The jingtian or "well-field" was an idealised land division in which a square was cut into nine equal plots like the character for a well, eight outer plots farmed privately by eight households and the central plot worked in common for the lord. The fullest account is in the Mencius of the fourth century BCE, which presents it as the just Zhou order; whether it was ever fully practised is disputed and archaeology has found no clear grid. As a normative model it nonetheless anchored Chinese debate on equitable land allotment and the state's claim to regulate it. Reformers and dynasts repeatedly invoked it when redistributing land.
The well-field became the founding ideal of Chinese land policy, a template for state-managed, gridded allotment that echoes through later equal-field and land-reform schemes.
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