ABSTRACT

The Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty is a collection of official papers of considerable comprehensiveness. In the early seventeenth century, in order to meet Nurhaci's challenge in Manchuria, the Ming court finally decided to mobilize the empire's financial sinews. The military farming program in Ming times had never been soundly organized as an institution. The proceeds from military farming and the number of government horses, projected from expectations, should never have been jumbled together to confuse the quantities of articles derived from actual counting. The bronze coins circulated in Ming times were the traditional wuzhuqian, about the size of the American nickel but less thick and with square holes in them. Stressing China's monolithic tax structure, we must point out that landed properties under direct imperial control or carved out as princely estates under the Ming and Qing were negligible in number and never came close to being a significant factor interfering with governmental finance.