Chapter 45: Productivity, Ah, Productivity

The vast farmland before Heifu was made up of long, narrow strips — those strips were the mu.

Standing at the field's edge, he stepped lightly with his left foot along the narrow drainage ditch that bordered the mu, then his right — one left, one right, and that was the era's basic unit of distance: the bu. One bu equaled six chi, roughly 1.38 meters by later reckoning.

Doing this, he just happened to cover the width of one mu plot.

So each mu was 1 bu wide and 240 bu long. That was because Qin, ever since Shang Yang's reforms, had adopted the large-mu system — unlike the 100-bu small mu of Yan, Chu, and Qi, or the 200-bu medium mu of Wei.

The reason, aside from Qin being vast in land and sparse in people at the time of Shang Yang's reforms — so the common folk needed larger allotments to grow more grain — was probably also that Qin had begun widely using ox-drawn plows. Even households without oxen could borrow them from the authorities. An ox, head down pulling a plow, could go roughly 240 bu before needing a breather. As for a man, pull a plow a hundred bu and you'd collapse from exhaustion.

And so, this hundred mu belonging to Heifu looked especially enormous.

After his shock wore off, Heifu crouched down and did some reckoning with a twig: in later times, one market-mu was 666.67 square meters, while one Qin large mu was a bit over 400 square meters — smaller than later. But converted, a hundred large mu came to over forty thousand square meters...

"Land this big — in the Qing dynasty or the Republic, I'd already be a small landlord."

Heifu found it a bit amusing. He knew that in the Qing, a typical yeoman farmer owning about ten mu was normal; the poorer ones might have only a few.

But he shouldn't get too happy too soon. Though this land was allotted to Heifu to farm, it still belonged to the state. The Han scholar Dong Zhongshu, with no evidence whatsoever, had speculated that Qin "altered the institutions of the kings, abolished the well-field system, and allowed the people to buy and sell." Yet since Heifu had come to Qin, he had never seen a single land sale transaction, let alone a contract, and the Qin bamboo slips excavated in later ages had yielded nothing of the sort either.

In Qin, land absolutely could not be bought or sold! After all, only on the premise of state-owned land could the land-grant system and military-merit ennoblement — the twin foundations of the Qin state — be sustained. At least, that was the case before Qin Shi Huang unified the realm and decreed "let the black-haired people fill in their own land." Peasants had land-use rights, but not ownership.

Thinking of it that way, Great Qin and my Celestial Nation actually had rather similar national conditions.

And don't assume that a big field means a big harvest. Quite the opposite — in this era, precisely because the yield from cultivated land was so low, a family absolutely could not survive without being allotted this much land.

"Elder Brother."

As Heifu rested on the field ridge, he took the chance to ask Zhong, "Last year during our family's autumn harvest, how much did one mu yield, roughly?"

Zhong was also sitting on the field path. After walking a while, his injured leg was aching a little, but unlike Heifu, he looked out over this stretch of land with eyes full of hope and expectation. As a farmer, how could he not love the land?

"For millet, about 2 shi. Rice is a bit more — 3 shi per mu. The land in Nan Commandery is low and damp, can't compare to Guanzhong. When I was on garrison duty, I heard soldiers from Guanzhong say that there, millet yields per mu can double or even triple!" As the family's pillar, Zhong had to keep a clear account of every year's harvest, good or bad.

The "shi" here referred to volume, not weight — after all, who had the means for precise weighing in this age? When peasants threshed their grain and hulled their rice, they poured it into dipper and sheng measures of fixed capacity. The "Shang Yang Standard Sheng" issued from Xianyang to every commandery and county was the era's standard measuring vessel. As the saying goes, a sheng of rice earns gratitude, a dou of rice earns enmity — the same went for paying the grain tax.

Heifu had been in this era long enough, and had carried countless loads of rice and grain on his shoulders, to have a rough idea. So he knew that, by his elder brother's account, their own fields produced about 50-odd market-jin of millet per mu, and about 70-odd market-jin of unmilled rice per mu.

