著者

斯波義信

雑誌

東洋学報 / The Toyo Gakuho

巻号頁・発行日

vol.66, no.1, pp.289-317, 1985-03

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Famine relief in Imperial China was one of the integral social functions, that the people expected the government to fulfill. Meanwhile, it has come to be known recently, that the disaster which frequented traditional China so often, rarely occurred on a nation-wide scale. This finding suggests that the topic of famine relief should be properly studied in the context of regional settings—with due specification of when and where famines occurred, what were the patterns of distribution of wealth, resources and population in the area affected by the disaster, what was the level of intra- or inter-regional trade, what institutional framework there was at the regional level to cope with the problem, and who then took the initiative in such a framework.In this essay, the author attempts to investigate the case of Han-yang 漢陽 in the years of 1213 and 1214 when the prefecture suffered from heavy drought. At the time, the resources in the Middle Yangtze region remained less utilized as a whole. But, the demand for provisioning a big army corps stationed at Ê-chou 鄂州 (present-day Wuchang) gave encouraging impetus to the rise in a thriving regional trade centered around Ê-chou. As Han-yang was located close to Ê-chou, on the opposite bank of the Yangtze river, both demand and supply of necessities for the people of Han-yang came to rely heavily upon the functions discharged by regional commerce. When a year-long drought hit Han-yang, Huan Kan, the magistrate of prefecture and a renowned disciple of Ch'u Hsi, took the initiative in the fight against the calamity. He mapped out an excellent plan. For the relief of those who could not sustain themselves, he ordered to sell at reduced price the rice he gained through prompt purchased from merchants or by appropriating rice from storage granaries.As to the needs of the poor, beggars and short-term migrants from other drought-stricked areas, he supplied them with free rice derived from emergency-granaries. The reasons why this measure won eventual success may be attributed partly to the excellence of the plan itself and partly to his good fortune in inheriting a handsome amount of storage-rice which his predecessors accumulated in the official granaries. The detailed records of his relief measure, discussed in this essay, throw light upon many of the dark problems surrounding what the actual socio-economic conditions were like in the region of the day.