ABSTRACT
The contrast between the population figures recorded by the Sui government and those dating from the early period of Tang rule is startling. In 609, before Emperor Yang’s Korean campaigns and the great rebellions, the officially registered population of the empire stood at 8,907,546 households and 46,019,956 individuals. Approximately three decades later, in an unspecified year between 634 and 643, the corresponding figures were only 2,874,249 households and some 12 million individuals.1 Banditry remained a serious problem in some parts of China long after the defeat of Tang’s last major military rivals, and there were reports of widespread devastation, with vast areas said to be almost devoid of human habitation. In 632, the Tang minister Wei Zheng painted the following picture of conditions in Henan, formerly one of China’s most populous regions: “From the Yi and Luo rivers east to the seacoast, there is an immense wasteland of weeds and rushes. The crowd of humanity has disappeared; the sounds of chickens and dogs are no longer heard.”2 This was, however, a considerable exaggeration, crafted for maximum rhetorical effect within the context of policy advocacy. While flood, drought, famine, banditry, and war had all taken their toll in the intervening years, the actual population of China could not have been reduced by nearly threequarters. For the most part, the discrepancy between the Sui and early Tang figures is thought to reflect not mortality but the state’s loss of administrative control over its people.3 During the preceding years of chaos, people left their homes in large numbers and local government records must surely have been destroyed in many places. Cleaning up this mess would have been difficult enough under any circumstances, but in early Tang the situation was further complicated by the fact that in some parts of China the authority of the imperial court did not penetrate to the local level.
