Revisiting Skinner: Counting Counties in Song China

Yidan Han and Tuan-hwee Sng

No 2025-02, CEI Working Paper Series from Center for Economic Institutions, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: We revisit a long-held consensus that the number of county-level units in imperial China remained stable and consistently hovered around 1,250 for two millennia. We argue that this consensus, traceable to G. W. Skinner 's influential introductory chapter in The City in Late Imperial China, focuses excessively on the county (xian), which exist ed throughout the imperial period, and overlooks other dynasty-specific types of field administration. During the Northern Song dynasty (960- 1127), alongside the predominantly rural counties, the state established various alternative types of field administration, most notably the towns (zhen), which administered urban households. Approximately 30% of the 1,900 towns existing in the year 1084 were staffed by centrally-appointed bureaucrat s. These officials collect ed t axes, provided basic public services, interact ed with the population daily, and were directly account able to the prefect. Overlooking the existence of these towns means underestimating not only the scale of the Song field administration, but also its sophistication. Unlike later dynasties, the Song state differentiated between urban and rural settlements administratively, and its urban coverage was unsurpassed until the modern age. We trace the precocity of the Song system to institutional innovations during the two centuries of political fragmentation that preceded the Song dynasty.

Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2026-03
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