NOTES TO CHAPTER 10 1089tion of The Rites of Chou wrote that the basic component of the 12,500-man army was
the 5-man squad recruited from 5 families who furnished I adult male each, PGSR 23: I a-
b. Pan Ku's treatise on the military in his Han-shu stated that the well-field had 8 fami-
lies, but each unit of 64 well-fields furnished 75 soldiers, a little less than I soldier for
every 7 families on average. The 64 well-field units (t'ien in Chinese) also had to pro-
vide I military chariot and 16 oxen and horses. See ibid. 23:2a-b. For a similar, but slightly
different set of figures in Hu An-kuo's commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals
(the Hu-shih chuan), see ibid. 23:5a.
Yu also cited a commentary by Chu Hsi on the hyangsu (hsiang-su in Chinese) system.
According to this there were two separate systems of organization culminating in units
called hyang or su, each with an identical 12,500 households. The basic cellular unit for
both structures was the 5-family group; since each family furnished I man each, the 5
men constituted a squad. Companies, battalions and the rest, up to the 12,500-man army
were based on multiples of the 5-man squad. Chu Hsi noted that the hyangsu system was
based on multiples of TO, and the well-field system on multiples of 9. Later on, Confu-
cian scholars tried to combine the 2 into a unified system, but Chu Hsi did not see how
that was possible. Ibid. 23:3b.
- Ibid. 23: la.
- Ibid. 23:5a.
- Ibid. 23: Ih,2a.
- The Han military system is discussed in ibid. 33:6a-7b. One Sung scholar, I Fu,
captured the essence of the system in one brief paragraph:
In the Han dynasty military system nothing was more detailed in its organiza-
tion than the Southern and Northern Armies of the capital. At that time soldiers
and farmers were not yet divided in two, and the Southern and Northern Armies
were in fact made up of the common people [as a whole] much like the well-
field system of ancient times. The Southern Army's soldiers were recruited from
the commanderies [chun] and feudalities [kuo], while the soldiers of the North-
ern Army were recruited from the Left, Right, and Capital/il [i.e., the San:fu or
three districts around the capital]. Ibid. 33:6aCompare a similar statement of a Mr. I, quoted in the Wen-hsien t'ung-k ao, 156, ping-
kao (essay on military affairs), pt. 2, cited in Hamaguchi Shigekuni, "Zenkan no Nam-
bokugun ni tsuite" [The Southern and Northern Armies of the Former Han], idem, Shinkan
zuiti5shi no kenk)'u [Studies in the history of the Ch'in, Han, Sui and T'ang] (Tokyo: Tokyo
daigaku shuppankai, 1966), p. 254.
Although scholars have debated whether the Northern Army recruits came only from
the capital regions or the whole country, there seems to be no major dispute about the
basic system of rotating military service for the male population at large. For the dispute
on areas of recruitment, see Hamaguchi, "Zenkan no Nambokugun ni tsuite," pp.
253-54. Hamaguchi, by the way, would accept the view of! Fu against present-day Chi-
nese scholarly critics, on the grounds that the administration of troops in the capital envi-
rons differed from that of the ordinary commanderies. and the chung-wei or commander