Tuntian (屯田) or tunken (屯墾) was a type of frontier "military-agricultural colonies"[1][2] in the history of China. Troops were sent to harsh landscapes at the Chinese frontier to turn uncultivated land into self-sustained, agrariansettler colonies. In other words, the soldiers doubled as farmers. The system was also adopted by other regimes throughout the Chinese cultural sphere.
^Muscolino, Micah S. (2010). "Refugees, Land Reclamation, and Militarized Landscapes in Wartime China: Huanglongshan, Shaanxi, 1937-45". Journal of Asian Studies. 69 (2): 458, 459. doi:10.1017/S0021911810000057. ISSN0021-9118. S2CID162487893. To take advantage of these natural benefits, Shaanxi needed to "set aside Huanglongshan as a military-agricultural colony (tuntian) and transfer troops to cultivate it, imitating the ancient system of supporting the military through agriculture". [...] First priority in developing China's northwestern frontier was "research on military agricultural colonies (yanjiu tunken)".
^Frank, Mark (2021-04-22). "Chinese Empire after Empire: Agrarian Colonization on the Twentieth-Century Frontier". The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. Archived from the original on 2022-01-08. Proponents of this strategy drew inspiration from the imperial institution of tuntian (colonial fields) in formulating a modern vision of tunken, which I interpret as agrarian colonization.
