Hi, sorry I appreciate this is a bit of a wide question but more than happy to be pointed to resources. Long story short, for a piece of writing I'm looking at pre-industrial society where rice is the staple crop: how dense the population is, how close the farms would be to cities and market towns etc. The basic precedent I'm going for is historical China, most specifically Hunan/wider southern China during the Song, although information about similar places/slightly further out time periods would also be greatly appreciated. I've got a pretty good grounding in Chinese history but never studied the rural/economic history in huge detail - I've found some things on JSTOR which have helped e.g. 'Rural China in the Song' (Peter J. Golas in Journal of Asian Studies, 1980) but they've not been hugely helpful for visualising the physical landscape itself.
I've read a very helpful blog post from historian Bret Devereaux which focuses on wheat-based farming systems - he makes reference to good stuff being out there on rice, so if anyone knows of where to find such resources / is happy to explain then I'd hugely appreciate it!
edit: Have been recommended F. Bray, "The Rice Economies" and Z. Xu, "Han Agriculture" elsewhere, in case anyone else is interested.
Provincial data for the period seem in short supply, but a broad picture can be gleaned from the official tallies reported in Dwight Perkins, Agricultural development in China 1368-1968 and the more tentative estimates of Gilbert Rozman, Urban networks in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan: both concentrate on later periods but include figures for the Song.
The long-run population record shows (apart from the Yuan period) a remarkable consistency in Hunan's share of China's population at around or just over 5% over most of the last millennium, with a million recorded households in 1173 indicating a population rather over 5 million, or 25 persons per sq km (a density slightly below the average for the 18 provinces of China proper or contemporary Italy, and rather higher than in France).
The cultivated acreage returns suggest a similar share, again excluding the Yuan: Perkins appears to consider the 1082 provincial return of 33.2m Song mu (1.88m hectares, 8.9% of the province's 211,000 sq km) an overstatement, but it seems near the mark after allowance for what looks like substantial under-reporting in other provinces (indicating a serious shortfall in his estimate of 24m ha for the Empire as a whole). If three-quarters of Hunan's households were engaged in agriculture as in early 20th-century China and landlessness was rare, the average holding would be around 44 mu or 2½ ha, roughly twice the 19th-century level.
Hunan was in later periods rather less urbanised than the Empre as a whole whose proportion urban Rozman puts at just over 5% under the Song, a figure that has been criticised as too low but is again probably of the right order of magnitude: if the province's subsequent share remained roughly consistent as suggested by the other indicators, we might have roughly two dozen cities and towns exceeding 3,000 inhabitants and perhaps 80-90 smaller market localities each serving an average area with a radius of 25 km.
That's about as much as can reasonably be gleaned from the materials I have to hand, I'm afraid: it does bring out to me the sparseness of settlement even at such a time of agricultural attainment. I'd welcome more about a province that seems far more representative than those which tend to draw the lion's share of attention (though that could be partly down to data limitations). But there must be more out there.