Chapter 478: The Bureaucratic Empire

After he had eaten and drunk his fill, Heifu lay down in a room warmed by a heated brick bed and continued leafing through the Qi-region documents and texts he had asked Zhang Cang to select and copy. Outside, the north wind moaned, making him restless; in the end he set the book aside and recalled his conversation with Wang Ben.

"Forty senior Qin officials, chief officials, and hundred-bushel officials governing four hundred thousand people of Linzi… If they can manage that, then ghosts must be real!"

The Qin dynasty had not the slightest connection to the "feudal empire" described in textbooks. Feudalism had already been toppled and abolished by the Legalists, tossed onto history's rubbish heap by the First Emperor.

It was a brand-new bureaucratic empire, with two sets of bureaucratic systems — central and local — to replace enfeoffment and state-building. No longer were there marquises, kings, ministers, or grand officers guarding the four quarters; what kept this empire running were the thousands upon thousands of "Qin officials"!

Qin local officials were divided into senior officials, chief officials, hundred-bushel officials, and junior officials — roughly equivalent to the distinctions between provincial-departmental level, division level, section level, and minor clerical staff.

The senior officials were the commandery governor, the left and right commandery commandants, the commandery assistant, and the supervising censor — four or five men per commandery — along with the magistrates of large counties. These provincial-ministerial and provincial-departmental level cadres held noble ranks ranging from Junior Architect of the Upper Ranks to Five Grand Officers.

Below the senior officials, those ranked from four hundred bushels down to two hundred bushels were the chief officials. These division-level cadres included county commandants and county assistants at full division level, as well as the various section heads, bailiffs, and chief clerks on the commandery staff at deputy division level; their noble ranks ranged from Duke Chariot to Grand Officer of the Officials.

The hundred-bushel officials were even more numerous: commandery-level clerk-scribes, commandant scribes, soldier scribes, chief record-keepers, and herd prefects; county-level section heads; and township bailiffs and patrol chiefs. Their noble ranks ranged from Grand Officer of the Officials to No Replacement, equivalent to section-level cadres — for example, the head of the Organization Department and the Academy Director in Pei County.

Below the hundred-bushel rank were the stipends of "grain-scooper" and "assistant scribe," who were the junior officials — men like Headman Liu of Pei County. These were the Great Qin's true grassroots civil servants, generally holding noble ranks of No Replacement or lower.

Over the past ten years, Heifu had risen from a minor civil servant to a provincial-ministerial level cadre, and he was thoroughly familiar with this administrative pyramid.

He had chatted with Zhang Cang of the Censorate and knew that, not counting junior officials, Qin's senior officials, chief officials, and hundred-bushel officials together numbered roughly eight thousand.

Calculated across the current forty commanderies, that averaged two hundred officials per commandery.

If divided by population, with nearly thirty million people in the whole realm, on average eight officials governed ten thousand people, assisted by a few dozen local junior officials and combined with the mutual responsibility system of squads and tithings and the extraordinarily meticulous Qin statutes — this was entirely sufficient to keep the localities docile and obedient. This was also why the later saying that "imperial power does not extend below the county" did not apply in Qin territory.

"But that is limited to places like Guanzhong and Nan Commandery, which have been ruled for many years and have already adapted to Qin law. Linzi is not the same…"

The Qin dynasty insisted on officials serving away from their home regions. Senior officials and the chief officials in charge of justice and garrison troops were one hundred percent transferred from other commanderies. In Linzi, their combined number was a mere forty men.

But to govern a place, outsiders unfamiliar with local customs and conditions were like deaf and blind men; they still needed natives to assist them. Therefore, the remaining chief officials and hundred-bushel officials were mostly recruited from among the local gentry.

This was equivalent to one parachuted Qin official governing seven native Linzi officials, and only through their mouths, tongues, hands, and feet could he control the several dozen junior officials below, and through them extend control to the tens of thousands of commoners.

It was not that Qin did not want to send more officials here, but that one state had annexed six others, and every usable official had already been dispatched elsewhere. Linzi needed officials — did Yan, Zhao, Chu, and Wei not need them as well?

Furthermore, Linzi was over two thousand li from Xianyang. Given the transportation conditions of this era, the journey took a month at the fastest, two months at the slowest. The means of communication limited the radius of rule, and Linzi clearly lay beyond that radius.

Apart from the ratio of officials and the distance, there was yet another great difficulty in governing Qi: language…

Just as he was pondering this, the sound of a door being pushed open came from outside, followed by Gong Ao's inquiring voice — Chen Ping had returned…

…

Chen Ping was the same as ever: wherever he went, he first made a tour of the markets. He truly was the advisor who had once gone beyond the frontier as a spy and nearly schemed Modu Chanyu to death. The strategic passes and obstacles of a region, its roads, walls, and towns — Chen Ping grasped them all by heart. The reason Heifu had been able to answer Wang Ben's question, "What did you observe upon entering Qi?" with such fluency was entirely thanks to Chen Ping, who along the journey had recorded his observations on paper and presented them one by one for Heifu to read.

