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A painting of a gentry scholar with two courtesans, by Tang Yin, c. 1500. The four occupations (simplified Chinese: 士农工商; traditional Chinese: 士農工商; pinyin: Shì nóng gōng shāng), or "four categories of the people" (Chinese: 四民; pinyin: sì mín), [1] [2] was an occupation classification used in ancient China by either Confucian or Legalist scholars as far back as the ...
Farmers during the Ming dynasty had two groups. Self-sustained farmers accounted for 10% of all farmers while tenants farmers of wealthy landlords made up as much as 90%. They had more burdens and gained less harvest than self-sustained farmers. [26] Craftsmen were severely exploited by the government.
Tenant farmer on his front porch, south of Muskogee, Oklahoma (1939). A tenant farmer is a person (farmer or farmworker) who resides on land owned by a landlord.Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of ...
They mostly relied on poor tenant farmers (diannong 佃農) who paid rent in the form of roughly fifty percent of their produce in exchange for land, tools, draft animals, and a small house. [54] Wage laborers ( gunong 雇農) and slaves were also employed on the estates of the wealthy, although they were not as numerous as tenants. [ 55 ]
For millennia, agriculture has played an important role in the Chinese economy and society. By the time the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, virtually all arable land was under cultivation; irrigation and drainage systems constructed centuries earlier and intensive farming practices already produced relatively high yields.
Confucian or Legalist scholars in ancient China—perhaps as far back as the late Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BC)—categorized all socioeconomic groups into four broad and hierarchical occupations (in descending order): the shi (scholars, or gentry), the nong (peasant farmers), the gong (artisans and craftsmen), and the shang (merchants). [1]
Ancient family’s tomb uncovered after 1,800 years in China. See the treasures inside Medieval castle — a ‘witness to centuries of change’ — excavated in the UK.
The four occupations were the shì (士) the class of "knightly" scholars, mostly from lower aristocratic orders, the gōng (工) who were the artisans and craftsmen of the kingdom and who, like the farmers, produced essential goods needed by themselves and the rest of society, the nóng (農) who were the peasant farmers who cultivated the land which provided the essential food for the people ...