Today we are going to talk about a map of the Han Dynasty, which is bland for Chinese, but it makes foreigners crazy. This is the population distribution map of the Han Dynasty made according to the population of the counties and states in the fifth year of the Eastern Han Dynasty (140 AD) recorded in the Book of the Later Han Dynasty.
In the ancient society that relied on manpower, the population was directly proportional to the national strength, and if an ancient dynasty wanted to be strong, it first relied on the growth of the population, and only with the population did it have grain, grass and soldiers.
According to the relevant records of the Book of Han and the Book of Later Han, the peak population of the Western Han Dynasty occurred in the first two years of the Han Ping Emperor (2 AD), with a population of about 63 million, and the peak population of the Eastern Han Dynasty appeared in the third year of the Han Huan Emperor Yongshou (157 AD), with a population of about 65 million.
That is to say, the peak population of the two Han Dynasties was basically maintained at about 65 million people, although this figure was only equivalent to the permanent population of Hunan Province today, but at that time, this figure accounted for one-third of the world. Some foreigners once joked that in the year of Jesus' birth, more than half of the world's people lived under the Han Dynasty or Rome.
Ancient Chinese mouth base is an indisputable fact, nothing unusual, but why would foreigners be crazy about it?
Because in addition to the population distribution, this map actually reveals a lot of other very interesting information, let's take a look at how foreigners analyze it:
1, you can clearly see how advantageous the north was before most of the population of the Song Dynasty moved south, a great map. (Qin Emperor Han Wu Note: Refers to the population migration southward at the beginning of the Southern Song Dynasty, which is also the largest southward migration of the Han people in the Central Plains in Chinese history)
2. In all the discussions about why the Shu Han of the Three Kingdoms failed to defeat Cao Wei, this map can clearly show the origin of the manpower gap between Shu Han and Cao Wei.
3. Did the Territory of the Han Dynasty really extend to southern Vietnam?
4. What did they do with wheat? How do they eat? Do you still eat wheat?
5) I prefer northern and central Chinese food, southern food is often too sweet for me.
6. This means that the population of the Han Dynasty in 2 AD was larger than that in 2016 in China.
7, put to today's point of view, if a country has a population of 57.6 million, it will be the world's 24th most populous country, second only to Italy.
8) It is 29 times the population of our country, which shows how influential China is and how much it must manage such a vast territory.
9) This is about the same population as the Roman Empire in 25 BC, which is too shocking.
10 Oh my God, wasn't that a third of the world's population at the time?
11 It seems to me that Henan was the most important territory of ancient China, and like neighboring Shandong, Henan and Shandong were more densely populated than the south, although the southern part of the Han Dynasty was much larger.
12. Why is the population the most densely populated in the northeast? I thought it should be distributed all over the East Coast.
13, that is the most developed agricultural area, at this time the Han civilization is still multiplying. In fact, ancient civilizations flourished along rivers rather than coastal areas.
One of the foreigners mentioned the demographic comparison between Shu Han and Cao Wei in the Three Kingdoms, and indeed, if according to the Records of the Three Kingdoms, the population of Shu Han was only 940,000 at the time of its demise, which is too small compared with Cao Wei. With such a small population, why did Zhuge Liang dare to go on the Northern Expedition for many years, was this not to drag down the Shu Han?
In fact, if we compare the population distribution of the Eastern Han Dynasty, we will find an interesting phenomenon. In the late Eastern Han Dynasty, Yizhou had a population of 7.24 million, and during the Yellow Turban and Dong Zhuo periods, Yizhou not only did not experience war, but belonged to the net inflow of population.
Therefore, What Zhuge Liang said in "Longzhong Pair" that "Yizhou is dangerous, fertile and wild, and has a million hukou" is definitely not an exaggeration, but the truth. So just over 50 years after the establishment of the Shu Han regime, the population of Yizhou was not even a million?
This is related to the taxation system of the Han Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, the scholar family often paid less taxes by hiding the population, and the Shu Han regime system continued the Han Dynasty, so it was normal for the population to be hidden, and the Shu Han Recruited soldiers for the Northern Expedition, which further aggravated the degree of concealment of the local population. Therefore, some experts conservatively estimate that the correct population of Shu Han should be more than 4 million.
With such a national strength base, it is understandable that Liu Bei dared to call out Eastern Wu and Cao Wei, and Zhuge Liang dared to go on the Northern Expedition for many years.