Editing Qing dynasty (section)

=== Revenue ===

The recorded revenues of the central Qing government increased little over the course of the 18th and early 19th century from 36,106,483 taels in 1725 to 43,343,978 taels in 1812 before declining to 38,600,570 taels in 1841, the land tax was the principal source of revenue for the central government with the salt, customs and poll taxes being important secondary sources.{{sfnp|Twitchett|Fairbank|1978|p=61}} Following the Opium Wars and the opening of China to foreign trade and the mid-century rebellions, two further important sources of revenue were added: the foreign maritime customs revenue and the ''[[Likin (taxation)|likin]]'' revenue though only 20% of the likin revenue was actually given by the provinces to Hu Pu ([[Ministry of Revenue (imperial China)|board of revenue]]) in Beijing the rest remaining in provincial hands, the Hu Pu also managed to raise some miscellaneous taxes and increased the rate of the salt tax these measures doubled revenue by the late 19th century, this however was insufficient for the central government which was facing numerous crises and wars during the period and 9 foreign loans amounting to 40mil taels were contracted by the Qing government prior to 1890.{{sfnp|Twitchett|Fairbank|1978|pp=61–62}}

It was estimated in the 1850s that wages around the capital of Beijing and the Yangtze delta region for a farmer was between 0.99 and 1.02 taels a month; assuming every day was worked, this would amount to roughly 12 taels a year with over 400,000,000 citizens in 1890 the level of taxation was extremely low.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Peng |first=Linan |year=2021 |title=The last guardian of the throne: the regional army in the late Qing dynasty |journal=Journal of Institutional Economics |volume=17 |issue=2 |pages=328–329 |doi=10.1017/S1744137420000430 |s2cid=225162563}}</ref>

The Financial Reorganisation bureau of the Dynasty (established in 1909) estimated total revenue to be 292,000,000 taels. H.B. Morse estimated in the early 1900s a total of 284,150,000 taels of which 99,062,000 taels was spent by the Central government, 142,374,000 taels by the provincial governments and the remainder by the local government. In 1911 the Consultative assembly estimated total revenue to be 301,910,297 taels. Included in this figure was over 44,000,000 taels from the Likin of which only 13,000,000 was reported to Beijing.{{sfnp|Twitchett|Fairbank|1978|pp=63–66}}

The Qing government during and following the First Sino-Japanese war increasingly took on loans to meet its expenditure requirements a total of 746,220,453 taels of which slightly over 330,000,000 taels was for Railway construction and the repayment to come from the revenues of the railways themselves thus these loans did not burden the central government finances. A relatively small sum of just over 25,500,000 taels was borrowed for industrial projects, over 5,000,000 taels for Telegraph lines with less than 1,000,000 taels for miscellaneous purposes. The remainder was primarily for the costs of the Sino-Japanese war and the indemnity in the Treaty of Shimonoseki amounting to over 382,000,000 taels.{{sfnp|Twitchett|Fairbank|1978|pp=63–66}}

Taizu noted that these figures for formal taxation only amounted to half of the total taxation and therefore revenue of the government with these surcharges being levied at a local level by local officials who found the level of taxation far too low to support even basic governance, despite the ability to levy surcharges belonging solely to the central government.<ref>{{Cite book |first=Taizu |last=Zhang |title=The ideological foundations of Qing taxation:Belief systems, Politics, and institutions |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2023 |isbn=978-1108995955 |pages=46, 69, 99}}</ref>