44

The Structures o f Everyday Life

between 24 and 35 million, depending on which of the three figures mentioned above we adopt. The last refers to the end of the eighteenth century, the other two to the sixteenth. The suggested figure of 100 million is very far from these estimates. It is impossible to prove anything of course; but while I would be hesitant to fix any figure myself, I am fairly confident that we can dismiss the suggestion of 100 million. The figures for Asia are also excessive, but it is not such a serious matter in this case. Carr Saunders27 thinks that Wilcoxs figure of 70 million for the population of China in about 1650 - six years after the Manchus had taken Peking - is wrong. He boldly proceeds to double it (150 million). Everything relating to this period of change in Chinese history is open to question (for example, the jen-ting could simply be, like the Western households, ordinary fiscal units). Wilcox, for his part, based his calculations on the Tung Hua Lou (translated by Cheng Hen Chen). Even if we assume that his figure is too low, we still need to take into account the terrible havoc wrought by the Manchu invasion. A.P. Usher calculated a figure of 75 million for 1575 and 101 for 1661.2 8 The official figure for 1680 is 61; the estimated figure given by one author is 98, by another 120. But these are for 1680, when the Manchu rgime had finally been established. A traveller in about 1639 spoke of some 60 million inhabitants and he was reckoning 10 people to a household, an unusually high coefficient even for China. The extraordinary demographic increase in China did not begin until 1680, or more accurately until the reoccupation ofFormosa in 1683. China was at first protected by the wide continental expansion that took her people to Siberia, Mongolia, Turkestan and Tibet. She was then obliged to engage in extremely intensive, colonization within her own boundaries. All the low-lying lands and hills that could be irrigated were developed, followed by the mountainous areas where forest-clearing pioneers multiplied. New crops introduced by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century spread visibly at this period - ground nuts for example, sweet potatoes and, above all, maize,, before the arrival from Europe of ordinary potatoes (which did not become significant in China ' until the nineteenth century). This colonization went relatively unchecked until about 1740. After that the portion of land reserved to each individual gradually dim inished as the population indubitably increased more rapidly than cultivable space.29 These deep-seated changes help us to pinpoint a Chinese agricultural revo lution intensified by a powerful and overlapping demographic revolution. Prob able figures are as follows: 1680, 120 million; 1700, 130; 1720, 144; 1740, 165; 1750, 186; 1760, 214; 1770, 246; 1790, 300; 1850, 430.30 When in 1793 George Staunton, secretary to the English ambassador, asked the Chinese what the population of the Empire was, they answered proudly, if not truthfully: 353 million.3 1 But to return to the population of Asia, it is usually estimated at two to three