000, stones. According to Wu Hui's research, Tang per stone combined with the present city stone 0.6, Song per stone combined with the present city stone 0.66, the gap between the two is not large, there is no difference in weights and measures caused by the more difficult.
From the above, it can be seen that the amount of grain transported in the Song Dynasty was much higher than the general amount of more than 1 million stones in the Tang Dynasty, and it was also more than 2 million stones higher than its maximum amount of 4 million stones. This would not have been possible without the rapid development of agricultural productivity and the resulting significant spikes in agricultural yields.
As far as the agricultural structure of ancient feudal society is concerned, it is impossible for us to accurately express the quantitative relations between its internal departments in numerical terms, but through the changes in the status of its internal departments, we can still roughly see the characteristics and development level of agricultural production in each period.
According to Tang Qizi's research, as early as the Western Zhou Dynasty, China's agriculture has formed an agricultural structure composed of six departments: crops, horticulture, grazing, sericulture, fishery, and forestry. During the Sui and Tang dynasties, the order of these six departments was as follows: crops, silkworm mulberry, and horticulture. Animal husbandry, bamboo, fishing. In the Song Dynasty, the order of the six capital gates changed again. That is, nong and sang have achieved equal status. Yu is horticulture, imperial pastoral, forestry, aquatic products. Sang Gong is the most important commodity production in our period of strength, and its products can not only solve the people's agricultural reading and improve their status as electricity, but also an indicator to explain the characteristics and development level of Agriculture in various generations in our country. Coming to the silkworm pear industry to take the same status as you to take the landmark force gate, which is one of the prominent signs of the further commercialization of agriculture in the Song Dynasty.
The expansion and specialization of the production of other cash crops was also a sign of the commercialization of agricultural products in the Song Dynasty. In the Song Dynasty, the cash crops that were expanded and developed into specialized production were cotton, hemp, tea, sugarcane, fruit trees, vegetables, medicines, and economic forests. The following is a selection of the most important ones.
Mian was no stranger to Chinese, and it was already recorded in the Wulu Geographical Chronicle before Jia Si's Hui Min Zhi Shu. The place of origin recorded in the Wulu Geographical Chronicle is the address, which is in present-day Vietnam. Cotton seems to have been introduced to China very early. Wu Han said that it was "imported from Nanyang and other places during the Southern and Northern Dynasties." Tang Han'e's "Four Hours of Compilation" is considered to be a monograph on agricultural techniques "along the Slippery River and the Lower Reaches of the Yellow River". In the book "Spring Ling Family II", there is a brief record of cotton planting technology.
It is likely that at the end of the Tang Dynasty, cotton had entered xiaojiang xiangxi individually, according to qi xia's research, during the Southern Song Dynasty, or earlier, cotton had entered Jiangnan West Road, Liangzhe Road and Jiangnan East Road. Cotton is a very reamant substitute for folded lettuce. It is a "textile progenitor that can help the use of mulberry hemp." Small harvest clouds sing the source of people's clothing, but also bring a series of economic consequences. Internally, due to the huge economic benefits of cotton, its spread in the Song Dynasty was not only an important factor in the commercialization of agricultural production in the Song Dynasty, but also provided a historical premise for the general development of cotton in the Yuan Dynasty.
The tea trade in China's history began in the Tang Dynasty. The production of tea in the Tang Dynasty has been very developed, "tea from Jianghuai, boats and cars successively, where the mountains are located, the color is more", which shows the huge output. Tea trade in the Song and Jin dynasties was sometimes relaxed, but it was never interrupted, because the needs of trade between the two countries could not prevent all kinds of secret trade. Tea was an important commodity officially exported to Gold in the Song Dynasty, and its trading volume was very large. According to the History of Jin:
"Tea, in addition to diet, non-essential things, than the years of competition, especially farmers, the city of tea shops belong to each other ... The annual cost is not less than one million. "In present-day Henan and Shaanxi Provinces, where there are more than fifty counties, the county eclipse tea rate is twenty bags, and the bags are worth two or two silver, which is more than 300,000 yuan of people's silver in one year." (The Japanese scholar Hitoichi Yano believes that this calculation is wrong, in fact, it is 720,000 taels of silver.)
Such a large huge profit will inevitably stimulate the development of the tea industry. According to the statistics of "Song History and Food Goods", the tea production of Huainan, Jiangnan, Liangzhe, Jinghu and Fujian is 23.05 million catties, but it does not include the tea production of Sichuan.
Sichuan was a heavy tea-producing area of the Song Dynasty, and some scholars have put the general level of the Song Dynasty in the 53.05 million districts of the Song Dynasty. (87) Add up to the two numbers, then the Song Dynasty tea production can reach 53.05 million catties. If you divide it from the 104,411,290 mouths in the fourth year of Daguan, the most populous in the Song Dynasty, everyone can get 0.51 jin. According to statistics, in 192, the tea output of Zhejiang Province was 2.14 million cartons, accounting for about 1/3 of the national tea production, in terms of twisting 100 jin, then 2.14 million twisted × 100 × 3 = 642,000,000 jin, with a population of 1 billion at that time, the national per capita tea volume was 0.64 kg. This shows the scale of the tea industry in the Song Dynasty. Without large tea plantations and a large number of professional tea households, this scale is almost unimaginable.
