Chapter 13 Section 3 The Shrinking Tendency of "County of a Thousand Miles"

From a general point of view, the territory of the Tongxian administrative district, known as the "county of a thousand miles", showed a tendency to gradually shrink from Qin to Song, and after the Yuan Dynasty, it went through a first big and then small ups and downs.This general trend of ever-shrinking is caused by various reasons, among which political factors are the most critical. The purpose is to realize the restraint of centralization from strengthening decentralization. Because the size of county-level administrative districts is small, and most of them do not have specific records of their size, they can only be represented by dots on historical maps—that is, the location of the county government.The administrative district of Tong County has a large enough area, and its county has a clear geographical location, so its geographical scope can be drawn on the map, and the size of the area is clear at a glance.On the other hand, the size of a unified county administrative district can also be judged from the number of counties under its jurisdiction. The more counties under its jurisdiction, generally speaking, the larger its territory, and vice versa.But this is not absolute. Under special circumstances, there are many counties under the jurisdiction but not large in size.In the analysis that follows, both criteria are used.

At the end of the Qin Dynasty, there were nearly 50 county-level administrative districts, and the total number of counties was about 1,000, with an average of about 20 counties per county.After the Han Dynasty, the size of the county was obviously smaller than that of the Qin Dynasty. "Hanshu Geographical Records" said: "Hanxing, because Qin County is too big, it will be reopened a little bit." "Opening" means to divide a part into several counties, or two or three.As mentioned above in the internal history of the Qin Dynasty (now the area from the north of the Qinling Mountains in Shaanxi to the Weibei Plateau) in the Han Dynasty, it was divided into three prefectures, Jingzhaoyin, Zuofengyi, and Youfufeng, known as Sanfu.Another example is Yuzhang County (now most of Jiangxi) from Lujiang County (now Jiangxi, southern Huainan, Anhui), Tianshui County from Longxi County (now southern Gansu), and Beidi County (now Ningxia, eastern Gansu) Out of Anding County and so on.Qin's internal history is equivalent to today's Guanzhong Plain, with an area less than 1/3 of that of Shaanxi Province. After being divided into three auxiliary areas, the area is even smaller.Why did the Han Dynasty divide the counties into smaller ones? The historical records do not clearly state, but it is clear that its main purpose was to weaken the power of the prefects and reduce the decentralization of power.

It is not easy to explain the general trend of changes in the size of Tongxian administrative districts if we analyze the specific area.Here, the changes in the number of counties under the jurisdiction are firstly used as a general representation. The following is the change table of the number of county-level administrative districts under the jurisdiction of the average unit of county administrative districts in the past dynasties. It can be seen from the above table that the size of Tongxian administrative district has shown twists and turns.After the Qin Dynasty, the size of Tongxian’s political districts plummeted, reaching the lowest point at the end of the Southern and Northern Dynasties; it rose again in the Sui Dynasty, but failed to reach the level of the Western Jin Dynasty; then it shrank again, and reached the second trough in the Song Dynasty; The Ming Dynasty reached a new peak; the Qing Dynasty began to decline again, but it was still higher than the Tang Dynasty.Let's make further explanations based on these basic figures and specific examples.

The counties of the Eastern Han Dynasty were somewhat smaller than the counties of the Western Han Dynasty.For example, the scope of Kuaiji County in the Western Han Dynasty included southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Fujian, which was too vast. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, it was divided into two counties: Wu County and Kuaiji County.But from a general point of view, the two Han counties are not far apart in size.In the Western Han Dynasty, each county had an average of more than 15 unified counties, which contained a lot of water, which was caused by the existence of many small princes.For example, Langye County in the Western Han Dynasty had 51 counties, which was the county with the most counties in the Han Dynasty. Its territory was actually not large, but it was only equivalent to the 11-12 counties and cities in Qingdao, Rizhao, Zhucheng, and Haiyang in the southeast corner of Shandong Province today. It's only limited in scope, because among the 51 counties in the county, 31 are small Hou countries.

