Study On The Relations Between Liye Bamboo Slips And The Local Administration Of Qin Dynasty

A large number of Qin bamboo slips, covering a wide range of topics, were found between May and June 2002, in Liye town, Hunan province. The bamboo slips has caused the common concern in academic. With the publication of Liye Bamboo Slips (the first volume)" containing the contents of the fifth, sixth and eighth bamboo slips, it could provide a great convenience for further researching the Liye Bamboo Slips. Because Liye Bamboo Slips are the documents preserved by local government, they are very important to research the local administration system of Qin Dynasty. And they also provide the rarely and precious academic materials. Today, the studies on the local administration mainly focus on the establishment and the promotion of official position, and the administrative districts division. However, the researches in the operating mechanisms of the local administration are not enough. This paper will focus on the contents of the Liye Bamboo Slips, with combinations of Shuihudi Bamboo Slips, Longgang Bamboo Slips, Yuelu Bamboo Slips, Zhangjiashan Bamboo Slips and the handed-down literatures. It also discusses the issues about the local administration of Qin Dynasty, such as granary management, the tax, the public goods, and the weapons management. Moreover, it tries to reproduce the ordering and the strong relationship of the administrative operation mechanism under the unified management of Qin Dynasty, through the discourses of the above outstanding problems. The article is divided into three chapters.In the first chapter, the establishment of the local administration, discovered in the Liye Bamboo Slips, is reviewed. The Liye Bamboo Slips are the documented case of Dongting County and Cangwu County. It analyses the establishment of the officials in the Liye Bamboo Slips, and reflects the characteristic of the local administration in Qin Dynasty. This is also the necessary groundwork as discussed below.In the second chapter, the granary management and the tax, recorded in Liye Bamboo Slips, are discussed. Because Qin Dynasty is an agriculture-based feudal country, the rules played more attention on the granary management. The chapter includes the contents, such as:the plowing labor, the preserving and distributing of the granary, and the livestock management. Moreover, it concludes that the feather as one of the military taxes is important to Qin local administration. It analyzes multiple occurrences of the instances that the prisoners are catching the birds for the feathers. It can offer another perspective on the diversity of the tax in Qin Dynasty.In the third chapter, the public goods management of the local administration, discovered in the Liye Bamboo Slips, is researched. Considering that the public goods include a lot of contents, this chapter only discusses the public tools, the storage management, checking out, indemnity and repair of the weapons, and the governmental financial management. It reaches the high efficiency of the local government operation in Qin Dynasty.