A Study On The Urban Population Of Shaanxi County In The Qing Dynasty

Historical town geography is the most dynamic field of historical human geography, which scholars has payed more and more attention to. The scope of the existing studies are mainly about large and medium cities, the regional areas of which are more concentrated in the southern area, the research contents focus more on the history of cities. However, there are a few concerns on the county town. We are actively implementing the strategy of urbanization. The urbanization rate, which is the proportion of the city population of the total population in a certain region, is an important indicator of the urbanization level. So the research on city population is particularly necessary.This dissertation takes the Shaanxi county towns in Qing Dynasty as the research object, and gets the city population size of them by researching the residence living in the county town.The dissertation is divided into introduction, body text and conclusion.The first part is the introduction which introduces the reason and significance of the selected topic, the situation of relative academic and research review, and some definition of some certain terms used in the article.The body text consists of five chapters.Chapter I reviews the development history of Shaanxi county, discusses the general shape of the county town, sizes up the Shaanxi county of Qing Dynasty by the square and circular quadrature formula, which lays foundation for evaluating the residence population of the county town.Chapter II analyzes the occupation structure of the city population. The city population consists of industrialists and merchants, civil servants and local government clerks, the garrison, the student group, the orphan, the poor, the vagrant, slaves and prisoners and some other categories.Chapter III and chapter IV, which constitute the main parts of the article, restores the city population of Shaanxi county town of the Qing Dynasty. The two chapters firstly introduce the social background of the time, clear the method used in this article, and then according to the city population density method estimate the county town population of the Northern Shaanxi, Guanzhong Basin and Southern Shaanxi three geographical units respectively. The result shows, the number of Shaanxi county population of the early Qing Dynasty is generally higher than that of the late Qing Dynasty, and the county population in Guanzhong area is larger than that in Northern and Southern Shaanxi. The paper verifies the data, analyzes the reason of some county population size of maximum or minimum.Chapter V analyzes the influencing factors of residence population of Shaanxi county town in Qing Dynasty from the three aspects:natural geography environment, social environment and economy level. Generally speaking, the city population of the county town with a superior natural condition, stable social environment, convenient traffic and developed economy is large, otherwise small. In other words, the agricultural economy level determines the city population amount that a region can support, and the commercial economy degree determines the number of city population that a city can attract, which has profound significance on our practicing the strategy of urbanization.The third part summarizes the dissertation briefly, and puts forward some views for the lack of power in the process of urbanization development of Shaanxi county.