- 著者
-
岸本 美緒
- 出版者
- 東洋文庫
- 雑誌
- 東洋学報 = The Toyo Gakuho
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.57, no.1・2, pp.171-200, 1976-01
Heng ch’an so yen is a collection of family precepts left to posterity by Chang Ying, 1638-1708, a scholar who served and was close to Emperor, K’ang-hsi. The text emphasizes the security of investment in land as compared to that in commerce and discusses the secret of making the former more profitable. The author came from one of the influential famines native to T’ung-ch’eng County, An-ch’ing Prefecture, Anhwei Province, and one of his sons, Chang T’ing-yü, 1672-1755, later became a powerful minister in the reigns of Yung-cheng and Ch’ien-lung.At the time of writing Heng ch’an so yen, it seems, Chang Ying was the owner of more than one-thousand mou of cultivated lands, and his income consisted mostly of the proceeds from the rice collected as rent from the lands and sold for cash. It is a safe guess that his yearly income from the lands, after deducting expenses necessary for reproduction and livelihood and tax duties, amounted to a sum in silver enough for purchasing more than one-hundred mou. Thus it was possible for him to expand steadily the lands he owned.In spite of such highly secure nature of the management of his lands, Chang Ying could not help warning his descendants in his precepts against the danger of their downfall through selling away the lands. It was because he had witnessed too many of such unfortunate examples, in which the sons of a landowner would fall into poverty caused by the thin profit margin on land management, or be ruined after selling away their land holdings and going into commercial activities seeking higher profit. Low profitability of investment in land was a frequent subject of discussion in Ch’ing Chinese literature. It is interesting to note that Chang Ying hardly considered it relevant to discuss the heavy tax burden and the anti-rent resistance by the tenants, two great problems in the Yangtzekiang Delta, but regarded the low profitability as mainly caused by the poor crop resulting from the landowner’s neglect of the land management and the lower price of grain in comparison to other commodities. Moreover, he felt that the two main causes of difficulty could be overcome if the landowner stopped living in town and returned to the countryside so that his lands would be put to optimum use to make him self-supporting in livelihood. Such a view of Chang Ying’s appears to reflect the economic situation at T’ung-ch’eng, where market economy had not yet penetrated the countryside at that time.