After the Qing government abolished the garrison system, military households and military colonies under garrisons were either transferred to the civil jurisdictions of departments and counties, or managed as newly established civil jurisdictions. After the reorganization of local administrative units (lijia 里甲) in coastal Shandong after the garrisons were dissolved, we find that these military households and colonies were either organized as new civil administrative units (she 社), or merged into the existing administrative system as “attached units,” while still keeping their military-colony name. In other words, the demarcation between commoner households and military ones still existed to some degree. The policy to privatize military colonies declared in 1729 was not compulsory. On the contrary, while the head and the land taxes collected from military households and colonies were usually designated for specific purposes, in order to collect the full amount,, local governments had no choice but to follow previous registration records, collecting them from previous registered military-colony households. In some places, non-military-colony households were not permited to purchase military lands. Therefore, the demarcation between military-colony households and commoner households persisted until the early Republican period.
Scholars who have studied the Xingningyi(興寧一) household in Lanshan County, Hunan, and the Guangyongmao(關永茂) household in Dongshan Island, Fujian, have claimed that, after the administration of garrisons was transferred to civil jurisdictions, military households who lost their registered status applied to the local government (county or department) as a new household under civilian registration. In this paper, I argue that both of these were military households that were already under local civil registration. Based on the properties they had bought from other commoner households, they applied as new commoner households under the local government, expecting that this additional household status could integrate them more smoothly into the local administrative system. As for those military households in the garrisons, except for those who were sent back to their hometowns, before the Qing government ordered a review of the registration of military households, most had been locally registered, and incorporated into local civil administrative units with their military colonies. However, their registered households were regarded as commoner households in some places, but military households or garrison households in other places. In the case of Lanshan and some other places, they were termed as military-colony households. In sum, the transfer of military households and military colonies into local civil administration during the Ming-Qing transition was a process that varied place by place, requiring further detailed study of the historical records.
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