唐代の捉錢戸について

Abstract

Though the T'ang officials were, as a rule, paid out of the land tax income, this system began to fail because of the shortage of revenue. Consequently, a new source of revenue caIled Kungchieh pengch'ien (公廨本錢) was set up to patch up defficiency in the pay roIl by expending the interest therefrom, and later the new tax which was thought as a temporary measure came to assume a more important feature in the taxation sytem. Choch'ien-hu is a name given to the household which was given the privilege of borrowing the Government funds and owed the obligation to pay interest. In the beginning it was exempted from corvee; hence many people looked for being designated as choch'ienhu with consequent evil practices. Thereupon, the the choch'ienhu was dearived of its privilege, and most of the choch'ienhu became impoverished, because they were obliged to pay interest as high as 30 to 50 per cent. The author concludes that the choch'ienhu's corvee played a considerable part in the decline of the landed farmers' class and the development of large scale landownership.