 Mencius was born about a century after the death of  Confucius.[6]  Details of Mencius’s early life are sketchy and uncertain, but he is said to have been born in the state of Zou, in what is now Shandong Province. His father supposedly died when Mencius was young, leaving him and his mother in poverty, and there are several famous stories of the determination of Mencius’s mother to provide a good education for her  son.[7]  Mencius is said to have studied under Confucius’s grandson Zisi, and then as an adult he traveled to different states in an attempt to convince their rulers to govern through benevolence and moral suasion rather than brute force. Like the majority of later Confucians, Mencius was what we would describe as a “public intellectual.” He offered advice on everything from foreign policy to the minutiae of public works. One passage from the Mengzi is a detailed treatise on tax policy (3A3), which includes Mencius’s famous proposal to adopt the “well–field system” of taxation: a village’s fields would be divided into nine equal sections, so that the borders between them looked like what we would recognize as a tic–tac–toe grid. (This shape happens to resemble the character for “well,” hence the name “well–field.”) One family would be assigned to each of the eight outer squares, and would keep the produce from that field. Caring for the inner field would be the joint responsibility of all the families, and the produce from that field would belong to the government as its tax. 