614 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONcourts, five directorates, and a number of other special agencies, including offices
serving the emperor and the princes, and the host of their subordinate and attached
officials - a task that consumed almost six full pages of text. Y It was not neces-
sary for Yu to insert his own interpretation of this situation since previous Chi-
nese commentators had written on this situation at length. Tu Yu in the T'ung-tien
recorded a number of reorganizations (in 662, 670, 69 I, 705) that apparently
did little but change the table of names and responsibilities. Then in 706 over
2,000 supernumerary officials (Yiian-wai-kuan) were created, including some
that were sinecures, and after that emperors created new positions by imperial
command without regard to the table of organization on the law books. The T'ang
govcrnment periodically sought to stem the tide by ordering reductions when
in 632 Empcror T'ai-tsung cut the number of capital officials to 643, and other
emperors ordered reductions in 737 and 740. JO Lateran Chu Hsi paused to remark
as well that the problcm of superfluous officials in the T'ang was caused by the
fatal e!Tor of retaining many of the offices of previous dynasties. II
The need to eliminate superfluous officials and rcduce the size of the bureau-
cracy had, in fact, been recognized since the beginning of the Later Han
dynasty. Emperor Kuang-wu eliminated 400 districts by abolition or combina-
tion and reduced the bureaucracy by 10 percent. During Emperor Wu's cam-
paign of retrenchment in the Western Chin dynasty (265-90), Hsiin Hsii
rcmarked that not only should regular as well as petty officials be reduced, but
the volume of government work had to be diminished as well. He stressed the
need to simplify written documents and files and eliminate pctty tasks, and he
praised Emperor Ming of the Wei dynasty (227-40) for dispatching envoys
throughout the empire to recommend staff reductions. 12
Han YUan ofthe early eighth century had also articulated a principle for deter-
mining the need for officials. The first task was to calculate the amount and type
of work that had to be done, appoint officials to do the work, and hold them
responsible for doing it. There was no reason at all to tolerate positions with no
work to be done because it would reduce the population engaged in productive
tasks - agriCUlture, sericulture, i ndu stry, and commerce. 13
Tu Yu repeated this theme in the late eighth century. After recounting the his-
tory of reductions of administrative staff in the T'ang, he praised the Chou gov-
ernment for appointing only the number of officials they would need and refusing
to establish any empty or superfluous positions. Unfortunately, the size of the
bureaucracy had not only grown to a figure higher than ten thousand to serve a
population of nine million, but approximately one-third the registered popula-
tion had been lost because of the increase of migrancy after the An Lu-shan rebel-
lion (755-63). The serious changes in population and residence had severely
damaged the organization of local districts. "One prefecture would not have as
many as three or four thousand households, but there would be fifty or sixty
officials [to administer it], like having nine shepherds for ten sheep. They afflict
the clerks and burden the people with all kinds of bothersome tasks." Nonethe-
less, even though a staff reduction would benellt the peoplc by removing the