Today, upon arriving in Linzi, Chen Ping had alighted from the carriage at the Ji Gate, wanting to visit the Jixia Academy he had long yearned for, and then walked across half the city.

Chen Ping changed out of his snow-covered furs and entered the room to pay his respects to Heifu. "Commandery Governor, your subordinate has returned."

Heifu personally warmed wine for him and asked with a smile, "Master Chen, what did you gain from your visit to Jixia today?"

Chen Ping rubbed his frozen-stiff hands and held them over the brazier, sighing. "Nothing to gain. The academy that flourished a century ago — the Jixia masters have long since scattered, and the books they collected have all been carted back to Xianyang."

"And General Wang Ben's subordinates have turned the academy into a barracks. The peach grove where Zou Yan, Tian Pian, Shen Dao, and Xun Qing once lectured has now been completely chopped down by the garrison troops and burned as firewood. In the Pan Pool before the Heng Gate, a bunch of soldiers are washing clothes and swimming. The sound of debate and recitation that once resounded through Linzi — now all that remains are the shouts of infantry training…"

Although Chen Ping came from a poor family, he was fond of study and counted as a scholar himself. The dream of his youthful travels had been to go to Jixia and pay homage to a renowned master of the Huang-Lao school. Yet now that he had finally arrived, this was the scene that greeted him; his face could not conceal his disappointment. This was also what dissatisfied him most about Qin governance.

Heifu remained silent. The decline of this ancient university was not unrelated to Qin policies. And yet, though Jixia had declined, most of the Jixia masters had gone to Xianyang to become Erudites, hoping to find a place within the new regime and continue to enter government through their scholarship. Although they still had the right to read and copy the books Qin had plundered from the six states, they were mere decorations and were not given important posts.

Restoring Jixia was of course impossible. Heifu, a mere Governor of Jiaodong, could not stretch his hand this far, and such an act would undoubtedly be a declaration of war against the Emperor's policy of unified public discourse. He could only work from the shadows and do his utmost to prevent the "book burning" incident from occurring.

Blocking the people's mouths is more dangerous than damming a river. Before the ash in the pit had cooled, Shandong was in turmoil — Liu and Xiang, as it turned out, did not read books…

"Paper has been in general circulation for several years now, and officials have begun to grow accustomed to using it to copy laws and write memorials and case reports. Yet its use among the common people is still insufficient. Should I add fuel to the fire and make everywhere under Heaven a Jixia?"

At this moment, Chen Ping, realizing he had misspoken, hastily dropped the subject and began recounting what he had seen and heard in the urban wards of Linzi.

"I did see the bustle and prosperity of Linzi. What a pity that when I tried to ask about things, whether I used the standard speech of Guanzhong, the standard speech of Luoyang, or the dialect of the Liang region, it was like a chicken talking to a duck with the people of Linzi — I simply could not understand a word they said!"

Over the years, campaigning east and west, Heifu had come to know many people and had heard a great variety of dialects. Across the whole realm, the dialects could be broadly divided into as many as fourteen types, namely: Qin, Western Qin, Jin,

Liang, Zhao-Wei north of the River, Zheng-Han-Zhou, Song-Wei and eastern Wei, Qi-Lu, Yan-Dai, Yan-Dai's northern frontier Korea and the Lie River, the Huai-Si region between the Eastern Qi seas and Mount Dai (Qing-Xu), Western Chu, Southern Chu, and Eastern Chu (Wu-Yue).

These were the broad categories; each regional dialect could be further subdivided, yielding as many as thirty-four varieties. And the difference between the Qin dialect and the Qi-Lu dialect was far greater than the gap between later Shaanxi speech and Shandong speech.

So Heifu told Chen Ping a story he had heard in Linzi from the little know-it-all Zhang Cang: "There was a grandee of Chu who wanted his son to learn the Qi language, so he hired a Qi master to teach the boy. But the Chu boy was surrounded by many Chu people who constantly disturbed him, speaking with him in the Chu tongue. Within days, the Qi he had just learned was forgotten. A year passed this way, and even when the Chu grandee beat his son with a whip, the boy still could not learn Qi. In the end, the grandee took his son to Qi and had him live among the Zhuang and Yue neighborhoods. The Chu boy, in order to converse with others, had no choice but to learn Qi, and within a month, he had mastered it."

This story was called "One Tutor Amid a Multitude of Babblers," and it also illustrated that the Western Chu dialect spoken by Heifu's family was mutually unintelligible with the Qi-Lu dialect.

