Assembling a New Cadastral Regime in Song China, 1015-1149

Abstract: By the early eleventh century, the Song state confronted an administrative paradox. Land tax and land-based obligations remained central to governance, yet fiscal accountability rested on registers that recorded land only indirectly and located it through relational boundaries that did not travel well across distance. This talk examines how the Song came to assemble a parcel-based cadastral regime, culminating in the Southern Song fish-scale cadasters (yulin tuce). It argues that this regime was not the product of a single reform blueprint but of a contingent convergence of techniques: the fiscal management of escheated lands; the geometric logic of the square-field (fangtian), anchoring measurement in a marked grid; unique geocodes ingeniously borrowed and repurposed from Buddhist scriptoria; and topographic mapping born of disaster-relief measures. Under the Southern Song boundary surveys, these strands were integrated into a new cadastral system.

Bio: Chun Xu is Jing Brand Fellow at the Needham Research Institute. His research focuses on the technological history of statecraft in premodern China. From April 2026, he will be a research fellow at the Chair of Sinology at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, where he will work on his project “Towards a Data History of China,” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.