Walled Cities in Late Imperial China
نویسندگان
چکیده
For thousands of years, the Chinese and many other nations around the world built defensive walls around their cities. This phenomenon is not well understood from an economic perspective. To rationalize the existence of city walls, we propose a simple model that relates the dimensions of city walls to a set of economic variables. Guided by this model, we conduct an empirical analysis using hand-collected and previously unused data on city walls in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties. Consistent with the model, we find that the circumference of a city wall is positively correlated with population size in the jurisdiction and that frontier cities subject to a higher probability of attack tended to have stronger city walls. Since a city wall imposes a physical boundary around a city, the land area inside the city wall provides a natural proxy of city size. We examine the physical size distribution of walled cities in late imperial China. We find that city sizes above a certain cutoff follow Zipf’s law, although the Zipf coefficient is sensitive to the choice of the cutoff point. This result complements findings in the existing literature that focuses almost exclusively on the population size distribution of cities.
منابع مشابه
Global Science and Comparative History: Jesuits, Science, and Philology in China and Europe, 1550-1850
[Benjamin Elman is Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University. He specializes in late imperial Chinese intellectual history and in the history of science and education. His recent book is entitled On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (Harvard University Press, 2005). Previously he has published A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China, ...
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