ABSTRACT

The account of the ching-t'ien system in Mencius, with its refinement in the Chou-li (the latter ostensibly pre-Mencius, but actually late and derivative), makes up the most symmetrical story ever told. Mencius' 'ching' unit of land was so-called because it was laid out regularly like the character ching 1}, or 'well', for his eight families' fields and a ninth, their common field. In the Chou-li nine fu ('cultivators', here units of cultivation), comprised a ching, and kou ('drains') four feet wide and deep marked off one ching from another; a square often ching by ten was a cheng, and between cheng there were hsii ('ditches') eight feet wide and deep. This pattern was built up with strict regularity to larger and larger blocks of space and wider and deeper waterworks.i Nothing could be more precise and tidy, more literal a statement of design. And nothing, accordingly, could be more vulnerable to Hu Shih's sort of dismissal, as a transparently contrived Confucian ideal of harmony, with nothing of the odour of historical social reality. It was simply, he said, a case of to-kukai-chih, an appeal to (imagined) antiquity as a sanction for change." As a like-minded scholar observed later, chingt'ien had no history: it was only a species ofsocial thought, an aspiration, an ideal.6