A page from the Wuzhou Fish-Scale Inventory. [Photo/WeChat account: jhfabu]
Jinhua's Fish-Scale Inventory, a kind of land register made in ancient China, was included as part of the fifth batch of Chinese archive heritage items recently.
The Fish-Scale Inventory is an important land registration archive, according to officials from the Jinhua Archives. In ancient China, the government had to compile records for each piece of land for tax collection, including numbers, drawings, and property right confirmation, and then registering the information in the book. The book was named for its fish-scale pattern.
The Fish-Scale Inventory was the basis for land administration and taxation in ancient China and the most important land registration archive since the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.
Jinhua (formerly known as Wuzhou) is the birthplace and prototype of the Fish-Scale Inventory. The Wuzhou Fish-Scale Inventory has a long history and abundant stock and is the best sample for researching related policies such as the natural form of cultivated land in the region, the distribution of land rights, and the system of taxation and servitude.
Zhang Haipeng, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a famous historian, once commented that the Fish-Scale Inventory found in Zhejiang (especially Wuzhou) is the most complete, systematic and coherent fish scale book found in China so far.