The total number of counties during the Three Kingdoms period was similar to that of the Eastern Han Dynasty, but the number of prefectures increased by 50%, which indeed indicated that the size of prefectures had decreased significantly, but this decline also had the meaning of deepening economic development.Especially in the southeast region under the separatist regime of the Soochow Wu, the population used to be small, the economy was not very developed, the distribution of counties was very sparse, and the size of the county was very large.At the end of the Han Dynasty, the Central Plains was in chaos, and a large number of people from the north came to the south. The government also focused on developing the economy to enhance its own strength, and accordingly added many new counties.Today in Jiangxi, there is only one county in Yuzhang in the two Han Dynasties, and it was divided into four counties in the Three Kingdoms period.The size of prefectures in the Jin Dynasty was not much different from that of the Three Kingdoms, but slightly smaller.During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the size of the county was continuously reduced mainly due to the need for the division of officials and positions, not all to weaken the power of the county prefect.

Although the size of the county was greatly expanded in the Sui Dynasty, it was still not too large, and it was still slightly smaller than that of the Western Jin Dynasty.In the Tang Dynasty, it was even more intentional to reduce the size of the unified county administrative district - the prefecture.The territory of the official administrative districts in the Tang Dynasty was not far from that in the Han Dynasty, but the total number of prefectures in the Tang Dynasty was more than three times that of the Han County, indicating that the average size of a state in the Tang Dynasty was only 1/3 of the Han County.At that time, people often called the state of the Tang Dynasty "a state of one hundred thousand households". In fact, this is just a symbolic name just like the county of a thousand miles.According to records in the first year of Tianbao (742 A.D.) when household registration was at its peak, there were only 36 states with more than 70,000 households, accounting for only 1/9 of the total number of states at that time.Even states with more than 50,000 households account for less than 1/5, and most of the states have less than 20,000 to 30,000 households, which shows how small Tangzhou is.

Not only that, while reducing the size of the state, the Tang government also cooperated with measures to deprive the power of the governor.The most important of these measures are two: one is the division of government between the military and the people, and the governor does not have military power like the prefect of the Han Dynasty; the second is that the state and county subordinates must be inspected and appointed by the central official department, and cannot be recruited by the state governor and county magistrate. ,dismiss.In the Song Dynasty, the centralization of power was strengthened, and the territory of the state was further reduced. Nearly 1/10 of the state only governed one county. The disadvantage of being easily shaken.

In the Yuan Dynasty, there were three levels of road, government, and prefecture in the unified county administrative district. The area of ​​the road and the government was larger than that of the prefecture in the Song Dynasty, but the size of the prefecture in the Yuan Dynasty was unstoppably declining. Among the 319 states, 158 states do not have counties. Except for higher officials, these states are actually equivalent to counties.However, judging from the overall average, the size of Tongxian administrative districts in the Yuan Dynasty was slightly improved compared with that in the Song Dynasty.

The Ming Dynasty was a period of sudden change, and the size of the main unified county administrative district-fu had exceeded the average size of the prefectures during the Three Kingdoms period.Take today’s Shandong area as an example. In the Ming Dynasty, there were only 6 prefectures, but in the Song Dynasty before it, there were 20 prefectures (or prefectures, armies). Even in the subsequent Qing Dynasty, 12 prefectures and Zhili Prefecture.Now in the Guangdong area, only eight prefectures and Zhili prefectures were set up in the Ming Dynasty, but there were 18 roads and prefectures in the Yuan Dynasty.It can be seen that the average size of Tongxian administrative districts in this area in the Ming Dynasty was double that of the Yuan Dynasty.

Both the high-level administrative districts and Tongxian administrative districts in the Qing Dynasty were smaller than those in the Ming Dynasty, especially because the number of Zhili prefectures was much larger than that in the Ming Dynasty, so the average size of the Tongxian administrative districts was much smaller than that in the Ming Dynasty, but it was still smaller than that in the Tang Dynasty. Be big. It can be said that the practice of expanding the territory of unified county administrative districts in the Ming Dynasty was a lesson learned from the weakness of the Song Dynasty.Now that the local military and finances have been brought back to the central government, appropriately expanding the scope of administrative affairs management of officials at the prefectural level will have certain benefits for the local ability to appease public order.The Ming Dynasty was able to maintain the rule of the unified dynasty for 277 years, which is not unrelated to the relatively strong ability of the Tongxian administrative district to suppress chaos.Since the Qin Dynasty, only the Tang Dynasty (290 years) had a unified dynasty that lasted longer than the Ming Dynasty. However, in the late Tang Dynasty, there were separatist regimes and towns, which could no longer be regarded as a truly unified dynasty.

