greencactaur wrote:Are there any records of sun quan or liu bei using such torture devices? The 3k period sounds like an awful time to be alive .
The Later Han-Jin Dynasty transition period saw the population of China reduced to a third. While there is some argument over this, with many asserting that the reason why the numbers were so low had to deal with taxable population centers, this is in some ways a distraction. Some of the most densely populated areas of China were depopulated to the point where frontier peoples were imported whole-sale to bolster numbers and make territories governable. Copious references are given to plagues, floods, years of dearth (which is a codeword for starvation), mass executions and slaughter, refugees fleeing by the thousands and tens of thousands, and so forth. Refugees transformed the territory of Yang province from a backwater territory that was an afterthought to a regional powerhouse that could contend for control of the nation. The entire government of China, along with much of its bureaucracy, was overthrown. There are a number of areas where traditional order was maintained, but for the most part you had the emergence of warlords who were able to create their own sense of authority and thus shifted the locus of government and the scholar-gentry to themselves.
That the taxable population of China remained so low after concentrated efforts at relocation and establishment of governance, and with so little complaint of such practices noted in any record that we have available, highlights just how bloody and violent this period was. 60 million people to under 20. Should we be generous and say a fifth of the population of China were outside of taxation purposes, then about 25 million people remained alive in China after almost a hundred years of concentrated warfare. This is so even when one would consider that families would still be founded, and children born to high fertility parents would be quite common. This isn't like China had to recover with 2-3 children, this is as though China could barely avoid total destruction with 5 to 8 children born every generation with disease, starvation, and war taking almost all of them.
Unless someone has a better reasoned article than the ones I've read for the demographic collapse of the Later Han, honestly it was a miracle that the War of the 8 Princes didn't result in China's irrevocable collapse - and thus makes something like the Wu Hu rebellions and the Northern Dynastic period one of the better potentialities for the nation after the Sima family went into an internal murder spree using what little remained of the Chinese populace as cannon fodder.