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SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS [VOL. 47 



1578, are taken from the Annals of the Ming. 1 It must be noted 

 that that of 1393 has no returns for several provinces of the Empire. 2 



Between the founding of the present Manchu dynasty ( a. d. 1644) 

 and 1734, we have enumerations of the population by households for 

 nearly every year. E. H. Parker has extracted them from the 

 Tung hua lit for the years between 165 1 and i860. 3 From 165 1 to 

 1730 they are as follows for every tenth year : 



1 Ming Shih, Bks. 40 and 43. 



2 It is interesting to note that nearly all European writers of the latter 

 part of the XVI and of the XVII centuries, such as Trigault, Matteo Ricci, 

 Herrada, Martin Martini, Semedo, Mandelslo, and Osbeck, give approxi- 

 mately the figure of the census of 1578 as that of the population of China in 

 their time, some of them stating that it included only adult males, or " fight- 

 ing men." I can find no authority for this in any Chinese work. Gemelli 

 Careri (Voy. Round the World, Pt. iv, 326) made out the population of China 

 at the end of the XVII century to be 59,788,364 men, " exclusive of women, 

 children, paupers, officials, literati, army, the imperial clan, etc." He gives 

 the number of families as 11,502,872. The figures, both of individuals 

 and of households, are substantially those of the census of 1578. He cites 

 no authority for his statement concerning classes of the population not 

 included in the census. I am inclined to believe he took his figures and this 

 statement bodily from Athanasius Kircher or Father Martin Martini, but they 

 in turn furnish no authority for their belief that the recorded population was 

 exclusively composed of male adults. 



3 E. H. Parker, A Note on Some Statistics Regarding China, Journal Royal 

 Statistical Society, xn, Pt. 1, pp. 150-156. Du Halde, Description, etc., 11, p. 

 14, referring to the early enumerations of the present dynasty, states that the 

 tax-payers were the adult males only between 20 and 60 years of age. 



