Forgotten Heroes： San On County and its Magistrates in the Late Ming

The counties (縣, yuen, xian) were the lowest level of the Chinese imperial state structure, and the county magistrates, the heads of the county administration, were in a very real sense the foundation which supported the whole of the rest of the administration. Study of the counties and their administrators is, therefore, of great importance, as well as being a study of great fascination. During 40 years of studying the local history of the New Territories of Hong Kong, the relationship between the villagers and the magistracy has frequently caught my attention, and, my interest thus excited, in due course led to the production of this book.

The central role played by the county magistrates in imperial China has inspired a number of English-language books in recent decades. Among others, T’ung-tsu Chu mostly used handbooks for magistrates, prepared by distinguished Qing scholars, to illustrate his work. John R. Watt produced a masterly work on the magistrates, as seen from the centre, relying particularly on the Qing law code and regulations, but also employing some local material to illuminate such questions as tenure, appointment, and dismissal. Philip C.C. Huang has written two books on the activities of the magistrates as judicial officers in the field of inter-personal, “civil”, legal disputes. There is also a fine study by Linxia Liang on the magistrates as judicial officers in the field of inter-personal legal disputes.

These studies provide an excellent overview of the magistrates and their work. They do not, however, look primarily at the magistrates from the local viewpoint, and so they do not study in detail the magistrates as they functioned within their counties. Several use those local archives that survive (mostly very late nineteenth-century archives from Ba county, 巴縣, that is, the city of Chongqing, 重興, in Sichuan Province; and from Baodi County, 寶抵縣, in Hebei Province, half-way between Tianjin and Peking), as well as central government archives, and some other local sources here and there. However the main aim of all these works is to illuminate the magistrates as a national administrative and judicial institution, taking China as a whole, and not primarily to look at the work of the magistrates within their counties, nor to clarify how they saw and reacted to local problems in those counties.

Clearly, however, the county magistrates were central to the administration and development of their counties, and, as such, also merit detailed study at the local level, as well as on a nationwide basis.

Bradly Reed has prepared a quite superb book (Clerks and “Runners”) which explores the work of magistracy underlings within one particular county (Ba County, the city of Chongqing), at the end of the nineteenth century, but it does not concern itself with the magistrates themselves (except insofar as they managed their underlings), and its setting (a very busy, large, city, a treaty port, at the very end of the imperial period) may well not reflect in its entirety the situation in a small, rural county 250 years earlier.

There were a significant number of handbooks for magistrates written by distinguished scholars in the late Ming and early Qing. One of these, written by Huang Liu-hung (黃六鴻) in 1694, is a particularly down-to-earth and practical work, and gives a good idea of how competent magistrates viewed their work and the problems they actually faced in this period. It has been published in translation; the introduction to this book by the editor, Djang Chu, is a valuable contribution to the study of the magistrates within their counties in the late Ming and early Qing. This manual looks in great depth (in 32 volumes, 卷), totaling 559 pages in translation) at the work of the magistrate within his county. It concentrates, however, on the practice in the north of China (Huang Liu-hung was