felt compelled to display it.  At first Chu personally showed no excessive signs of this tendency, though they emerged later; but he conferred great land grants on all his relatives, friends, and supporters; he would give to a single person land sufficient for 20,000 peasant families; he ordered the payment of state pensions to members of the imperial family, just as the Mongols had done, and the total of these pension payments was often higher than the revenue of the region involved.  For the capital alone over eight million shih of grain had to be provided in payment of pensions—­that is to say, more than 160,000 tons!  These pension payments were in themselves a heavy burden on the state; not only that, but they formed a difficult transport problem!  We have no close figure of the total population at the beginning of the Ming epoch; about 1500 it is estimated to have been 53,280,000, and this population had to provide some 266,000,000 shih in taxes.  At the beginning of the Ming epoch the population and revenue must, however, have been smaller.

The laws against the merchants and the restrictions under which the craftsmen worked, remained essentially as they had been under the Sung, but now the remaining foreign merchants of Mongol time also fell under these laws, and their influence quickly diminished.  All craftsmen, a total of some 300,000 men with families, were still registered and had to serve the government in the capital for three months once every three years; others had to serve ten days per month, if they lived close by.  They were a hereditary caste as were the professional soldiers, and not allowed to change their occupation except by special imperial permission.  When a craftsman or soldier died, another family member had to replace him; therefore, families of craftsmen were not allowed to separate into small nuclear families, in which there might not always be a suitable male.  Yet, in an empire as large as that of the Ming, this system did not work too well:  craftsmen lost too much time in travelling and often succeeded in running away while travelling.  Therefore, from 1505 on, they had to pay a tax instead of working for the government, and from then on the craftsmen became relatively free.

4 Colonization and agricultural developments

As already mentioned, the Ming had to keep a large army along the northern frontiers.  But they also had to keep armies in south China, especially in Yuennan.  Here, the Mongol invasions of Burma and Thailand had brought unrest among the tribes, especially the Shan.  The Ming did not hold Burma but kept it in a loose dependency as “tributary nation”.  In order to supply armies so far away from all agricultural surplus centres, the Ming resorted to the old system of “military colonies” which seems to have been invented in the second century B.C. and is still used even today (in Sinkiang).  Soldiers were settled in camps called ying, and therefore