Why did the population of the Qing Dynasty explode and what was the reason for the explosion from 70 million to more than 400 million?
During the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, Kangxi, as the emperor, knew that for a country, the quantity and quality of the population were directly related to the rise and fall of the country.
Therefore, from the very beginning of his reign, he took a series of measures to promote population growth.
Among them, the most praised is his reform of the "craftsman" system. He included the silver of the craftsmen, which originally belonged to the craftsmen, into the field endowment, so that these craftsmen could be counted as a normal population, which undoubtedly expanded the population base of the Qing Dynasty.
However, it was not enough to include artisans in the demographic, and the Kangxi Emperor had a more far-reaching vision.
Under his promotion, the Yongzheng period completely abolished the "cheap borrowing system" and included all the population that was not originally included in the Ding tax system, making the population statistics of the Qing Dynasty more comprehensive and accurate.
By the sixty-first year of Kangxi, that is, in 1772 AD, the population of the Qing Dynasty had exceeded 25 million, which was undoubtedly quite amazing in the world at that time.
And behind this, it is inseparable from a major policy promulgated by Emperor Kangxi during his 50 years of reign: "breed people, never add endowment".
This policy stipulates that the new number of people will not be taxed in the future, which greatly reduces the burden on the people and encourages people's enthusiasm for childbearing.
Subsequently, this policy was further promoted and improved in the first year of Yongzheng (1723 AD).
Emperor Yongzheng changed the tax amount of Dingkou to a fixed amount, so that the newly added Dingkou was no longer included in Dingyin, which further reduced the problem of population concealment in previous dynasties.
As a result, the population of the Qing Dynasty began to rise year by year, showing a vigorous development momentum.
In order to further solve the problem of land concealment, Emperor Yongzheng implemented the policy of "spreading the land into the mu" in November of the first year of Yongzheng.
This policy divides the fields into three classes according to the output per acre, stipulates the taxes of each class, and incorporates the population tax into the field tax.
As a result, large households can no longer evade taxes by hiding their land, and poor families are relieved of their burdens by the rational apportionment of taxes.
This series of policies patched the Qing Dynasty, a feudal dynasty full of loopholes, and made the population of the Qing Dynasty begin to rise in numbers.
And all these achievements were reflected in the fifth year of Qianlong, when the population of the Qing Dynasty exceeded the 100 million mark, and in the Daoguang period, it reached 400 million, which can be called the peak of the population statistics of the feudal dynasty.
Of course, there was another important reason behind the population growth of the Qing Dynasty, and that was the large-scale development of arable land. The Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong dynasties all implemented policies to encourage reclamation.
In the twelfth year of Kangxi, he began to issue an edict on the tax exemption for ten years, and in the sixteenth year of Kangxi, he began a ten-year "Yellow River and Huaihe River Control Project".
On this basis, Emperor Yongzheng improved the Qing Dynasty's "disaster relief system" and officially included "work for relief" into the disaster relief routine. These measures created good conditions for the population growth of the Qing Dynasty.
However, there are two sides to everything. Although the population growth of the Qing Dynasty brought prosperity, it also placed a huge burden on agriculture.
From Daoguang to the end of the Qing Dynasty, the population growth rate was in a state of decline, which also indicated that the decline of the Qing Dynasty was inevitable.
The explosive population growth of the Qing Dynasty was not achieved overnight, but the result of the joint efforts of many emperors such as Kangxi and Yongzheng, which made the population of the Qing Dynasty grow by leaps and bounds in just a few decades, which is rare in the history of the world.
