Agricultural economy in Ming dynasty

In ancient times, agriculture was the top priority of the country, and the amount of cultivated land was directly related to the strength of national strength. Zhu Yuanzhang once said: "Agriculture is the foundation of the country, and demand is everywhere." To develop agriculture, we must first fix the peasants scattered on the land after the war. To this end, Zhu Yuanzhang repeatedly let the people return to farming and encouraged them to reduce taxes. In the first year of Hongwu (AD 1368), it was stipulated that people were allowed to reclaim wasteland for their own business, and were exempted from corvee and tax for three years. In the third year of Hongwu, landless people from Song, Hangzhou, Jiahu and Wuhu counties in Jiangsu came to Lin Hao to cultivate seeds, and the officials gave them money, grain and cattle breeds to avoid corvee for three years. In addition, there are many incurable places near cities in the north. "Ask people to plow the fields, give fifteen acres and two acres of vegetable fields, rent-free for three years, and those who have spare capacity are not limited to acres." "Additional land reclamation will never begin." This has also brought refugees from all directions back to their fields. Less land, more land, not much land, and less land have all been allocated to barren land. These measures have effectively recalled the displaced people, and are also conducive to the stability of people's lives and the recovery of agricultural production.

At first, due to years of war and inflation, the economy was on the verge of collapse, and the former dynasties increased the corvee for water control. During the Hongwu period, Ming Taizu implemented the policy of recuperation, reclamation and frontier defense, and also the policy of reclamation. Barracks account for nearly one-tenth of the country's arable land. In addition, Shangtun is also quite popular. In exchange, the government lured businessmen to transport food to the border to ensure the food demand of the border defense. However, this method does not require salt merchants to pay first, and then give salt in the salt drying season. Instead, it takes another takeaway on the grounds of insufficient tax revenue, which delays the delivery of salt to regular salt merchants, making salt merchants have to wait for three to five years or even ten years to pay. Ming Taizu also sent imperial academy to the countryside to supervise water conservancy construction and reduce agricultural taxes. These measures revived many war-torn areas in the past and quickly restored the economy of the Ming Dynasty.

During the Wanli period, the total area of cultivated land in the Ming Dynasty was 7 million hectares, and it reached more than 7.8 million hectares in the late Ming Dynasty. This level has not been broken even in the prosperous time of Kanggan. At that time, European missionaries described the Ming Dynasty like this. The cultivated land in China is as orderly as a garden, and there is no wasteland. Sugar made in China is whiter than that made in Europe, and cloth is more beautiful than that made in Europe. Agricultural production technology and agricultural textile industry invented a new farm tool "instead of farming" at that time, which was labor-saving and efficient by using mechanical principle; Agricultural fertilizer, using efficient "pressed oil cake"; Cotton planting adopts the famous "Zhang Wudian Cotton Planting Method"; Agricultural irrigation uses Xu Guangqi's imitation "dragon tail truck" to take water, which "saves trouble and does not bother, but uses less force and more water"; Implemented agricultural diversification and so on. In agriculture and cotton textile industry, at that time, the rice yield per mu in Jiangnan reached 23 tons, while the wheat yield per mu in the north was between 24 tons. Planting sweet potatoes, corn, tobacco, oilseeds and peanuts in northern and southern provinces. Cotton cloth has become the main material in this country. Xu Guangqi's cotton spinning tool "Stir the Car", one person can be three people, and one person can be four people; Taicang style can be eight people for two people.

The Ming Dynasty carried out a major "agricultural revolution" in human history. Through the improvement of Vietnamese rice varieties, new rice varieties are widely popularized in the north and south. The yield per mu of rice has been greatly improved. In the Ming Dynasty, ecological farming was first introduced in Jiangnan, where mosquito eggs were raised in paddy fields. Malaria caused by mosquito eggs once ravaged China in Song and Yuan Dynasties, but it was no longer a great harm in Ming Dynasty.

The Ming Dynasty pioneered the comprehensive management of flood discharge canals and reservoirs for the first time, which lasted for thousands of years. The water conservancy projects left by Guan Xu and others are still the lifeline of Jiangnan to resist the rainy season. Since then, there has been a saying that there is heaven on earth and Suzhou and Hangzhou on earth. What most people don't know is that western economists divide the productivity of China society into two saddles, which reached the peak of one saddle in the Song Dynasty and reached another higher saddle in the Ming Dynasty. The productivity of the two saddles on both sides of the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty decreased greatly.