明代の漕糧と餘米

Abstract

The aim of this study is to illuminate the financial act of grain tribute 漕運 system and its relationship to the non-institutional factors such as physical distribution of the time. By establishing its political and military center in a location far from the principal sources of the land tax, the Ming dynasty was required to invest resources in establishing material supply lines and maintaining their stable operation. Given the high cost of such operations, the bulk goods such as grain could not continue to be sent to Beijing endlessly. In accordance with the increase in the number of the people involved, the amount of individual payments was naturally limited. One of the countermeasures chosen as most appropriate was the allotment of one dan 石 per month as the grain ration for both soldiers and officials. This allotment was fundamentally maintained even after 1522 when the collection of tribute grain 漕糧 was remarkably commuted to silver. In this case, the short-term decrease in the amount of tribute grain collected in kind was not in the least the result of the general preference for employing silver as payment, even if payment in silver was indeed an important factor in easing the operation of the governmental finance. After a period of trial and error, the method of paying two months of the ration to the military in silver became fixed in 1582. The monthly allotment of one dan of grain alone cannot be presumed to indicate that there was consumer's surplus in a numerical sense. Therefore, payment in silver itself was predicated of necessity on additional grain supply. At least from the second half of the 16th century onward, the commodity that fulfilled the demand is what is generally called surplus grain 餘米. The term surplus grain refers to the unused remainder of the grains collected as an additional tax to offset the cost of shipping tribute grain. The existence of the surplus grain itself, on the one hand, well represents the character of the Chinese governmental finance system, which maintained its elasticity solely through such supplementary, additional taxes. It can be surmised that the increase in the dispersal of silver from the Taicang Treasury 太倉 following the second half of the 16th century gave a great impetus to the outflow of surplus grain from Beijing, and ultimately it was those directly involved in the governmental grain transport who responded nimbly to the gap in demand. In a sense, what the expansion of silver economy signifies was not just the development of purely spontaneous market economy, but a sort of amalgam of free trade and command economy, which continues to exist over along period.