This, according to his calculation, shows a surplus of nearly twenty millions of taels every year. But the outlays for quelling insurrections and transporting troops, deficiency from bad harvests, defalcation of officers, payments to the tribes and princes in Mongolia and Ílí, and other unusual demands, more than exceed this surplus. In 1833, the Peking Gazette contained an elaborate paper on the revenue, proposing various ways and means for increasing it. The author, named Na, says the income from land tax, the gabel, customs and transit duty, does not in all exceed forty millions of taels, while the expenditures should not much transcend thirty in years of peace.[166] This places the budget much lower than other authorities, but the censor perhaps includes only the imperial resources, though the estimate would then be too high. The pay and equipment of the troops is the largest item of expenditure, and it is probable that here the apparent force and pay are far too great, and that reductions are constantly made in this department by compelling the soldiers to depend more and more for support upon the plats of land belonging to them. It is considered the best evidence of good government on the part of an officer to render his account of the revenue satisfactorily, but from the injudicious system which exists of combining fiscal, legislative, and judicial functions and control in the same person, the temptations to defraud are strong, and the peculations proportionably great.

The salaries of officers, for some reasons, are placed so low as to prove that the legal allowances were really the nominal incomes, and the sums set against their names in the Red Book as yang tien, or anti-extortion perquisites (lit., ‘nourishing frugality’), are the salaries. That of a governor-general is from 15,000 to 25,000 taels for the latter, and only 180 or 200 taels for the legal salary; a governor gets 15,000 when he is alone, and 10,000 or 12,000 when under a governor-general; a treasurer from 4,500 to 10,000; a judge from 3,000 to 8,000; a prefect from 2,000 to 4,500; district magistrates from 700 to 1,000, according to the onerousness of the post; an intendant from 3,000 to 4,500; a literary chancellor from 2,000 to 5,000; and military men from 4,000 taels down to 100 or 150 per annum. The perquisites of the highest and lowest officers are disproportionate, for the people prefer to lay their important cases before the highest courts at once, in order to avoid the expense of passing through those of a lower grade. The personal disposition of the functionary modifies the exactions he makes upon the people so much, that no guess can be made as to the amount.

The land tax is the principal resource for the revenue in rural districts, and this is well understood by all parties, so that there is less room for exactions. The land tax is from 1½ to 10 cents a mao (or from 10 to 66 cents an acre), according to the quality of the land, and difficulty of tillage; taking the average at 25 cents an acre, the income from this source would be upward of 150 millions of dollars. The clerks, constables, lictors, and underlings of the courts and prisons, are the “claws” of their superiors, as the Chinese aptly call them, and perform most of their extortions, and are correspondingly odious to the people. In towns and trading places, it is easier for the officers to exact in various ways from wealthy people, than in the country, where rich people often hire bodies of retainers to defy the police, and practise extortion and robbery themselves. Like other Asiatic governments, China suffers from the consequences of bribery, peculation, extortion, and poorly paid officers, but she has no powerful aristocracy to retain the money thus squeezed out of the people, and ere long it finds its way out of the hands of emperors and ministers back into the mass of the people. The Chinese believe, however, that the Emperor annually remits such amounts as he is able to collect into Mukden, in time of extremity; but latterly he has not been able to do so at all, and probably never sent as much to that city as the popular ideas imagine. The sum applied to filling the granaries is much larger, but this popular provision in case of need is really a light draft upon the resources of the country, as it is usually managed. In Canton, there are only fourteen buildings appropriated to this purpose, few of them more than thirty feet square, and none of them full.