Research Of Land Price Of Shanxi Province In Qing Dynasty From Contracts

As legal documents and private archives of Chinese civil society, contract documents, which directly reflect the national political, economic and legal system is acting on the substrate society, enjoy the reputation of "civil official". Through the combing and analysis of 2366 contract documents in Shanxi Province during Qing Dynasty, this paper analyses the causes of land sales and variation trend of all types of land prices in this area. Based on the previous analysis, the author goes into the region inside and makes a further study on the similarities and differences of the land price of the northwest, middle and south of Shansi Province. In Shanxi Province during Qing Dynasty, the reasons of land sales can be grouped into 11 types, which are inconvenience in use, under-use, emergency of handing in food and family affairs, drought, discord on field border and so on. But the author divides them into two categories to study the land price. The first one, he will group the land into bare and farm land two types of land from the view of presence of plants. The second category, depending on the location and the degree of its fertilization, the author classifies them into irrigated, flat, sloping and garden land. Through the study on the variation trend of the two categories of land price, the author find that farm land price is generally higher than bare land price. In terms of the types of land, irrigated land price keeps the highest, garden land price takes the second place, plain land price is in the third, sloping land price is the lowest. Therefore, in Shanxi of Qing Dynasty, land price of different types presents a comparatively big difference, but the same land type fluctuates a little, which are closely related to land quality, land appendages, nature of contracts and the actual situation of the buyer and seller. In the region of Shanxi, land price presents completely distinctive features. First, from the types of land sales, in south of Shanxi, land sales concentrated on plain land, while, in the middle and northwest of Shansi, land sales focus on bare land. Second, from the vertical point of view, the amount of land sales during the late Qing Dynasty is larger than that While from the horizontal point of view, the amount of land sales in northwest and middle area of Shanxi, especially in northwest area, is larger than that in south area of Shanxi, which is mainly caused by the relatively small number of per capita cultivated land. Thirdly, in terms of variation trend, the land price in the northwest area of Shansi varies more greatly than that in the middle and south area of Shanxi. Moreover, the turning point of land price variation in the northwest area of Shansi appeared in the period of Daoguang, while the same point in the middle and south area of Shanxi appeared in the period of Jiaqing. Finally, in terms of garden land, the price in the middle, northwest and south area of Shansi respectively keeps the highest, the second highest and the lowest. Except for garden land, land price in south area is generally higher than that in northwest area. Although the land price in the region of Shanxi shows a distinct difference, by and large, the overall variation trend of land price is consistent. That is, the period of Jiaqing as a watershed, before and after it, the integral variation trend of land price is respectively ascending and descending. The author thinks that the turning point of land price in Shanxi appeared in the period of Qing Dynasty, which is earlier than that in the period of Qing Dynasty some present scholars put forward to. This is the most prominent discovery in this paper. The major reasons of this variation trend of land price depend on the diversification of land use, contradiction between human and land, the introduction of high-yielding crops, increasing taxes, cultivation of poppy, frequent disasters and famines and many other factors.