Practice of Ya tsu 押租 in Old China

Abstract

Ya tsu is a manner of contract which combined mortage and lease of lands and houses, and it means renting of a house or a piece of land by means of trustint money or silver in advance for the tent. This article deals only with ya tsu of farms. As population growth of tenant farmers brought about relative shortage of land, there arose a keen competition among them for tenements. Some of them, in hope of being given a preference, began to pay in advance certain amount of rent for the year either in copper coins or in silver. As the competition intensified more and more, the amount of money offered in advance gradually increased, till there appeared ` chung ting ch'ing tsu '重頂軽租, which meant to pay a large amount of copper or silver in advance at the beginning of the term of a contract with paying an insignificant amount of rent annually. And the landlords used the money they received from their tenant farmers for money-lending business at high interest. The rise in the amount of money thus deposited led to expulsion of the poorer class of tenant farmers from competition, leaving only substantial, stable farmers. It sometimes happened that because a landlord had not ready money to pay back the deposit to a tenant farmer when he threw up his lease, the farmer transferred his lease to another farmer who gave him that amount of money for it; while there appeared a group of big farmers who leased a large area of land from one or more landlords to sublet the land to poor farmers of the lower class at higher rent than they themselves paid to the landlords. The relationship between a landlord and a tenant farmer when the land was leased by ya tsu resembled that when the land was leased by t'ien mien 田面. Many recently published reports of the investigation into old rural practices have described the right of a tenant farmer who deposited a large amount of money by ya tsu as ` t'ien mien ', but there was a great difference between them, and it can be said that the more the practice of ya tsu developed the more declined the practice of t'ien mien.