era—resulting in five prefectures in the Taiping provinces being classified in the control group. We have tried a robustness check in which being occupied largely before or after 1860 is the criterion for the classification of the Early or the Late Taiping areas.<sup>35</sup> _Wasteland_ **.** Wasteland between the Taiping Rebellion era and 1915 is measured by the share of wasteland in total arable land in 1915 from the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture (1915), which provides county-level data for the Taiping provinces. Ideally, we need wasteland both before and after the rebellion to apply the DID approach. However, because the national agricultural survey in China started at the beginning of the 1910s, only cross-sectional regressions are feasible.

_Likin_ **.** Provincial-level annual _Likin_ revenues from 1861 to 1925 are available from two sources: those for 1861 to 1908 are from Luo (1936); those for 1920-1922 and 1925 are from The Second Historical Archives of China (1996) **.** Since _Likin_ was about spatial transportation costs, we normalize _Likin_ by the area of the region: _Likin_ per 1,000 square km.

_Control Variables._ We include key controls of prefecture characteristics that have implications for long-term development, such as geography, natural resources, and political importance. Proxies of geography include the distance to the Yangzi River, to the coastline, and to the Grand Canal (i.e., a major canal linking the north and the south), and the number of neighboring provinces of the prefecture. Such indicators of geography are important to control for because we need to filter out favorable geographical conditions under Taiping areas, and because we later rely on the longitude as the instrumental variable for Taiping areas based on the war-routing strategy of the Taiping Army. The number of neighboring provinces is controlled for because prefectures near multiple provincial borders were less tightly controlled by the provincial government; they were also more prone to rebellions, due to free-riding and monitoring difficulties stemming from a greater distance to the provincial government. All geographical variables are from China Historical GIS Data (Bol 2002). Since the treaty ports system has had strong impacts on population growth and income (Jia 2014), we control for the duration (in years) of being treaty ports before 1949 (Yan et al. 1955), and the duration of being concessions and leased territories (Fei 1991).

> 35 The year 1860 was the year after which the vast majority of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces were occupied by the Taiping Army. This definition largely coincides with our definition except for Jiangning and Zhenjiang prefectures (under the Qing definition), which were occupied before 1860. When using the alternative definition of the Late Taiping period based on whether a prefecture was occupied largely before or after 1860, if a prefecture was occupied longer after 1860 than before 1860, we define this prefecture as a Late Taiping area. For example, if prefecture _A_ is occupied by the Taiping Army for 11 months before 1860, and for 20 months after 1860, then we define _A_ as a Late Taiping area. In this case, Jiangning and Zhengjiang prefectures (of Jiangsu) are included in the Early Taiping areas. The qualitative results (available upon request) remain the same.

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