Ran-lang Collection

The Ran-ljang Collection (蘭陽簡, ran-ljang-k.rên) is a cache of wooden slips found in 1942 in Ran-ljang County, Themiclesia. Preserved in the arid climate, the wooden slips were found at the site where a Tsjinh bureaucrat was killed. The slips have been dated to the 1st century BCE and represent one of the earliest Themiclesian sources on law, religion, medicine, attire, and annotations on the Menghean classics. In nearly pristine condition, the cache has been extensively consulted by historians and been credited with a "revolutionary" impact on historiography, which previous thereto was primarily founded on received materials.

Law

The Ran-ljang Collection consists of nearly 20,000 wooden slips that cover civil ranks, salaries and entitlements, personnel qualification and structure, land use, fiscal law, criminal law and procedure, prison labour, arrests, oracules, shrines, conscription, corvée, and numerous others. There is a vast body of administrative rules that pertain only to the collection of taxation, probably specific to the bureaucrat's needs.

Enfeoffment

Though the 1st century BCE is usually described as a time of reform and centralization in canonical and private histories, the Ran-ljang slips have greatly nuanced that assessment and shed light on the role of aristocrats in this process. Rather than a royal coup that outright took power from leading aristocrats and consanguineous princes, the Tsjinh king is shown to have established many more minor aristocrats from the civil service, whose fortunes depended on the king's success, and many of these bureaucrats came from the retainers and cadets of the greater aristocracy. Effectively, the king offered them a small entitlement for serving him instead of their own patriarchs, who were the magnates of the realm that the king still periodically called upon to conduct major policies or campaigns.

The slips list 19 "earls" (侯) and 48 "lords" (君) and their domains. According to some, these individuals ruled between one and three quarter of the whole Tsjinh realm; the collection describes these domains as quasi-independent entities, as royal tax bracks omit them, but military portions include the same. In particular, bureaucrats who achieved the rank of 600 bushels are "awarded settlements and retainers" (受邑受客), though this may have been subject to the availability of land and condition of royal coffers. Many of these "settlements" are located on the peripheries and took on a colonial nature; however, with the exception of earls and lords, different aristocrats often were awarded the same settlement, meaning they shared the settlement's revenues but still accommodated a degree of royal administration.

The landed aristocracy bore civil, military, and fiscal obligations to the royal house. The collection provides that earls were each expected to provide 100 armed men to royal levies, while lords were expected 50. Lesser nobles provided 30, 20, 10, 8, or 6. At the same time, commoner households were each expected to provide one man. The nobility ladder complemented the civil service ranking system, which was obviously introduced from Menghe; some historians say the Ran-ljang records support the long-standing hypothesis that the Tsjinh state's success in the Hexarchy is in part due to its moderate policies and the willingness to experiment with partial or mixed reforms, while other states often adopted much more aggressive policies that frequently led to dissonance and (in what is reflected in the record) defection.

See also

• Themiclesia