Chapter III
FINANCE
LIKE all Chinese matters involving reference to statistics, facts about the national revenue and expenditure are difficult to obtain. Great variations appear in the statements of European writers who undertook to discuss the subject between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The earliest estimate, that of a French missionary—Père Trigault, writing in 1587—put the Central Government's income at twenty millions of taels, or about eight millions sterling, taking the tael at its then value of eight shillings, approximately; and sixty-eight years later, another authority computed the figure to be five and a half times as large. Then, after a short interval, there appeared estimates the lowest of which was five millions sterling, and the highest (Barrow's in 1796), forty-nine millions. On the whole, however, the consensus was that the revenue actually reaching Peking aggregated from twelve to fifteen millions sterling annually, and that the revenues collected for local purposes totalled about thirty-five millions.
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