Public pay grades of Themiclesia

All full-time government employees in Themiclesia collect remuneration according to their public pay grade (公秩).

History

Origin of bureaucratic pay

The early development of a government bureaucracy outside of a royal household in Themiclesia occurred under considerable Menghean influence and may be traced to the Classical Antiquity in Themiclesia (3rd c. CE). It is usually assumed that the earlier royal household may not have explicitly paid those who worked for it on a day-to-day basis and near at had. Instead, a king as head of clan had an inherent authority to arrange work for household members, even those distantly related, as well as an inherent duty to provide materially for the wellbeing of the household, which could involve doling out food, goods, land, or other economic rights. Thus, the need to compensate for work only arose when individuals outside of this common economic unit entered the king's service, and this should be datable to the Late Archaic (c. 1 – 200 CE).

During the Archaic Period, the practice of sending out barons as colonizers gave rise to a hereditary economic right over the land colonized, less an agreed tribute payable to the baron's patron. Many bronze inscriptions from before the Common Era witness the granting of goods and cowrie shells for some sort of service. Instead of bureaucratic pay, such payments are deemed compensations or recognition for extraordinary efforts or losses suffered for royal business beyond the ordinary baronial duty; this payment may come from the royal treasury or, more often the case, spoils of war.

During the Classical Period, a common form of bureaucratic compensation was to grant serjeanty land (采, tseq). Though initially convenient for the king, not being responsible for the productivity of granted land, it was always difficult in the absence of an exact land survey to recover the land when the official left service. Likewise, the location, irrigation, and fertility of the land frequently resulted in difficulties. The prolongation of this system would obviously exhaust finite royal land and cause the household itself to fall into indigence (a problem that befell most royal houses in early Themiclesia).

The advent of regular taxation of cities militated towards using goods and later money for bureaucratic pay. By the Classical Period, most cities under royal authority paid a fixed quantity of grains and other goods towards the royal treasury, and the royal court sent commissioners (令) to defray the tax on the city's residents. As there was no census or land survey, it was not possible to collect tax on the basis of land ownership. Terms like "a commissioner of 1,000 dak" were in common use, yet it is uncertain what quantity this figure referred to. In later usage, the figure of 1,000 dak would be a pay grade according to which the official was paid, but it is suspected the term may have described the amount of tax the official was expected to collect in the locality to which he was posted.

Hence, in the Tsinh Hegemony's first administrative law of 313, the king recognized seven grades, being 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, and 1,000 dak, and commissioners were expected to arm and command the same number of men in battle. No pay schedule survives from this codex. The grade of 2,000 dak (as well as ones lower than 300) existed in Menghe but not in Themiclesia: notably, the absent grades were those that were not associated with commissioners or magistrates over settlements in Menghean usage. Thus, it may be deduced that the grade system was primarily used by commissioners over settlements outside of Tsinh, with other officials receiving compensation through other means.

The second Tsinh code, compiled in 361, provides that the commissioners sent to cities shall collect no more for themselves than what was sent to the royal treasury. Thus, if the expected revenue from a 300-dak commissioner's city was 300 dak, then the commissioner may collect up to 600 dak, of which 300 would go to the treasury and the other 300 to himself. A commissioner's salary thus depended entirely on the settlement's productivity. During the mid-4th century, a prolonged peace seems to have fostered increased population and opening of new land, leaving it possible for the commissioner to collect more for himself than for the treasury, thus necessitating the new rule.

This system persisted until 385, when the Duke of Alang pressed forth with the initial census and land survey over the demesne land controlled by the Tsinh court. A new code was compiled yet again in 389 or 390 for the administration of