The size of a unified county administrative district is the scope of power of the administrative district chief at that level, and the size of this scope is directly related to the degree of decentralization.Especially in the dynasties that implemented the two-tier system or the virtual three-tier system, the central government did not want the territory of the unified county administrative district to be too large, so from Qin to Song Dynasty, the administrative district gradually became smaller.During the period when the three-level system was implemented, the danger of separatist regimes still lay in the high-level administrative districts. The consideration of the size of the unified county administrative districts focused on administrative management efficiency rather than the issue of decentralization. The reason is that the first-level government district of Lufu allows a relatively large scale. What is the appropriate size of county-level administrative districts and why counties should be gradually reduced? These issues have not been recorded in top-down official documents.However, "Huayang Guozhi" written by Chang Qu (qu Qu), a native of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, retained an extremely valuable memorial to the division of counties from the bottom up, from which we can see that apart from the political purpose of the central government, other There are various reasons for planning a small county. In the second year of Emperor Huan Yongxing (AD 154) in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, Dan Wang, the prefect of Bajun, sent a letter to the court, requesting that Bajun be divided into two. He stated the reasons for the division of counties and proposed specific divisions. Program.Although the rulers at the time were conservative and did not agree to the division of counties, because the necessity of dividing counties has always existed, the Eastern Han Dynasty finally adopted this suggestion 38 years later, but the plan was changed to one division into three.Danwang's memorials were sincere and well-reasoned, and here is an analysis of the reasons for his request to divide the counties. The fundamental reason for the division of counties is that the county territory is too large, there are too many household registrations, and the industry is prosperous.At the beginning of the memorial, it said: "According to the "Bajun Tujing": the boundary is four thousand from north to south, five thousand from east to west, and more than ten thousand miles in a week. It belongs to fourteen counties, with five officials in salt and iron, each with a history of Cheng. The household is four hundred and sixty-four thousand and seven hundred Eighty, with a mouth of one hundred and seventy-five thousand five hundred and thirty-five.” In the Qin Dynasty, Ba County lived in the eastern part of Sichuan today, with a vast territory. It was not until the middle of the Western Han Dynasty that the southwest corner was separated and established as Qianwei County. The county has not changed in the following 300 years , while the number of households and the number of population have increased by two times and one and a half times respectively from the end of the Western Han Dynasty to this time, and the number of counties has increased by three, and each county has a developed economy, with salt, iron and five senses.For the convenience of administrative management, such a large county should naturally be divided into smaller ones. Due to the large size of the county, "the land boundary is far away", "the distance from the county to the county is 1,200 to 1,500 miles, and the township to the county, or three to four hundred, or thousands of miles", so governance is very difficult. "Ling Wei can't ask the culprit exhaustively. From time to time, there are thieves, and the supervising post will pursue the case. After ten days, the thieves have fled far away and their traces are extinct." It is very inconvenient to visit relatives "traveling thousands (miles)".If lower-level officials "wrong the weak people wrongly", they "want to go to sue the county officials, and they will go back every time they are afraid."At the same time, higher-level officials' inspections of subordinate counties were also affected. "The prefect went to Sangnong for less than four counties, and the governor's travel department for less than ten counties."The exchange of official documents is protracted. "Prisoners must report, or there is impeachment, and it will take years."In a word, because the territory is too large, the administrative management is extremely inconvenient. In order to govern effectively, it is required to divide Berkshire into two. It can be seen from Danwang's memorials that the territory of a county should not be too large, especially after the population increases and the economy develops, it must be properly divided.Shu County, which is adjacent to Berkshire, was divided into three in the Western Han Dynasty (one was divided into five at one time).Berkshire is mostly mountainous, and its economy is far behind that of Shu County, so the county has remained unchanged for a long time.But 300 years later, the conditions for subdividing counties have matured, so it is only hoped that this sparseness will appear.This kind of bottom-up spontaneous request to divide counties is rare, because for the prefect, the bigger the county, the bigger the power circle, which is exactly what one wishes for.Therefore, this memorandum is a reflection of the strong desire of the local scholars, people and tyrants. Although we do not know the specific circumstances of the division of a large number of county-level administrative regions, in addition to the central government's purpose of centralizing power, there must be some reasons such as those listed in the above-mentioned Fenba County Shu.

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