Mongol epoch. But
all this was frustrated in the very first years of Chu's reign. The laws
were only half carried into effect or not at all, especially in the
hinterland of the present Shanghai. That region had been conquered by
Chu at the very beginning of the Ming epoch; in it lived the wealthy
landowners who had already been paying the bulk of the taxes under the
Mongols. The emperor depended on this wealthy class for the financing of
his great armies, and so could not be too hard on it.

Chu Yuean-chang and his entourage were also unable to free themselves
from some of the ideas of the Mongol epoch. Neither Chu, nor anybody
else before and long after him discussed the possibility of a form of
government other than that of a monarchy. The first ever to discuss this
question, although very timidly, was Huang Tsung-hsi (1610-1695), at the
end of the Ming dynasty. Chu's conception of an emperor was that of an
absolute monarch, master over life and death of his subjects; it was
formed by the Mongol emperors with their magnificence and the huge
expenditure of their life in Peking; Chu was oblivious of the fact that
Peking had been the capital of a vast empire embracing almost the whole
of Asia, and expenses could well be higher than for a capital only of
China. It did not occur to Chu and his supporters that they could have
done without imperial state and splendour; on the contrary, they felt
compelled to display it. At first Chu personally showed no excessive
signs of this tendency, though they emerged later; but he conferred
great land grants on all his relatives, friends, and supporters; he
would give to a single person land sufficient for 20,000 peasant
families; he ordered the payment of state pensions to members of the
imperial family, just as the Mongols had done, and the total of these
pension payments was often higher than the revenue of the region
involved. For the capital alone over eight million _shih_ of grain had
to be provided in payment of pensions--that is to say, more than 160,000
tons! These pension payments were in themselves a heavy burden on the
state; not only that, but they formed a difficult transport problem! We
have no close figure of the total population at the beginning of the
Ming epoch; about 1500 it is estimated to have been 53,280,000, and this
population had to provide some 266,000,000 _shih_ in taxes. At the
beginning of the Ming epoch the population and revenue must, however,
have been