The Confusions of Pleasure by Brook Timothy;

Author:Brook, Timothy; [Brook, Timothy;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-23T08:00:00+00:00

SUBSISTENCE IN AN AGE OF PLENTY

Patriarch Miao was careful to see the resources of his lineage husbanded properly. The family was reasonably prosperous, though whether that had anything to do with his instructions is a matter of pure speculation—perhaps the lineage simply held good investments. So too the laity who contributed several hundred taels of silver to have the Vairocana Buddha cast in bronze must have been prosperous men and women. But the wealth of the late-Ming economy was not evenly distributed. The pressure of population during the final century of the dynasty made wealth for all impossible.

Determining how many people were actually alive in the late Ming involves calculations with absurd margins of error. The official census records were hopelessly out of touch with demographic reality. The compiler of a Zhejiang gazetteer of 1575 insisted that the number of people off the official census registers in his county was three times the number on.17 A Fujian gazetteer of 1613 similarly dismissed the impression of demographic stagnation conveyed by the official statistics: “The realm has enjoyed, for some two hundred years, an unbroken peace which is unparalleled in history,” the editor pointed out. “During this period of recuperation and economic development the population should have multiplied several times since the beginning of the dynasty. It is impossible that the population should have remained stationary.” A Fujian contemporary agreed: “During a period of 240 years when peace and plenty in general have reigned [and] people no longer know what war is like, population has grown so much that it is entirely without parallel in history.” Another official in 1614 guessed that the increase since 1368 had been fivefold.18

China’s population did not grow between 1368 and 1614 by a factor of five, but it certainly more than doubled. The standard estimate suggests that China was approaching 150 million by 1600, though working from a modestly higher base figure suggests that it may have approached 175 million.19 It is possible that rising mortality may have slowed this rate of growth in some areas. So too did human choice, for it seems that some attempt was made to space pregnancies. A possible example from the 1590s is the wetnurse Yao of Tongxiang, Zhejiang, distressed to find herself pregnant by her husband before the proper “interval between the union between husband and wife” had expired, which was three years. Despite the assurances of the family where she worked that shortening the interval was not a shameful matter, Yao committed suicide by drinking mercury (“liquid silver”). This is the only reference to spaced pregnancies I have found in Ming sources, and it may apply only to wetnurses who had to coordinate their pregnancies with the production of milk for their employers, for which the standard contract appears to have been three years. Yet the stress of shame suggests that she had internalized birth spacing as a moral norm that was more powerful to her than her contractual responsibility to her employer.20 The more consistent method of discouraging population growth, however, was infanticide.

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