What did that mean in context?

Heifu's hometown in his previous life was in the countryside, and he knew the five grains. He knew that in modern hybrid-rice paddies, a single mu could yield close to 2,000 market-jin at best! For millet, large-scale planting could yield eight or nine hundred market-jin per mu!

In other words, grain yields per mu in this era were, at most, only a few dozen times smaller than in the 21st century.

Productivity — in his previous life, it had been just a dry word in a textbook. Now it felt so desperately critical. If people wanted to eat their fill, and per-mu yields couldn't be raised, the only option was to expand the planted area. No wonder the average landholding per person was so huge at this time.

So Heifu could especially understand the hardship of farming in this era. Without mechanized help, the work each peasant had to do was ten times, even several dozen times that of later ages! A family of five to eight, during the busy farming season, had to toil in the fields day and night just to cultivate all that land.

Qin peasants, guided by state-appointed field officials, had already moved beyond the slash-and-burn, broadcast-sowing stage and begun intensive cultivation. The "Statutes on Granaries" even taught peasants step by step, saying that when sowing seeds, rice and hemp used two and two-thirds dou per mu; millet and wheat used one dou per mu; glutinous millet and beans used two-thirds dou per mu...

But even so, millet yields were only a little higher than Wei's "1.5 shi per mu" from two hundred years before. Combined with heavy land and poll taxes, the best one could hope for was to be half-starved rather than full.

After all, this era had no chemical fertilizers or pesticides — what that brought wasn't ecology, but low yields. Farm tools mixed wood, stone, bone, bronze, and iron; farming techniques still had room to improve. If you wanted a good harvest, you could only force it higher with irrigation. Guanzhong, with its Zhengguo Canal, and the Chengdu Plain, with its Dujiangyan, became Qin's greatest granaries, sustaining the Qin king as he launched war after war.

Now Heifu alone had been allotted a hundred mu of land. Though it looked wonderful at first glance, on second thought, he lost all desire to farm it.

"Elder Brother... let's go with what you said. This land — we'd better find someone else to farm it." The mere thought of all that farm work made Heifu's scalp prickle.

Zhong nodded and said, "No rush on this. Over the next couple of months I'll ask around the village, see if any hired laborers are willing to come and work it."

Although the land-grant system was in effect, not everyone in Qin had land. There were always drifters, or people who had committed crimes and had their fields confiscated. Because the Qin legal code's attitude toward land was that you couldn't hog the latrine without taking a shit — you're not keen on farming? Fine, stop farming. It reverts to the state and gets allotted to someone else!

The most typical example was Dongmen Bao's family. Because his father had drowned while drunk, which counted as violating the statutes, their land was confiscated. There was no empty land near the county seat for him to secretly farm, so Dongmen Bao had to scrape by through other means. Little Tao's family was the same — father and son worked as hired laborers and tenant farmers for others, and could sink into servitude at any moment.

Pointing to the edge of the field, Elder Brother added, "The reason I called you out to see the land today was to discuss hiring some hands to build the field boundary ridges first."

Though Heifu's land was large, it had limits. At each of the field's four corners, a square-cut mound of earth had been piled up, called a "feng." Following these feng, other people's fields had built four earthen boundary ridges — these were the lie, used to mark the borders.

As the two brothers were pointing out the field, several people happened to pass behind them. One of them, with his hair in a mallet-shaped topknot and wearing a wooden cap, looking like a tall, gaunt old farmer, had his hands behind his back and watched them from a distance. "Isn't that the two brothers of the Zhong household?"

The man was none other than the village head of Xiyang Ward, bringing a few convict laborers out to the fields. Zhong and Heifu had no choice but to rise and cup their hands to him.

"Greetings, Village Head."

