China is the third largest country in the world with an area of 3,657,
765 square miles. Canada is the second with 3,843,144, and the
US is fourth, after Brazil, with 3,022, 387 square miles.
But this great landmass is circumscribed by major geographic
limits. Far in the eastern side of Eurasia, China is surrounded on
all sides by huge physical barriers: to the east and south lie the
widest of the Oceans, the Pacific; to the west lie the highest
mountains of the world, the Himalayas; to the north a thousand
miles of desert occupied by the most militaristic nomads of the
world. Two-thirds of the country's land is mountainous or
semidesert (more than the US, Russia, or India); only 600,00
square miles of the land is effectively inhabited; barely 15% of the
land - some put the figure at 10 or 11 percent - is usable for
agriculture.
Yet more people have lived in China *throughout history* than
anywhere else. It all started in the eastern part of the provinces of
North China, much of Hopei province, the lowlands of western
Shantung and parts of Honan province, in the basin of the Hwang-
Ho or Yellow River, an area of loess-derived alluvium; the cradle of
the Chinese race, the birthplace of Chinese civilization, of the
Shang dynasty (1523-1027 BC), the home of Confucius, the center
of state authority, the location of the capital Peking.
This loess soil was ideal for farming; it was extremely fertile and
easy to work. The Yellow river, one of the 10 longest rivers on
earth, may carry up to 40 per cent sediment, much of which is
loess, a fine wind-blown silt. (The Yangtze River deposits more silt
than the Nile, Amazon, and Mississippi together; the Yellow River
deposits three times that of the Yangtze).
Once the Hwang-ho basin was fully colonized on an intensive basis
the build up of population led to the progressive settlement of
southern lands. However, despite the southward shift of
demographic growth during and after the Song (960AD-1276), the
North China plain remained throughout the largest *single* region in
terms of people. During Han times (206BC- 220AD), when
settlement of the south was in the early stages, the official census
of AD 2 recorded a population of 58 million, that is a population
larger than that of the whole contemporaneous Roman empire.
Much of this population, to repeat, was concentrated in the Hwang-
ho plain wich covers only 125,000 square miles.
I want to argue that the most important theme of Chinese history
has been the successive intense cultivation of highly fertile lands
leading to the normal growth of population until a point of
diminshing returns was reached at which point the Han Chinese
were taken up with the need to absorb new lands. There were five
or so major waves of migration, caused by Malthusian pressures
as well as wars and natural calamities leading to a gradual
occupation of south China, a process which took on a strictly
Malthusian overtone after 1500, after the Lower Yangze wet-rice
area had been intensively cultivated, *supported and facilitated by
the introduction of New World crops*.
