of land owned.  The lowest bracket, however, in this new system of taxation comprised more land than a poor peasant would actually own, and this was a heavy blow to the small peasant-owners, who in the past had paid a proportion of their produce.  Most of them had so little land that they could barely live on its yield.  Their liability to taxation was at all times a very heavy burden to them while the big landowners got off lightly.  Thus this measure, though administratively a saving of expense, proved unsocial.

All this made itself felt especially in the south with its great estates of tax-evading landowners.  Here the remaining small peasant-owners had to pay the new taxes or to become tenants of the landowners and lose their property.  The north was still suffering from the war-devastation of the tenth century.  As the landlords were always the first sufferers from popular uprisings as well as from war, they had disappeared, leaving their former tenants as free peasants.  From this period on, we have enough data to observe a social “law “:  as the capital was the largest consumer, especially of high-priced products such as vegetables which could not be transported over long distances, the gentry always tried to control the land around the capital.  Here, we find the highest concentration of landlords and tenants.  Production in this circle shifted from rice and wheat to mulberry trees for silk, and vegetables grown under the trees.  These urban demands resulted in the growth of an “industrial” quarter on the outskirts of the capital, in which especially silk for the upper classes was produced.  The next circle also contained many landlords, but production was more in staple foods such as wheat and rice which could be transported.  Exploitation in this second circle was not much less than in the first circle, because of less close supervision by the authorities.  In the third circle we find independent subsistence farmers.  Some provincial capitals, especially in Szechwan, exhibited a similar pattern of circles.  With the shift of the capital, a complete reorganization appeared:  landlords and officials gave up their properties, cultivation changed, and a new system of circles began to form around the new capital.  We find, therefore, the grotesque result that the thinly populated province of Shensi in the north-west yielded about a quarter of the total revenues of the state:  it had no large landowners, no wealthy gentry, with their evasion of taxation, only a mass of newly-settled small peasants’ holdings.  For this reason the government was particularly interested in that province, and closely watched the political changes in its neighbourhood.  In 990 a man belonging to a sinified Toba family, living on the border of Shensi, had made himself king with the support of remnants of Toba tribes.  In 1034 came severe fighting, and in 1038 the king proclaimed himself emperor, in the Hsia dynasty, and threatened the whole of north-western China.  Tribute was now also paid to this state (250,000 strings), but the fight against it continued, to save that important province.