Documenting the Regime: Local Administration and Documentation in the

Documenting the Regime:

Local Administration and Documentation in the Ming

There is a remarkable phenomenon in the historical narratives noted in the textual materials found in northern Gutian/Pingnan. The narratives could start from various periods, but the portion since the early Ming often renders more details in that dates were precisely recorded by reigns of emperors; locations were presented by jurisdictions of local administration, sometimes to the lowest level of Sector (du 都) and Plat (tu 圖). Of course, exceptions always exist: the detailed Song-Yuan information in the document I analyzed in the previous chapter is very exceptional. Generally, the narratives before the Ming were unorganized and anecdotal, and therefore as I discussed in Chapter 1, the narratives before the Ming seemed to be less reliable.

Moreover, in many historical narratives, “early Ming” was taken as an important turning point. Families, after tracing their winding history of migration from the central plain, claimed to settle in current location during the early Ming or in an earlier period, but narrators were able to provide the full name of their ancestors since the Ming. It would be unreasonable to believe that all the families suddenly moved to these valleys at the same time or started to remember the names of their ancestors from the same period. This phenomenon, which was shared by many places in southern and southeastern China, resulted from the historical formation of these historical narratives.1 In these regions, early

1

For the discussion on the cases in Guangdong, see Liu Zhiwei 劉志偉, Zai guojia yu shehui zhijian:

Ming-Qing Guangdong diqu lijia fuyi zhidu yu xiangcun shehui 在國家與社會之間:明清廣東地區里甲賦

役制度與鄉村社會 (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue, 2010), 243-250. 90

Ming was often the period when earliest textual records were available. The contents of these records hence became the factual basis of historical narratives when they were taking shape. Even though most of the original records during the early Ming no longer exist, their contents were inherited by later texts, and translated into various historical narratives, originating from the earliest written records. Instead of telling a historical fact, this “early Ming” phenomenon actually tells a “historical formation of fact.”

The availability of early Ming textual records is, by and large, the consequence of the reconstruction and extension of the official documentation system at the beginning of the Ming dynasty. This is not to say that official documents did not reach this area during the middle period, but they went deeper and wider to these villages in valleys. The penetration of official documentation system during this era not only influenced the formation of official documents, but also had significant impacts on non-official ones. These official and non-official documents shaped the modes that local communities interacted with the state and with one another, and provided the materials for later generations to reconstruct their history or even their identity.

This chapter begins with the establishment and limitation of the official documentation system during the early Ming, and subsequently discusses its impact on the textual culture in northeastern Fujian villages.

Official Documentation System in the Early Ming

Tradition of Documentation and the “New Institution”

To maintain a political entity as huge as the Chinese empire, a bureaucratic system with sufficient information of its subjects is necessary to manage its people and territory,

and to mobilize its manpower and economic resources. Written documents, used as the most important vehicles of communication and the records of information, thus played an important role. Based on the observation of historical and contemporary polities, Jack Goody argues that “writing is critical in the development of bureaucratic states, even though relatively complex forms of government are possible without it. Also, the adoption of writing for various purposes associated with the polity has implications for the conduct of its affairs at all levels.”2 In this regard, the Chinese state has been particularly noted by social scientists and historians as one of the earliest bureaucratic states.

Chinese government certainly started to use written records in ruling its people and territory far before the Ming dynasty. Archaeologists found records of household information written on bamboo slips during the Qin and Han dynasties, and some recent studies claim that a refined bureaucratic system of the Chinese state was built as early as the Western Zhou.3 More official documents, especially written records of household registration, found in Dunhuang and other archaeological sites in western China, reveal the sophisticated documentation system of the Chinese state during the middle period.4 With the expansion of state power and advanced techniques of administration– such as woodblock printing – written documents played an important role in administering local jurisdictions during the Song-Yuan period in which government issued printed forms of documents to local administrators. Manuals published for officials and clerks taught them

2

Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 91-92.

3

Li Feng, Bureaucracy and the State in Early China: Governing the Western Zhou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

4

Ikeda On 池田温, Chūgoku kodai sekichō kenkyū 中国古代籍帳研究 (Tōkyō: Tōkyō Daigaku Tōyō Bunka Kenkyūjo, 1979).

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the principles to manage various textual materials. “[Documentation] is the root of administration,” the key neo-Confucian philosopher, Zhu Xi (1130-1200), once commented after hearing that a magistrate lost his register of taxation records in a dialogue between him and his disciple.5 The Master knew it well: Zhu Xi started his career at twenty-one years old as assistant county magistrate (zhubu 主 簿 literally “register manager”) of Tong’an 同安 County in southern Fujian.

