The Administrative Division, Population, and Livelihood in Rural Areas of Huzhou in the Late Song and Early Yuan Dynasties—Based on the Survey of the Household Documents of the Huzhou Circuit in the Yuan Dynasty

Abstract

There are extremely scarce records of individual villagers in the Song and Yuan dynasties in handed-down literature, and it is also difficult to see the public documents, records, and other materials in the initial state. The printed version of The Rhyme Dictionary of the Ministry of Rites with Emendation and Annotation, an official document of the Yuan Dynasty, which has grassroots household documents of Huzhou Circuit on the back, has been published after collation. These documents include 900 households and nearly 3,000 people, with complete records of the population and people’s properties. As most of the people in the documents lived during the transition from Song to Yuan dynasties, and their family businesses were already finalized in the Song period. Therefore, these documents reflect people’s production and living conditions at the end of the Song Dynasty. Through comprehensive discussions of all the data, this paper analyzes the rural construction in Anji Prefecture (Huzhou Circuit) by using micro-level measurement and accounting in the way of statistical induction. Moreover, this paper also gives statistics including sex ratio, age ratio, average household population, fertility rate, number and type of land owned by households, and housing types, and analyzes the residence and livelihood of the villagers. This is the first time that comparison analysis is made based on original records among the study of rural history in the Song and Yuan dynasties, which provides relatively accurate statistics for the in-depth study of the rural society in the Jiangnan Region (south of the Yangtze River). It is also helpful for understanding the operation mode of the rural society in the Song and Yuan dynasties, and provides basic data support for exploring and reconstructing the daily life history of the villagers.

Keywords

Song Dynasty, Yuan Dynasty, household documents, population, land, housing, livelihood

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