The collection consists of 166 land deeds from the Library’s own collection, 19 land deeds from the Mak Chi Yeung Collection, and six volumes of fish-scale register (yulin tuce).
The land deeds from the Library’s own collection span over three hundred years from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to the mid-twentieth century. Most of them are from the Qing Dynasty, mainly receipts of Shanxi province. The land deeds from the Mak Chi Yeung Collection are the land deeds of the Mak family in Shunde, Guangdong province, generously donated by Mr. Mak Chi Yeung.
Land deeds are unique primary resources for studying the history of land tenure in China. Each land deed generally includes location, owner, buyer, seller, land description, sale price, transaction date, and witnesses. After the sale is completed, the buyer will take the sale contract to the local magistrate’s office and have the land re-registered for land taxation in the buyer’s own name. A supplementary document (qiwei, 契尾) was then issued by the magistrate’s office with local government seal and attached to the end of the sale contract. These land documents not only reflect the land ownership changes but also provide political, economic, and social information of the past.
Fish-scale registers are field cadasters for taxation purposes. In the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), land information was recorded in a “fish-scale register”, where the land pieces were drawn like fish scales. It recorded the location of each piece of land, holder, place’s name, shape, borders, and total area from which land tax was to be collected.