Second, the Song-Jin trade and the development of agriculture in the Jin Dynasty
Jin differed from the Song Dynasty in that, first, before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1115, it was still at the end of "primitive society, that is, a period of rapid change from a patriarchal clan system to a class society." "Second, this period is adapted to an economy dominated by animal husbandry and primitive agriculture and gathering. Of particular note is the characteristics of its primitive agriculture. "Grow grains", but "do not do silkworm mulberry." That is to say, it is still very different from the agricultural civilization of the Central Plains, especially from the commercial agricultural civilization. As Edamipov put it, they lived in a "land of agriculture and pastoralism,...... He is engaged in extensive farming while raising animals. They were a horse-riding people of herdsmen and peasants, and therefore their ideological considerations were different from those of the purely nomadic Huns and Turks. ”
Scholars have different views on the position of the Jin Dynasty in China's economic history. Li Jiannong believes: "Under the successive rule of Liao Jinyuan, the social economy has shown a reversal. Fu Zhufu said: "In the Yellow River Valley under the rule of the Jin people, due to the political darkness of the Jin people and the continuous attack of natural disasters and man-made disasters, for a long period of about 100 years of history, the social economy has not been truly restored, let alone further development." ”
Zhang Boquan's view is different, he believes that the Jin Dynasty economy was a period of greater reversal and twists in the long river of China's entire economic development, but it does not mean that it will always retreat backwards. "It is always determined by the general tendency and power of the economy to move forward ... It always has to offer something new or trending in the process of development that was not previously available. "We believe that from the perspective of the development trend of agriculture in the Jin Dynasty, Zhang Boquan's judgment is closer to objective reality. The History of the Conquest. Northern agriculture has indeed undergone a process of destruction and recovery. Its broken scenes are:
"The Hu people have been fattening into the Kou with their bows and horses in late autumn for many years... As far as the lake, Xiang'er Zhejiang, the soldiers are scratching, and there is no promised land where they are located. ...... Jing Kang Bing was in the middle of the year, Jin Di chaohua, in the six or seven years, Shandong, Jingxi, Zhuannan and other roads, Jinghao thousands of miles, bucket rice to dozens of thousands, and can not be obtained. ”
However, more than a decade later, during the reign of Emperor Xizong of Jin (1135-1149), the social economy did recover, and people at that time summed it up: "During the reign of Emperor Xizong, people inside and outside were gained, and when the wind and rain were stormy, the years were abundant, the thieves were interested, and the people were safe. "Xi Tai and ,...... The time is long, and the people are rich. "This shows the general outline of the recovery and development of agriculture in the Jin Dynasty." What can express the characteristics of agricultural development in the Jin Dynasty is the Song and Jin trade.
According to Kato Shigeru' research, many farms were set up along the border between the two countries during the Song-Jin trade. The main contents of the transaction between the two sides are: Song Xiangjin's export of tea, spices from the South China Sea, medicines, ivory, rhino horn and the like, and medicines, silk fabrics, kapok, money, cattle and rice produced by Song. Jin exported northern beads, fur, ginseng, licorice, silk fabrics, and horses to the Song. The most important of these are the tea exported by Song to Jin and the silk fabric exported by Jin to Song.
In another study, Kato Believed that Gold exported more silk fabrics and raw silk to Song than Song to Gold. Although the "History of Jin" cannot provide direct evidence for this, it does record that "merchants mostly use silk to change tea", and it is recorded that the minimum number of acres of mulberry dates for agricultural production was stipulated in order to promote the cause of sericulture. "Where there are mulberry dates, the people should be diligent in planting more, and those who are less will plant three-tenths of their land, and those who are young will be taught to plant one-tenth of their land." Hebei even has a scene of "everywhere mulberry and ma". If his estimation is correct, then this is a taste: the agricultural management project of this "sericulture" nation has made new developments, and the prevalence of the sericulture industry in the Yellow River Basin and its important position in agricultural production seem to be estimated to account for 10% to 30% of agricultural production, from which we can also see the trend of commercialization of agriculture in the Jin Dynasty.
epilogue
In summary, it can be seen that the development of agriculture since the Song Dynasty, the development of agricultural productivity marked by the increase in grain production, is the basis for the development of commodity agriculture in the Song Dynasty. The rise in the status of the production of important cash crops such as mulberry, cotton, and tea in the agriculture of the Song Dynasty, the expansion of production areas, the improvement of production, and the specialization of production clearly show the historical trend of the development of this commodity agriculture.
The primitive agriculture of the Jin people, which is still far from the agricultural civilization of the Central Plains, after contact with the agricultural civilization of the Central Plains and the exchange with the developed agriculture in Jiangnan, not only underwent rapid changes, gradually approaching commercial agriculture, but also in general, together with the agriculture of the Song Dynasty, constituted the general trend of agricultural development in this era, the commodification of agricultural production.
References: History of China's Agricultural Development, History of the Song Dynasty, History of Jin, General History of China