Hongwu’s tax system did indeed generate gigantic amounts of paperwork. The records for the entire population were stored by the Finance Ministry on three islands in the Xuanwu lake in Nanjing, curated by Finance Ministry staff. Each time the national census was carried out, thirty rooms had to be added to the archives to accommodate the new records. Though largely destroyed at the time of the Manchu conquest in 1645, it was perhaps the greatest archival project in history before modern times.
