290 LAND REFORMwas inefficient, and the peas'ants in fact sold off their allotments either to alle-
viate indebtedness or to payoff the land and household taxes. The toleration of
purchase and sale even allowed slaves to accumulate greater holdings than com-
moner peasants.~5
Although the k 'ou~fen-t'ien allotment system was reinstituted in the Sui and
Tang, population density continued to be a problem, which the government off-
set by grants of reduced sizc. Tang law also permitted peasants willing to move
from overpopulated to underpopulated areas to sell their k'ou-fen allotments;
like the Northern Wei, the purchaser could not buy more than he was legally
entitled to, and all sales had to be approved by the authorities.^46 Otherwise the
property would be confiscated by the officials.
Yu ended his discussion of the equal-field system in China with the remarks
of Tu Yu and Ma Tuan-lin. Tu Yu (T'ung-lien) noted that by the middle of the
eighth century the equal-field system had broken down completely and the prob-
lem of land accumulation and large holdings was worse than the late first cen-
tury B.C. during the Former Han dynasty.47 Ma Tuan-lin (compiler of the
Wen-hsien t'ung-kuo) identified the method of taxation as the major cause of
the failure of the equal-field system. Instead of using land as the basis of taxa-
tion, which he claimed was the principle used in the Hsia, Shang, and Chou dynas-
ties of antiquity, the governments of the Northern and Southern dynasties and
Tang used households or individuals as the subject of taxation. In the san-tai
pcriod land was granted to people without household or capitation taxes; in the
Former and Later Han dynasties there were no land grants but light household
taxes were begun; in the period from the Northern Wei through the Tang, house-
hold taxes were levied supposedly in return for land grants but governments were
unable to guarantee regular land grants while the burden of household taxes
increased to oppressive levels.^48
Yu Hyongwon expanded at length on Ma's interpretation. The main fault of
the equal-field system was "registering adult males to establish labor service
and calculating population in order to divide up and grant land."49 The author-
ities should have surveycd the land to establish correct land boundaries. Because
they did not, it was easy for individuals to encroach on the land of others. Reg-
ulations were also too complex, which made it difficult to administer the sys-
tem. Complex regulations required complex record-keeping to maintain accuracy
and fairness, but it was difficult to keep accurate records and ensure that the
agricultural population would remain fixed and stationary. Written records could
not keep up with the migratory shifts in the population, and a system of land
grants based on population offered no ftexibiity for dealing with this problem.
As a result, there were too many inaccuracies in the records and too many cases
of undcrregistration.so
Furthermore, a system of capitation or household taxes produced a particu-
larly egregious form of corruption and oppression. If certain individuals fled the
village or died. the officials would make up the lost tax revenues or military ser-
vice obligations by increasing the assessments on neighboring households. The