Although the scale of private reclamation was expanded
continuously, it was still very limited as a whole. According to
Chronicle of the L. sea salt industry (Ji, 1806), in the middle of 16th
century, the total land area of all the Jiangsu saltworks was around
5616.1 km2, and the farmland occupied about 612.4 km2, i.e., 10.9%
of the total. In 1761, the farmland areas were 10.6% of the total,
almost the same as the middle 16th century. Such a rate implies
that probably for more than two centuries, farmland and grassland
maintained a relatively stable proportion about 1:9 in the total land