SOME SALIENT FEATURES OF THE MING LABOR SERVICE SYSTEM

Abstract

For over two millennia imperial China was ruled by emperors who embodied the powers of an absolute monarch, a high-priest, and a patriarch. The emperor's right to rule was said to have been mandated by Heaven, or by the God on High, who was alleged to have granted to him both the land and people of the earth and to have delegated to him the authority to rule over all of earth's creatures on his behalf. The earliest extant evidence of such a claim appears in an inscription on a bronze vessel of the early Zhou dynasty. King Kang (r. 1004–967 BC), the great-grandson of King Wen (r. -1122 BC), the nominal founder of the dynasty, speaking of his illustrious ancestor's military achievements, said to one of his ministers that when his forefather established the Zhou kingdom on receiving the “Great Mandate of Heaven,” he was granted “the people and the land on earth.” Thus, an ode of the Zhou period states: “All under Heaven is the king's land, and no one of the people living on the land, even unto its farthest boundaries, is not the king's subject.” After the First Emperor of Qin had conquered the other feudal states and established his rule over the unified empire of China in 221 BC, he had all the more reason to declare that “all under Heaven and on the earth within the four quarters is the emperor's land … wherever human beings may be, not one is not our subject.”