Chen Ping said, "Never mind Linzi and Xianyang, Daliang, or Anlu — I have heard that even Linzi and Jiaodong, though both belong to the Qi region, are likewise mutually unintelligible."

This was because the Jiaodong commandery dialect was heavily mixed with a large number of ancient Eastern Yi and Huai Yi words, belonging to the Qing-Xu speech of the "Eastern Qi, between the seas and Mount Dai" region, and was not even the same tone as Qi-Lu speech.

This was also the reason why it was absolutely impossible for outside Qin officials alone to govern the Qi region. With the two sides unable to communicate, what kind of governance could there possibly be?

Such rule was clearly unreliable. As a later saying went, orders issued from above are carried out below. An edict from Xianyang might be strictly enforced at the commandery and county level in Linzi, but by the time it reached the township and village level, it would be greatly watered down, and by the time it was disseminated to the individual, it was as good as nonexistent.

And looking from the bottom up, the Qi people had their own culture, history, and dialect. They had a university of free scholarship and trade where frontier passes and markets were supervised but not taxed. Two generations of mediocre rulers had governed Qi for fifty years using Huang-Lao thought, allowing the Qi population to flourish, undisturbed by war. Every day, the people ate sea fish, played the zither and mouth organ, played cuju and liubo, basked in the sun, and lived leisurely and contentedly.

Then one day, their state perished. Their king was hauled off to a foreign land and starved to death, while they themselves were governed by a group of parachuted Qin officials from west of the pass, whose mouths were full of a strange tongue.

Qin law was harsh: this was forbidden, that was forbidden. Even a quarrel or a fistfight among wandering knights was not allowed. Merchants who had once held respectable status were overnight reduced to the bottom of society. The two great industries of salt and iron were confiscated by the authorities. They could not wear silks or satins, and every transaction they made was subject to heavy taxes. Ordinary commoners fared no better; they had to cope with corvée labor several times more burdensome than under Qi, and it would be strange if they did not harbor resentment.

If Heifu had been born a Qi man, he would probably have long since gone to sea to become a pirate, seized an island, and been ready at any moment to counterattack the mainland, overthrow Qin imperialism, and fight for the restoration of Qi's freedom…

What a pity that Governor Wei's backside was now planted firmly on the Qin side.

At this thought, Heifu could not help but shudder. "Qin's rule in Qi is truly like a tree without roots, water without a source — floating on the surface. In Linzi of Qi, with its three hundred village wards, the officials do not know their people, and the people do not trust their officials. No wonder, historically, that the moment trouble arose, powerful families bared their right arms and rallied in the marketplace, and thousands upon thousands responded. Slaughtering several dozen Qin officials was as easy as butchering pigs and dogs; within a single night, the entire city rose in revolt. Qin's rule east of the pass likewise crumbled like earth collapsing and tiles shattering…"

"When I served as county commandant in Anlu, I was surrounded by fellow townsmen who shared my speech, so whether training troops or implementing policies, everything was easy. When I went to Beidi as commandery commandant, that was west of the pass, close to Xianyang. Although there were Rong tribesmen, there were also large numbers of military-merit landlords utterly loyal to Qin. The good sons of Beidi were all taken in by me as cavalrymen, so I encountered no obstacles in my work either."

But on this journey to take up his post in Jiaodong, Heifu had only reached Linzi and already realized that what awaited him would be a situation utterly different from the past!

It was exactly as Ye Teng had warned him.

"Be careful! Be careful you don't become a great sea fish, stranded from familiar waters and trapped in the shallows!"

…

That night, Heifu and Chen Ping talked long into the night about how they should govern once they reached Jiaodong Commandery.

The next day, when he went to bid farewell to Wang Ben, the moment he entered the general's residence, he sensed something amiss. The clerks and maidservants all kept their heads lowered, not daring to speak, while the Wang clan's retainers had red-rimmed eyes and had clearly just been weeping.

Heifu's heart thumped — he knew something terrible had happened. Entering the reception hall, he saw Wang Ben, who only the day before had been impeccably groomed, now with his hair disheveled, his eyes full of grief, sitting desolately on the mat, clutching a letter tightly in his hand.

"General Wang…"

Heifu called to Wang Ben. Only then did Wang Ben raise his head. Realizing Heifu had come to say goodbye, he sighed and cupped his hands. "Governor Wei, travel slowly. Wang Ben will not see you off… I have just received word from Xianyang. My father has passed away!"

PS: The fourteen dialect groups are a summary of Han dynasty dialects compiled by Mr. Lin Yutang based on Yang Xiong's *Fangyan*; the differences among Qin dynasty dialects may have been even greater.

(End of chapter)