See how to collect property tax in ancient times.

Recently, the news of levying property tax has been widely circulated. People think that property tax is a new tax in China. In fact, property tax is not a tax in the modern sense. As early as in ancient China, property tax was levied. There is evidence that China is probably the first country to levy property tax. "Zhou Li" once recorded that "the palm of your hand is divided into the whole government". Cloth is equivalent to the property tax collected at that time, and it is part of the land tax, which is divided into three types of houses. As an independent tax, it is no longer included in the land tax. Property tax began with the "shelf tax" levied in the fourth year of the founding of the Tang Dynasty (AD 783). Zhao Zan, then Assistant Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, suggested setting up a "shelf tax" on the grounds of "military refusal". The so-called "open shelf, two rooms per room" is a kind of property tax with housing as the object of taxation, also known as "house tax" Its collection method is "house tax is 2000 yuan, middle tax is 1000 yuan, and 500 yuan is taxed". It can be seen that the taxpayer is the owner of the house, the tax object is the house, and the tax basis is the external sign of the house, which is divided into three categories: upper house, middle house and lower house. For those who hide and don't report, "Dare to hide in one room, post sixty, and reward the reporter with fifty taels of silver." This practice of levying housing tax regardless of income has made some "well-dressed gentry or poor people with no money stick to their old jobs and work hard in many houses, causing hundreds of thousands of people to suffer." Ordinary civilians are even more unbearable. At that time, this "shelving tax" was actually a heavy tax. Therefore, in the first year of Xingyuan (AD 784), there was a mutiny in Chang 'an, that is, the slogan of not accepting shelving and excluding strangers was put forward in Chang 'an, forcing Tang Dezong to abolish it together with other taxes. Later, it was collected in all previous dynasties, but it stopped as soon as it was collected. When it stopped, it was not that the house was not taxed, but most of it was incorporated into the land tax and collected together. "In the early Qing Dynasty, local miscellaneous taxes flourished, and there were pavement taxes in Wan and Ping counties; Some places have a room tax; Jiangning has cloth and banknotes; Shi Jing has two factories, Liuli and Liangwa, which pay taxes for Tan. These are all housing taxes, which were gradually abolished during the Qianlong period. 1840 after the opium war, in some big city concessions occupied by western powers, taxes such as house donation were forcibly levied on the pretext of sufficient funds for house arrest, which opened the real source of the history of house donation in modern times. In some areas under the jurisdiction of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, houses were donated. The collection method is different, according to the number of rooms and the donation by day. According to historical records, the levy was: Jiaxing, Tongxiang and Changshu donated money. In the 24th year of Guangxu reign in Qing Dynasty (A.D. 1898), the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development ordered all provinces to review the number of shops in urban market towns, copy the concession method, and stipulated the articles of association for donating houses: "All rented houses shall be taxed at 10% of the monthly rent, and the landlords and tenants shall bear half of it. Those who live in their own houses are taxed at 10% according to the rent of the rented houses nearby. "But it was ordered to stop before it was implemented. Later, after the end of Eight-Nation Alliance War and the signing of the "Xin Chou Treaty", the Qing government undertook huge reparations. However, at that time, the income of the Qing court dropped sharply, the expenditure increased greatly and the national treasury was empty. So the Qing government shared the compensation amount among the provinces, so the Regulations on House Donation was tried again in the 27th year of Guangxu (A.D. 190 1 year), but the implementation was different in different places.