Tenant farmers under the Qing period experienced a multitude of both reforms and revivals of taxation and rent payment. As many tenant farmers would be lifted from legal serfdom under their landlords at the outset of the 1820s, pre existing fees and taxes would be leveraged in-kind via rents to landlords. While landlords could no longer extort services from their tenants, they could affect taxes and payment adjacent to municipal bureaucratic structures (Theobald, 2000). Tenants likewise during this period would gradually begin to pay these rents and taxes in quota-based fees rather than paying lords through their services. Contracts would reflect this new relationship in the tenant’s right to work their own land so long as they paid their quotas until the contract’s end.
In terms of land use itself, parcels of land were often divided up into small plots that could be worked by a collective of 1-4 households where the landlord would retain a larger parcel for their own use (Marks, 1996). This divvying up of the land was attributed to the nature of rice cultivation and the pressures of growing urban environments and geographical constrictions. With land being a constraint and rice being a labor intensive crop, rice farmers could better maximize their yields within a small area of land by paying close attention to each rice plant in their fields. Thus, it was more advantageous for any landlord, be they an owner or lower subletter of rented lands, to keep their best fields for their use while renting out smaller plots to other families. Families of 10-15 people could reliably nurture their rice paddies and send payment to their renter in the form of rice crop quotas or monies.