results were achieved by others by just stimulating merchants to import
grain into deficit areas.

With the social structure of medieval Europe, similar financial and
fiscal developments which gave new chances to merchants, eventually led
to industrial capitalism and industrial society. In China, however, the
gentry in their capacity of officials hindered the growth of independent
trade, and permitted its existence only in association with themselves.
As they also represented landed property, it was in land that the
newly-formed capital was invested. Thus we see in the Sung period, and
especially in the eleventh century, the greatest accumulation of estates
that there had ever been up to then in China.

Many of these estates came into origin as gifts of the emperor to
individuals or to temples, others were created on hillsides on land
which belonged to the villages. From this time on, the rest of the
village commons in China proper disappeared. Villagers could no longer
use the top-soil of the hills as fertilizer, or the trees as firewood
and building material. In addition, the hillside estates diverted the
water of springs and creeks, thus damaging severely the irrigation works
of the villagers in the plains. The estates _(chuang)_ were controlled
by appointed managers who often became hereditary managers. The tenants
on the estates were quite often non-registered migrants, of whom we
spoke previously as "vagrants", and as such they depended upon the
managers who could always denounce them to the authorities which would
lead to punishment because nobody was allowed to leave his home without
officially changing his registration. Many estates operated mills and
even textile factories with non-registered weavers. Others seem to have
specialized in sheep breeding. Present-day village names ending with
_-chuang_ indicate such former estates. A new development in this period