Even today we expect few inhabitants of the Dutch city of Nijmegen to be familiar with the existence of a town in Taiwan. The same observation, but the other way around, goes for the people living in contemporary Lugang. In the period we study here, the scope of our actors was even more limited. Why then is it that this book brings together the two populations? What can we gain by comparing the demography of Lugang and Nijmegen? The title of this book already suggests that our main focus was the simple fact that whatever the social, economic, and cultural differences between the two opposite ends of the Eurasian continent, the people living there only had one life at their disposal. In this life the demographic parameters were the gridlines within which the other components of the human existence had to find a place. Birth and death formed the logical markers of start and end, but marriage, reproduction and migration were so invasive that they too had a major impact on the life course. Oblivious of each other as they may have been, this is what inhabitants of Nijmegen and Lugang shared, the one march from birth to death.

Another shared experience was the constant threat of poverty or even starvation. The unequal power of the growth of population and resources was a phenomenon people had to take seriously long before Thomas Malthus described it in his famous Essay. According to some it is in the reaction to population pressure that we can distinguish the demographic regimes of the world. In Europe, Malthus wrote, more specifically in Western Europe, John Hajnal added, marriage restriction was used for centuries to regulate population within relatively safe limits. Late marriage for most, or even permanent celibacy for some, resulted in a fertility level that kept the population of Europe practically stable between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. This ‘preventive’ check on population was not used in China, the Malthusians say, and the result was a high pressure and extremely vulnerable demographic regime. Famine, epidemics and social unrest were the major characteristics of this ‘positive’ check on population. For the inhabitants of Lugang and Nijmegen this would imply that the shared experience (threat of overpopulation) evoked different reactions.