After expelling the Mongolian rulers, the instant problem that the new Chinese emperor had to face was to control the vast territory and numerous subjects inherited from his predecessor. The situation was critical, since the core area of the empire was devastated by wars and countless upheavals, and the infrastructure of local administration was massively demolished. The ambitious Hongwu emperor, the first ruler of the Ming, installed a series of institutions, called “the Hongwu New Institutions” (hongwu xinzhi 洪 武 新 制 ) by later historians. Many of these “new institutions” were actually the continuation of those of the previous dynasties, but further elaborated and regulated. Many of them were actually refined by his successors. Among his numerous institutions to reconstruct the imperial order, the most influential one on local administration should be the system of hereditary households.

In the system of hereditary household, all the subjects of the empire were categorized into several types of “households” (hu 戶 ). Different households had different responsibilities to the state: taxes, tributes, corvée labors, civil or military services. One’s obligations to the state were decided by the type of household that one’s family registered

5

Zhu Xi, Zhuzi yülei 朱子語類, v.111, 2714.

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in official records. For example, families registered as a military household had to provide one adult male to the army and support his expenses; families registered as a craftsman household had to serve in official manufactories. Since these registered households and their obligations were hereditary and hardly changeable, the purpose of this system was to make sure that the government could collect a certain amount of taxes and mobilize manpower as needed. Moreover, this system attempted to attach each subject to a fixed registered household, so that a local administrator could easily handle the subjects in his jurisdiction. Ideally, different types of household were conducted by different administrative institutions, and everyone’s actions were directed by one’s registered status. This system of hereditary household was inherited from the hereditary occupational household system during the Yuan period, but the Ming rulers made it more inclusive and more regulated. The Ming government used this system to categorize its subjects. Throughout the Ming dynasty, registered households became the basic unit by which the state governed its people. Local administrators collected taxes and mobilized manpower according to the records of registered households within their jurisdictions, and submitted the registered portion to the central government.

This system of hereditary household, theoretically, depended upon accurate and comprehensive information of each local family, including its members, its property and its registered location, so as for local administrators to know where and how much they could extract. Moreover, this information had to be frequently updated so that the administrators could catch up with the changes of local population and property ownerships. In order to maintain reliable records of these households, the Ming government had to establish a comprehensive system of documentation. While the scale of

documentation system expanded, more officials and clerks were involved in these processes of survey, recording, editing and revision.

The Ming rulers realized the importance of documentation at the very beginning. Before his regime could control the whole China, the Hongwu emperor had required his army to collect local archives created from the previous government, which were largely destroyed or lost during the wars of political transition. One of the first tasks the Hongwu emperor started was land survey and household registration. He issued several orders encouraging people who had fled from their residences to register with local authorities by exonerating them from punishment. In 1370, the third year of his reign, the emperor initiated registration by issuing a household certificate (hutie 戶帖) to each household in the territories under his control.6 His proclamation, written in vernacular languages and printed on the household certificate, became an important historical text for the early effort of household registration.7 In 1381, a nationwide registration system of commoner households was institutionalized. Its overall structure was not only used throughout the Ming, but also followed by the subsequent Qing dynasty. This system, usually referred to by the name of the archive, “Yellow Registers,” became the most important documentation system for local administration throughout the late imperial China.8

6

Ming shilu 明實錄, v.35, 634; Daming hudian 大明會典, 19/19

7

This proclamation was copied in several gazetteers and biji. One of the most quoted sources is from Li Xü’s (1505-1593) 李詡 Jie’an laoren manbi 戒庵老人漫筆, prefaced in 1597. According to Li Xü, the household certificate and the proclamation were rarely seen in his time. Li Xü, Jiean laoren manbi (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1982), 34-35. Some pieces of original household certificates from the Hongwu reign survived, see picture 1 in Ruan Chengxian 欒成顯, Mingdai huangce yanjiu 明代黃冊研究(Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1998). The English translation of this proclamation can be found in Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the

Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 4-5.

8

The study of Yellow Register system was inaugurated by Liang Fangzhong’s 梁方仲 important article, “Mingdai huangce kao 明代黃冊考,” which gave an outline of the whole system. Our understanding has

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Certainly household registration did not start from the early Ming either. Bureaucrats always had to first establish a procedure to manage its administrative records. Compared to the previous procedure of household registration, the significance of “Yellow Registers” and its persistence through more than five hundred years can be summarized from two aspects. First, this system was highly regulated and vertically integrated into the imperial administrative hierarchy. Second, this system was also horizontally integrated into local administrative units, especially the county government and lijia 里甲 system.

Centralizing Information within the Hierarchy

The operation of the Yellow Registers system was highly regulated. The form of the Register was strictly controlled, including the color of paper (yellow), the script, the size of characters, and the space between lines. Entry of each “household” included the registered names of household, family members (names, ages and relationships) and property registered under this household. After county magistrate and his clerks received the records from local communities, they had to check the returns and compiled two copies of the county Yellow Register. After properly signing and sealing, a copy was submitted to the prefectural government, where the prefectural Yellow Register was compiled. The prefect and his subordinates collected all the county Yellow Registers within his administration, and then compiled, checked, signed, and sealed the prefectural Yellow Register and submitted a copy of the prefectural Yellow Register to the Provincial Administrative

been further enriched by Wei Qingyuan’s 韋慶遠 careful investigation on every stage of compilation and development, and by Ruan Chengxian’s detailed research on related documents in different periods. Liang Fangzhong, “Mingdai huangce kao” in Liang Fangzhong jingjishi lunwenji 梁 方 仲 經 濟 史 論 文 集 (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1989, firstly published in 1949); Wei Qingyuan, Mingdai huangce zhidu 明代黃冊制 度 (Beijing: Zhonghua 1961). Also see Ruan, Mingdai huangce yanjiu.

