From the agricultural point of view, the population and cultivated land area at that time far exceeded the previous historical period. According to statistics, in the 24th year of Kangxi (1685), there were 600 million mu of cultivated land in China. During the Qianlong period (1799), the cultivated land in China was about/kloc-0.05 million mu, and the grain output increased rapidly to 204 billion Jin. Barrow, who came to China with the Macartney Mission at that time, estimated that the grain harvest rate in China was higher than that in Britain. The wheat harvest rate is15:1,while that of Britain, which ranks first in Europe, is10:1. (Proceedings of the bicentennial seminar of Chinese and British communicators, 188, embassy in China) China's total crop output ranks first in the world. The population increased from about10.50 billion around/kloc-0.700 to about 310.30 billion in10.94 (59 years of Qianlong), accounting for13 of the world's 900 million people.
From the perspective of handicraft industry, it has also been improved to a considerable extent. With the expansion of production scale, manual workshops and handicrafts have gradually increased. Such as smelting industry in Guangdong, coal mining industry in western Beijing, textile industry in Jiangnan and copper mining industry in Yunnan. Manual division of labor is further refined, such as Jiangsu Songjiang cotton dyeing workshop, which is divided into blue workshop, red workshop, bleaching workshop and variegated workshop according to product types.
The market has also developed to a certain extent. Grain, cloth, cotton, silk, satin, tea and salt have become the main commodities, and their circulation value is 350 million silver (and Wu's History of Capitalism in China 1 vol., p. 284). If you add tobacco, wine, sugar, oil, coal, iron, porcelain and wood, it is not less than 4.
Foreign trade has increased substantially. The main export commodities are tea, silk and homespun, especially tea. /kloc-At the end of October/August, the British East India Company purchased an average of 4 million taels of tea from China every year. The total value of the main commodities (woolen goods, metals and cotton) shipped to China by British businessmen is not enough to offset the tea shipped from China. In order to balance the trade balance, British businessmen had to transport a lot of silver to China. During the reign of Kangxi, the positive tariff levied by the Qing Dynasty was 43,000 taels of silver, and in fact the tariff revenue greatly exceeded the positive tariff. By the end of Qianlong, the annual surplus (that is, excess) had reached 852,000, which was more than 20 times of the positive tariff set in Kangxi period. It was to balance the trade deficit with China that Britain brought a lot of opium into China and launched a vicious opium war.
/kloc-At the beginning of the 8th century, under the auspices of Emperor Kangxi, the Qing court undertook two huge scientific projects. One is the origin of calendar (17 13 17 22), which introduces various theories of Chinese and western music, musical instrument manufacturing, astronomical calendar, western mathematics and China arithmetic; The other is to draw the first detailed map of China with modern scientific methods (1708- 17 19).
China's cities have also made great progress. By the beginning of the19th century, there were ten cities with more than 500,000 residents in the world and six in China, namely, Beijing, Jiangning, Yangzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Guangzhou. The number of market towns below the city has also greatly increased. For example, Nanjing is a famous silk producing area with tens of thousands of silk weavers. Dozens of streets and hundreds of hutongs in the city are crowded with people. (Wu: "The Scholars") Jining, Shandong Province is a place where department stores gather, and merchants must invest in goods. (Records of Qianlong Jining Zhili Prefecture, Volume II, Customs)