A New Study On The Chu Counties Of The Warring States Period

In this thesis,using transmitted and excavated texts and based on the previous research,I study the issue of administrative unit,termed as "county"(xian ?)in the state of Chu during Warring States.I first revisit the question of criteria to determine the Chu county and argue that we need to pay attention to classifying the different nature of the historical materials and also to the characteristics of naming the Chu county.After that,I discern the errors that have been made,concerning the issue of Chu county,and try to fill up what have been left blank in the previous research.Moreover,utilizing some recently discovered materials such as“Shui Lu Licheng”text of Peking University Qin Bamboo Slip Collection and "Chuju" text in Tsinghua University Bamboo Slip Collection,I newly ascertain the prospective locations of the seventeen Chu counties that have been attempted in the past research,and thereby seek a more accurate fact about it.The final section of Chapter One is a case study on"Yang" county in the Chu.In this,I suggest that this place could be Tanghe county,Nanyang,Henan in the present day,but by no means" Yangcheng" near Fangcheng county today.In Chapter Two,I comprehensively examine the issues of local governing system and bureaucracy in the Chu county,and by this,I reflect upon the characteristics of Chu county.First,using some discovered manuscripts,I review the issue of scale and nature of local administrative units such as li ?,yi?,and other units like yu ? and huo(?),all of which were under the control of county in the Chu.From this,I argue that Chu county existed in a dual structure of urban area and suburb,that lower units under county in the Chu were diverse and had no unified standard in formation,that the Chu county had never completely overcome the blood-tied kinship but executed governance based on regional relationship,and that living in the family-union was rather a universal characteristic.In the second section,I examine the nature of county duke(xiangong ??)in the Chu.Through a comprehensive review and examination,I understand that the status of the county duke in the Chu was not similar to that of later“county magistrate”but only a minister of a county;in terms of the scope of power and duty,he held a status of nobility and its title,but was probably not like the professional governing minister of a local administration.In Chapter Three,I place stress on the physical issues of the form,structure,and system of the Chu city sites and discuss the size of the core zone of Chu county,general structural characteristics,the uniqueness of the distribution,etc.Dividing Chu into three grand regions,Huaihe valley,Nanyang basin,and Jianghan district,I separately examine the possible locations of twenty-seven Chu counties' core cities,and thereby reach the conclusion as follows:Among the three grand regions,theHuaihe valley has the highest number of city locations;although regional differences do exist,the standard shape of Chu county city was square or rectangular;the ruins that still have a structure of gate are only nine,and most of them had been in use until Han dynasty.