This paper provides the first estimates of housing price movements for Beijing in late pre-modern China. We hand-collect from archival sources transaction prices and other house attribute information from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for Beijing during the first two centuries of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1840), a long period without major wars, political turmoil, or significant institutional change in the Chinese capital. We use hedonic methods to construct a real estate price index for Beijing for the period. The regression analysis explains a major proportion of the variance of housing prices. We find that house prices grew steadily for the first half-century of the Qing Dynasty and declined afterwards in both nominal and real terms through the late eighteenth century. Nominal prices grew to start in the late eighteenth century and declined from the early nineteenth century through 1840. But these price changes occurred with contemporaneous price changes in basic measures of the cost of living: there was little change in real terms to the end of our period.

In this paper, we assemble a new and unique dataset for house prices in Beijing between 1644 and 1840 (that is, from the start of the Qing dynasty through 1840), a period without war, major political turmoil, or significant institutional change in the Chinese capital. 1We use the dataset to document long-run house price trends in Beijing. We combine this long-run house price index with historical information on population, economic conditions, government policies, and natural, political and economic shocks, and discuss what the driving forces behind the long-run historical price changes might be. We combine the historical house price series for Beijing with series for consumer goods prices and wages to estimate the change in real house prices. More speculatively, we relate these to recent and present price levels for housing in Beijing.