The Hongwu Emperor orders the Yellow Registers

The new dynasty inherited a country whose population records had been lost in the wars of the Yuan collapse. From 1370 households received certificates listing their members, and in 1371 a system of grouping households was tried in the Yangtze basin. The edict of 1381, as the History of Ming describes it, organised all households into li of 110: the ten households with the most adult males and grain took turns as li head for a year, and the other hundred were divided into ten jia of ten, each with a rotating head, who answered for the services due from their group; the order of the rotation, reset every ten years, followed each household’s manpower and grain. Widows, orphans and others unable to serve were listed at the end. Concealing people or land was punishable by death.

For every household the register recorded its members and its land under four headings — what it had held, what it had acquired, what it had given up and what it now held. Four copies were made: for the county, the prefecture, the province and the Ministry of Revenue; only the ministry’s copy had yellow covers, and these copies were stored in depots on the islands of the Back Lake (Houhu), now Xuanwu Lake, in Nanjing. In 1387 the registers of households were complemented by ‘fish-scale’ maps of land plots — in the History of Ming’s image, the land registers were the warp and the Yellow Registers the weft of the tax system. The count of 1393, the History says, gave 10,652,870 households and 60,545,812 people.

The registers were compiled 27 times, the last in 1642, and the archive grew enormous — by the count of a modern study (Zhang, 2008), some 60,000 fascicles were added with each revision, and shortly before the fall of the Ming it held about 1.7 million documents in 700 buildings — until it was almost entirely destroyed in 1645. By then the registers had long become a formality: as the History of Ming notes, officials assessed taxes and services from separate ‘white registers’.