王杖木簡再考

Abstract

Wooden slips 木簡 concerning the bestowal of royal staffs 王杖 continue to be excavated from Han-era tombs at Wuwei 武威 in Gansu. The twenty-six wooden slips discovered by a local farmer in 1981 in particular have been judged precious historical resource because, although one slip is missing, together they comprise a lengthy passage from a document titled the Ordinance of Lantai 蘭臺令. The contents recorded therein are imperial edicts 詔勅 designating the privileges of those to whom a royal staff had been bestowed and they support earlier scholarly opinion that Han-era ordinances were in fact imperial edicts. Nevertheless, when compared to other Han-era documents with the word "ordinance" in the title, for example the Ordinances on Fords and Passes 津關令, which was excavated from a Han tomb at Zhangjiashan in Jiangling, Hubei, the ordinances from Wuwei have a much more complex structure. In contrast to the individual provisions in the ordinances excavated from Zhangjiashan, each of which is composed in principle of a single imperial edict, in the case of the edicts excavated at Wuwei, in a single provision are included multiple imperial edicts and memorials to the throne 上書 and even records of judicial precedents 決事. This complex makeup is due to the fact that the ordinances excavated from Wuwei belong to the category of ordinances known as qieling 挈令. According to current academic theory, the qieling have been interpreted to be collections of regulations composed for reference in order that various government offices could carry out their duties. However, the character for qie 挈 in qieling originally meant to "raise high, " and therefore qieling does not refer to the content of the ordinance, but probably refers to the form of a public notice. Central government offices would select from among the edicts issued by the emperor those that should be made known throughout the nation and promulgated them along with related judicial precedents. At the various offices that received them, they were "raised high" and displayed in a prominent place within the government office in order to insure the public was fully aware of the law. If considered in this way, the special character of the wooden slips of Wuwei can be explained in a straightforward manner without resorting to obfuscation. Because the laws so "raised" in each government office became a sort of notice board, it would not be unusual to have multiple imperial edicts and judicial precedents. Although there was no single code of law in effect throughout the land during the Han dynasty, local officials were able to know the content of the law because of the existence of this qieling system.