TWO ESSAYS ON THE CHING ECONOMY OF HSIN-AN
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implied a physical division of the land itself. From the scanty evidence on tenant rings, we can conclude that the sale of cultivation-value was probably regulated within the group. In any event, it was unnecessary for the landlord to be informed of the sale.
Descent among perpetual lessor clans was governed by the principle Fen tsu erh pu fen t'ien (分租而不分田: "divide the rent but not the land.") Gompertz, in CSO109 Ext., comments:
When an inheritance has already been divided among the various branches of the clan the problem is very much simpler but as a matter of fact such partitions have been hitherto very rare and we are now in the dilemma of being obliged either to devise a form of title suited to this collective ownership or to refuse to take cognisance of anything but the ownership of individuals.3
The Ping Shan Tang genealogy gives this account of the origin of this principle in Tung-Kuan county (at the time of the writing of this passage, Hsin-An had not yet been formed):
We have been inhabitants of Ping Shan for six generations. From my great grandfather to my father (i.e., three generations) no ancestral property was divided, a fact which greatly benefited the villagers. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, an imperial edict forbade the uniting of different families into single households. Thereafter, my younger brother and I began to register separately as inhabitants of Huang T'ien Ch’ang (黄田昌) and Tung-Kuan respectively. The ancestral properties were divided into two portions. As for the properties in remote areas, the grain payments (i.e., the rent) and the land-tax (plus corvee responsibilities) were also shared equally between us.36
One of the strongest prohibitions contained in clan rules was that against selling land, private or communal, to "outsiders:"
In large clans transactions in land take place, as a rule, between different members of the clan without the property ever being disposed of to outsiders. In such transactions the deed of transfer is invariably worded as if it were a mortgage, and no period of redemption is fixed, the vendor or mortgagor, or his descendants, thus having every opportunity to redeem the property at the original price even several generations after the transaction has been made.37