accumulation of estates
that there had ever been up to then in China.

Many of these estates came into origin as gifts of the emperor to
individuals or to temples, others were created on hillsides on land
which belonged to the villages. From this time on, the rest of the
village commons in China proper disappeared. Villagers could no longer
use the top-soil of the hills as fertilizer, or the trees as firewood
and building material. In addition, the hillside estates diverted the
water of springs and creeks, thus damaging severely the irrigation works
of the villagers in the plains. The estates (_chuang_) were controlled
by appointed managers who often became hereditary managers. The tenants
on the estates were quite often non-registered migrants, of whom we
spoke previously as "vagrants", and as such they depended upon the
managers who could always denounce them to the authorities which would
lead to punishment because nobody was allowed to leave his home without
officially changing his registration. Many estates operated mills and
even textile factories with non-registered weavers. Others seem to have
specialized in sheep breeding. Present-day village names ending with
-_chuang_ indicate such former estates. A new development in this period
were the "clan estates" (_i-chuang_), created by Fan Chung-yen
(989-1052) in 1048. The income of these clan estates were used for the
benefit of the whole clan, were controlled by clan-appointed managers
and had tax-free status, guaranteed by the government which regarded
them as welfare institutions. Technically, they might better be called
corporations because they were similar in structure to some of our
industrial corporations. Under the Chinese economic system, large-scale
landowning always proved socially and politically injurious. Up to very
recent times the peasant who rented his land paid 40-50 per cent of the
produce to the landowner, who was responsible for payment of the normal
land tax. The landlord, however, had always found means of evading
payment. As each district had to yield a definite amount of taxation,
the more the big landowners succeeded in evading payment the more had to
be paid by the independent small farmers. These independent peasants
could then either "give" their land to the big landowner and pay rent to
him, thus escaping from the attentions of the tax-officer, or simply
leave the district and secretly enter another one where they were not
registered.