Many of these estates came into origin as gifts of the emperor to individuals or to temples, others were created on hillsides on land which belonged to the villages.  From this time on, the rest of the village commons in China proper disappeared.  Villagers could no longer use the top-soil of the hills as fertilizer, or the trees as firewood and building material.  In addition, the hillside estates diverted the water of springs and creeks, thus damaging severely the irrigation works of the villagers in the plains.  The estates (chuang) were controlled by appointed managers who often became hereditary managers.  The tenants on the estates were quite often non-registered migrants, of whom we spoke previously as “vagrants”, and as such they depended upon the managers who could always denounce them to the authorities which would lead to punishment because nobody was allowed to leave his home without officially changing his registration.  Many estates operated mills and even textile factories with non-registered weavers.  Others seem to have specialized in sheep breeding.  Present-day village names ending with -chuang indicate such former estates.  A new development in this period were the “clan estates” (i-chuang), created by Fan Chung-yen (989-1052) in 1048.  The income of these clan estates were used for the benefit of the whole clan, were controlled by clan-appointed managers and had tax-free status, guaranteed by the government which regarded them as welfare institutions.  Technically, they might better be called corporations because they were similar in structure to some of our industrial corporations.  Under the Chinese economic system, large-scale landowning always proved socially and politically injurious.  Up to very recent times the peasant who rented his land paid 40-50 per cent of the produce to the landowner, who was responsible for payment of the normal land tax.  The landlord, however, had always found means of evading payment.  As each district had to yield a definite amount of taxation, the more the big landowners succeeded in evading payment the more had to be paid by the independent small farmers.  These independent peasants could then either “give” their land to the big landowner and pay rent to him, thus escaping from the attentions of the tax-officer, or simply leave the district and secretly enter another one where they were not registered.  In either case the government lost taxes.

Large-scale landowning proved especially injurious in the Sung period, for two reasons.  To begin with, the official salaries, which had always been small in China, were now totally inadequate, and so the officials were given a fixed quantity of land, the yield of which was regarded as an addition to salary.  This land was free from part of the taxes.  Before long the officials had secured the liberation of the whole of their land from the chief taxes.  In the second place, the taxation system was simplified by making the amount of tax proportional to the amount