The Ming was something of a curiosity in terms of its tax provisions, compared to most of the other Chinese dynastic eras of rule. Though the regime certainly borrowed extensively from previous dynastic policies – financial policies such as having supervisors double as fiscal auditors, circulation of paper government notes to act as currency, the trade and taxation of tea for horses with the nomads of central Asia, and governmental monopoly on the production and sale of salt being the most obvious examples of policies taken up pretty much wholesale from the Yuan, Song, and Tang regimes that preceded the Ming. At the same time, the early Ming state differed substantively from its antecedents – and thus set the tone for the whole dynasty – in terms of remarkably high concentration of power in the person of the emperor himself, and thus a relatively smaller number of regional and local administrators, as well as a greater reliance on agrarian sources of revenue than its predecessosr, especially after the death of the second emperor and the heavy restriction of maritime trade.

Part of the reason for these differences stems from the fact that under the Ming regime, policy was focused on correcting the perceived imbalance in development between different regions of the realm. The coastal regions – much like China today – profited immensely from foreign trade and craft work, while the interior toiled under much the same agrarianism that had been the lot of a farmer since time immemorial. From Ray Huang:

As the Ming administrators saw it, to promote those advanced sectors of the economy would only widen the economic imbalance, which in turn would threaten the empire's political unity. It was far more desirable to keep all the provinces on the same footing, albeit at the level of the more backward sectors of the economy. The Ming fiscal policies were largely determined by this attitude. Such an approach seems absurd to the modern historian, in that it sacrificed China's long-term economic growth for the sake of a short-term political aim. Ming administrators, however, did not have the foresight to visualize the contributions that industry and commerce could ultimately render to a modern state.

China was vastly larger than any Western European state, or those feudal territories of pre-Tokugawa Japan for that matter. What this meant was that promoting industy and commerce would have far more visible and immediate positive effects on those smaller territories, whereas across the vastness of the Ming, such benefits were much less clear. Another explanation was that – again, very much unlike Japan or Europe – within the borders of the Ming, there was virtually no regional competition, and thus no real impetus to revise or adapt policies that were deemed “good enough.” In other words, Ming administrators felt that they “could afford the price of backwardness” to achieve their goal of uniform stability over the whole empire.

The Ming tax system was based on household registration, the so-called Yellow Book system (huangce) with a census to be taken every 10 years beginning in 1381 under the personal direction of the founding Hongwu Emperor, and with the last Ming census completed in 1642, just two years before the dynasty’s collapse. The population as a whole was classified into 4 broad categories: 1) general population, 2) hereditary military families, 3) artisans, and 4) households involved in the state production of salt.

Travel and trade, though not outright forbidden, were heavily discouraged. This is probably best summed up by Hongwu’s favorite moral dicta from the Dao Dejing:

Let the state be small and the people few;
So that the people... fearing death, will be reluctant to move great distances
And, even if they have boats and carts, will not use them.
So that the people... will find their food sweet and their clothes beautiful,
Will be content with where they live and happy in their customs.
Though adjoining states be within sight of one another and cocks crowing and dogs barking in one be heard in the next,
Yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.

In order to travel from state to state one had to have an official passport and be registered with the government. Those found in contravention of these demands were harshly punished. Once again, this is largely because extensive trade tended to promote regional inequality and disuniformity, one of if not the primary concern of the Ming court.

Part of the tax collected was in the form of compelled, unpaid labor, or the levy system. In every villages, households were organized into the lijia system. Every 110 households formed a li, with each li being further subdivided into 10 jia of 10 households each. The remaining 10 households – those deemed to be the largest and wealthiest by census-takers – took turns each year to act as the head of their li. Each year within a li, one of the 10 jia would be tapped as levy labor:

Under the direction of the li chief of the year, it performed the local tax collection and delivery, and met all material and labor requisitions on behalf of the entire li. The other units paid their regular taxes, but were not liable to service obligations that year. Thus in a decennial period all households took a one-year turn at discharging their service obligations. After the ten-year cycle a new census was taken and all li-chia were re- organized in accordance with the changes that had occurred during the decade. With certain variations, the wards and precincts in the cities were organized along similar lines.

Services rendered by the jia called up for their year-long spate of duties could expect to perform tasks for the government such as providing office attendants for the administration, from the county all the way up to the imperial government... in role as varied as doormen, guards, messengers, litter-bearer, cooks, buglers, boatmen, patrolmen, jailers, stable grooms, receiving men in warehouses, operators of canal watergates, and clerical assistants. As mentioned, this wasn’t necessarily confined to one’s home region, but instead wherever the government deemed a vacancy needed to be filled.

In terms of materials that were requisitioned from the lijia system, they too fell completely on the “designated jia, and could be quite extensive. They were to supply the local government with things like stationary, oil, charcoal, and candles, as well as military equipment like swords, bows, arrows, and uniforms. And from regions of interesting or useful botanical growth, a jia could expect to have herbs and medicinal plants as a part of the quotas. These quotas were based on the basic fiscal unit of the ting, meaning able-bodied male – and what one of those “ought” to be expected to be able to provide. Unlike, say, a land tax though, there were elements of progressive taxation: households were not all expected to be able to contribute the same, but were instead classified into upper, middle, and lower categories, with obligations distributed accordingly. This would work well at the beginning of the dynasty, but as time went on and more and more families were able to commute their jia obligations through payments of silver, problems gradually cropped up at a systemic level.