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Commission. The Provincial Administrative Commissioner and his clerks collected all the prefectural Yellow Registers and compiled a provincial one. After the same procedure of certification, the provincial Yellow Registers were submitted to the central government at the end of year. These provincial Yellow Registers were checked by officials and students in the National Academy and stored in special archival houses situated on an island at Hinter Lake (houhu 後湖) in Nanjing.9

Every ten years the Yellow Register was revised in what was called “grand compilation” (dazao 大造 ). The whole procedure from local communities, counties, prefectural, provincial governments and central archives of the Hinter Lake had to repeat again. The county government had to compare the written information collected from its jurisdiction with the previous one, update the changes of members and properties in each household, and depending on the change of registered population, decide whether the current division of local administration had to be rearranged or not. These updated Registers would transfer again along different layers of governments so that each layer, from county to the central government, could obtain the updated information from the revised Registers. The whole process of grand compilation was pre-scheduled, and each layer of government had to strictly follow the timeline. In the following ten years, these revised Registers became the basis for local administration. Taxes and manpower were levied and deployed to each layer of government in accordance with these newest written records.10

9

Daming huidian, 20/1b-4b, 7a-8b. These registers were placed on an island to prevent the loss from fire. The regulations on the management of Hinter Lake Archives can in found in Houhu zhi 後湖志.

10

Daming huidian, 20/4b.

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This highly regulated procedure of check and update was to make sure that information could be precisely and timely circulated within the administrative hierarchy. When the information was conflicted at the lower level, clerks could go back to the registers stored in higher-level administrations, and even go to the Hinter Lake Archives in Nanjing. The lower layers of administrators followed the information of registers and the higher ones supervised them according to the same registers collected from them. This whole system was established on the basis that the process of documentation and its forms were nationwide standardized so that different layers of governments in different regions of the empire could easily share the same information, and these records were eventually stored in the central archives, supervised by the central government.

Moreover, this system also had to rely on numerous clerks and scribes in each layer of administrations. In order to manage these documents and their transmission, the state had to develop a large group of skilled and experienced clerks and scribes in many different bureaus. These clerks and scribes shared similar knowledge of making official documents and together became a distinguished and universal group of literates.

From the perspective of the central government, the documentation system collected and transmitted local information to the state so that the centralized state could supervise and manage its subjects within the administrative hierarchy. From the perspective of local communities, this centralized and standardized process of documentation brought a universal culture of governmentality down to the local. Even though each community was quite different in many different ways, they shared the same official documents and went through the same process of documentation. In other words, the documentation system not only served as an important component of centralized governance, but also formulated a

sense of “being governed” upon local people through this repeated procedure. While most studies on official collection of information tend to stand on the stance of the government and simply take it as a characteristic of bureaucratization or a means of control and surveillance from the state, its influence on local communities should also be considered.

Local Administration and the Penetration of Official Document

The transmission of Yellow Register was integrated into the administrative hierarchy, and at the lowest level, its operation was closely attached to the lijia system, which was the local administrative unit beyond registered households and below county government. According to the information of initial registration, the early Ming government assigned every one hundred and ten registered households as a “community” (li 里). Ten most affluent households among them were appointed as “chief household of tithing” (jiashou hu 甲首戶), and every chief household of tithing led other ten registered households together as a “tithing” (jia 甲). Ideally, these ten chief households were the agents of government, who had to collect taxes, distribute corvée labor, and other state obligations for their own tithing. They also had to take turns to be the “community head” (lizhang 里 長). In their turn of being the head, this chief household had to collect the taxes that other nine chief households of tithing collected from the ten households, and submit the taxes to county government. The community head was also responsible for all the other obligations, such as sending tributes to local government and arranging manpower to make sure that all the labor services registered in official records were fulfilled. The ideal of lijia system was to build a stable administrative structure at the lowest level of society, which was led by local leaders, and these local leaders took the responsibility to fulfill local obligations to the

state. This was particularly important during the early Ming when local orders were destroyed and the infrastructure of the state was still being rebuilt.

Under the lijia system, the role of chief households of tithing and the community head became very important. Officially designated, they became the bridge between government and local people. These wealthy families, taking official responsibility, gradually became leaders of various local affairs. Among their many official responsibilities, one of them was that chief households had to, at least nominally, manage the registration records of their tithing. According to the design of Yellow Registers system,