The village head, however, spoke with an unfriendly expression. "Zhong, Heifu, what are you two skulking around these boundary mounds for? The statutes say that if you damage a boundary mound, whether on purpose or by accident, it counts as 'illicitly shifting a boundary marker' and is punishable by shaving of the beard. If you two dare secretly shovel them away and extend your field a few bu outward, that's 'land theft,' and the punishment is even heavier! Hmph, don't say I didn't warn you!"

Who treats someone like a thief with their very first words? Heifu felt a surge of displeasure.

This village head's grudge against their family went back eight years. The village head's son had also taken a fancy to their sister-in-law Kui and wanted her as a concubine. But Kui was set on marrying their elder brother. In the end, with their grand-aunt's sweet talk... no, her well-meaning persuasion, Kui's family had also agreed to the match.

From then on, the village head's family had begun constantly making trouble for the Zhong brothers: when borrowing oxen for spring plowing, they'd only allot the weakest, oldest ox; when borrowing iron farm tools, they'd give nothing but broken, battered ones.

This was also why, the moment Heifu got money, the first thing he did was have his elder brother buy a full set of iron farm tools — he didn't want to have to watch people's faces anymore.

Heifu also suspected that his being assigned to corvée labor right during the New Year holiday had likely been the village head pulling strings.

The look he gave the village head was somewhat hostile, but his elder brother merely bowed with a smile and said, "Many thanks for the reminder, Village Head. We would never knowingly break the law. There is, however, something I'd like to ask you."

Zhong said, "I inherited our late father's rank of Gongshi. Every year, the ward is supposed to assign one shuzi to help with the farming, yet last year there was none. Leaving that aside for now, my younger brother has newly earned the rank of Gongshi. He can't possibly manage a hundred mu of land alone. Village Head, surely this year a shuzi should be assigned to him?"

The village head kept his face stern. "Gongshi? So what? Is a Gongshi so impressive? I'm still a Shangzao! Shuzi are limited, but there are seven or eight households in the ward with rank — how can they go around? According to the statutes, shuzi must first be assigned to those holding official posts, and then distributed household by household according to the registry numbers. Your family's turn will come sooner or later. Just wait patiently!"

With that, he gave a cold laugh and made to leave.

At this, Heifu finally couldn't quite hold back. He asked loudly, "May I ask, Village Head — if I too became a clerk or official, would the shuzi then be assigned to my household first?"

"An official? You?"

The village head turned around, cast a contemptuous glance at Heifu, and said scornfully, "When your family was in Chu, you were commoners no better than bondservants, serving my family for generations. Only after entering Qin did you luck into a Gongshi rank. And now you want to be a clerk or official? Let a few more generations struggle first!"

With that, he lifted his chin and walked off with his convict laborers.

Under Chu rule, this village head's family had been a minor clan in the area, flourishing in numbers. After Qin's takeover, they had been put forward as village head. Deep down, he looked down on Zhong, Heifu, and others who had been poor for generations.

"A tiny village head the size of a sesame seed, and he acts like there's no one above him — even dares to use petty tricks to retaliate against our family. Ptui."

Once the village head was far away, Heifu felt as if he'd swallowed a fly; the good mood of the past few days was ruined. Still, come to think of it, weren't plenty of later-age village chiefs and party secretaries just the same? Corrupt and law-bending, colluding with each other, practically local bullies.

"He's an official, after all. Heifu, the family is counting on you to become a clerk or official — maybe that'll make him rein it in a bit." Zhong gave a bitter smile and shook his head. The family's life had grown harder and harder these past few years, not unrelated to the village head's retaliation, yet they could only seethe in silence.

The common people cannot contend with officials — true in any era.

Watching the village head's peacock-like strut, Heifu did not get angry, but laughed instead.

"Elder Brother, just you wait. One day, I'll make sure his family can't even hold on to being village head!"

PS: The data in this chapter comes from "An Examination of Grain Yields per Mu in the Qin and Han Dynasties." Since the records used are mainly from the Han, the figures have been slightly reduced.

(End of chapter)