On the Appearance of Villages in China : An Aspect of the Ruin of the Ancient Empire

China had its period of city-states in antiquity, and something of this system remained in the Han (漢) dynasty. Therefore, in the Han the hsien (縣), hsiang (鄉里) and t'ing (亭) were all cities, each with a wall around it, and held some arrondissement (li (里)) in it. The peasants living in the cities tended the farms nearby outside the wall every day, and the lands farther away were left uncultivated. In the Han dynasty, there were few villages to be found like those of later times. When the centralization policy adopted by the government brought about the ruin of the hsiang and t'ing, the peasants moved to the hsien to seek employment, and therefore more and more fields were left uncultivated. These deserted areas were then occupied by the nomad-invaders from the north or west, who established villages there. On the other hand the Chinese government alloted the deserted areas to its soldiers, after abandoning attempts to reconstruct the hsiang and t'ing. These alloted fields, called t'un-t'ien (屯田), were established by Ts'ao Ts'ao (曹操) of the Wei (魏) dynasty in the north. The t'un-t'ien needed the establishment of villages as well. Sometime later, in the Yangtze River basin in the south, there flourished the manors of the powerful clans, who gave refuge to those who fled from north China, and villages consequently appeared there also. The pro-wu (保伍) system, though originally designed for the military, was later used by the government to gain control of the dwellers of the new villages